Man, I love seeing a good movie. Which makes it all the more disappointing that I was unable to see Aliens vs Predator: Requiem. Oh, I was able to rent it. And my DVD player ran it just fine. But the movie was so dark I had to turn off all my lights, unplug the clocks, cover the windows with trashbags, and duct tape over the readouts on my electronics just so I could darken the room enough to get from "I can't see shit." to "Is that a Predator or a lamp?"
Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (referred to with the oh-so-hip moniker AVP:R from here on out) takes place directly after the original AVP ended. If I remember correctly, the lead Predator had just finished killing a bunch of aliens in a Mayan temple in Antartica when his buddies showed up and he died. Or something. Then he was impregnanted with an alien.
Well, I hate to keep you in suspense any longer but at the very beginning of this movies the alien pops out, grows to about 10 feet tall in 45 seconds, and wipes out the rest of the Predators. Luckily this spaceship comes equipped with an "Eject Infected Pod to Earth" option and half the ship breaks off and goes back to Earth from somewhere near one of the ringed planets.
There is no explanation for why this happens and if you expect one you haven't been paying attention to the AVP series. You just go with the flow and hope for some good alien carnage to soothe the migraine you are getting from your brain trying to skip over the continuity and logic issues.
So the ship crashes, facehuggers poor out and proceed to wipe out a town in Colorado. Some humans get together to fight the aliens, another Predator arrives to clean up the mess, and lots of shooting and "homages" to the earlier films fill out the screenplay.
This is all well and good. I knew what I was getting in to here. To be fair, the plot wasn't awful and the effects were decent. If I could see anything I'm sure I would have enjoyed it. As it stands, AVP:R may be the worst shot theatrically released movie in history. I know Fox long ago gave up on giving a shit about the Alien franchise but was the budget so tight they couldn't hire a goddamn lighting person?
You can have your own AVP:R experience without renting the movie. Just put in any flick of your choosing, turn off all your lights, turn the brightness down to zero on your TV and try to discern what is happening on screen at any given moment. You can even turn it into a game! First person who says "This is unwatchable." wins! It's fun for the whole family!
I'm not going to review The Dark Knight. Plenty has been written about it and there is little else to add. The movie is brilliant, fully worthy of the acclaim it's garnering. I'm looking forward to seeing it again to watch how it all comes together instead of guessing how it is going to play out. Heath Ledger is outstanding, as is the entire cast, and it is easily the best superhero movie yet made.
But.
Am I the only one that misses Danny Elfman's iconic theme music from the movies and the excellent animated series? It's not that the score in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight is bad, it's actually quite good. But I'll be damned if I can hum it. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Christopher Nolan and company shed everything from the earlier franchise. The taint of Schumacher and Bat-Nipples was dripping over everything so a clean break was required. But was it really necessary to ditch the theme music? You're probably humming it right now, it was that damn good.
I know it's a nitpick but it bugged me last time too. Also, it's kind of hard not to giggle when Christian Bale is doing his angry Batman voice. I know he has to disguise himself, but come on. It's better in this one, but still a tad over the top.
That said, man did I love me some Dark Knight. Even better, it beat the records previously set by the fucking ATROCIOUS Spider-Man 3 so a mighty "Huzzah!" to all involved for erasing the milestone of that piece of shit.
By now, we've all heard about the brouhaha surrounding Jesse Jackson's apparent desire to castrate Barack Obama for telling it like it is (when he correctly insisted that fathers - specifically black fathers - should take their responsibility seriously and be involved in the lives of their offspring).
And we have, of course, also heard the inevitable public apology where Jackson claims he didn't mean what he said, it was a 'mistake', 'taken out of context', yadda yadda yadda.
You could almost write the script:
Celebrity says something off color, thinking nobody can hear him.
Someone can hear him. Public outcry ensues.
Celebrity claims what he said was taken out of context, or that he didn't mean it.
Public either forgives and forgets, or doesn't forgive but still forgets.
After all, in the modern 24 hour news cycle, even moral outrage has a shelf life of less than a week. What I find amusing is the fact that whenever celebrities are caught saying something offensive in an unguarded moment, they act as though they're the only people on earth who would never dream of speaking or thinking this way and that we just don't know the real them.
As I mentioned in a previous post on a similar subject, each and every one of us has these moments. We have all expressed hateful, profane or even prejudicial sentiments in private moments in the company of people we trust, thinking that nobody else can hear. We've all said, thought and even done things that if were generally known to our acquaintances would probably end a lot of relationships.
But we all do it, have done it and will do it again. If you are shocked that Jesse Jackson would say something like that I have to ask you, why? You really think that every celebrity's public persona is identical to their personal one? You think just because you're not allowed to say 'shit' on television that this means nobody who is on television ever says it in private either?
You do, so why wouldn't - or shouldn't - they?
I'm not saying what Jackson said was appropriate for the situation by any means. Maybe the criticism struck him a little too close for comfort, having himself fathered a child with a woman who was not his wife some years ago.
