Miscellaneous Debris, June Edition

Items of interest and observation that don’t merit 750-1000 words.

 

The Fourth of July is more or less the halfway point of summer, meaning we’re virtually halfway through the biggest movie season of the year. And yet for a while now we’re been just trying to stay awake. Far from anything really memorable, summer 2009 will likely go in the books as more memorable for what it wasn’t than what it ever was. Films are making money, by and large: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had its 200 million dollar opening week, putting it on a fast track to top the summer’s current money maker Star Trek. But there’s no surprise, crossing-demographic runaway blockbuster this year, compared to 2008′s The Dark Knight or even Iron Man. The big summer movies, immediately recognizable as such, are marching through the theatres with dreary precision, one giving way to another like multimillion dollar dominoes.

Still, movie news keeps accumulating. The following list includes some observations, ideas, and occasional snarky remarks we’ve compiled while working on longer pieces. All the opinions are just our own, of course.

1. Is the lowest common denominator approach that’s been stifling the selection of available Blu-Ray format titles finally beginning to thaw? Recent weeks saw such classics as The Seventh Seal, Dr. Strangelove, and Last Year at Marienbad making their debut on the high-def medium, classing up shelves usually dominated by much lower brow fare. Fans of foreign cinema will be glad to know that Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha makes its Blu-Ray debut August 18, while Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing debuts just this week. We imagine Sal’s Pizzeria looks great in high definition.

We expect lots of this.

2. Meanwhile, the Lord of the Rings trilogy seems to be inching closer to a release of its own, according to this report, even though a release of the films’ straight-to-DVD expanded versions will wait until the 2011 premiere of The Hobbit. The three films collectively made just shy of three trillion dollars in worldwide box office receipts, so why Warner Brothers would drag heels on releasing a full edition in the meantime is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’re as pessimistic about Hobbit co-director Guillermo Del Toro’s vision for the LOTR prequel as we are?

Box office 'Deliverance': Ferrell in LOTL

3. In a summer with no surprise hit (yet), what about the bombs? So far Terminator: Salvation, Angels & Demons, Land of the Lost, and The Taking of Pelham 123 have all fallen short of expectations, while the mid-range budgeted Year One also seems destined not to recoup its money. Poor word of mouth hurt Terminator, and Pelham 123 likely should have come out later in the year, when more adults frequent multiplexes. As for Land of the Lost, Angels & Demons and Year One, we’re blaming audience shtick fatigue in all cases. We’ll tempt fate here and predict that Bruno also disappoints: previews make it out to be nothing more than Gay Borat, and audiences may take a “been there, done that” attitude as a result.

Just dandy: Depp

4. If Universal pushes Public Enemies any harder they’re going to risk a groin injury. The seemingly relentless advertising campaign, already somewhat misleading in depicting Michael Mann’s reported character study as an action-adventure romp, has commercials all over television, mostly featuring Johnny Depp’s good looks. We expect very good things from the film, but if early audiences feel baited and switched the film could likely join the crowd of turkeys mentioned above. It’s also not a good sign that all the rave critical comments used in the TV ads are from Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, who’s essentially the go-to guy for movie critic testimonials.

The cast of The Nine

5. DirecTV deserves some applause for bringing two of HBO’s most acclaimed dramas that aren’t The Sopranos to a wider audience. Last month the satellite provider began airing reruns of Deadwood and Barry Levinson’s landmark 90s-era prison drama Oz on its The 101 channel, presenting them uncut and without commercials. Coupled with its resurrection of worthy but prematurely cancelled network dramas Smith and The Nine, the all but unknown The 101 offers better summer programming than the major networks.

Not your father's G.I. Joe - and that's the problem.

6. The rumors about fired directors and other postproduction crises surrounding G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra only throw fuel on a bonfire of backlash for a film that’s due to premiere for another five weeks yet. Part of the cynicism, and a big chunk of the problem, is that the creators have violated a lesson that Hollywood seems to finally have learned about adapting comic books: don’t screw with what endeared the subject matter to audiences in the first place. Past superficial costuming similarities in some of the characters, the film bears little resemblance to the 80s cartoon and toy line, trading loyalty to that nostalgia for some generic looking Michael Bay-style histrionics. The producers should know better. And knowing is half the battle.

7. Continuing his long odyssey through the entirety of genre flick purgatory, Nicolas Cage will appear next March in Swordfish director Dominic Sena’s sword and sorcery horror adventure Season of the Witch. Cage plays a knight transporting a witch to a group of priests who will determine if she started the Black Plague. Ron Perlman (Sons of Anarchy) and British actress Claire Foy (Little Dorritt) co-star. Hard to believe Cage was once considered one of America’s most potent leading men, with versatile turns in Leaving Las Vegas and Red Rock West. But, films like this, Knowing and Bangkok Dangerous must be making money somewhere, because they keep getting made.

8. Finally, Ang Lee returns to theatres with August’s Taking Woodstock, a based-on-true story about the small Upstate New York town that more or less played host to the Woodstock music festival (the original one in 1969, not the corporate crap in the 90s.) Though comedy is probably no one’s first thought when discussing the meticulous Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm) the unpretentious feel and goofy spirit in the trailer below looks all kinds of promising. The broad ensemble cast includes Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch, Zoe Kazan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Paul Dano. It also stars Liev Shreiber as a gun-toting transvestite, which we hope was actually a common sight at the over-revered music concert.

