Category — Reviews: Movies

The requisite squeeing fangirl post. Stark and I saw Star Trek (dammit, I keep typing “Stark Trek”) yesterday and had differing opinions on the film. Stark said “Meh,” I said “Wheeeeeeee! Saving the universe and getting in bar fights! Tribbles and booze and wild space adventure! Pyoo pyoo set phasers to stun!!”

Right before my trip to New York, Space Channel was showing a Star Trek movie marathon. We diligently powered through each of the movies up until I left. Sadly, I only got to watch up until the eighth movie before I had to leave the country, so I missed out on Insurrection and Nemesis. Oh well, I have heard I wasn’t missing much. Generally, I thought the entire series wasn’t all that great. Most of the movies amounted to just decent, extra-long episodes of the show. Which is not a bad thing, really. I mean, for the hilarious interactions of Bones/Kirk/Spock alone, they’re worth watching. The most movie-like of the movies was The Voyage Home, which had an engaging script, time travel with an amazing purpose, and great interactions between the cast. Chekhov getting captured as a Russian spy! Bones bitching about medieval medicine! Uhura being baffled by San Francisco! Kirk doing a terrible job of hitting on a woman and making her pay for his dinner! SPOCK MIND MELDING WITH WHALES!!! Awesome. Here are my ratings for the series:

I, Star Trek: Boring but inoffensive
II, The Wrath of Khan: Campy awesomeness. KHAAANNNNN!
III, The Search For Spock: Kinda rambling and slow, but generally decent.
IV, The Voyage Home: WHALES! BEST. MOVIE. EVER.
V, The Final Frontier: AWFUL. AWFUL. Never leave Shatner in charge of a story. Ugh.
VI, The Undiscovered Country: Definitely an improvement on V, but more like a long episode than anything else. Lots of boring galactic council meetings. Lucas should have learned from this. Space politics, like real politics, are BORING.
VII, Generations: I liked this movie. It was actually the first Star Trek movie that I ever saw in theaters, so I’ll always be fond of it.
VIII, First Contact: Borg queen! Borg queen! Data being smarter than everyone! Awww, Picard, you make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you say things like “Engage.” Purrr. And the day is saved by Picard’s hot biceps of power and righteousness!

In sum, STAR TREK RULES!
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For awhile there I was really despairing as to the state of Hollywood movies. So many of them seem to either be remakes, sequels, or just generally hackneyed crap. I was honestly convinced that the movie industry would crumble before Hollywood produced an original script and took some chances on something different. These three movies have shown me that it is still possible to have fun in Hollywood.
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Having heard mostly bad reviews for X-Men: The Last Stand since it came out, I had been hesitant to pay money to see it. Finally, it appeared on cable last night, and I got a chance to see what everyone had been so angry about. I have to admit, for about the first half or so I didn’t think it was such a crappy movie, and couldn’t understand why everyone had been so angry. I should note that I think that none X-movies have been very good and this one suffers from the same defects as the prior two movies. These specific defects alone wouldn’t have caused me to hate the movie, and there were some decent additions that made me think it wouldn’t end up being that bad, but on the whole, if I tally up the pros and cons for the series as a whole, I end up with way more bad than good. I’ll put the rest under the cut, in case anyone wants to avoid two year old spoilers.
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Halloween has come and gone, and here is the new crop of horror movies I saw during the spooooky holiday season:

-Eye 3
-They Wait
-Poltergeist
-Dead Calm
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Books:
- After Dolores by Sarah Schulman
- Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain

Movies
- Roadhouse
- Magnum Force
- Friends With Money
- Batman

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Woo hoo, have I been getting a lot of reading done lately. I’ve made a point to skip off to bed at a reasonable time, thus having time to actually read more than two pages before going to sleep. Why didn’t I think of this before? Everyone else has books sitting on their bed stands and in movies, the wives are always reading in bed while the husband is out having an affair/killing someone/running the country, and yet the thought of reading prior to sleep never occurred to me until I moved to Toronto. Huh.

