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Me and my Friends
Mar. 5th, 2006 10:10 pmMostly media-related stuff for this entry.
Saw Night Watch Friday after work. Boy-howdy, but $5 million gets you a whole lotta movie in Russia. This was a good good movie, folks. Modern-day fantasy horror, shot in Moscow so it looks really dark and grim and gritty, good versus evil, improbable heroes, really nifty mythology. If this is showing in your local arthouse/independent theater, go see it.
I work with a fellow I've considered one of my best friends for most of my life - we met when I was 16 at GSP. We'll call him ... Jack Midnight. Dude's got a geek hat about as big as mine, and our hats have a whole bunch of overlap. His Holy Grail of fandom is Star Trek. He will go on and on about Trek, about what's great about it and what has been done right and wrong throughout the history of the franchise, and the future of Trek. Now, I'm not a Trek hater. I like a lot of the franchise's core ideas and elements - going Out There, humanism, the search for knowledge and truth. Two Trek technical manuals and about a dozen Trek novels sit on my bookshelves. I snapped up most of the Trek RPG line that Last Unicorn Games put out during their too-short existence (oh, and Decipher? Blow me.), and I can watch The Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country, or First Contact just about anytime. Heck, I even played McCoy in some of Jack M's Star Trek fan flicks, mostly because I was the most fluent speaker of Southron.
Having said all that, I think Trek's dead, and it just doesn't know it yet. There's no sense of "boldly going where no man has gone before." Since DS9 wrapped up, Trek has timidly gone where everybody and their brother have already been and established strip malls. The most recent incarnation of the franchise was Enterprise (I liked it, at first), which retconned the established history and rehashed old ideas all at the same time, while wasting some darn fine talent. What looks like the leading candidate for an eleventh Trek film is a frickin' Starfleet Academy movie. One of the loudest voices in Trek fandom comes from a bunch of goons who want to resurrect Captain Kirk. Now, yeah, Kirk went out like a punk in Generations, but that whole movie is pretty much worthless except for finally blowing up the Next Generation Enterprise. If Trek is going (or even deserves) to survive, there has to be a clean sheet of paper idea. Take the franchise's core ideas, give us a whole new ship and crew - no cameos, no guest appearances, no nods. If you've gotta, name the ship Kirk or Picard or something. But move forward. Do what Trek has always done best - take what's going on in the world today and tell stories about it through the eyes of the 24th Century. Heaven knows there's enough fodder for countless hours of good TV. Have a real writers' bible, with two or three people to ensure continuity. Take a page from Farscape and Battlestar Galactica - make us care about the characters first, and give the whiz-bang special effects time later on. And, for goodness sake, eliminate the particle-of-the-week nonsense.
Tonight's Oscar night, wherein I swear more at the TV than during 4 Super Bowls. Pretty good production this time - Jon Stewart's hosting.
Some real craziness here at the Lakeside Resort this weekend. Friday night, after we got back from the movie, a half-dozen fire and emergency vehicles filled up the street out front. This afternoon, a fire truck, ambulance, and three police cruisers. Crews went to an apartment to the right of mine, came out empty-handed. This is beginning to freak me out just a little bit. I mean, firemen and EMTs - somebody gets hurt. Cops? Somebody's trying to hurt somebody else. The mysterious miscreant should at least have the common decency to get up to shenanigans on Thursday night when I'm running a cops game so that we can have some appropriate background effects.
Saw Night Watch Friday after work. Boy-howdy, but $5 million gets you a whole lotta movie in Russia. This was a good good movie, folks. Modern-day fantasy horror, shot in Moscow so it looks really dark and grim and gritty, good versus evil, improbable heroes, really nifty mythology. If this is showing in your local arthouse/independent theater, go see it.
I work with a fellow I've considered one of my best friends for most of my life - we met when I was 16 at GSP. We'll call him ... Jack Midnight. Dude's got a geek hat about as big as mine, and our hats have a whole bunch of overlap. His Holy Grail of fandom is Star Trek. He will go on and on about Trek, about what's great about it and what has been done right and wrong throughout the history of the franchise, and the future of Trek. Now, I'm not a Trek hater. I like a lot of the franchise's core ideas and elements - going Out There, humanism, the search for knowledge and truth. Two Trek technical manuals and about a dozen Trek novels sit on my bookshelves. I snapped up most of the Trek RPG line that Last Unicorn Games put out during their too-short existence (oh, and Decipher? Blow me.), and I can watch The Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country, or First Contact just about anytime. Heck, I even played McCoy in some of Jack M's Star Trek fan flicks, mostly because I was the most fluent speaker of Southron.
Having said all that, I think Trek's dead, and it just doesn't know it yet. There's no sense of "boldly going where no man has gone before." Since DS9 wrapped up, Trek has timidly gone where everybody and their brother have already been and established strip malls. The most recent incarnation of the franchise was Enterprise (I liked it, at first), which retconned the established history and rehashed old ideas all at the same time, while wasting some darn fine talent. What looks like the leading candidate for an eleventh Trek film is a frickin' Starfleet Academy movie. One of the loudest voices in Trek fandom comes from a bunch of goons who want to resurrect Captain Kirk. Now, yeah, Kirk went out like a punk in Generations, but that whole movie is pretty much worthless except for finally blowing up the Next Generation Enterprise. If Trek is going (or even deserves) to survive, there has to be a clean sheet of paper idea. Take the franchise's core ideas, give us a whole new ship and crew - no cameos, no guest appearances, no nods. If you've gotta, name the ship Kirk or Picard or something. But move forward. Do what Trek has always done best - take what's going on in the world today and tell stories about it through the eyes of the 24th Century. Heaven knows there's enough fodder for countless hours of good TV. Have a real writers' bible, with two or three people to ensure continuity. Take a page from Farscape and Battlestar Galactica - make us care about the characters first, and give the whiz-bang special effects time later on. And, for goodness sake, eliminate the particle-of-the-week nonsense.
Tonight's Oscar night, wherein I swear more at the TV than during 4 Super Bowls. Pretty good production this time - Jon Stewart's hosting.
Some real craziness here at the Lakeside Resort this weekend. Friday night, after we got back from the movie, a half-dozen fire and emergency vehicles filled up the street out front. This afternoon, a fire truck, ambulance, and three police cruisers. Crews went to an apartment to the right of mine, came out empty-handed. This is beginning to freak me out just a little bit. I mean, firemen and EMTs - somebody gets hurt. Cops? Somebody's trying to hurt somebody else. The mysterious miscreant should at least have the common decency to get up to shenanigans on Thursday night when I'm running a cops game so that we can have some appropriate background effects.