This is another test-post, with no content to speak of.
(But attentive readers of AICN and of Byzantium’s Shores should expect one of my patented geek-eruptions in the near future….)
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Hmmmm….generally I’ve been of the view that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, my remains should be either donated to science, launched into space, or cremated and scattered on the Skywalker Ranch. (No, George doesn’t know about it. I’m thinking, just mix me into some water, make a whole bunch of water balloons with the mixture, and lob them over the fence.)
But now I’m wondering if I need to reconsider my position on burial — especially if this place has plots available….
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Jane Galt‘s said a few things lately (here and, more recently, here) about the tendency of political opposition to get really whacko with respect to the people actually in power. I guess I can sort-of see her point, but by and large, there’s no way that Democratic insanity with respect to President Bush comes anywhere near the insanity we saw directed by Republicans at President Clinton. I’d say more, but Oliver Willis has it covered.
Well, just one more thing: I find it interesting that, judging by the comments in the latter post linked above, conservatives tend to judge a liberal’s sanity by how conservative they are willing to be or appear. But then, this seems to merely illustrate what Jane says in the former post linked above; and for that matter, I’d like to know just what constitutes, then, a “sane” criticism of the President.
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At some point yesterday, May 2003 became my second-highest month ever, in terms of hits. That’s pretty cool. (To beat April, I’d have to get a big mention from someone higher up. But such mentions are hard to predict.)
Having made that due notice, the family and I are expecting company this weekend. Since that would make posting light, and since weekends tend to be my slowest periods (in both my posting and my hit-count), and since I’m pretty tired the last few days and still have a ton of work to do on other projects, I’m going to go on hiatus until next Wednesday. While I’m recharging the batteries, visit any or all of the sites on the sidebar and tell them who sent you, so they link back to me, little devils that they are.
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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.)