Yaaaaayyyyyyy! Serenity begins filming in three weeks!

I loved Joss Whedon’s Firefly television series and am thrilled it’s going to the big screen. The new film is set to big “big” according to Whedon:

. . . bigger, faster, stronger . . . . The show plays on a very small, personal level. And while I want that to work in the movie, the movie has an epic quality and a resolve that you simply can’t afford in a TV show. Because if you have the epic quality, you run out of money, and if you have the resolve, you run out of ideas. … The movie is really like, if you took a giant hit of the show all at once. It’s very big. Perhaps I should use different imagery

It’s going to be a ride.

Those of us in Taiwan may note that the show uses a lot of Chinese language . . . albeit, most of the actors just plain suck at Mandarin . . . and I don’t mean a little, they suck a whole bunch. I hope they have better language pronunciation coaching this time around. It was as if they had never been explained the concept of tones which are very important to Mandarin pronunciation. Listening to them was as bad as hearing John Wayne’s broken Mandarin from one of his old movies. In both cases, I had to translate the rotten pronunciation to my wife and daugher, both native speakers . . . as I’m used to lousy Chinese as I am quite proficient in speaking with a terrible accent. Actually, I seem to have a more tolerant ear.

The first time we watched Firefly, I had to rewind the language bits a few times as my wife refused to believe they were speaking Chinese. She thought it was some alien tongue . . . and even when she finally did get that it was Chinese, she couldn’t figure out whatever the hell they were saying.

It’s too bad the language coaching wasn’t better as these are quite competent actors and I am certain they could have mastered the lines they needed to say with a bit more care and instruction. Mimicry is part of the actor’s craft. When I was in college I took on the role of a deaf man in the stage play Children of a Lesser God and was able to convince an audience of deaf folks and specialists who worked with the deaf that I was indeed actually deaf from birth. A competent actor can accomplish reasonable facility with a dialect or language given appropriate coaching and time to learn the lines. I really hope that now that they’re doing the big show for Firefly, the Serenity movie that is, that they will invest in doing the Chinese language lines right . . . albeit, even if they screw it up . . . again . . . I have no doubts that I will still love the film as the source series is great stuff.