Last night I went down to Albany and didn't get home until quarter to one in the morning. Tonight I went down to Albany and didn't get home until quarter to one in the morning. Last night was due to laundry. Tonight was due to Metallica. That's a way better reason for staying out late!
Now it's time to sleep for the next three days.
No time for a review of the TNG movies today. I'll let these two geek out on my behalf.
Star Trek: The Motion Pictures
Watching the original series Star Trek films on DVD was like rediscovering them for the first time. Not only did they look great, but on DVD we get director's cuts.
While alternate cuts are not always the way to go, when it comes to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first and worst of the Trek films, it made a WORLD of difference.
My mother-in-law (and I'm sure many other Trekkies) refers to TMP as "Where Nomad Has Gone Before". The premise was hardly original, it was a bad mishmash of the Original Series episode, The Changeling and Star Trek: Phase II, the next planned Star Trek television series that never came to fruition. On top of that it was like Gene Roddenberry told director Bob Wise to go overboard on all of the effects shots they could never do on TOS. We were "treated" to these really loooong and boring shots of NOTHING happening for a good four and a half hours with two minutes of bald chicks and "story" placed sporadically throughout the flick. Ugh. What an atrocious film.
BUT WAIT - there's now this incredible Director's Cut wherein the great makers have discovered the "lost" art of EDITING. Holy cow, what a difference good editing makes. The Director's Cut of this film not only makes the film tolerable, but enjoyable as well. I had *never* wanted to watch this film again unless I was having trouble sleeping. But that's all changed now. If you'd seen this film on VHS or, dog forbid, caught the television edit and thought, "meh", get thee to a dvd rentery and give this flick another shot. It's excellent.
What can I say about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that hasn't already been said? Nick Meyer came in and breathed some much needed life into the franchise and directed a classic.
I've always been on the fence about Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. I used to be distracted by Saavik's perm...it didn't seem logical for a Vulcan to have such a high maintenance hairstyle. Not only that but the film flits about until the very cruddy ending where they magically put Spock's katra back where it belonged (brain and brain, what is brain!)...I dunno, I just didn't buy it, I always felt it was a little weak.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was my absolute favorite out of the TOS films this time around when I watched it. It's a fun movie and it has whales. Yep, whales. How can you go wrong? And what the hell is up with the mom and dad from 7th Heaven in two Trek movies now? It's some sort of Christian Family Drama Conspiracy (tm). I can't really complain, Catherine Hicks is wonderful as the passionate Dr. Gillian Taylor. ST: IV is funny, charming and exactly the kind of adventure that is a joy to take with the crew of the Enterprise.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
They producers of Star Trek must've gone down on their knees to beg Nick Meyer to come back and once again save their dying franchise - and he did, with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It really is best in its original Klingon. Seriously though, when Captain Von Trapp started singing the reprise of So Long, Farewell in full Klingon garb, I knew this was a hit film.
Here's a little side note. When I watched The Sound of Music as a kid I used to wonder what happened to those Von Trapp kids. The last I knew they went off to live in the mountains. Many were teens, didn't they ever get horny? Was there inbreeding? What does that sort of isolation do to one's emotional state? Did they live there forever? Thankfully at some point in my childhood I saw the remaining VonTrapp kids (who were really damn old) on Oprah and realized they came down from the mountains after a while (or at least before coming to Chicago to film Oprah).
Anyway, the original series Star Trek films, all five of them, were pretty ok if not excellent. I ranked all of the franchise films a short while ago, but I'll yoink out the pesky TNG ones and share my order of favorites for just The Original Series cast.
4 The Voyage Home
6 The Undiscovered Country
2 The Wrath of Khan
1 The Motion Picture
3 The Search for Spock
5 The Final Frontier
A mass of conflicting impulses. - Spock and V'ger Nomad
The Great Star Trek Project of 08-09 has been slowly drawing to a close. While Mr. Val and I finished Enterprise last month and will soon tackle the pre-boot on blu-ray we've been busy with fan films and parodies for a while. My intention was to blog my progress throughout the project but that was overly ambitious. I think I am at the point, though, where I can step back and make some pretty good observations about the project as a whole.
