OK, folks, obviously something is rotten in the state of Denmark. I’m trying to get things fixed, but until then, things may appear strange here. Bear with me.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Congrats, Ruben.
I didn’t watch the entire finale — just a bit at the beginning, and the last twenty minutes, when Ruben was crowned. Clay Aiken is a class act, I have to say. I loved how stunned Ruben looked through it all, and I hope he has a long and happy career.
(But my favorite part of the show was when they gathered some of the rejects to do that “Sing a Song” tune from Sesame Street. That just cracked me up.)
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OK. Time to talk for a little bit about 24…spoilers abound, of course.
I’m a bit non-plused as to the cliffhanger, here. Is President Palmer dead, or on the verge of dying? Presumably Jack Bauer will spend part of next season seeking out the assassin (whom I am told is a character from the first season, which I did not watch), but clearly some time needs to go by, seeing as how Jack was barely conscious by the time this season ended. I expect, then, that Palmer will die, and be replaced by Vice President Prescott, who has just relinquished power after his ninety-minute coup. (I also wonder if the fact that Prescott spent those ninety minutes as Acting President will ever be made public….)
As for the story in the last episode, I thought it did a great job of tying in plotlines from earlier in the season, while at the same time it seemed at bit of a deus ex machina. The way certain forces that have been acting against Bauer suddenly do a 180 and act with him felt forced, but it might actually play out better if the show is actually watched in real-time on DVD. (And I loved the fight scene between Bauer and that one goon. Even on the verge of heart failure, Bauer is one mean fighter.)
So, I can’t wait for next year. I hope Palmer’s not dead, because Dennis Haysbert simply did a magnificent job of portraying this man, the President we’d all like to have. (On one Internet message board I read occasionally, one poster waxed poetic a while back about how wonderful Palmer is, because he’s sticking to his guns in not wanting to go to war against innocent countries. This same poster, though, had two months earlier said that it was a crime against civilization — exact words, there — that Baghdad and Tehran had not been reduced to smoldering craters by 9:00 am on September 12, 2001. I didn’t bother trying to point out the disconnect.)
What I loved most about 24 this year was that the writers didn’t take the obvious route by keeping the bomb the focus of the entire season. That would have been too easy — just end the last episode of the year with Jack’s fevered attempts to defuse it or whatever. Instead, they wove the bomb plot into an even bigger story, and for the most part they did so convincingly. A lot of the details in 24 this year don’t really stand up to scrutiny, but while the thing was taking place, my disbelief was always on full-suspension. Kind of like how Casablanca is an utterly engrossing, classic movie — and the face that the “letters of transit” make absolutely no sense at all does nothing to change that.
(Oh, and here’s an interesting Salon article about this year’s edition of 24.)
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I watched Star Trek: Nemesis last night, and now I’m hoping that if they ever make a fourth Terminator movie, the plot consists of Ah-nuld’s Terminator and Robert Patrick’s T-1000 saying, “Forget about John Connor. Let’s go kill Rick Berman.”
This movie is terrible.
Star Trek‘s onscreen history has been spotty, to say the least (check out my Star Trek Redux series, conveniently linked under “Notable Dispatches” for more!), but even when the Trek people have turned in an unsatisfactory product, I’ve at least been able to give them an A or B for effort. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier may not be a good movie, but I can see what Shatner was trying to get at and I know how Paramount stepped in, gutted his budget and basically forced him to dilute his story. Star Trek III: The Search For Spock has the worst production values of any of the movies, but it’s still got a lot going for it, including the best distillation of the concept of Heroism I’ve yet seen. Even Star Trek Generations has some campy fun, even though its plot is a confused mess.
Nemesis, though, has almost nothing going for it.
The story is a lame blend of tropes from earlier Trek films, most notably The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, with none of the epic quality that made those films so good. We get no feeling at all for the troubles at the heart of the Romulan Empire — it’s an empire, for God’s sake, and yet it seems to have all the scope of Des Moines, with a ruling council the size of the Wyoming State Legislature. The TNG episode “Reunification” did a much better job, with more limited resources, at conveying the idea that the Romulans are a society.
