Movie Update 40

Man, 40 of these stupid things. No witty comment, just: man.

Anatomy of a Murder


One of a pair of long courtroom dramas I saw this last week, and one of a pair of movies starring James Stewart. He plays an aging lawyer who despite being out of practice, agrees to defend a soldier who murdered a man after he supposedly raped his wife. Strictly, the rape wouldn't be enough to qualify the killing as self defense, but Stewart uses it as leverage to help push a plea of temporary insanity. The film examines how precarious the legal system is, requiring the jury to ignore information they have been given and having cases rely on the always unreliable human ability to lie or accurately remember what happened. There's some terrific acting, and it's interesting how the truth is not what's important, but rather the trial itself.

Harvey


Another really good James Stewart performance, one that props up a movie that is watchable but I wasn't particularly drawn to. He plays a man with a friend named Harvey who happens to be an invisible six foot tall rabbit. Everyone thinks he's crazy, even his sister, who may or may not also be able to see Harvey. Various people act like assholes towards Stewart, but in the end things turn out okay because blah blah whatever.

Judgment at Nuremberg


A movie about one of the infamous trials at Nuremberg, where four judges are put on trial for rulings they made during the Nazi rule of Germany. It's undeniable that they made decisions that contributed toward the horrible things that happened under the Nazis, but the defense makes a great case that they are no more culpable than other people who didn't actively work against the regime and even other governments that didn't stop them earlier. Maximilian Schell actually won an Oscar for his depiction of the defense attorney, and he was quite good, though personally I preferred the more subtle work of Spencer Tracy as the chief judge on the tribunal. It's important to be reminded sometimes of just how awful the Holocaust was.

Stripes


A pre-Ghostbusters Ivan Reitman/Bill Murray/Harold Ramis joint that substitutes cursing, nudity, and general silliness for true wit or an intriguing premise. There's something still likable about Bill Murray's dickishness, but I thought overall Stripes was pretty uninspired as a comedy, although that doesn't prevent it from being pretty watchable anyway. It has a fine cast, including John Candy and Judge Reinhold as two of the more recognizable supporting members. Really, there's nothing terrible about it, I was just hoping for more from its talented core.

Star Trek: Generations

We're finally drawing to the end of my planned exploration of the Star Trek franchise. Before it's over though, I have to get through the last four films, which range in fan opinion from pretty good to downright awful. I've seen all of them, and while I didn't hate any, I didn't think any were particularly great either. We start things off in thoroughly mediocre fashion with Generations, the only film to feature both James Kirk (and the only original cast members willing to slum it with him) and Jean-Luc Picard. Unfortunately, they don't do a whole lot with the opportunity, with Kirk relegated to an ignominious death scene at the beginning and a shoehorned role in the plot's climactic (by default) moment. Most of the film is just an average TNG episode stretched out to feature length without a whole lot justifying it. It wasn't too bad really, as I spent most of the time mildly bored instead of really bothered by anything. "Not terrible" isn't really the best endorsement, though.

There were a few things I enjoyed. Data's experiment with an emotions chip was pretty funny for a while, until the plot really got going and it had shockingly little importance to any of the significant events. That was just sort of weird. Malcolm McDowell is a fun actor, and he does a solid job as the movie's villain at the same time that Picard and his crew fail miserably to counter him in a well reasoned way. To be honest, I'm struggling with finding good things about the movie... as I said, it's not egregiously poor, but there's so little about it that was memorable or interesting that it's hard to be even neutral on it after the fact. At least Picard acted like Picard the whole time, which becomes a huge issue in the sequels. They destroy the Enterprise to add some drama in an overly long crash scene and also to give an excuse for a rebuilt ship in future films that accommodates the wider aspect ratio, at the same time Picard is entering a strange alternate reality where the two captains finally meet. As I said though, it's not the most exciting result ever, as the big action finale is a few old dudes beating each other up. They pretty much dropped the ball, which honestly describes all these movies pretty well. Well, no matter. It's hard to be too disappointed by it when the last Trek film was so awesome.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

A couple movies ago they showed how to make Star Trek funny and make it work, and this time they showed that it can totally succeed by taking itself seriously. There are of course a few moments of levity sprinkled throughout, but Undiscovered Country is generally a very somber, tense movie that succeeded beyond my expectations for the franchise. The conflict is yet again with the Klingons, though it's different this time - a lasting peace is in the cards, but a plot involving mistaken identity and sabotage puts that in jeopardy. The Klingons were always a sci-fi parallel to the USSR, and with the Cold War ending, the writer decided to absolve their differences with Starfleet in basically the same way. There's some really interesting scenes of diplomacy and non-violent conflict, like a dinner with some emissaries that doesn't go too well, and a surprisingly suspenseful trial. Kim Cattrall is another surprising actress to play a young Vulcan officer, but she does a decent job and helps provide the only time the mind meld has ever been scary. It's not a perfect film, but it's definitely a good one, and a nice send-off for the original crew. The end credits begin with the cast literally signing off in farewell, which makes it all the more pathetic that three of them came back yet again in the next movie. But I won't be seeing that for a while.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