Star Trek: The Original Series
Oh joy, what fun. There are few shows that can be so genuinely wonderful but still have enough cheese that they don't even warrant parody. TOS does enough to parody itself, so much so that, at times, it's painful. Let us all recall Spock's Brain. Ok, let's not. Instead, let's let some genius with a YouTube account condense it into 4 minutes that are far more enjoyable than being subjected to the entire episode.
This clip is also sure to highlight one of my favorite lines from all of Trek: Brain and brain, what is brain!?!
Clearly the original series stood for a lot of good in addition to the cheese. Yay brother. The show was one of the first to spotlight minority actors and actresses and show them working alongside white people as if it was no big deal. And despite some seemingly sexist overtones, I feel like Gene Roddenberry saw much of the sexiness of the women on the show as an expression of female empowerment. Let's face it, throughout all of the different series it's clear that women can do anything, however, the amount of quality face time by powerful women in Star Trek pales in comparison to that of the men. To me, that shows that we have a longer way to go in current society.
One of the primary missions of Captain Kirk was to destroy every Eden he could lay his hands on. Apparently space is populated by peaceful and beautiful worlds that all hold a different, dirty little secret. Each has its own version of the snake. While I kept a list of characters who said, "I'm a doctor, not a ______", I should've also kept a list of Edens destroyed by the glorious Captain Kirk, a man with no need of a Prime Directive. Every time it happened, I know I turned to Mr. Val with my best Kirk imitation and spat, "so this...is...your...Eden".
For the best of the original series we turn to the first, and shockingly, the third season.
Easily one of the most famous episodes of TOS is The City on the Edge of Forever. I dare you to watch it and not shed a tear. According to the Wiki page, writer Harlan Ellison recently settled with Paramount over royalty issues despite at one time disowning the script. Ha! Sounds like Ellison. But he certainly deserves credit for this, even if the final version is someone dissimilar to his original script.
Another outstanding episode in the catalog was penultimate episode of the entire show's run. They should've ended the series with All Our Yesterdays since the final episode, Turnabout Intruder was a poorly executed look at what the glass ceiling in Star Fleet can do to a poor girl. Anyway, back to the good one, here's All Our Yesterdays, featuring one of my favorite Ladies of Star Trek.
Now for the fun part. Let's turn to YouTube for some hilarious splices and clips.
First, there's the ever-famous video featuring all of the variations on: "he's dead, Jim".
I love this next one. The person who uploaded it simply calls it, "Shatner at his finest":
All in all, the Original Series is a wonderful show, I can't wait to get the remastered versions on blu-ray with the beefed up effects. I'm always happy to revisit this universe.
Coming tomorrow (if I feel like it): a look at the Original Series Films
I'm glad I can now post content from Amazon again, but I can't seem to write in the same post that I post any Amazon content? Anyway, as I suspected it would be, Purple Hibiscus was great -- a really sad, evocative coming-of-age novel. To me, Half of a Yellow Sun is the better novel, because it's broader in scope and more political, but I think that's a matter of personal preference; I think many readers would be completely enraptured by the intimacy of Purple Hibiscus.
When I was a kid I remember liking Born in the USA. I never really considered myself a Springsteen fan, but that was a huge song in the early 80's. Fast forward to the 90's and I remember watching him getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I was more excited to see Max Weinburg since I had become a fan of him on the Conan O'Brien show. Boy was I ever disappointed. I don't even remember what they played (probably Born in the USA) but damn, that song went on for.ev.er. I started to realize that all the Boss really ever had were a couple of really catchy riffs, sexeh charisma and twenty musicians who only knew the basics. I mean seriously, maybe it's only because I've only had exposure to the singles and the popular tunes, but I can't recall any stand-out musicianship in any of his stuff.
Regardless of that, I can't help but still like a few of his tunes. They're catchy, what can I say?
Ha - at the end of Dancing in the Dark the crowd is going nuts doing that oh-ay-oh-ay-oh-ay-oh-ay thing. They do that at a fuck ton of Maiden shows too. I seem to recall finding out it was a soccer thing.
Not one woman? Not one?