Shinzon is a lousy villain. He’s a whiny teenage kid who makes it obvious from his first minute of screen time that what he needs most is to have his ass kicked, and hard; but sure enough, we get scene upon interminable scene of Picard trying to understand him and come to terms with him and to make him see a better way and blah blah blah. I’ve read in other reviews that James T. Kirk would have locked phasers on target almost immediately, and I can’t disagree. Hell, so would Captains Sisko and Janeway. This movie actually made Jean-Luc Picard a parody of himself: the guy who would rather talk and be the diplomat, no matter what the situation. Terrible. (And really, if you’re going to do the “Hero and villain as two sides of the same coin” thing, you’d better do it at least as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark did it.)
So for all of the attempts to give Shinzon some background and reason for his evil, all we get in the end is a 24th century Blofeld figure, complete with incredibly goofy uniform and cavernous rooms to walk through slowly with his hands behind his back. I kept waiting for him to pet his white cat and kill some underling for failure. (Oh wait, he actually did that, so I guess I was just waiting for the white cat.)
And then there’s Data. Honestly, I’ve long since stopped caring about his quest to become more human. It’s gone far enough — and yet this has, in some ways, been a significant plot device in each of the TNG movies, building up to his big “Spock sacrifice” moment. But never fear, we’ve got the whole “Katra in another” thing going on. Good thing he found that brother. Bonus points, though, if you can explain to me just why Data’s other brother, Lore, is never even mentioned. I guess Lore is now the Star Trek equivalent of Chuck, the older brother of Richie and Joanie Cunningham from Happy Days who was so utterly forgotten that in the show’s last episode, Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham loving refer to their “two wonderful children”. This B-4 character — inasmuch as he’s a character at all — only serves to jumpstart a few plot moments, and that’s it. Lame.
The film’s action sequences were also terrible. Does there really need to be a dune-buggy chase in a Star Trek movie, complete with an utterly implausible stunt at the end? Is “Let’s fly this little spaceship through the halls of this big-ass space cruiser until we can find a thin spot in the hull to blast our way through” really a convincing tactic? When the Enterprise rams Shinzon’s big-ass space cruiser, should the crew then stand around in utter silence, with the unspoken question “Uh, what should we do now?” written on their faces? And did anyone making this movie really think that Shinzon’s “I will now use my superweapon to destroy you utterly — just wait ten minutes while my big-ass ship unfolds its wings so as to look really menacing before we fire!” bit would actually increase the tension, as opposed to sucking it dry?
And do we really need more soap-opera scenes in which we catch up on the Enterprise crew and explain just why these career officers, with fifteen years or more in Starfleet, are still serving in the same ranks on the same ship? And can we have a Star Trek movie whose SFnal MacGuffin isn’t just some new bit of made-up technobabble? And if you’re only going to give Worf and Dr. Crusher and Counselor Troi a combined ten minutes or so of screen time, why not just get rid of them entirely and use that time for, oh I don’t know, story? And why not let someone other than Jerry Goldsmith do the scores for these movies, since he’s just turning in one boring, auto-pilot, paint-by-numbers Trek film score after another now?
I think Star Trek is done, I’m sad to say. I loved it, when it was good, and there was a lot of great stuff there. But it’s over. It’s time to move on to something new. I’m just sorry Trek had to go out with such a bad, bad movie.
Would the last person to leave the Enterprise please turn out the lights and close all hailing frequencies?
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OK, I’m getting a little tired now of this page’s inability to load (a) quickly, (b) completely, or (c) at all. I can’t believe it takes that much time for this thing to load — it’s all text, for god’s sake, with pretty limited graphical dressing.
At some point I will probably have enough money to afford hosting somewhere…and then, it’s off to Movable Type.
