Friday, March 5, 2010
Beating Dead Kryptonian Horses
Posted in
Television by
Hipp
Hey guys, I used to love Smallville—there, I said it—but it's gone from acceptably campy to the sort of hammy, unintended cartoonishness that epitomized Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Sacagawea. They must be doing something right, though, since the CW (haha!) has renewed the show for a tenth season. Jesus. The whole "Clark Kent will never fly on Smallville" idea was only tenable if the show tanked after four seasons, Mssrs. Gough and Millar. Don't you fuckers want to see that blue-and-red flying already? And I don't mean as a possessed Kal-El version of Clark. That was lame. And not a flying Bizarro, either.
Anyway. Smallville is a pretty good example of why you don't let lead actors become executive producers on their own shows. You let them direct. Have we learned nothing from the lessons of Star Trek?
Also, the girl from NBC's delayed-then-destroyed series Kings has signed on to a new show called Betwixt being developed for the CW, and you get bonus points if you guessed that it involves the supernatural. Futon Critic is reporting that Allison Miller—my sister would flip shit over those two L's in her first name—will be one of "three teenagers who discover their lineage has granted them special abilities which they use to fight evil." Hey, look it's based on a YA novel!
Eastern Cynic Fun Fact: I used to work at Barnes & Noble because it was preferable to being the only person in Park Slope with nothing to eat, so if the CW is picking up an adaptation of a book I've never seen in my life, 
you can be sure they're getting to the very bottom of that particular barrel.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Keeping up with the Cardassians
Posted in
Celebrity by
Hipp
I'm not going to pretend I know what the hell is going on in pop culture. I assume, to some degree, that if I don't know who someone is or why they're famous, it's my fault. Upon doing research on someone I don't know, I tend to find out why they're famous, and it usually makes sense. I even understand the girls from The Hills. Sort of.
But I don't know why the Kardashian family is famous. I've looked it up before, but the evidence must have been so underwhelming that it just didn't stick with me because I had to look it up again today. As far as I can tell, the reason they're famous is because they're on TV, which isn't really enough reason for anyone to be famous. I suppose it might also be because Kim Kardashian has enormous breasts and was in a sex tape with someone else that no one knows, but again, there are amateur sex tapes all over the internet, and no matter how hard I stare at them, I still don't know who any of those people are. And believe me, I've tried to find them.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
There Be Whales Here
Posted in
Star Trek by
Hipp
The only thing I don't buy about the future proposed by Star Trek is that by the 24th or 25th centuries, San Francisco hasn't been wiped out by a massive earthquake.
You probably didn't know—and undoubtedly don't want to know—that both parents from Seventh Heaven have had supporting roles in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the dad) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the mom). I don't expect anyone to believe me when I say that I do not and did not and would not watch Seventh Heaven, but on the other hand, I'm so open about my love of Gossip Girl and The O.C. that I think it's clear I don't bother hiding things like that.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Deflectors, Now!
Posted in
Internal Dialogues,
Star Trek by
Hipp
Let's take it as a given that Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a piece of crap, which is easy to do because it is a piece of crap. Spock looks old as fuck, everyone's uniforms make the Enterprise look like an intergalactic tennis stadium, and the guy from fucking Seventh Heaven is a main character. I think it's the first time that something decides to set a course for Earth with malicious intent, but it's not particularly alarming; any solar system-sized cloud that vaporizes Klingon K't'inga-class starships can't be all bad.
Let's forget that I knew the name of that starship class. While we're at it, let's forget that I knew it wasn't a Bird Of Prey or a D-7 or Vo'rcha-class.
The point is, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is beyond stupid. It kicked off the odd-number curse of the Star Trek movies, which The Next Generation confounded by making an all right seventh movie (Generations), a phenomenal eighth movie (First Contact), a douche-chill-inducing ninth movie (Insurrection), and a tepid, unknowably bad or good tenth movie (Nemesis). But for all its faults, the score of this movie is wicked. The good kind of wicked, circa whenever people still used the word that way. Forget the orchestration, even, and you're left with this mind-bending... thing that happens when the EVIL CLOUD approaches anything, like someone is plucking a lower string on piano while someone else detunes it. It's fucking awesome.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Who watches the Watchmen?
