Jordan Hoffman Dot Com

I’m still waiting to come down from this one, but I think it might be in the top 3 nature docs I’ve ever seen.

More on UGO next week.

One of my great shames is that I’ve never actually read any of the books written by my acquaintance Alex Robinson.

As I expected, his work is charming, funny, intelligent and wise. The very economic TCTBF, soon to be a major motion picture, tickles the imagination and tugs the heartstrings – and does it in record time. Highly recommended.

Picking up where GLC: Recharge left off, To Be A Lantern follows the newly initiated Lantern/Hottie Soranik Natu as she finds her footing. Also, the friendship between Raanian and Thanagarian enemies Vath Sarn and Isamot Kol continues. Lastly, and most humorously, Guy Gardner finally browbeats Salaak into granting him shore leave. . . with some very amusing results.

The book culminates with Gardner and Chthos-Chthas Chtatis engaging in a rescue mission on the sentient city of Ranx, an episode that had me giggling with intense nerdish glee on a New Jersey Transit bus.

Hello?… Uh… Hello D- uh hello Dmitri? Listen uh uh I can’t hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little?… Oh-ho, that’s much better… yeah… huh… yes… Fine, I can hear you now, Dmitri… Clear and plain and coming through fine… I’m coming through fine, too, eh?… Good, then… well, then, as you say, we’re both coming through fine… Good… Well, it’s good that you’re fine and… and I’m fine… I agree with you, it’s great to be fine… a-ha-ha-ha-ha… Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb… The *Bomb*, Dmitri… The *hydrogen* bomb!… Well now, what happened is… ahm… one of our base commanders, he had a sort of… well, he went a little funny in the head… you know… just a little… funny. And, ah… he went and did a silly thing… Well, I’ll tell you what he did. He ordered his planes… to attack your country… Ah… Well, let me finish, Dmitri… Let me finish, Dmitri… Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?… Can you *imagine* how I feel about it, Dmitri?… Why do you think I’m calling you? Just to say hello?… *Of course* I like to speak to you!… *Of course* I like to say hello!… Not now, but anytime, Dmitri. I’m just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened… It’s a *friendly* call. Of course it’s a friendly call… Listen, if it wasn’t friendly… you probably wouldn’t have even got it… They will *not* reach their targets for at least another hour… I am… I am positive, Dmitri… Listen, I’ve been all over this with your ambassador. It is not a trick… Well, I’ll tell you. We’d like to give your air staff a complete run-down on the targets, the flight plans, and the defensive systems of the planes… Yes! I mean i-i-i-if we’re unable to recall the planes, then… I’d say that, ah… well, ah… we’re just gonna have to help you destroy them, Dmitri… I know they’re our boys… All right, well listen now. Who should we call?… *Who* should we call, Dmitri? The… wha-whe, the People… you, sorry, you faded away there… The People’s Central Air Defense Headquarters… Where is that, Dmitri?… In Omsk… Right… Yes… Oh, you’ll call them first, will you?… Uh-huh… Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri?… Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Omsk information… Ah-ah-eh-uhm-hm… I’m sorry, too, Dmitri… I’m very sorry… *All right*, you’re sorrier than I am, but I am as sorry as well… I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri! Don’t say that you’re more sorry than I am, because I’m capable of being just as sorry as you are… So we’re both sorry, all right?… All right.

Seeing Iron Man for the first time since the theaters made me respect the movie all that much more. It is so much fun that you don’t realize how light and how ridiculous it is.

People who accuse Star Trek of relying on coincidence really need to check this movie out.

And how the character of Pepper Potts wasn’t held up by feminists as a target is flabbergasting. Or, maybe it was. Like I said, the zippy nature of the film is too overwhelming to ignore.

Example: why does simply landing on the roof cause Tony Stark to crash through a roof, a piano and another floor? It doesn’t matter, because the timing and effects and editing is perfect – and it gets a great laugh. Favreau, while we weren’t looking, became an absolute master of idiotic popcorn cinema.

One of the true marks of a great film is to make people you know you would despise in real life seem welcoming on the screen.

Exit Through The Gift Shop is going to be one of the most important documentaries of the next five years, and will be discussed and argued passionately by undergraduates for quite some time.