The truth hurts, but I digress. Let's look at the nature of the private smear/public apology, shall we?
We've all said rotten things about someone behind their back, and when you do, don't you in a perverse sort of way want them to find out? Human nature is such that the majority of us are loathe to approach someone we have a problem with. Confrontation is a natural and necessary part of life but civilization has bred it out of most of us over the past few millenia so that we all grimace at each other in private.
I'm not talking about run of the mill problems like someone owing you five dollars or your neighbor taking too long to return your lawn mower. This paradigm applies to potentially explosive, personal issues that if pursued face to face with someone, might seriously or even permanently damage your relationship.
Jackson and Obama are ostensibly allies, if not friends. So, were Jackson to call Obama on the phone and say "I think you're talking down to blacks and I would like to chop off your balls!" It's more than likely someone is going to get removed from someone else's Christmas card list at the very least.
So when we have such a problem with someone we stew in it, afraid to approach them and therefore unable to resolve it. So what do we do? We tell someone else how we feel and secretly hope it gets back to the person in question. And when it does, and they confront us, what do we invariably say?
"What? Who told you that?"
Because we don't have the guts to take ownership of our feelings or to deny them, we just want to make sure we know they got the information from the intended source. After all, isn't it the height of arrogance and weakness to yack about someone behind their back so that someone else can tell the person you despise how you feel about them?
You want them to find out. You just can't bear to tell them yourself and you hope that they'll get the message and change their behavior without the two of you ever having to discuss it. We all know it never works, and if we later apologize for what we said, we invariably claim that 'we didn't mean it'.
I remember apologizing to my parents for getting into the cookie jar once when I was a kid. Of course like most kids I was explicitly instructed never to do this without permission so I simply defied my parents outright. Looking back, I can tell you that nothing will ever make me regret eating a chocolate chip cookie; those things are good. Of course, it didn't feel good to disappoint my parents - I'm not the Devil - but I was mostly sorry I got caught.
I am not saying all apologies are insincere, but I am fairly certain the majority of them are for the benefit of the listener, and and not the speaker.We don't hate the bad things we do nearly as much as we hate getting caught doing the bad things we do.
We've all blurted out 'I hate you' or 'I could kill you right now' in a fit of anger, and I think this is usually considered an exaggeration and can usually be excused. But when you casually mention in front of a room full of people (in front of a camera no less) that you'd like to 'cut a guy's nuts off', not only do you surreptitiously mean for it to get back to him, but you most certainly did mean to say it.
Sorry, but you just don't say shit like that unless you mean it. That's like the guy who fools around on his wife and then tries to say 'It didn't mean anything.'
Of course it means something, ass clown! It means you're not happy with your marriage, and you didn't have the balls to talk to your wife about it! And when you say you want to 'cut a guy's nuts off', that's some serious shit. It means you're seriously raw with someone, and you two really need to straighten some things out.
I just wish people would stop being so disingenuous about it. When is someone finally going to say 'Yes I meant it, but I should have kept it to myself.'
Trust me, when someone makes a racist comment - like say, calling New York City 'hymietown' - and then hastily backtracks when they realize the wrong people heard it they're merely sorry they were overheard. I assure you this does not mean that they've had a change of heart overnight and are now magically no longer racist.
If Jackson had merely said 'I can't believe that guy' or even 'What the fuck is wrong with him?' then maybe that's one thing. But when you say 'I'd like to cut his nuts off' then my friend, it's on. You are seriously pissed at someone and there's no point in trying to hide it. Rather than cutting of the other guy's nuts you need to call up your own and say something to his face like a man.
And if you don't have the guts to do that then let it go. But despite his many accomplishments, Jesse Jackson has shown on more than one occasion that there are more than two sides to him and some of his sides are hypocritical, sleazy and untrustworthy.
Makes me want to shove a red hot poker up his ass.
I don't watch a lot of television, but when I do I am always glad I live in the time and place that I do. The DVR is undoubtedly one of the greatest inventions in all of human history. Imagine - we have machines that do everything for us! My air conditioner runs when it needs to, my PC updates itself if I tell it to, my car tells me when the air in the tires is low, and now my television can watch itself without me!
Unfortunately they haven't invented anything to make commercials suck any less. I have 500 channels now and routinely find like that old Springsteen song, there's only ever anything I want to watch on three of them. And to make matters worse, all the cable channels apparently joined forces to make sure they all show commercials at the exact same time so it seems like when you surf from one channel to avoid a commercial it's just on another channel at the same time.
It's pure evil.
Which brings me to the subject of this post. As I recall cable television was supposed to be commercial free. That didn't last long, and now I have no recollection of those days or if they ever really did exist or were merely legend. I guess I shouldn't complain - there were no commercials because there were only two channels, A and B.
Great. Like I said, now I have 250 times that many channels and there's commercials on them about 60 percent of the time. And there are three commercials I hate more than all the others. They piss me off and while I can't remember ever buying something specifically because a commercial told me to, these products I will be sure not to buy no matter how bad off I get because I hate their commercials so much.