Posted in
Movies,
Star Trek,
Star Wars,
Television by
Hipp
I loved the graphic novel, but I haven't seen the movie yet. While I was in the city yesterday, I thought about an 8:15 showing of Watchmen, but I ultimately decided to come home and maybe see it at the Pavilion at 9:25. I didn't do that either. Maybe if the movie wasn't two hours and forty-three minutes long. Maybe if the reviews weren't raves or tepid or on-the-fence. The truth is, as excited as I was for Watchmen, I kind of spent my enthusiasm over the year of build-up to its release.
However, I will be at the theater on May 8th, feverishly awaiting JJ Abrams' Star Trek because it reaches straight to a special place in my heart, a box of boyhood toys that includes a rather intense love affair with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here's how bad it is: when I was unemployed last February and March, I spent my time—besides sending out nearly two hundred resumes and applications—watching the entirety of TNG (eight seasons), Deep Space Nine (seven seasons), and even Enterprise (four seasons).
As much as I love Star Wars (and given the new trilogy, my directorial disdain of A New Hope, and my general hatred of George Lucas for the special edition revisions of the original trilogy, I must love it a lot to still like it at all), it's not a complete universe. You get vague notions of everything—moreso in the newer movies—but it's not a painstakingly created vision. Not only that, it's a vision of a galaxy far, far away, a long time ago. Star Trek, though, is a meticulous vision of the near future in a galaxy right fucking here. That's not to say that Wesley Crusher doesn't annoy me. That's not to say that Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Search For Spock, The Undiscovered Country, Insurrection, and Nemesis weren't lackluster (please note: only even-numbered Star Trek movies are ever any good). I won't even watch Voyager, which at the very least tried to expand the largess of the Alpha Quadrant by exploring the Delta Quadrant of the Milky Way. There are some episodes of TNG that I absolutely will not watch. I stopped watching DS9 some time before the Dominion War when it was in production.
But still... there's something about Roddenberry's world—sorry: universe—that's undeniably compelling. Starfleet. The United Federation Of Planets. The Romulan and Klingon Empires. Phasers and Runabouts. The post-Cardassian War sentiments. Crumbling regimes, the Prime Directive. Even when they would time travel—which TNG and DS9 never did with the disturbing abandon of Enterprise, a show that spent much of the final season running back and fucking forth, even stumbling upon the Borg that were (apparently) left on earth in First Contact—it worked, somehow. There's a continuing story arc in DS9 where Benjamin Sisko is a black comic book writer in the 40's or 50's, and he's writing DS9, for the most part. It sounds patently ridiculous. A real jump-the-shark-while-nuking-the-fridge notion. But it is some of the best TV writing I've ever seen. One of Star Trek's best episodes is all about time travel. Sisko's son Jake, as an old man, is telling some fan (he's a successful writer in his golden years) about how his father was lost in some sort of temporal subspace rift and he reappears for a short while every so often. If you've read The Sirens Of Titan, think of chronosynclastically infundibulated Winston Niles Rumfoord. Again, it sounds borderline retarded, but that episode made me weep like a baby. Not that that's any real accomplishment.
What Star Trek has over Star Wars and Watchmen is a brilliant sense of wonder. The latter two are admittedly and purposely grim stories where things like wonder are muted colors in the background; take the Force, for example, for which Han Solo is always hanging lampshades or Dr. Manhattan's Martian base. But Star Trek is based on the idea of exploration, of finding new worlds and new civilization, and to get into the middle of things so completely unknowable that they can only be describe as "where no one has gone before." It's like Ziggy Stardust, Harry Potter, Stephen King's Dark Tower series and books like The Talisman, Insomnia, and IT. Pure, synapse-sparking wonder, questions shaped so perfectly that your brain answers them simply by opening.
Who watches The Watchmen? I would, but I'd lose my place in line for Star Trek.