So, some assorted reviews for my future reference and for possible use on Stark and my queer book/movie review site, if we ever get that going:

Movies:
- Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
- Paris, je t’aime
- Escape from New York and LA
- Ripley’s Game

Books:
The Devil’s Cup
Two Ends of Sleep
The Glass Cell
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Life has been hectic lately. Work is out of control and, in addition to my regular job, I’ve also been doing some emergency copy writing, which is really fun, but also a crunch in terms of deadlines. I’ve been powering away at my running. I ran over 10K last week, which was exciting and also encouraging, as I registered for a 10K race at the end of July before I had actually hit that distance successfully and was starting to worry that I had hit a plateau and wouldn’t be able to increase my distance in time. I am starting to develop some tightness in my right calf that I’m worried about, though, and I’m hoping that stretching will keep it from becoming a problem before the race.

The article about the Canadian Club project was finally published in Time Out Chicago last week. It made the front page of the site, which was awesome. I’ve sort of reached a bit of a block while thinking about doing an adbusting blog. I just have a million projects going right now, and the thought of working on all of them at once has left me with no choice but to retreat to the couch to read magazines.

But, in exciting news! My parents came to visit and brought me two old cameras they had found while getting ready to move. One is a Cine-Kodak 8mm camera, which is really cool looking, but unfortunately 8mm film is no longer manufactured. And who can afford to process film anyway?

The other is a Voigtlander Brillant which, miracle of miracles, is a medium format camera that uses 120mm film! Stark and I are going to get the lens cleaned and buy some film for it, and hopefully many photographic adventures will be had.

This weekend is Pride, and I’m hoping I’ll get some good shots of the crowds.

Now, on to some general notes on things I’ve seen and read lately. Not really full reviews, but just for my own future reference:

Movies:
- Juno
- Sweeney Todd
- I’m Not There

Books:
- Persepolis I and II
- After Dark
- Cover Me
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Do you know what works better than renting movies that were critically acclaimed and nominated for Oscars? Picking movies with funny covers and/or Phillip Seymour Hoffman. This last batch of movies was far more satisfactory than that last bunch of allegedly “great” films. Hooray!

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We’ve been watching a lot of movies and I have failed to be impressed by any of them. What is it with movies sucking so hard lately? I mean, I guess none of them sucked, they just weren’t very good, and they were supposedly the best movies of last year. Eh.

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We watched The Kingdom last night. I was a bit disappointed. It was a decent movie but I had been expecting more. My mother had billed it as “the best recent movie about the Middle East.” I am guessing that either my mother has very different tastes than me or (and I think this is the more likely option) all the other major Hollywood releases about the Middle East have sucked royally.

Things The Kingdom had going for it:
1. Chris Cooper
2. Chris Cooper
3. Jennifer Garner with a gun
4. Chris Cooper
5. Jamie Foxx’s freakish, all-encompassing hairline

Things going against The Kingdom:
1. Not enough Chris Cooper
2. Peter Berg as a director

I blame the lack of Chris Cooper on Peter Berg, who is a sixteen year old boy with a directing style most closely resembling dropping anvils on people’s heads. When I saw his name pop up in the credits I knew there was no hope for subtlety or intellectualism. This is a man who thinks suspense can be created solely with quick cuts. This is a man whose only semi-decent contribution to the world of directing was Friday Night Lights, which I’m sure was only possible because he is, as previously mentioned, a sixteen year old jock in a scrawny man’s body.

Witness the special features. In the car chase featurette, Peter Berg sits in a stunt car, wearing a t-shirt for one of his Friday Night Lights high school football teams (we get it Peter, you directed a popular movie, thanks for the reminder), and declares “This car would be great for picking up chicks.” He never gets to test this theory as no woman appear on set in any capacity until the section where Peter Berg admires the final footage of some big explosions. He is impressed with the results and remarks that even though it took a long time to set up, it was worth the wait. He then proceeds to compare the several days it took to set up a special effect to the two years he had to wait to get into some girl’s pants when he was sixteen. He even says her name. Classy, Peter. Very classy. I’m sure that woman is very grateful that you compared her relationship to you to a car chase.
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