Those Vonage commercials, with that smug, not very attractive girl in the orange shirt. You know, some dork representing 'the phone company' is talking about all their stupid pricing plans and then this chick in a Day-Glo orange shirt comes out with this stupid smirk on her face like she's the one who invented pizza. And then she starts ripping into his shit. I have nothing against Vonage, in fact some of their old commercials are pretty funny, like the one with the blonde at the beach with the sharks. I just hate this one. I think it's because I hate smug, condescending people like the chick in this commercial. I already don't use Vonage's internet phone service because I can theoretically already use my PC and talk to anyone else on the planet free of charge as it is. I can also use it to tell the world how much I hate that stupid commercial. Mission accomplished.
The Aleve commercials where the people break into spontaneous dance because Aleve has changed their lives. I am not talking about the Super Bowl commercial or the Leonard Nimoy one. No, there's one with a redhead dancing with her kid, and then some wiry looking blonde guy who looks like one of Madonna's backup dancers, a black guy and then an Hispanic man. He asks: "How does a man who survived Woodstock deal with back pain?" My question is what the hell does one have to do with the other? Are you saying that just like in 1968 you feel that drugs are the answer to everything, you dried up old hippie? Then this totally gay sounding song (Yes- it's gay. Very gay.) plays and he starts jumping around like he's got ants in his pants. Warning! Side effects may include acting like a complete homo! Apparently Aleve is for back pain. Well, you'd have to break mine in three places to get me to take that shit since their commercials are so dumb.
And then there's the commercial I hate more than any other in existence. Every time it comes on it makes me question what I am watching because demographics play a large part in what commercials get shown when. Well apparently I occasionally watch the same thing as pot bellied, middle aged men who are incontinent, have bladder control issues, high blood pressure, color their hair, and have limp dicks. This is because I see that mother fucking Viagra commercial a little too often for my liking. You know the one, where a bunch of codgers are sitting around with musical instruments and one of them just starts belting out 'Viva Las Vegas', and they all start playing along. Except they're not singing about Las Vegas, they're singing about taking Viagra and getting some stank on the hang-lo. Usually when people sing about taking drugs and getting laid it has an entirely different connotation, so I guess the irony is a little funny when you think about it that way. But I am way, way too young to be thinking about it that way. I suppose if I hadn't had an erection in 20 years Viagra might make me sing out loud too. Then again, if your biggest problem in life is that then you either aren't trying very hard to get laid or you are just too damn old to be having sex. Your heart couldn't take it old man, just turn on Fox News, pour yourself a Maalox and enjoy your golden years. Plus, imagine a bunch of guys sitting around hanging out and suddenly one of them says "Hey everyone, let's all sing a song about our dicks!"
You're kidding, right? If I ever wrote a song about my dick that didn't sound like Whitesnake I would fully expect my friends to deliver me such an epic beat down I'd end up in one of those Aleve commercials.
"How does a guy who writes songs about his cock deal with back pain? By taking Aleve, and then dancing to a song I wrote about my cock!"
In fact if you're writing songs about your dick at all and your name isn't Howard Stern you need to show me the wormhole that opened up and delivered you here from 1981 because somewhere there's a hair metal band missing a lead singer.
Last post I promised you - inspired by my reading someone else's blog - elaboration on what I once predicted were the things that would kill Star Trek. Now that they have come to pass and we are again on the thresh hold of an unholy reanimation of the decayed old franchise, I give to you, the things I hate about Star Trek. This is by no means a complete list and I will add to it as I see fit.
Particularly if the upcoming movie reboot is as dreadful as I think it will be.
Anybody remember how the Enterprise was always the only ship within five hundred light years whenever something happened? This always ensured they would go into every situation alone and without backup. I know I know – they were on a five year mission in uncharted space – but it became a lazy contrivance the show leaned on one too many times across each incarnation of the show. For all that high minded talk of the Prime Directive our heroes were rarely in a position where they felt they actually had to follow it because the nearest help was always on the other side of the galaxy.
Speaking of the Enterprise, has anyone ever noticed how many times the ship was successfully hijacked? How many times did Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Sisko, Tom Dick or Harry lose control of their command and have to go commando on board their own ship to get it back? Not only is it apparently a piece of cake to commandeer a Star Fleet vessel, there don’t seem to be any repercussions for the crew that lets it happen.
Then again, this may be why it is so damn hard for minorities to get anywhere on that show. You’re telling me Sulu was the best helmsman in the fleet but it took him twenty five years to make Captain? Last time we saw Uhura she was doing the same thing she was back in 1967 – sitting around answering the phone. Sure they made Chekov first officer of the Reliant, and as soon as they made the Brother in charge of the ship kill himself poor Pavel's Gypsy ass is back in his old seat next to Sulu, working the turn signals again. So much for all that racial equality. And don’t bother reminding me about Sisko. They finally put a Brother in charge and he's the most boring schmuck they could find. I don't know about you but I am thinking Affirmative Action is alive and well in the 24th Century. And Richard Daystrom, the black man who invented the Duotronic computer? Yeah, he also almost blew up the Enterprise, went insane and was locked away in Space Prison. A Brutha can’t get a break even on the other side of the galaxy. Damn.
