Reading too far into The Boss.

Against my better judgement, I saw a Melissa McCarthy film in the cinemas today. I’ll be the first to admit, I had no prior experience with her or her output. And after this film, I still have no experience. The movie was terrible, but also exactly what I thought it would be.

I want to call the film shamefully capitalist. We follow a main character who works her way up to becoming the 47^th richest woman in the United States, which seems an oddly specific number, and makes a wonderfully subtle public appearance alongside the wonderfully subtle song and dance number by T-Pain and tells her legions of fans to follow the “American Dream” and work hard. Knowing the way the United States actually works and the people there that actually made it big, that seems a little bit inaccurate. After she is convicted of insider trading within her company and is rewarded with about five minutes and one unfunny gag work of jail time, she seeks to work her way back up again. She does this through encouraging Girl Guides to forcibly sell as many brownies as they can to unsuspecting families to turn in a profit, which she then distributes back to them in the form of physical wads of cash. This is suspicious to me, and I would follow it up more if I knew any more about how the economy works in general.

Between this film and Pixels (it hurts to put that in italics), this is building a case with regards to Peter Dinklage’s recent film career. When he’s not on his small budget hole-in-the-wall TV series, he’s played exclusively for laughs in these terrible comedies as a dwarf who has preferences for other cultures and accents. Here, it’s Japanese culture he’s into, which is thankfully left at samurai swords and top-knots only. If it went any further than that, I would definitely have reconnected with the latter part of my fight or flight senses while sitting in the theatre. Is this movie just racist to little people? Is this movie racist to Peter Dinklage? Can we help Peter Dinklage overcome this typecasting? Can we help him find more racist roles? This particular part is just nonsensical, and feels like an outtake from Bruno, with the exception of his romantic (???) history with the film’s lead.

Star Trek III.

And so on….

I actually don’t mind this film that much. Granted, the science and logic in most of it is absolute toffee, but seeing as I laughed at both at the jokes and the special effects, that makes it a winner to me. The film, and both the experience I had watching it, definitely felt like a transitioning stage for my journey. As important as it was that the movie surrounds the eventual resurrection of fan favourite character Spock through contrived death/rebirth imagery, alongside that we moved my laptop closer to us halfway through. You may think I’m straining to get this point across, but I saw it as both poetic and beautiful. Anyways, Kirk and crew are still hung up because Spock died fixing the warp drive. They steal the Enterprise from Earth because of a sudden chance to bring him back, and encounter a group of rogue Klingons who want the Genesis science-thing from the last film. That’s pretty much the film.

There are similar themes to the last one: dealing with loss, old age, proper performance and Shatner’s undying love towards a man who in the past displayed no outward signs of emotion toward him. The Klingon villains in the movie are indeed a stepdown from Khan, because everything in life is, but Christopher Lloyd’s performance as their leader is admittedly over the top and pretty entertaining. His obsession with the Genesis device goes beyond logic really as the movie proves it to be a hoax, courtesy of a grand mistake by Kirk’s son Dr Marcus. Through science tampering, the planet that the device forms quickly becomes unstable and begins to fall apart, enabling quite an amazing fight scene between the actor who played Doc Brown and a young man far too athletic to be Kirk. I was immediately floored by the choreography displayed: choking, grabbing the other one’s foot etc.

Even though the planet material is eye-rolling at best, there’s still a good sense of camaraderie between the cast, which probably comes courtesy of Spock actor Leonard Nimoy directing the film. Bones’ sudden realisation that Spock transferred his consciousness to his head without his permission is pretty damn funny, and his erratic behaviour preceding this turns out to be enough to land him in prison for the night. Those bureau agents in the future just don’t take chances with wayward senior personnel hanging out in seedy bars while on shore leave. It’s like Space Saigon or something. Granted, as much as I probably would be backing Kirk on finding Spock’s body again or whatever, I think I would still look at further consultation with my superiors or something before stealing a guarded star ship, or at the very least considering other perfectly legal alternatives. Remember in Star Wars when you could hire a ship and a pilot to go places? Fuck, wrong franchise. End.

CHEKOV HUMILIATION 3: Tricks Kirk into believing a resurrected Spock is in his cabin early on in the film.

Star Trek II.

Allow me to get this off my chest first…

CHEKOV HUMILIATION 2: Allows Khan’s revenge to be set in motion by discovering him on Ceti Alpha V, is fed a mind-controlling eel through his ear, and endangers the lives of all scientists on the Regula I station to be found, tortured and killed by the film’s villain. Also, he hides himself with his captain inside a container that Kirk has to open by punching the emergency glass (seriously, fuck Chekov).

Alright then. Although I unfortunately broke my sacred oath to do this on a weekly basis, I made up for it by watching the next Star Trek film not only with more company, but also within the sheltered and delicate comforts of my own freezing cold Aro Valley flat. The end result was that I was able to drink throughout the entirety of the film, and tensions ran so high this time around that a shirt was ripped clean open. This was of course in reference to the famous scene where Kirk did that thing from The Big Bang Theory or whatever. Having seen this film a few times beforehand, it was difficult to show restraint for the things that I actually really liked about it.