I have a lot to say about this film – I’ve been quietly processing it for over a week now – and will have a more thorough (yet still pithy!) review on UGO this week.

It will also be a review with a punchline. Much like the movie.

Kinda funny, but 100% pointless. Not everything is Anvil! The Story of Anvil!

I’ll probably review this for UGO in the coming days, just so I can shock everyone with my “meh” response. I’m the only one not doing backflips over this one.

Bring on the fan service!

In the first arc, Harcourt Fenton Mudd is back! And he’s brought the “Sallah” and that politcal intrigue from Peter David’s earlier DC comics stories with them.

There is the usual fun with Mudd, this time involving secret arms dealing with the Klingons.

Next is one of my personal favorites: the great Gary Seven. This time, lots of talk given to Seven’s group and the inherent paradoxes therein. Oh, if only there was a Gary Seven show on TV. I still pray for it – it isnt’ that crazy of an idea, you know.

Anyway, this time Seven (and Isis) prevent a new weapon devised from protomatter to be created. Scotty also steals a lot of the show.

This recent TNG comics run is a success, because it feels a lot like a genuine episode of TNG you’ve never seen before. Or, perhaps more honestly, like one you’ve seen and kinda forgot.

All the characters are consistent, but it isn’t all that outstanding. It’s a fairly typical story of Picard encountering a planet with warring factions. Worf gets captured and, for a little while anyway, our friends a trapped in some sort of white void. (White voids work better in comics than they do on TV.)

Fun – and very wordy. Some of the panels are absolutely tiny, cramming in lots and lots of info. Not the usual 5-minute read.

Awful. But, in a way, also awesome.

This tale of the very slow, slow, slow silversmithing of the Holy Grail has some of the oddest, most surreal matte paintings in cinema. And, what’s so strange, is that I can’t tell if it is *meant* to be artistic, or if it is just awful. Plus, Virginia Mayo looks like a drag queen. So – yeah – you may want to check this one out. . . just have access to a FFwd switch.

Pretty stinking awful.

What’s weird is that I’ve seen this one before and I kinda liked it.

This time it was just dreadful, stagey obnoxiousness. Yeah, I get it, the parables of the Gospels done all street theater. Cute on the stage, maybe, but awful here.

Cool, though, to see some terrific NYC location photography – like the unfinished WTC.

Either Enterprise just killed 3200 Paraagan mining colonists or someone is trying to set them up.

Wouldn’t you know it is the Suliban and Enterprise is once more a pawn in the Temporal Cold War. Usually things get wrapped up by the end of the episode, but this time the cure seems worse than the disease as not only the ship seconds away from total destruction, but Captain Archer is trapped a thousand years in the future with no means of getting back! Oh – and we have to wait til next season to find out what happens!!

The fans aren’t the only ones who get services on Risa!

This shore leave episode is pretty damned great. Archer’s arc seems like a romance, but actually extends the Suliban/Temporal Cold War storyline; Reed and Trip run afoul of gangster, Toshi literally lets her hair down and Dr. Phlox gets to do some real comedy. Seriously. Phlox does a pratfall that may be the single funniest moment of all Trek. I rewound it three times. It’s a marvel – a truly sublime moment of physical comedy.

Sadly, T’Pol does not pull a Jadzia and we do not see her in a bathing suit. What’s up with that?

Asymmetric warfare in a desert culture, eh? Sure.

The meat, though, is Archer and Trip lost amid the elements, fighting for survival.

Good, tense episode.

A badass Vulcan Ambassador gets the Enterprise into a hot bucket of shit. It ends with The Vulcan High Council and Enterprise kinda respecting one another – and that makes me feel good.

Points, first of all, for all the explicit references to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Wages of Fear. After that, a pretty standard hard SF yarn (with some nods to the Alien franchise as well as DS9’s “Great Link.”)

Still, fun, energetic – good “bottle show.”

At the time it was thought of as a Quantum Leap reunion, now we know it is a great Trek/BSG crossover.

That aside, Archer and Mayweather (the least developed character on the show – I usually forget he even exists) get stuck in a detention center and they learn about a different side to the Suliban. It’s a good episode – one Kirk would have been proud of.

1/2

Even with Rene Auberjonois in the cast, this episode kinda blows. And it was done 100 times better on DS9 as Shadowplay