But never mind the minorities, there was always the one Fish-Out-of-Water Character™ on the show who was bizarrely different from the rest of the crew but warmly endearing because all he or she wanted to do was be just…like…us. Spock was the first one, but he wasn’t weird enough so eventually they gave us Data the Self Conscious Android, Odo the Obsessive Compulsive Shape Shifter, the neurotic Holo-Doctor from Voyager, Seven of Nine the Super Hot Cyborg, and perhaps the most odious of them all – Jar-Jar Neelix and his elf-like little girlfriend Kes. Barf. What is it with all these aliens who are perpetually unable to be proud of what they are that they want to be like us? And what’s up with the crew always letting them think that way? What’s so great about being human, anyway? Just so you can pay lip service to the uniqueness of every other race in the galaxy but never let them forget how different they are from you by constantly bringing it up? What are we, a race of politically correct galactic rednecks who speak about equality when it's convenient but can’t resist the occasional inference that you just don’t quite measure up? Why not remind Data that there’s no need for him to be human because he can bench press a thousand pounds, has an IQ of 1200 and according to Tasha Yar, is hung like a racehorse? He's actually better than we are! Because the way to control someone you view as inferior is to keep them neurotic by never letting them suspect that you might view them as an equal.
The transporter! It beams you up, it slices, it dices, it gets the writers out of tight spots that pen and paper just can’t handle; it does everything! What started as one of the coolest ideas in science fiction eventually became a do it yourself cure-all-plot-hole-spackle that usually functioned at the expense of creativity. Someone’s contracted a deadly disease? No problem, just run them through the transporter and it will magically restore them to a previous quantum state. Someone’s being held hostage on an enemy vessel with shields up? Don’t worry, just phase the transporter with the shield rotation cycle and magically rescue them. Chief Engineer Scotty is dead? No he’s not; he ‘suspended’ himself in the transporter beam at the last minute so that he could be conveniently resurrected by the guy who has his job today! Just watch how it slices through this tomato even after cutting through 100 aluminum cans! Unfortunately it also splits people into good and evil twins, sometimes accidentally sends people back in time and like most of the technology in Star Trek, only works like it’s supposed to when the plot requires it to. If anything on the real U.S.S. Enterprise was as unpredictable and gimpy as the transporter the Navy would yank it off the ship immediately.
This brings me to the way the potency of the weapons they use on Star Trek depend entirely on the plot. Sometimes one photon torpedo will blast a ship to smithereens – other times it takes two dozen. Sometimes the ship’s phasers could knock a dime off a Romulan’s ass half a light year away. Other times they can’t hit shit. Sometimes a photon torpedo is enough to kill a powerful God-like alien such as the one in StarTrek V: The One That Never Happened, but Captain Kirk is able to survive the blast by just diving behind a nearby rock. I’m just saying, the only thing he suffered was a dirty uniform.
Speaking of uniforms, why is it necessary for Star Fleet to change uniforms so often? The US Army have worn more or less the same thing since the fifties but Star Fleet changes duds every 22 episodes. Remember the pajamas the characters wore in season one of Next Generation? They never stopped tinkering with them all the way through Deep Space Nine and Voyager. First they were one piece, then they were two, then there were no collars, then there were, then the stripe went this way, then it went that way, then the buttons were over here, then they were over there. Pleats, no pleats, poly-cotton blend, Rayon...everyone on one show dressed slightly different from everyone on another show. Listen, I’m no idiot. They’re just trying to periodically add some spice to the series, the way they periodically have to blow up the Enterprise and replace it with a slicker looking version, or whip out the old 'kill off but not really kill off a character because he ducked into a time vortex at the last minute and will return next season' trick. It’s just that when you resort to goofy little tricks at the expense of creative story telling to keep the show fresh you use up your creative capital pretty quickly.
Time travel. Enough. With. The. Time. Travel. Apparently for some reason the cast of one Star Trek series or another were present at almost every historical event of any importance in the past 500 years. Whether through actual time travel or through some other form of trickery that technically qualifies as time travel our heroes have: Narrowly averted nuclear war with the Soviets, tangled with the Nazis, matched wits with someone who I am pretty sure was supposed to be Bill Gates, gone ten rounds with Genghis Khan, spent a day in Sherlock Holmes' shoes, saved the whales, lent Jack London money to start his writing career, helped invent warp drive, the transporter and the phaser, met their own evil twins about twelve times, hung out with Mark Twain, Abe Lincoln, Robin Hood and his not-so-merry men...uh...invented fire, paper and the wheel...and then hung around to watch the Earth cool just for kicks. Hey look – some of the very best Star Trek episodes (and I am talking about four, five maybe out of the hundreds of total episodes of all the shows) were time travel episodes, but many more of the less memorable ones were as well. I am not saying that a science fiction show shouldn’t examine things like time travel on occasion. But for a series that prides itself on being (arguably, remotely) scientifically relevant you would think they’d at least give a nod to the fact that time travel (unless you're Doctor Who) just isn’t something that conveniently happens to you all the time. And sorry – I am just not willing to accept, even on a fictional level – that everyone who has ever served on a ship called Enterprise all know each other. No wonder the carrier Enterprise was the most decorated ship in World War II. Because Mister Spock was aboard!