The previous Trek movie showed how to make the series funny and do it right. This one shows how to do it terribly, terribly wrong. The film is downright silly. It's not clever or intelligent, it's downright slapsticky. It gets more serious as it goes on, though it never really gets good. You know a plot is on weak footing when it has to go back and give the most developed character a secret half brother to get to the point. I guess William Shatner was trying when he came up with the story and directed this, but very little about it works, and this is when I started feeling kind of depressed about how old everyone looks. I mean, this movie was released twenty years after the TV series ended. And yet here they all are, dancing erotically, scooting around on rocket boots, and being written out of a scene by banging their head on the ship. There are a couple moments that almost work, but by and large it can only be considered poor. The ending is among the films' most bizarre and meaningless, as the conflict just sort of dies without much resolution. I can't even remember what happened to certain key players. Just not good.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Leonard Nimoy's second turn as director might actually be my favorite of the original Star Trek movies that I've seen. The second one had some good stuff in it, but The Voyage Home is just consistently entertaining throughout. It starts as a relatively serious, normal Trek story. Kirk and the crew are returning to Earth to face trial for their insubordination in traveling to retrieve Spock, and there's a mysterious alien probe headed on the same course. It's all pretty normal, but once the words "humpback whale" are uttered, it basically turns into a comedy. They do their absurd slingshot-around-the-sun thing to go back in time, and embark on an unusual mission to save the Earth's future, and some animals as well. These guys have gone back in time before, but it's never been this consistently funny. Things like Spock's experimentation with profanity, Bones' distaste for modern medical practices, and Chekov asking people if they know where to find nuclear wessels are great, and it's funny how cavalier they are about changing the past and causing potential paradoxes. This year's Trek film was pretty humorous as well, and that's probably the best tone for the series, at least from what I've seen. It's a series about the fun and wonder of having adventures through space and time, not gritty galactic conflict. The film's not without flaws, but it's enjoyable throughout.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

The third Trek film opens with a recap of the second, including the funeral, which happens to be the best scene in this movie too. This film forms a trilogy of sorts with the previous and the next, and Search is actually fairly eventful for the middle of a story. There's not a whole lot of Nimoy on screen, though he was actually behind the camera as the director for this one, and does a decent job. There's some bizarre casting decisions and it's a bit anticlimactic, but definitely affected the least by the odd-numbered curse on the original cast Trek films. Klingons (led by an out-of-place Christopher Lloyd) are after the technology developed and activated in the last movie, and stumble upon Kirk's son, a reincarnated Spock (have I not mentioned he "died"? He "died"), and the recast Kirstie Alley character. Kirk and the rest of the crew enact a plan to commandeer the Enterprise and come to the rescue, and though parts of that story are entertaining, it never gets exciting like you'd hope from the films' first Klingon/Starfleet conflict. After that gets resolved, there's still the case of Spock and turning him truly back into the man he should be. There's some emotional moments and bits of humor sprinkled around, and it ends with things left to accomplish. Like most of the earlier Trek canon, I can say it's... not bad.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

The consensus is that Wrath of Khan is not only better than the first Trek film, but probably the best out of the lot of them, at least before this year's remake thing. I can't speak for the second part yet, but they were right about the first. It's noticeably shorter than the first one yet seems to pack a lot more in, including some actual action sequences and a few of the franchise's most iconic moments. The space funeral at the end with Kirk's speech is particularly memorable, and no one can forget him shouting his foe's name at the top of his lungs. I've come to expect the unexpected with these things, and one surprise was seeing a young Kirstie Alley as an up-and-coming Vulcan officer. Ultimately though she didn't seem to do much, and gets replaced by a different actress in the next movie. There's also a subplot with an ex of Kirk's and the son they apparently had together, although I didn't pay attention to a lot of that. The focus is on Khan's elaborate revenge plot involving taking over ships and even people's minds, and using a special device to annihilate everything as a last resort. There's some sacrifice and sad goodbyes, although it's all temporary as the cast would stick together for another four films after this one. I wouldn't call it a great science fiction movie, but it was certainly fairly entertaining and a good step up from the first one.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Star Trek's first film incarnation is a bit interesting. Conceptually that is, not so much to watch. Being released ten years after the series ended, the whole main cast returns, though they've all aged visibly in the meantime. So their characters aged as well, showing Kirk as an admiral now, retaking command of an updated Enterprise on a dangerous mission. It's well over half an hour before the crew is back together, and I think about fifty minutes in when he finally reunites with Spock. Needless to say, the movie's pace is slow. There's really not that much going on as far as a conflict - an alien threat exists, but it doesn't put the main cast in a whole lot of apparent danger. I'll admit I didn't pay as much attention as I could have, but I didn't see a whole lot of the movie really striving for me to do so. It's interesting to see what was big in special effects at the end of the 70s, but that's really about it. The subplot involving the displaced captain and some bald woman proved to be fairly important, but still, it was struggling at the edge of doing something compelling. It's hard to really dislike anything about the series, but this movie bored me for most of its duration.

