Only Gus Van Sant gets to make Paranoid Park.
What I mean is, frankly, it is possible I’d shrug this off if it was coming from some young unknown. Especially if it were from the So-and-so Brothers and shot digitally. But it isn’t. It’s the same dude who can play it totally straight and make Milk, if that sentence makes any sense.
Taking much of the shooting style of his brilliant “pure cinema” trilogy of Gerry, Elephant and Last Days with just a dash of CSI intrigue, the movie is an exercise in tone with enough kick-off momentum to sail on its own. I think that was a skateboard metaphor. Anyway, really well done stuff. In some other life, I’d've put this on my top 10 of the year, maybe.
Such a disappointment. The great screenwriter Ed Neumeier gets in the director’s chair and….lays waste to his best property.
All the subtlety that makes the first Starship Troopers such a masterpiece is traded in for cheap jokes and easy satire. When the Federation is this plainly evil it also deadens all of the action sequences, in that it is impossible to root for anywhere. Mild kudos, though, to Casper Van Diem to be seen as such a, um, vertically challenged man. Who knows if he knew about it on set, though.
As shocking as it may sound, I prefer the straight-up monster movie slasher that was Starship Troopers 2.
Will the radical twists and turns about the story of Dr. Julian Bashir never cease? Turns out dude is genetically altered? And now his kindly gardener father is gonna do hard time. And it is kinda the EMH Doctor’s fault!
Meanwhile Rom and Leeta finally hook-up and it only takes Leeta’s most cleavage revealing outfit to do so.
No Insignia
Retarded, even by Voyager standards. Infiltration of “nasty elements” of a programmed reproduction of historical characters invade the safety-redundant EMH? And how can light throw you off a cliff again?
The trouble here is that Robert Picardo’s The Doctor is, let’s face it, the best character on Voyager, hence the writers scramble to write Doctor stories. The sad fact is that the EMH should have always stayed on the periphery. Once he becomes the focus, it all falls apart.
Here you are, sir. Main level, please.
Considered one of the richer Trek novels - this 1988 tome is, indeed, a fun place to romp around in.
The A-story is a little far-fetched: the Vulcans are voting on whether or not to leave the Federation. Certain folks are called in to testify. Kirk-Spock-Bones, of course, but also Sarek, who we get to know more in this story than in anything up until his appearances in TNG
Sprinkled between chapters are tales from the birth of Spock’s planet of Vulcan. We see it before it is dried into a desert. We see the oft-mentioned centuries of brutal conflict. We witness the birth and rise of Surak, founder of modern Vulcan thought and proponent of cthia and Kolinar.
We also see a very excited writer itching to share her insights about Usenet. Eh, who can blame her. Much of the writing is quite good (by the standards given by these books at this time) and if you were to pick up a first Trek novel you could do a lot worse than this one.
Oh my Christ - the Cardassians have joined the Dominion? Gul Dukat is now ruler of Cardassia? The Klingons resign Khitomer….and bring the (sit down for this one) Romulans with them?
Begun the Dominion Wars have.
Holy Christ, the Borg are back. And when they disconnect they become - formerly assimilated Federation folk from Wolf 359? Mind-screwer, that is.
A planet of reformed Borg now want back in to the Hive Mind before old ethnic tensions tear them apart. It’s like voting to renounce elections. Far out.
The Plak-Tow raises its ugly head again. A hats off to the the original Amok Time, this time a crazed Vulcan also infects a half-Klingon.
Luckily the holodeck is there for schtupping purposes.
I don’t buy, though, that “The Doctor” has a thunderbolt idea. Isn’t the release of sexual tension one of the unspoken uses of the holodeck? On DS9, Quark doesn’t even mince words about it. A bit of a disconnect here, but it is network TV…..
What at first seems like one of those time continuity loop episodes turns out to be Janeway run afoul of … death eather aliens? Or something? Either way the ghost of her Dad shows up.
1/2
Kira finally pumps out the newest O’Brien as Odo and Dr. Mora try and nurse a lost, baby Changeling to health. No go on that, but at least Odo can shape shift again. Shwew!
The most successful fantasy epic out of Europe in the past decade and you know what? The best parts are the straight-up period costume scenes. The dawn of the age of reason and its struggles among the people and the resultant backlash in the parlors makes for good enough drama. When the wire-fu and horrid special effects start you realize (and God forgive me for saying this) just how good Michael Bay can be.
I watched the director’s cut, too, which meant the pacing is completely lopsided, a truly never-ending tale. Oh, how silly I felt when I coulda sworn we were wrapping things up and there were still 58 minutes left on the disc. What’s funny is that Ann, who was half-asleep opened her eyes, asked me what she missed and then correctly laid out all the final twists and turns before turning back in.
Pleasant enough, but this should have been fantastic. Some of the episodes - like Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands - are pretty good. The rest not so memorable. The Coen Brothers’ 5 minutes here are more inspired than anything you’ll see in that got dang Burn After Reading. Alexander Payne’s “dumb, midwestern,” while funny, is too easy. I exect more from that dude, even in a short. The presence of fat mimes (I kid you not) makes it hard to really recommend this.
At least this episode of Voyager has the guts to say which TNG episode it cribs from.
I can’t buy into, though, the average Starfleeter’s willingness to accept a holographic person as, like, a person. Shouldn’t, like, a team of Troi’s be dispatched to everybody at their adolescence to make sure this doesn’t happen?
Oh, and it was with this episode that I realized that Garrett Wang is a shitty actor. The Internets tell me that he had a horrible flu while they were shooting this, so maybe he gets a pass.
When the definitive text of whacked-out, THC-friendly, somewhat-visionary, somewhat-fringe cinema is written, there may be a chapter on eggs. On one side will be Edith Massey’s caged ovum-loving granny in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos bellowing “thank you egg-man!” and at the other end of the spectrum is Samuel L. Jackson’s mostly-immortal criminal The Octopus, an evil mastermind who reserves a special hatred for the common breakfast food going anywhere near his face.
Read the rest of my review at UGO.com.
Neelix learns that it’s always better to tell the truth. And knowing is half the battle!