All the moralizing. Look, I understand that Star Trek – at least at the beginning – was from the high brow school of science fiction, despite the go-go boots and girls’ asses hanging out of their uniforms. Most of the stories were allegorical in nature, meant to make us think about complex subjects by simplifying and humanizing them. However not only has Star Trek pumped the well dry on its own formula it’s been aped by every other science fiction franchise in existence. Trek has almost become a victim of its own success. I’m not necessarily suggesting they need to abandon all the trademarks of their storytelling – or maybe I am. Gene Roddenberry certainly didn’t invent allegory, nor was he the first science fiction writer to think about it or to bring it to television. But for this sort of adult storytelling to be a part of a science fiction oriented adventure series was unique. The problem is that we’ve seen it all before. Black and white allegory is so transparent – let’s drop the formula and think in broader terms. It probably wouldn’t have hurt the show to experiment with longer story arcs, and being more flexible with its episodic format. But by the time Next Generation rolled around, Roddenberry had far more latitude than he had when NBC was calling the shots and the show’s pedantic moralizing became even heavier handed. The Enterprise became a country club in space manned by a crew of self important Space Liberals. And there they went, rocketing through the galaxy with their clean cut families in tow, sipping Chardonnay and quoting Shakespeare, lecturing to other cultures about the superiority of their way of life:
“We too were once backward, foolish savages such as you. But we abandoned our warlike ways and learned that our differences are what truly make us one. We coalesced into a perfect Socialist collective that no longer cherishes violence, uses money, sees color, or recognizes people as individuals. Technology is our God and we are yours. Aspire to join us and yea, verily when I return to my gleaming city in the sky I will consider your application from on high.”
Yeah, you hear yourself laughing. You know it’s true. You can almost close your eyes and hear Patrick Stewart bellowing at some lumpy headed alien ambassador before dematerializing back into the ether with a flourish. I can get a sermon at church, or from Michael Moore. I like my science fiction on the brainy side but do try and exercise some subtlety, kay?
10. Every planet they visit is populated by 30 people and looks suspiciously like Southern California. Yeah, they’re on a budget. This would be why on Stargate SG-1 every planet in the galaxy looks like WashingtonState. I’m just telling you I’ve noticed.
11. Every alien race just looks like the guy from the soap commercials with some putty on his forehead. Again I know – there’s a budget. Once again I’m just telling you I’m wise to it.
12.The Disease of the Week episode, where some or all of the crew is infected by a rare alien microbe for which there is no cure, but the Doctor nonetheless manages to spontaneously invent one, just in time for the last commercial.
13. All the villains have been neutered. Remember the Klingons? Yeah well they’re like pets now. They growl from time to time but they know who has the kibble. And the Borg, one of the most ingeniously diabolical sci-fi villains ever? Yeah they were ruined in First Contact. What was once an unstoppable, immortal collective of soulless cyborg worker bees with no command hierarchy to outwit became just another gang of ordinary thugs with an ordinary moustache twirling ham running the show. Sorry, I meant ‘ordinary’ hip swinging tart in a bat-suit. It turns out that the Borg aren’t exactly a collective, strictly speaking. They have a Queen Bee who’s just as good at mind numbing academic discourse as Picard. Of course, she’s not smart enough to realize that her insane Rube Goldberg plan to destroy humanity by keeping us from meeting the Vulcans is pointless and overly complex. All the stupid bitch had to do was drop off a couple of drones in 1860 wait a couple of days, come back and make robot Abraham Lincoln kneel before Zod.
14. The techno-babble. What do I mean by that, you say? O, you know how when power to the warp core suddenly drops thirty five percent due to a plasma rupture in the EPS conduits adjacent to Jeffries tube 32 or a spike in zeta-chronoton particle emissions overloads the shields and forces a temporary power shunt from life support. Then of course, there’s the old transporter malfunction caused by a failure in the polymer integrity of the dorsal buffer probe that overloaded the Heisenberg compensator. Huh? Look, I imagine that some of the conversations aboard a real naval vessel are equally confusing to the lay person so I don’t necessarily have a problem with them trying to replicate that – to an extent. But all too often minute after minute of screen time is taken up with this nonsense in place of any sort of meaningful story momentum. I really wondered sometimes whether or not it was sometimes said in meetings:
“Look, at this point we’re about thirty minutes into a forty minute episode. Just kill five with some bullshit about running an interior baseline diagnostic on the isolinear input generator, we can put in a commercial here, Doctor Crusher cures the disease in five, commercial, Picard gives a speech about how this proves humans have overcome their violent ways to work together for the benefit of all and…roll credits."