Star Trek - Season 3

And so the beginning of one of science fiction's longest tenured franchises comes to an end. Not with a bang, but a whimper. The final episode is a pretty standard one, no goodbyes or anything, just a lame body switch storyline to throw on the pile of overused ideas the writers liked to recycle every few episodes. There really weren't many standout episodes from this season, and no significant new characters either. Uhura got semi-replaced by some white lady near the end, but that was about it. I realize I'm asking too much from something that did so much for the genre and was made in the 60s, I just find it hard to get excited about such poor production values and lack of ambition with character or plot. I know I'm not the only one who thinks the show had fallen pretty far by this point though, so I don't feel too bad about ragging on it. I'm just glad that I became interested in the medium after The Sopranos left its mark, because without some sort of reward for sticking to it and making an effort to watch every week, there's no reason not to just cherry pick a few good episodes and stick with those. I can see myself leaving the TV on if I flip to some old Trek episode, but I can also easily see myself leaving five minutes later to do the laundry or something. There's something to be gained from checking this show out, but I was already aware of most of its contributions anyway through cultural osmosis. Oh well.

Star Trek - Season 2

New features for Star Trek's second season:

- The first use of the classic arena music is here I believe, when Spock and Kirk are forced to fight to the death. It then pops up again every couple episodes.
- Kirk has a new green v-neck command shirt with a sideways Starfleet emblem at his hip instead of on his chest. I don't really like it, but he only wears it half the time.
- Kirk gets busy with alien ladies a lot more often. Most of them just look like humans, but it happens all the time.
- McCoy gets his name in the main credits. He deserves it, he might actually be my favorite character.
- Chekov shows up. He's a really lame character. In a show where the Enterprise can travel back in time by going really fast, the episode where a gorgeous female member of the landing party is totally into him was the hardest to believe.
- It might just be me, but I feel like the idiosyncrasies of Kirk's speech patterns are much stronger now. This is where people got the justification to mock him until the end of time.
- They've done it before, but this was the season where they really went wild with extremely powerful computers and robots that are always defeated by using logic against them to either fry their circuits or cause them to shut themselves down. It's clever the first time guys, but it becomes a cliché when it happens every time.
- I'm pretty sure the return of Mudd is the first instance of a recurring character who's not an Enterprise crewman, and still the only one so far.
- Another new plot nugget they decided to use repeatedly is that of a planet that has molded its entire culture after a specific period and place in Earth history. You want Kirk and Spock to fight Nazis? You got it!
- Glowing, multi-colored brains in a glass dome.
- It took a while, but we finally have a scene with a bunch of exotic-looking aliens all meeting in a room on the Enterprise. This should have happened in the pilot.
- And lest I forget, we have the first recorded instance of a parallel universe in which the evil version of a character has a goatee. Good stuff.

The thing about Star Trek is I can't decide if I like it more when it's good or bad.

Star Trek - Season 1

The recent Trek film increasing my interest in the franchise finally paid dividends about a month ago when I started watching the original series. It's kind of slow and boring on occasion; the fact that it was made in the 60s leads to some painfully dated scenarios, especially any attempt by a character to fight another; and it sure seems like a lot of plot ideas get reused repeatedly. Almost every episode can be shoehorned into one of maybe half a dozen archetypes. Still, the show did enough to keep me watching through these struggles, and it's hard to deny its importance to science fiction. It succeeds for the most part because the cast is good. Scotty, Sulu, and Uhura are fine I guess, but the show is carried by Kirk, Spock, and Bones. All three are great in their own way, but also similar. They have a combination of intelligence and fearlessness that makes watching them tackle a highly sensitive and difficult situation at least interesting, and usually a lot of fun.

The show is highly episodic and was aired out of production order, and you could pretty much watch the episodes in any order and not miss anything. Cast members pop in and out and characters change their assignment between episodes without anyone noticing. Obviously this results in a situation where some episodes are really good, and some definitely aren't. Unlike the more serialized shows I tend to gravitate towards, the reason to keep watching isn't to find out what happens next, but the hope that the next episode is one of those good ones. Some of the better ones include "The Corbomite Maneuver", where Kirk protects his ship through the sheer power of his huge brass balls, and "Space Seed", which introduces Khan, one of the series' most infamous characters. The version I watched was the remastered one, which primarily features improved visual effects in the outer space scenes. Normally I'd prefer to see the unmolested original, but in this case I didn't mind because it never affected the story and was undoubtedly a vast improvement over whatever they might have mustered in 1966. The most interesting thing was how it didn't play to my expectations, of Kirk commanding a ship against a bunch of alien vessels and romancing alien women. The former was only an occasional situation, and the latter never happened at all. Either that stuff happened a lot more in subsequent seasons, or I've been highly duped by popular culture. In any case, I'll keep watching to find out.