A picture of serenity

I am Joss Whedon's bitch. I saw Serenity this evening, which is an almost perfectly formed 120-minute entertainment. For some reason, I didn't buy popcorn, which was a big mistake. It's that kind of movie.

All the reasons you think you love Joss are there, sure. The assumption that The Audience Knows. The lemony-fresh one-liners. The cute finger-on-the-pulse touches, like the fact that everyone swears in Mandarin and pilots mumur haiku from Bashő. Women can kick ass without being in an S&M outfit. Shards of Star Wars spliced together with Aliens, tied together with spaghetti from westerns and laid sushi-style on a puck of wuxia rice. But the real reason you love Whedon isn't just that he's seen the same movies you've seen. It's that his characters have seen the same movies you've seen. You know that the crew of the Serenity aren't getting taken in by that there little gambit on the part of the evil Alliance, and why not? Because every fool in the galaxy saw what happened to Lando Calrissian! The Empire got to him first!

The fine piece of apparel pictured above is from the enduringly brilliant folks at thinkgeek.