It would appear that no art, literature, music or any other form of entertainment will be in use for the next 400 years. Ever notice how everyone on Star Trek is obsessed with Shakespeare, Mozart, or generally people and things from the 20th Century? Doesn't anybody watch whatever the hell is on television in the 24th Century? Did Khan take away all the books when he took over the world? Are the Dallas Cowboys no longer around? Were there no brilliant scientists on Earth after Einstein and Stephen Hawking - and that drunken asshole from First Contact? What the hell is wrong with these people?
Wesley Fucking Crusher. Enough said.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Star Trek is an old tea bag that’s been used 50 times. The product is just watered down, tired and worn out. Remember what I said earlier about the Bond movies? You remember how each one had a megalomaniacal super villain with the island fortress and an evil sidekick with the freakish physical deformity? It got to the point where anybody who had seen one could probably write one, and the average Star Trek episode – or movie – was no exception.
My suggestion back in 1996 was that since Next Generation had run two years longer than it probably should have, Generations had been 90 minutes of pointless dreck and the bastard monstrosity that was First Contact had removed what little credibility remained from the franchise, it was time to just let it go. Give it a rest for a few years to be sure, but I was okay just letting Star Trek go away with what dignity it had left before it overstayed its welcome to the point that Paramount itself had to put a bullet in it. Well here we are 12 years later, and I think almost everyone can agree that my dire prediction has come true and I am here to tell you it was even more horrific than I’d imagined.
Is there hope for the franchise? I really don’t think so. The upcoming Star Trek ‘reboot’ includes an old cast member (Leonard Nimoy), a time travel story partially lifted from an episode of the original series and a ubiquitous, overexposed director who is the first guy that gets called whenever Judd Apatow isn’t available.
Oh great, we couldn’t just have a reboot with an original story, concept and actors, No, we have to continue carrying 40 years of baggage along with it just to please the dwindling number of obsessive compulsive nerds who can’t let go of the original show.
It’s the exact…same…way the last iteration of Star Trek began in 1987. But don’t listen to me. What could possibly go wrong? Flame me if you want Trekkies, but it happened before and it will happen again - and there's nobody to blame but yourself. I saw the light and tried to warn other fans but you didn't want to listen. Star Trek died because it failed to change and adapt - because fan's refused to let it! Star Trek always had to stay the same - the stories, the cast, everything. No matter how boring, cheesy, old or fat anything or anyone about it got, you wanted the status quo.
Well that's fine, that's the way you wanted it. Just remember that things which fail to change and adapt eventually outlive their usefulness and become extinct. There's a reason the word 'dinosaur' is an adjective as well as a noun.
And Star Trek, unless a lot of things change - beginning with the fans - is the biggest lizard going in the world of science fiction. Live long and prosper kids, for you have killed Star Trek, and it will do neither.
I read an article recently about Star Trek that gave several pretty convincing reasons why the franchise has outlived its usefulness and should be left to wither in the entertainment purgatory where it has languished since the cancellation of the wretched Enterprise some years ago.
I got a chuckle out of it because it was clearly written by someone with some knowledge of the franchise who - like me - was probably once a fan. This got me thinking about a website I created back in 1996 when Star Trek was still alive and well, enjoying a great deal of undeserved popularity. It detailed my reasons why Star Trek should be destroyed, buried and forgotten about.
I said it not as a hater, but someone who at one time had just about everything memorized about all 79 original episodes of the Star Trek series. I can’t say I ever learned to speak Klingon or anything but I was a little obsessive about my devotion to Star Trek and would go to any lengths to obtain information on the show. But one day I realized that the fine line between simple geek and world class loser is a fine one indeed and I needed to get some perspective. My obsession with Star Trek needed to deflate to reasonable proportions.
And now, I had seen something I once loved become feeble, sick and infirm. It was suffering, I was suffering with it and for both our sakes it needed to be put out of it's misery.
That’s right, I was once an Orthodox Trekkie, but now I am Reformed. Praise be. I can still talk shop with the dorks, as you will see – but trust me kids, there’s a whole big wide world out there. Move out of Mom’s attic and go check it out.
Speaking of the aforementioned dorks, it is safe to say at the time my thoughts were not well received by the notoriously rabid Star Trek community. I found myself the target of endless email flaming as well as some not too thinly veiled threats. I also drew some positive attention from a guy who was somehow associated with Mystery Science Theater. I’ve long since misplaced the email so don’t ask me for a name. Believe me, I wish I could remember. So not only did I feel vindicated in my thinking, I also waved the endorsement in the face of each and every angry dork who suggested that I deserved to be torn limb by limb for all eternity in the Klingon hell of Gre'Thor.