(Does it say anything that I didn’t know a thing about status.blogger.com until just two or three days ago? A public acknowledgement along the lines of “Here’s the problem, and here’s what we’re doing to fix it” would go a long way toward keeping the natives satisfied. I’m one of those people who doesn’t seek out new alternatives until I’m almost literally forced to do so, and Blogger service lately has been coming close to doing just that.)
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I finished the rough draft of the baseball story this morning, and it turns out that my previous hopes for brevity were, um, greatly exaggerated. The actual word-count is just under 8,500 — well above the 7,000 I was hoping for. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it down to 7,000 after editing, but we’ll see. I always strive for a ten percent reduction in word-count, which would leave it around 7,650 or so. That’s still my shortest story on record, except for “The City of Dead Works”.
And now I’m onto my retelling of the “Snow White” story. To my great surprise, this one is writing itself, almost. That hasn’t happened in a long time.
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I’ll hold off on posting my thoughts on 24‘s finale until tomorrow, just in case anyone has it on tape and is watching it tonight.
But that last event….damn!!!
I hope they at least give Jack Bauer a day or two to, you know, sleep before they send him right back out to deal with this one.
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I actually seriously considered casting my vote for Clay Aiken after last night’s penultimate episode of American Idol, but I decided not to. I didn’t vote for Ruben Studdard, either. I genuinely think that they could flip a coin between these two guys.
I don’t care if the music they do on this show is safe and predictable. I don’t care if Paula Abdul has the same two comments for everyone (“You made the song your own!” if they did well, “Hey, you’re still better than all those people who didn’t make it this far” if they didn’t). I don’t care if Simon’s mean sometimes, or inconsistent (if he keeps insisting that they’re looking for the best singer, then why the hell does he keep carping on Clay’s appearance?). I don’t care about any of that.
What I care about is that this show celebrates people who have a talent and who are working as hard as they can to be as good as they can be with that talent. American Idol isn’t about sixteen narcissistic creeps on an island forming alliances to screw one another. American Idol isn’t about giving people money if they can hold their breath underwater while driving a car, leaping from a helicopter onto a moving train, and drinking one half-gallon of castor oil in under five minutes. American Idol isn’t about some creep, male or female, trying to pick a mate.
Maybe it’s just because I’m a writer looking for my break, and therefore I sympathize with what Clay and Ruben are trying to do (and what Kimberley and Josh and Trenyce and all the rest tried to do). That’s probably a big part of it. (And I’m not too thrilled about American Juniors, with the combined creepiness of parents who think their kids are uncommonly talented and twelve-year old girls belting out “I’m your lady”.)
Whichever one of these guys wins, deserves it. And I have a feeling that the “loser” won’t exactly disappear into the void. So here’s to Clay and Ruben. Good luck to both, but I’m not going to say “May the best man win”, because they’re both the best, and in my eyes, they’ve already won.
End of sappy sermon.
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Notes from real life:
:: It strikes me that sometimes I have to actually remind myself about parenting stuff. A little while ago, my daughter asked if she could have some strawberries. Problem was, I had already taken my seat at the computer to get some work done, so my immediate impulse was to say no and offer some Fruit Snacks or some other thing she could get herself. (She likes to eat strawberries quartered and with a fork.) I then caught myself, and thought: “You dumb-ass, she’s asking for fruit, and you’re telling her no?! Idiot!!” I got her the strawberries.
:: Our apartment’s patio came with some handy hooks in the overhang so we could hang plants, so I put our nice, big ivy plant out there a couple of weeks ago. (It’s been so cool this spring that the plant’s leaves are now tinged with red, but that’s another story.) This morning, we noticed an odd collection of twigs and leaves and various outdoor flotsam in the pot, beside the ivy plant itself. Sure enough, a robin has chosen our ivy as her nesting location. I’m hoping this doesn’t mean that, for the duration of her stay in our ivy, we’ll have to endure a pissed-off robin trying to defend her babies every time we want to use our patio. (But at least the plant is hanging at the end of the patio opposite where we put the grill. That could have made for some unintentional hilarity.)