“All field units. Intercept the android.”
There’s a new Star Trek movie in theatres, and I’ve got pretty serious problems with it; which makes this a perfect time to continue my backwards troll through the endlessly problematic Star Trek: The Next Generation feature films, bringing me to Star Trek: Insurrection, a.k.a. Star Trek 9, and – arguably – the origin of whatever problem in the franchise grew so massive that it compelled Paramount to hit the reboot switch, wiping out 40 years of Star Trek continuity. Something about the mood in the room changes with Star Trek 9, and the franchise crosses the border from mainstream fare to fan service, even though the fans didn’t like it much either. This was 1998 – Deep Space Nine was wrapping up (Worf’s presence on the Enterprise explained in a line which is, delightfully, interrupted before finishing, as though to assure the audience that no one cares), Voyager was in the middle of its lackluster run, and Enterprise was imminent. Less than half a decade later, Star Trek would be a dead duck. The tide turned here.
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In 2009 I wrote a non-review of the first Abrams film by way of sidestepping the excruciating scope of having to respond to this newfangled property directly; the guy who’s Blogging the Next Generation every week, I’m far too close to the material to do anything but repeat the trick. So, with apologies again, let’s (boldly) go:
In which the effort to tell the story behind the story has seen better days.
Happy Valentine’s Day, fuck-os! Is it a good day to die hard? Read my review, just posted to the Substream.
Retrospective review! To warm you up for Die Hard 5, here’s my review of Die Hard 4, a.k.a. the most unintentionally profound movie of its year, and possibly its decade.
After hopscotching his way across nearly every genre in filmdom for his twentysomething-year career, Steven Soderbergh, for his theatrical coup de grace, has landed on a film where the genre, itself, is a spoiler. Delicious!
Shortening the turn on the total downfall of cinema as we know it, the first of two major Netflix Original Series for 2013 arrived yesterday in a hailstorm of chunky digital fury and incessant livetweeting.
My degree is in film production, which means that I have an oversensitive ear for “film school writing,” of which Broken City has a stupefying amount. Kids in film school can’t write dialogue to save their lives, probably because they’ve never stopped listening to the sound of their own voices long enough to understand that the majority of the human race doesn’t talk that way; nor have they come to the clear realization that even if people did speak like that, it wouldn’t work as drama.
“HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS is probably slightly better than THE BROTHERS GRIMM.”