That’s one thing that has never failed to amaze me about life in general and the Internet in particular. People get so very, very angry with you simply for having a different opinion than they do. They will argue in circles with you until at some point, unable to withstand the deluge of juvenile brickbats, exclamation points, random capitalizations and poor grammar you will just give up and agree with them. Luckily I just don’t live in the same world as most people so the benefits of this demented method of discourse are lost on me.
All I did was point out the fact that Star Trek had become nothing more than an ATM for Paramount and the quality of the product grew more suspect each year for one simple reason: Because as finicky as sci-fi and horror fan-boys like to believe they are, they generally will accept anything and everything that you give them because they have no lives.
It’s that simple. Despite the decades long friendly (and sometimes not so friendly) feud between them, the one thing that Star Trek and Star Wars fans have in common is that they’ll sit through absolutely anything, as long as it says Star Trek or Star Wars on it. Trek fans would gleefully pay to watch static for 79 minutes as long as it started with those eight musical notes of theme music and somehow worked in a Shakespeare quote. Star Wars fans would watch George Lucas take a shit for two hours as long as he had a light saber in one hand (no, the other hand), which was not terribly unlike the experience I had sitting through all three Star Wars prequels.
At least George Lucas Taking a Shit would have a logical beginning, middle and end. It also would have cost Lucas about $300 to make and he still would have earned four hundred thousand billion dollars at the box office as geeks around the world debated the hidden meaning of it all.
All they want is more, more, more and they don’t even care how good it is. And you know what you dorks - your wish has been granted. The overwhelming majority of science fiction and horror stinks because apparently all of us can’t get enough of it. Star Trek – the focus of this discussion – reached a creative nadir at least fifteen years ago because creative ideas to the world of Star Trek are a basic requirement of the system but the system is a closed loop, doomed to run out of them very quickly.
In other words there was a formula – one for the films and one for the television shows – and once fans became addicted to the formula they weren’t willing to wean off the teat even once it had gone dry. So, rather than provide you with any more reasons why Star Trek should stay dead, I will try – to the best of my recollection and in no particular order – to recall the reasons I gave in 1996 why its death was inevitable. Bear in mind that this really is little more than a list of clichés and contrivances that by and large once made Star Trek compelling viewing. However, long ago the franchise became a slave to these things the way the Bond movies became indistinguishable parodies of themselves.
What did I say? Well like I said I just remember the gist of it but as we approach the next unnecessary chapter in the Star Trek saga I relish the opportunity to once again rankle the loyal, dorky masses. I’ll elaborate in my next post. Stay tuned, loyal readers to subspace channel 445.32-Zeta and...shit...you know you dip your toe back in and next thing you know it all comes back to you.
Because I know how to operate a savings account Marla and I are taking the little Tylers on vacation this week. I'm sure it will be rife with adventure and peril at every turn. Probably every time I accidentally take the wrong exit off the highway and spend the next 45 minutes trying to get back to it while avoiding Guido the Killer Pimp and those roving bands of street gangs that I've heard so much about on 60 Minutes.
TIP! If you are driving late at night and an oncoming car flashes it's brights DON'T FLASH BACK! It's a gang initiation and if you do they will find you and run you off the road and slash your achiles tendon and totally murder you. It's true, my cousin's nephew's brother's former roommate told me.
I just avoid the whole deal entirely and leave my lights off. That'll show them.
Finally got around to watching Rambo yesterday. A fairly slight movie plot wise. The story offers no real surprises and unlike Rocky Balboa it never feels necessary but it is still pretty impressive. Stallone directs with a lot of confidence and the movie looks and feels more realistic than the other sequels, bringing it a bit more in line with First Blood. It is an uncommonly violent movie. The war violence is at the same level as the opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan. People get exploded by high caliber gun fire, mines, rockets, etc and in large quantities. Then there are the multiple stabbings, gang rape, maimings, and one unlucky fellow literally has his throat ripped out. NOT one for the whole family.
The scant plot concerns a group of missionaries, including Julia Benz from Dexter and Angel, hiring John Rambo in Thailand for transport into Burma to bring aid to the villagers in the war torn country. The missionaries are captured, and the leader of their church asks Rambo to take some mercenaries to the site where he dropped off the unlucky doctors to get them back. All manner of hell commences to break loose.
It’s an entertaining movie that makes you feel guilty for being entertained. On one hand you are actively rooting for the disembowelment of the EVIL Burmese Army bad guys. On the other, you know they are going to get theirs so all the atrocities are just window dressing to get to the action. It's a strange film to sit through and I'm still not sure if I liked it or not. I know it's not going in my "probably will buy someday" pile but I could see myself watching it on HBO in a year.
If you are a fan of the first and 2nd movie or have a Sunday to spend an hour and half it’s worth a view. It’s not a particularly pleasant movie and is utterly devoid of humor but it is far less cheestastic than the first 2 sequels.