Join us Friday for our review of Public Enemies. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel
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Star Trek: Great Trekspectations

Seven cool things about the Star Trek universe we hope to see in the new movie.

The long-awaited new “reboot” of the Star Trek franchise opens in just 30 days (Update: Read our review of the new film here) and the previews growing ever more pervasive on television and online have just begun to reveal the new film’s rollicking story. We expect that’ll continue up until its opening, but in the meantime – being somewhat neophyte Trekkers ourselves – we’ve come up with a list of people, places, and things we’d like to see shown or at least visually referenced. Each one, we think, could ramp up the cool factor even further.

The following list isn’t in any particular order, and we apologize in advance for any gaps in our knowledge. These are ideas and concepts we’ve come across over the years, and we’ve taken what we could from Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki, to fill in the blanks. Also, what’s below doesn’t necessarily include everything from the semi- and non-canonical expanded universe of Trek novels, video games, comic books, cartoons, and role playing games. We’ve barely dipped a toe into that ocean.

Romulan birds-of-prey in formation

The Battle of Cheron and the defeat of the Romulan Star Empire: The Romulans (like Mr. Spock’s Vulcans, but craftier and far more malicious) are the bad guys of the new film, but in Star Trek continuity Earth and its allies fought a long and mutually devastating war with their vast Star Empire a century before. Little is known about this conflict’s climactic battle except that the defeat was a humiliating loss for the Romulans and directly led to the formation of the Unied Federation of Planets.

If other franchises like Star Wars and Battlestar: Galactica have anything on Star Trek, it’s a well-known space battle. Showing such an event as a Midway-in-space-style slugfest would fix that once and for all.

Robert April, the Enterprise‘s “first” captain: When Gene Roddenberry wrote the first Star Trek treatment for MGM in 1964, the ship was called the Yorktown and was captained by Robert April, a part reportedly meant for Jack Lord or Lloyd Bridges, among others. Over the years a number of canonical and non-canonical sources have incorporated and fleshed out April’s character, establishing his British heritage and giving him a more militaristic bearing than his successors Christopher Pike (played in the new movie by Bruce Greenwood) and James T. Kirk (Chris Pine). Seeing this earliest of Star Trek creations, possibly in his later career as an ambassador, would make a great tribute to the mid-20th Century bravado of the original series.

The legacy of Star Trek: Enterprise: Probably the least-loved of the six series, Enterprise was nevertheless exciting and remarkably well-acted TV sci-fi. Especially in its second two seasons, when its storylines and tone took smarter but markedly darker turns, the prequel series offered multi-episode arcs that settled a lot of long-running fan debates while also fixing inconsistencies in the overarching Trek timeline and universe. And it managed all that while still remaining the most action-oriented Trek yet.

Honestly, we expect this black sheep of the Trek franchises to get short shrift in the movie, but it deserves some kind of acknowledgement for its efforts to explain the backstory of every series set after it.

Gary Mitchell, Captain Kirk’s best friend: The pilot to the original series featured helmsman (and possible First Officer) Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell, Kirk’s buddy from their days at Starfleet Academy and as wily an officer as Kirk himself. Driven mad from psychic powers gained on a world at the edge of known space, he attempted to kill Kirk and the Enterprise’s crew before meeting his own death at Kirk’s hands. Mitchell was played by Gary Lockwood, who two years later starred as the astronaut murdered by the HAL-9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There’s no mention of  a Lockwood character in IMDB’s listing of the new film’s cast, which is kind of a shame. Introducing a character that died in the series’ first episode would have lent a grim in-joke to the crew’s “first” adventure, if indeed the new film works as a prequel to the 1960′s series.

Andorians, the warlike anti-Vulcans: Blue-skinned inhabitants of a frozen moon that orbits a ringed gas giant, Andorians are fiery-tempered warriors who pride themselves on letting emotions guide their decisions. The historical enemies of the dispassionate Vulcans (who live on a world of deserts and volcanoes), they were among Earth’s strongest allies in the war with the Romulans and then later a founding member of the Federation.

They’re also among the most prominent aliens in the Trek galaxy, appearing in all its three time periods. It almost wouldn’t be the same without one or two of them manning a station aboard the Enterprise or filling in the ranks at Starfleet Command. And speaking of cool alien races…

Caitians, the Federation’s cat-people: One of two feline-derived species in the expanded, non-canon universe, Caitians were also briefly glimpsed in the gallery shown at the end of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Various stories and sourcebooks published over the last two decades describe them, somewhat ironically, as a peaceful, vegetarian, and spiritual people who value loyalty above all else.

An interplanetary civilization like the Federation can’t have too many aliens interacting with humans. And cat-people are cool by definition.

A map of the Neutral Zone from the original series

The Neutral Zone, the no-man’s land between Federation and Romulan space: Part of the bitter peace created at the end of the Earth-Romulan War, the Neutral Zone was established as a no-fly zone between the two warring powers. That didn’t stop both sides from heavily fortifying their boundaries, with the new Federation building massive stellar fortresses out of hollowed-out asteroids towed into formation for that purpose.

Actually, of everything on this list we give the Neutral Zone the best odds of making an appearance. Not for nothing, but the Zone and the Romulan Star Empire were introduced in the episode ”Balance of Terror,” considered by many (including series creator Gene Roddenberry) to be among the best of the original series.

Star Trek opens nationwide May 7, with international release dates varying through that week.

- Michael Kabel

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