Recent Viewing Part IV

Was Deep Space Nine more up your alley? Or re-envisioned Battlestar Galactica?

Doctor Who is a thousand times campier than Star Trek!

It is all right not to like Trek, but to say that episodes like

- The City on the Edge of Forever
- Mirror Mirror
- Measure of a Man
- Space Seed
- All Good Things
- The Best of Both Worlds
- Sarek
- Amok Time
- Unification

to name but a few at random were done by people who were not entirely clear about what they were doing is simply unfair. Those episodes rank among the very best that has ever been done in serial TV science fiction.

"Conspiracy" (2001 TV movie)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266425/combined


A mostly real-time performance of a secret NAZI gathering where the question of what to do with the Jews, was discussed amongst high-ranking officials. This really happened.

I think these videos give you a good idea of the film:

The opening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3up5SZBZdY

A scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKwvA8ns9wo


The film features no music (except one classical piece), not even a closing and/or opening score cue.

Just saw Jeff Nichols's MIDNIGHT SPECIAL. This guy knows how to make a movie. It's utterly fascinating from beginning to end, totally unpredictable, totally original, and convinced me, even more than his last film, MUD, that Nichols is a director to watch. It wouldn't surprise me if his career takes a similar path to that of Chris Nolan. You all need to see this film.

It's an extremely solid film, and it's picked up a cult-like status since its release -in no small part due to Ricardo Montalbán's performance- but it doesn't have the same impact as something like The Empire Strikes Back. They're very good (well, a couple of them are), and it certainly helps to love the world of Trek, but even Khan, the film that's often heralded as Star Trek's best, never really reaches 5 star level. It's schlock. To call any of the Trek films "great", in the '5 star classics' sense, is to deny reality.

And there's a reason they never achieved what Star Wars did: Star Trek dealt with ethics, which was well suited in episodic form, and that never translated well (and was rarely put into action) in the films. The films could never really recreate everything that made Star Trek so successful in the first place. Sure, there was plenty of action and personal drama in the episodes, and the films covered all that, but they were never able to recreate the whole ethos of Star Trek, namely the moral questions. And when it did, it mostly left audiences bored, confused or frustrated.

Star Trek wins as a TV show, and Star Wars wins as films. I say this as a die hard fan of both franchises, and even a die hard fan of the Trek films. I love watching the old Kirk films. But I can take off my Trek hat and don my critic's cap and look at it objectively.

I thoroughly enjoyed this too. Nichols is a talented writer/director. Also, Michael Shannon is quickly becoming one of my favourite actors.

So do I. But do you really think either of those films (especially III) deserves 5 stars? I love them for almost everything aside from the the film making aspect; i.e. the characters, the special effects, the music and the nostalgia. They're competently made, but not expertly crafted. They have not aged nearly as well as something like The Empire Strikes Back, because that's a much better film.

Star Wars and especially Return of the Jedi, sure. But Empire? Nope. Blows Wrath of Khan out of the Mutara Nebula.

That's a cinematic shortcoming? I mean, we are talking about the quality and craft of the visuals themselves, not the logic of the storytelling.

Those are plot holes. A great film can be riddled with illogicalities and still be well-made.

Goodness. Who cares about how long it took Luke to get from planet A to planet B!? That's rather missing the point of Star Wars.

As I said, it doesn't bother me at all.

That's very true. I've noticed of the last few years that these documentaries are becoming more docu-dramas. The way they show the endings - where we see the end result of the patients' experiences - the music goes all doom-and-gloom and there's a sense of foreboding but then we see that (for example) Jon has managed to keep all his limbs after all and the music goes all happy. Sometimes it's such a disappointment!

Who is the more foolish, the fool or the fool who ... oh...