Reviews and a design challenge
Quick review of the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie:
You should probably go see it if you like any of the other versions, or you like SF comedy. Sure, they took a lot of stuff out. (Cutting 3 hours of radio play down to 90 minutes will do that.) Sure, they changed a lot of stuff. (This was a practice Douglas Adams himself was quite fond of.) But if you go with an open mind and don’t insist on a copy of one of the other Hitchhiker’s media, you ought to have a good time.
Quick review of last Friday’s Enterprise:
Plot? Who cares? Space battle scenes with a certain class of starship… *happy sigh* (There’s some other eye candy too, for het-male or compatible formats.)
In all seriousness… I wonder how a 21st-century costume designer would design a believable futuristic military uniform that would provide eye candy for het-females and compatible? Bill Theiss tried showing some leg in the men’s “skant” uniforms for TNG, and the design died a quick, ignoble death. It’s an interesting question.
Mental clutch not engaging
Uggggh…
Brain is not working this morning. I am slow and stupid. Caffeine not helping. I just pray I get through the morning without embarassing myself too much.
I don’t know what the problem is, I ate well yesterday and got 6 hours of sleep last night (okay, interrupted once or twice by the cat, but I thought I was used to that by now).
Failed to dodge a spoiler yesterday for “Revenge of the Sith”, and it’s disappointing. From all I hear, the movie’s going to be quite good, but I’m disappointed that they chose to include this one little detail.
Last week’s Enterprise, however, was all style, no substance, and yet it rocked. You don’t need things to make sense when you’re having this much fun. The last 6 minutes especially… oooh, nerdgasm. The 8-year-old fan in me was royally entertained. Can’t wait to see tonight’s; at least the show’s going out fighting.
Standing Mode
raininva and I watched Robot Jox this weekend – I hadn’t seen it since the early nineties. I liked the mech designs better than I did when I first saw it, and Gary Graham’s an old genre friend now (once considered for Captain Sisko, according to the IMDB). But the script is still ungood. My favorite bit is still the one where the bad guy uses a prohibited ranged weapon during a match, causing the death of hundreds of spectators, and the referees just shrug and say “do-over!”
Contrast this to Gunhed, which has a cooler mech and more interesting characters, but is confusingly edited and is willing to let the audience make up their own explanations for a bunch of plot points. There was enough left unanswered in that flick that I was easily able to steal the whole plot for a Shadowrun game without giving too much away to the players. Still, I prefer it.
I’m trying to make a mental list of live-action “giant robot” movies that are worth spending 90 minutes or so on. Iron Man #28 looks good, but I don’t know if it will ever be dubbed or subbed. And though I love it for camp, I’m not sure I can bring myself to include the first Power Rangers Movie.
Speaking of such, I’ve procured the Cutey Honey live-action flick, which will go into the “to be watched” queue after the latest Orion Slave Girl episode of “Enterprise” and this week’s “Doctor Who”. The movie’s looking very cheesy, which of course is just what I’d be looking for.
The other serious Whovian at my office wants me to bring in the Whoman DVD that I still owe rubinpdf money for. I will do so. He has been warned 🙂
Booklist: I re-read Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, and am trying to finish his Beyond This Horizon, but the latter’s just not grabbing me. OTOH, the local library had a hardcover of Larry Niven’s Ringworld’s Children, which I’m enjoying much much more than The Ringworld Throne. It’s feeling more like SF than the “fallen-civilization fantasy” that Niven admittedly loves, but I think is a bit mined out. I’ve got another nonfiction library book on the OSS to read after that.
Wow. This got long.
Epic Storylines
While thinking of sf/fantasy movies & TV today, it occurred to me that they’re all more ‘fun’ if the fate of humanity hinges on the outcome. That’s hard to do in episodic TV, of course, but Babylon 5 managed it, Deep Space Nine managed it, and Enterprise picked that up by its third season.
It’s in all the fan favorites; The Original Series and The Next Generation didn’t do it often, but when they did (“City On The Edge Of Forever”, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Best of Both Worlds’) It was memorable. The best Trek movies did this: Khan had to be prevented from getting the Genesis Device; the Whale Probe had to be silenced; the Borg had to be prevented from disrupting First Contact).
Of course, the original Star Wars trilogy let us know practically from the opening crawl that ‘humanity’ (i.e., the Rebellion and a pair of leftover Jedi) was gambling everything on Anakin’s twins; and in The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship knew that if they screwed this up, Middle-Earth was lost. Indeed, in SDF-Macross, the heroes almost blew it, and vast populations of human beings didn’t live to see the end of the series.
This may have been part of the problem with the new Star Wars trilogy, and the first two seasons of Enterprise. There was just no urgency in what the characters did, since we knew, in broad strokes at least, what the eventual outcome was going to be. You can make up for that with compelling character drama, but we didn’t get that either. (I know that Enterprise had a “Temporal Cold War” going on, but it was dull as dirt. We didn’t care until the Xindi zapped Earth.) Voyager eventually became character-driven and somewhat interesting, but might have had far better legs in the beginning if it had tried the Space Battleship Yamato / B5: Crusade formula and had to deal with an urgent need to get home ASAP – whether or not their technology was initially up to it.
