Star Trek

I went and saw the new Star Trek this weekend, on IMAX no less, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you should. Man, is it good. The movie effectively deals with the messy problems of coming after an iconic series with a tidy plot, which it manages to explain in such a way that’s blatantly obvious and yet doesn’t come across smelling like an info dump.

The Infamous Kate W. had told me that there’s nothing bad or wrong about this movie, and she’s right. The writers/producers/director/what-have-you could have so easily taken the story off the deep end in so many places, and yet the managed to walk a fine balance that resulted in nothing but solid, well done entertainment. Kirk’s childhood could have been relegated to angst-ridden navel-gazing, the scene of Spock being bullied might have been relegated to the excessive if it hadn’t played a role later in the plot, and Leonard Nimoy’s cameo could have been nothing more than a wink to the hardcore Trekkie fans, except that it wasn’t. None of it. Everything and everyone played a purpose in this movie, which gave it both a sense of completion and of being just the beginning.

Admittedly, I’m much more a Next Generation girl than a fan of the original Star Trek series, so a lot of the inside jokes were lost on me. And while this movie did make me wish to go back and rent the series and the various movies, I still haven’t decided if I’m willing to sit through Shatner’s Kirk. (I just never much went for the grandiose playboy types.)

As a bonus, though, is that I finally had a prolonged look at what so many of the writers at the various workshops are talking about when they use the Star Trek characters as archetypal examples. One less thing to go flying over my head at the conference this year. Woo-hoo!

Friday Feature: Jack the Bear

A friend came over to borrow the washer and dryer last night, and as her clothes went through the proper wash, rinse, and repeat cycles, we flipped channels and happened upon the beginning of a movie. I don’t know what it is about opening credits, but I always stop to find out what’s playing, even if I can tell by the music rolling during credits that I won’t hang around for the main feature. The creepy intro music of a horror, for example, will send me scrambling for the remote right after the name of the movie flashes across the screen.

I blame the basest of curiosities on my title-determination. Titles are hazy things for writers. I know so many of my fellow penners who struggle over a title for their manuscripts, and it’s that very title that so often is the first thing tossed by a publishing company. That, coupled with the need to know what, exactly, I may be missing, keeps me waiting through that long list of credits.

On Thursday, those credits included Danny DeVito, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Gary Sinise, and Reece Witherspoon. My friend and I looked at each other.

“Have you ever heard of a movie that has all of those actors in it?” I asked her.

“Uh-huh.”

Then the title: Jack the Bear.

“You ever hear of this movie at all?” she asked me.

“Uh-huh.”

So we settled in to watch as the washing machine rumbled in the background. The voice-over had us cringing, especially when the main character, a young boy named Jack, reminisced about how maybe this is what led to what happened. I remembered groaning aloud at the third, “maybe this…” as nothing significant had happened. Half an hour in, and we still waited for whatever was suppose to happen to actually happen.

The choppy flashbacks shot, for some reason, in a red tint, changed point of view.

Construction workers appeared on the street in front of their house, tearing up the road. “What are they doing?” Reece Witherspoon’s character asks the young Jack at one point.

“I dunno. They just showed up one day.”

That’s it. That was the only explanation in the entire movie for why so many of the characters had to maneuver around large machinery.

We were expected, apparently, to maintain sympathy for poor, poor Jack because his mother had died, despite his various overly angst rants, ravings, and occasional physical abuse of a younger neighbor and emotional abuse of his younger brother.

And yet we watched. We’d wonder aloud every once in a while about why we watched, but we did. The story had enough injections of actual plot to carry us over just as the remote started to look pretty darn good, and the odd ramshackle of this movie caught us in a morbid fascination.

The lesson: whatever happens has to happen for a reason. Don’t throw in a couple of bulldozers and expect people to connect the dots.

Do give your main character something that keeps people from wanting to shake him and tell him to stop whining for cripes’ sakes.

And when all else fails, hire Danny DeVito. He’s no Matt Damon, but most of the time his odd charm can win you over.

Friday Feature: The Dark Knight

The second installment of the new Batman movies comes out today. Huzzah, Huzzah, and Hip Hip Hooray! I love Batman, and I love this most recent incarnation of him. So today, for the Friday Feature, I present Batman.

Christian Bale as Batman

 

No more words are necessary.

Friday Feature: Why Did I Like This Movie?

Did you ever watch a movie that you liked, but you’re not entirely sure why? It’s not really a bad movie, but it’s not good enough to rise above the mediocrity, and yet for some reason you can’t stop thinking about it. The one I’m speaking of in particular is a sci-fi flick called Sunshine.

I know what I did like about it. The sun is dying, and the movie takes place aboard the the Icarus II, a spaceship carrying a huge bomb that the crew plans on sending into the star to reignite it. I don’t know much about astronomy, so okay–I’ll go with that. No problemo. The deal is, they swing around Mercury and realize that the first ship sent out, the Icarus I, is hovering near the sun sending out a distress signal with their bomb still intact. Now, they’d been sent out seven years prior, and everyone on the Icaraus II pretty much agrees that there’s not much of a chance that any of the crew could have survived given the lack of oxygen and food and all. You know, little things like that. A few want to go check it out anyway. They’re current trajectory will take them close enough to the first Icarus that, with a bit of tweaking, they can pass right by. The question: do they want to take the chance?