Interestingly, Rambo shows the acting range of Stallone quite well when comparing it to the 2006 Rocky Balboa. There is not a hint of Rocky in this performance. Whereas Rocky is not the smartest guy on the block, he has a big heart and it shows. He’s all big gestures and a friendly, unhurried way of speaking. Rambo is an intelligent guy that is almost incapacitated by regret over what he IS and as such very nearly incapable of showing feeling off the battlefield. I believe his first line of dialogue is "Fuck the world." He speaks little, but when he does it is clear he is still haunted by the same old ghosts.
Stallone steps into the role like no time has passed and the world weariness he brings to the character is well earned. The first explosion of violence from him is shocking in the suddenness and finality of it and really makes you take notice.
Then the movie goes off the rails with total mayhem but for a bit there you could see the movie it wanted to be underneath the bloodshed.
Yes, I said it. I came out and said it. Is it politically correct? No, but scroll down a few weeks and you'll see how I feel about Political Correctness.
Is it something you yourself have often thought? Yes, it is. Don't deny it. Are you telling me you haven't approached checkout at the grocery store after 30 minutes of shopping hell, ready as a wrongly convicted felon to get the hell out - but you have more than 15 items so the express checkout is a non-starter. You peruse your available choices and are faced with the following scenario:
Lane Four - Disinterested looking teen at the register. Line is backed up like Rob Reiner's colon.
Lane Five - Single Mom alert - two carts filled with Captain Crunch and Similac with three kids hanging like screeching bats from each one. You want to walk up to her and tell her there's a Sam's Club down the street and that condoms are in aisle five but there's no reason to make a scene. You just want to pay for your crap and then get out. Shopping for groceries sucks almost as much as shopping for clothes.
Lane Six - Hippie Guy with a cart full of organic produce, soy milk and Scooby Snacks who insists on using his own landfill friendly hemp bags for everything. This is going to take a while. In line behind him is Comic Book Guy with a week's worth of Mountain Dew and Totino's Pizza.
Lane Seven - Holy shit, it's empty. People are walking right by it like it isn't there. Sweet deal - you high tail it over to lane seven, sneering at all the suckers trapped in line behind Shaggy and Future Jerry Springer Guest.
That's when you see it. There was a reason nobody wanted to get in line at Lane Seven. You glance over at Lane Eight and make contact with NASCAR Guy - belly perched like an asthmatic pigeon on his shopping cart full of bratwurst and Light Beer and his beefy little hands wrapped around an issue of Weekly World News. His eyes twinkle with mockery as though he's at his favorite dive bar, nursing a warm pitcher of Bud Light while watching a college kid try to order something decent like Sam Adams.
"Today isn't your day, Fancy Boy." He seems to be saying.
Yes, there's only one person in front of you in Lane Seven but in this case one is enough. It is Little Old Lady with Twelve Items, A Bag Full Of Nickels And A Mason Jar Full Of Coupons.
There's nowhere to go. All the other lines are full. You're trapped, my friend. Your next stop, the sign post up ahead. The Twilight Zone.
You know what's coming. She disputes the price of everything in the cart...
"I thought this was ninety eight cents, you rang up ninety nine."
"Last time I was here milk was cheaper."
"I have a coupon that's fifty cents off, and would like to combine it with this coupon that lets me get two for one."
"That seems a little high, I need to speak to the manager."
"Maybe I should write a check, I don't want to use all my nickels. Now, where did I put my pen. No, I can't use your pen because it is on a chain and I don't like that. It's too hard to write. Just give me a moment, I am sure my pen is here somewhere. Then again, I do hate to have carried all these nickels in here for nothing..."
And the hits keep on coming. You're going to be in line for three hours over a horoscope book, some beets, a couple of cans of creamed corn and some Metamucil. Single Mom and her $450 of pop tarts is long gone. Comic Book Guy has been back home playing World of Warcraft for half an hour.
It is then that you realize that the country would be better off if Old People stayed home and had their food delivered to them. That way they can't hold up the line at the grocery store trying to redeem coupons from 1989, they can't plow their cars into the Farmer's Market and best of all they can't disturb you by acting as a stark reminder of your own fragile mortality.
They can rest at home in climate controlled comfort watching game shows, grousing about young people and reminiscing about how much better things were when FDR was President. Better for them, better for you, and better for me.
And in case you're wondering yes, I will gladly abide by my own rules if and when I am old. As a matter of fact I have to constantly remind my beloved but constantly brooding grandmother to take heart, because she has into her eighties what those of us in our thirties would pay real money for - unlimited time to do what we want when we want.
The bright lights, noise and bustle of the world isn't for you. Stay home and enjoy your golden years and let the many services and products made possible by your decades of hard work finally work for you.
And more importantly, save me some time. Just as your fellow octogenarians can't wait to hear how angry young people make you, all ten of my loyal readers are clamoring to hear my opinions on how angry you make me.
It's the Circle of Life. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
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Monday, July 28, 2008