Perhaps that’s something the writers of Trek Series 6 should think about. (I don’t doubt there will be a Series 6, next year or 10 years from now.) Make us worried, maybe not from the first episode but before too long. Make us feel like the leads are fighting not just for themselves, but for us or our kids. Give us an investment.
I bet we fans will eat it up.
MacWrite? What’s that?
It’s quite trying to have to find 15-year-old install floppies so one can access archived stuff in an obsolete format. (And find a floppy drive while I’m at it.)
I should just thank Eris that the old software even runs. I need one of those Federation tricorders that can access 1000-year-old alien logs in 20-30 seconds of thinking.
Captain’s Blog…
He shouldn’t have spent the latinum on that AssimilatedJournal account.
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/649.html
Marscon and stuff
Got back from Marscon Sunday. It was an interesting weekend – all the rooms were taken over by a military group preparing for special training, so all the attendees had to drive back and forth to their hotels. Put a damper on things, that’s for sure. I wish I’d remembered that there would be a Rocky Horror show on Saturday night – maybe they’ll do it again next year.
Caught up with kittykatya, impink, tzel, Tom & Donna, Jesse, Suzanne, Dave & Jodi, Dwight, Helen, and a bunch of other folk. I got some cheap Discworld paperbacks, and another Steve Jackson card game; for $1, I also bought a memory – the two books of the 1978 D&D Basic set (4th or 5th printing). We also got some Deadlands modules, and raininva won an auction for a signed uncut sheet of WARS: Nowhere to Hide!
Screen-capture trivia: the men’s miniskirt Starfleet uniform from the early Season One episodes of TNG. Strange that this didn’t catch on. I mean, can’t you just see Worf running around in it?
There was something else on my mind, but it’s gone now.
Continuing the saga of the books I’ve read this year – just finished a re-read of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I have to give Asimov credit for, in the space of a few short stories, giving me the feel of observing the fall of a Galactic Empire.
Weekend thoughts
Ocean’s Twelve had some really funny parts, but it wasn’t really a good caper movie. It’s so busy being cute and inscrutable that the we give up on the plot too long before the Big Twists are revealed. Still worth a ticket for the good bits, but don’t expect the coolness of the first one.
Continued musings on the plight of the superhero: if you have a Code Against Killing, but the serial-murdering super-villain you’ve just captured laughs at you and tells you he’ll be back on the street killing people in 6 months – and you know he’s right – what do you do? Break your code and make sure the villain can’t hurt anyone else ever? Or follow your code, knowing that the likelihood is that people will die for your choice?
Morning linkage: This is a keen Smithsonian webpage that allows you to sit in the cockpit of several aircraft, from a Spad to a Mercury capsule, using QuickTimeVR.
Saw the last of the Vulcan arc of Enterprise this weekend – it did not disappoint. As usual, a few quibbles – I’d have like to have gotten farther in the head of the main bad guy, and another character did something stupid for an excruciatingly long time before stopping and admitting he should have known better – but plenty of good stuff. Trip is growing up fast, and it’s great to watch; and the sehlat exchange was classic Vulcan dry humor. “You keep a pet – Porthos.” “Porthos doesn’t try to eat me if I’m late with dinner.” “Vulcan children are never late with dinner.” I’m back to being a regular watcher, I think.
I’ve had a cold or a bug or something for days. Sore throat and stomach issues all week, then weakness Friday and Saturday, and Boom! – Sunday was Drainage and Constant Sneezing Day. This morning, it’s nearly all gone away – I am thankful.
Katamari Taters
After reading about the fun that kittykatya, eeedge, jsciv and impink are having, I put a copy of Katamari Damacy (PS2) on my Wish List, and raininva bought it for my birthday. This game is incredibly surreal and trippy, and has that wonderful “let me just try this level one more time” quality. The player must rebuild stars by rolling together clumps of loose objects on Earth – you have to try it out to understand it. Highly recommended.
Finished watching the Brent Spiner episodes of Enterprise. Pretty good overall, with the last episode the strongest. Despite its enjoyability, the arc hit some of the most tiresome cliches in Star Trek: “it only takes five guys to take over a Starfleet vessel”, “with the fate of humanity at stake, we’ll nevertheless give the bad guys all the access codes they want if they threaten one of the show’s stars”, “the Enterprise isn’t worth diddly in a real fight unless the heroes know their opponent’s Secret Weak Point(tm)”. Yes, they all made sense in the story context, I’m just tired of seeing them again.
The Meyers-Briggs-Trek personality test says that I’m an INFP, much like Kes or Elim Garak. Rain’s response was “Garak? Eww! Well… hm. Actually…”
“Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew…” – Sam Gamgee rapping about taters.