The movie’s all about revisiting the past, as genetically engineered Khan Noonien Singh finds a chance to escape from the planet he was exiled on 15 years ago to exact revenge on Kirk, the man who put him there in the first place. Running concurrently is the experimentation of the Genesis device, some scientific whatcha-call-it that creates life at an accelerated rate but also be conveniently used as an explosive, which Khan comes across in his pursuit of sweet, sweet revenge. The film is a definite improvement as it handles Kirk much better by drawing attention to Shatner’s age this time around. He looks old, tired, decorates his apartment with priceless antiquities in a desperate attempt to look younger to his friends and is probably shown putting on a girdle in a deleted scene or something. The only reason he is commanding the Enterprise this time around is rather the opposite of in-universe vanity last time: the ship is largely being run by cadets, and an emergency situation requires the most senior officer to take command. It’s nice when things in movies actually make sense sometimes.

Khan’s also a lot of fun as well. His slouched, open-shirt manner upon the captain’s chair of a commandeered ship was worth trying to replicate whilst watching. It’s interesting that the character is supposed to be Indian, and people were upset that Benedict Cumberbatch played him last time. However, it’s worth pointing out that the actor who made him the villain he is in this film was Mexican, and does not even try to attempt any vaguely resembling Indian affectation. What he could do was passionately quote Herman Melville at both the camera and my own heart, and he did it. Importantly, he has motivation here that makes sense to the audience, as the planet they were marooned on underwent convenient yet significant climate change that left them on the fringes without any assistance from Kirk or anybody. Again this makes sense from a script setting, even if it’s not entirely realistic. This does take place in a universe after all where many planets are breathable to humans, and it’s a wonder that all the things Khan and friends went through didn’t lead to them just suffocating at the end or something. Mind you, there wouldn’t be a movie, and it would make the film’s protagonist look even worse…

Overall, I commend this film for allowing me to drink regardless of whether we had a drinking game devised or not. Looking forward to seeing Spock resurrected next time.

Star Trek I.

It was like any other Friday night, and I had been drinking. I had to stop however, because I was at a flat which wasn’t actually mine, most of the occupants had gone to bed, and the increasingly dropping temperature in the living room made a cold beer less than inherently desirable at 1:30 am. It was just Cam and I to start us off on this magical experience, so we sacrilegiously inserted my Yoda USB into the TV, and prepared ourselves for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The film itself, from both a combination of Internet reading and having seen it before, is notoriously slow-paced. I already knew it going in a second time, so for this viewing I made myself focus on the smaller details on the screen: extras who might not have known what they had to be doing in the scene and so on. Once I got bored of that very quickly, I proceeded to say Spock’s name repeatedly a la William Shatner. Eventually, Cam caught the ailment too.

Well, the basic premise of the film is the discovery of a sentient probe named V’Ger who is trying to not only reach but also contact Earth. The catch is that its immeasurable power levels entire star ships, and it tends to do the latter than have a proper conversation. This malevolent entity at one point takes control of the bald-headed helmsman/navigational officer/plot device named Ilia, and uses her as a vessel to basically mock the ship’s crew. Maybe? All I remember was that she was bald. Maybe that didn’t happen after all. With the reveal that V’Ger was in fact a lost Voyager probe seeking the truth about its existence, I was already fidgeting on the couch by this point, restless. This was an ongoing issue, as breathing heavily into my shirt for warmth did little to escape the conveyer belt tour of the Enterprise model we were forced to endure at the 20 minute mark, let alone at the 120 minute one.
  

A striking detail about the film is that James T. Kirk is more a designated hero, or one in name only. He forces himself on board the Enterprise, in the process demoting the current captain who repeatedly states that the ship has been radically redesigned and needs someone who knows how to work it, so basically himself. Kirk further goes on cause the deaths of two crew members in the middle of beaming over to the ship, and in turn forcibly drafts his old medical officer Bones from shore leave (or Boogie Wonderland going by his costume). The icing on the proverbial space cake comes at a rare moment of tension in this major motion picture, where an ill-fated attempt at warp speed causes a speedball of special effects consisting of a vague “wormhole” and a very stationary asteroid. I was literally on the edge of my seat during this, and I can safely say that no other scene in the 132 minute running time comes even close.

However, the movie is still just as slow moving and dull as I remember it being, because so much of it is people looking at things. I cannot tell if this was a deliberate move on the part of the filmmakers seeing as it is a visual medium, but I did find to a degree layer upon layer of some unintentional intrigue. Once I got bored of watching the Enterprise crew watching the ship’s view screen, I turned my attention to the condensation on a nearby window. I am using this to fault the director/producer/big management for breaking the intended verisimilitude and the effect it could have had upon me. You could have had me, film. I gave you another chance at entering my life and you proceeded to revert back to your old ways, exactly as they were before. In summary, it’s about as hard to get into as an internship in Silicon Valley.

NB: Because of parallels in these films, I am also recording the instances where Chekov places himself or others in a dangerous position. I am doing this because I sincerely hope a defamation league will rise up and call out his various injustices in the franchise, and also because I don’t like the character. The first one is rather innocuous, but if some writer in the courts would like to record it for future reference, quote me as saying:

“Chekov burns his hand like a little bitch when V’Ger is scanning the bridge of the Enterprise.”  

Introducing "The Star Trek", or, my belated journey towards becoming a man.

It's the selfless act of 2016 you never knew you needed. Up until the release of the hardly-anticipated film Star Trek Beyond, I am taking it upon myself to not only watch but also review ALL the previous Star Trek movies, one week at a time. Why am I undertaking such a potentially dangerous, unheard of, frightening and borderline suicidal venture? Because I believe in hope and progress. Let me be your pariah, disinterested reader. Allow me to carry a burden you might never have known even existed, and hopefully unlike the martyrs before me, I'll live through it all.

Also, fuck television shows.