Movies we love:  the new Star Trek film —
He said, she said, but nobody said the right things
posted 5-9-2009 - 1:23 am

 
This isn't a review of the film: I'll get to that in another post. Rather, this is more of an observation regarding other reviews of the film. Other than Roger Ebert's, of course; I always like his comments, whether or not I agree with them.

Now that the new Star Trek has previewed here this weekend, I’ve been perusing some of the reviews here and there. Accordingly, I ran across the He Said, She Said commentary in The Scorecard Review online ... and after reading it and others on the Web, I began to wonder just exactly how many of the younger film critics are familiar enough with the Star Trek universe. If they’ve seen the films but never watched the original series, they’re really not qualified to say much of consequence about the new film.

As expected, He (Nick Allen) and She (Morrow McLaughlin) did their thing, parsing the movie’s action and wow factor, comparing it to the less favorably received X-Men outing, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Yet I found their comments off target, surprisingly. Not that I expected them to be anywhere near as lucid as Roger Ebert, but hey, somebody’s gonna have to pick up his baton and run with it one of these days. It would help if that person or persons were good at being on point.

Well, at least they like the best of us ...
posted 3-3-2008 - 3:05 am

Not everybody hates print journalism or considers it obsolete yet. Or at least, not everyone in business hates newspapers and magazines.

Fortune's annual series of articles on the World's Most Admired Companies is just out. The Top 50 list frankly gives me pause. After all, it has Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America on it — and I can't see why any company that's received or is asking for a bailout should be on that list. Then again, this survey must have been taken before the bailouts really began; it's the only thing I can think of that would make sense of those rankings.

Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica season 5, so far
posted 1-31-2009 - 4:37 pm

So: Felix Gaeda has deteriorated into a bad guy. He's not the fifth Cylon, Ellen Tigh is; but he is a mutineer and a traitor, demoralized by having come this far for nothing and blaming everything on the Cylons, including rebel Cylons. And this requires a lot of rationalization, but there's a lot of that going around now in the fleet as morale descends into near nothing and order into chaos.

I'm wondering, on this morning after the third episode, why neither Tigh nor Adama anticipates the rebels tossing in a grenade once they crack the door and isn't in place to immediately toss it right back, where it could explode on the other side. I was thinking about that even as it happened. They did have just enough time to prepare, after all. But I digress.

Shows I love: awaiting Battlestar Galactica
posted 1-16-2009 - 7:27 pm

In less than an hour, Battlestar Galactica returns after months of absence. Its fans have been alternately hopeful, pissed, confused, exasperated, and excited. Same here, but I've been mostly pissed -- at the lousy ending of the last episode that aired, at the fact that the timeline was so drastically condensed in the last 15 minutes of that episode, and that it was done in such a not-at-all credible, nonsensical fashion.

I'll get to more about that later, perhaps after I've seen the new episode of this final half-season. For now, let me indulge in what has preoccupied most fans for months: the identity of the final secret Cylon. That will be revealed in tonight's episode anyway, so the wait is nearly ended by now.

Much ado about the swan that didn't die
posted 1-15-2009 - 6:30 am

I hate artistic revisionism. At least in ballet. And I blame the post-Walt-Disney Disney Company for it.

What started this rant, you ask? I attended a performance last Sunday of the Russian National Ballet Theater, and they performed Swan Lake. Theirs is a relatively new company, having been founded during the late 1980s, and, by the caliber of dancing that I saw, clearly second tier: fine, but certainly no threat to either the Bolshoi or the Kirov. I wouldn't put them on the same level as the New York City Ballet or the American Ballet Theater, either, but those two are also world class, so no surprise there. But I love Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky's score, so I really didn't mind.

Despite some lack of precision now and then among the corps de ballet, I was enjoying the production, for the most part. Particularly the performance of the prima ballerina portraying Odette/Odile, whose performance was clearly on a higher level than the rest of the company but whose name I don't know because the program listed four names for that role (this is a traveling company, and this role is obviously rotated, as are several others). In fact, I eagerly anticipated watching that particular Odette do the dying swan scene.