Now, this is the part I like. The crew recognizes that the fate of the entire world rests on them and this second-chance bomb strapped to their backs. For once, characters in a movie are taking this seriously. There’s no joking around. There’s no lighthearted comments or long drawn-out sob stories about how the people aboard the Icarus I might still be alive and wouldn’t it be giving up their humanity if they didn’t just check? I always hated that argument in movies. Given most circumstances, I’m all for stopping to help others, but I always felt that it detracts from the power of the story when people do that while millions and millions of other people depend on them.

And the Icarus II isn’t a ship out of Star Trek. There’s no quick turns or little stop-overs. The decision to check on the Icarus I could mean death for the crew of the Icarus II in more ways than one, which means death for everyone back on Earth. Of course, for the purposes of the story, they do need to check on the Icarus I, so how does the writer get them there without relying on the tired “But their lives are just as important as the millions upon millions back home”?

Simple. Logic. One of the scientists aboard reminds them all that there’s another bomb strapped to the back of the first Icarus. It’s a second chance in case something’s wrong with the one they have.

Now, I still have issues with this argument. The first being how the heck they’d planned on carting along the second bomb? These aren’t missiles, folks. These bombs are bigger than the freakin’ ship. And that’s if it’s even still operable.

But I could appreciate this argument much more than almost any other, so I was content.

The second part of the story that I really liked is when things started to go wrong. (As things are wont to do in such movies.) The first major error is caused by someone forgetting to take one of the thousands of variables into account. That’s it. He’s so worried about the change he’s required to make in the trajectory, so preoccupied with making sure everything’s right, that they’re heading in the right direction while still being able to complete their mission, that he forgets a detail that jeopardizes them all. How human is that? It’s the first time I really connected with any of the characters because it’s just so simple and honest. These are people under a ton of stress, and one of them f-ed up.

The visuals are stunning. Definite props for that, and the actors are all ones I recognize, though I couldn’t tell you any of their names if my life depended on it. I only know that they’re character actors, though I don’t know why they’re just character actors considering the majority of them have more talent than a lot of the starlets out there now.

Then we get into the “Um, wait. What the hell just happened?” that tips the scale toward the eye rolls and sighs of “Oh, come on!”. I don’t want to give away any major spoilers in case someone strolling along decides s/he wants to watch it, but suffice it to say the plot takes a turn for the pretty ridiculous toward the end. It’s metaphoric, but really–come on.

And despite those beautiful visuals, some of the camera work drives me crazy. The movie uses those little picture-flash effects that interrupt the flow of the story, though not often enough to give me the characteristic motion sickness.

Still, I have to wonder. I liked the movie. Quite a bit. But I’m not completely sure why.

Red Light, Green Light

I watched the movie Sweet Land last night that had me thinking of narrative time jumps. The movie’s very good, but I almost didn’t get past the first 10-15 minutes. For the first five or so, the present overlaid with the past both in flashes of dialogue and images. Then, to make matters worse, the story began to jump between the present, the past of the late ’60’s (or so said the synopsis on the back of the movie), and the past of the early ’20’s. I had a hard time anchoring myself until it picked up the 1920’s storyline and began to follow that through.

Time jumps in stories are always very difficult for me to follow unless they’re a prologue or some similar past that leaps once and then follows a present storyline. I’m a very linear thinker. I write from beginning to end (save for one); that’s just how the story naturally evolves for me, so to ask me to keep up with constant back and forth between three separate times is confusing. I view them as three different stories entirely, even though they’re all referring to the original, the 1920’s story. For me, they have different characters, different themes, and different endings. I see the connection between them, the common thread, but they still remain separate. Even flashbacks can throw me off unless they’re handled really well.

I haven’t decided yet if the 1960’s storyline and the present storyline were entirely necessary to the plot. The movie is based on a short story by Will Weaver, “A Gravestone Made of Wheat“, which I haven’t read yet, so I don’t know if that’s how it was presented in literature though I’m assuming so. Maybe in the story it was necessary, but I go back and forth about the movie adaptation. There’s no clear POV in the 1960’s story, and the present story is just a way of rounding off a straight-up romance in a “literary” fashion, which I say with no ill will. Some people like to cut at the HEA, while some like the bittersweet. I’d have preferred if the movie focused entirely on the 1920’s storyline, but it’s still a wonderful film.

I don’t see this schizophrenic time jump in too many novels, though. I wonder if it has anything to do with the media, as I’m sure it’s easier to manage rapid back-and-forth with images rather than words. This, in turn, makes me wonder if that’s similiar to how authors who use the cut-and-paste writing method see their story. I see mine in emotions, for example. People and actions are colored in auras of various intensity, which evolve and change as the story grows. Do people who write scenes regardless of their place in the story see flashes of detailed images and sounds?

Oh, the ponders I ponder.