Remembering the Duke

Seeing as today is the 30th anniversary of John Wayne's passing I thought I'd post a clip from one of my favorite movies of his, The Cowboys.

Movie Review: Star Trek

Rating: 3 out of 5

I'm not a big fan of J.J. Abrams. I don't think I've ever seen anything from him that I've enjoyed. I really hated his Mission: Impossible III. If not for all the good reviews that Star Trek has received I wouldn't even have bothered to see it in a theater. So going in my expectations were really low.

So how was it? Not as bad as I was expecting but also not as great as the reviews I've seen would have you believe. I would rank this movie somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to Star Trek movies. My personal favorite would be The Wrath of Khan followed by The Undiscovered Country, First Contact, and The Voyage Home. Then the reboot and then the rest of the Star Trek movies which means, for me, it borders on being unwatchable but doesn't quite reach that point. I won't be buying the DVD or seeking it out when it comes to cable but if there's nothing better on I might tune it in instead of just turning off the television.

The cast do a decent enough job with the material they're given. Chris Pine is a little bland as Kirk but still does an acceptable job. Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban are perfect as Spock and McCoy, nicely capturing the characters while making them their own. Zoe Saldana and John Cho do a good enough job as Uhura and Sulu even if they don't particularly shine. Simon Pegg steals ever scene in which he appears. Unfortunately his character, Scotty, has been reduced to a comedy relief goofball. Anton Yelchin is alright as Chekov but he's also been reduced to comedy relief. All of the supporting cast do good jobs and I've got no complaints there.

Mild SPOILERS will follow. You have been warned.

The plot itself is decent enough in concept but leaves something to be desired in actual execution. If you're the sort who might wonder why Nero spends 25 years upgrading his ship's weapons when he could spend the same 25 years upgrading the Romulan Empire's technological base and turn them into the most powerful force in the galaxy, well, you may have some problems with the movie. If, on the other hand, it doesn't particularly bother you that in one scene a character wants to ride in a shuttle's bathroom because it has no windows and ten minutes later he's now in a different shuttle in a window seat eagerly staring out the window with no sign of his previous anxiety, well, then you'll probably enjoy Star Trek.

Externally I like the latest version of the Enterprise even if it does look more like the Enterprise class ship of the movies than the Constitution class ship of the original television series. I did not, however, like the internal redesign of the ship. The iBridge, as some people have dubbed it, is too bright and too cluttered. Engineering, on the other hand, looks like a 20^th century chemical plant with a large, transparent water pipe that winds all around the room for no apparent reason other than for loveable goofball Scotty to get sucked in and whisked about while Kirk frantically dashes about trying to figure out how to get him out of the thing. (Did I mention that Scotty has been reduced to being the comedy relief?)

I found the action sequences to be a confusing. Abrams is apparently a big fan of using close ups with lots of stuff flying around so you can't tell what's going on. It seems to be a popular style these days but I hate it. I've been told it's supposed to convey how chaotic combat is but all it does, in my opinion, is make action sequences unwatchable and convinces me that the director has no idea how to handle an action sequence. Abrams and other directors of this ilk would be well advised to watch Danny the Dog aka Unleashed and take notes as its fight scenes do an excellent job of conveying how chaotic the combat is while allowing the viewer to follow the action quite easily.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I don't like the story is done because not only is it a J.J. Abrams film but the screenplay is by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman who also wrote the screenplay for Mission: Impossible III which, as I've already noted, I really hated.

MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.

Now to go through all the problems I had with the story.

When we first meet McCoy, he's been hiding in a shuttle's bathroom because he's afraid to fly. When he's forced to sit next to Kirk he goes into a rant about all the horrible things they can expect. It's a funny scene until you start wondering why someone so scared of catching some horrible disease went into the medical profession. I have some phobias of my own and strangely enough not once have I been tempted to seek out a profession that would expose me to the things I fear on a regular basis.

Are we really supposed to believe that officials of the Vulcan Science Academy think it's appropriate to make racist remarks, illogical ones at that, about the parentage of an applicant and that after making said remarks they would be surprised that the applicant changed his mind about attending the academy?

In explaining the purpose of the Kobayashi Maru scenario, Spock says the intent is to see how cadets handle the fear when they realize they are facing a no win situation. To which I say that's a pretty stupid test because the cadets know they're in a simulation and there are no consequences for failing the mission. No one is going to die or even get hurt and it's probably well known that no one has ever beat the simulation so, at best, it's going to test how the cadets handle the frustration of being given a task to complete that can't actually be completed.

When an emergency arises on Vulcan while almost the entire fleet is off dealing with another emergency, Star Fleet has to crew 8 ships with cadets and instructors from Star Fleet Academy causing me to wonder how it is that Star Fleet just happens to have 8 ships lying around with no crew.

Why is Spock in charge of deciding which cadets get assigned to which ship?

Why is the navigator given the task of making a ship wide announcement instead of the communications officer? Why does the PA system require a verbal authorization code? Do they really have to tell their password to the entire bridge crew whenever they want to make an announcement?

Why has Nero spent the last 25 years upgrading his ship's weapon systems when he could have been sharing technology with the Romulan Empire?

Why does Nero's mining ship have a "drill" that has to be lowered into a planet's atmosphere? Even in the original series they had energy weapons capable of hitting the surface of a planet from orbit. Having a drill that must be lowered into the atmosphere seems like an unnecessarily complicated bit of technology. And is it really more efficient to drill the surface of a planet from orbit instead of from the surface?

Why does Nero bother drilling into a planet's core anyway? A "red matter" bomb dropped on the surface of a planet is going to take out the entire planet. It's not like it's going to take a big chunk out of one side of the planet and leave the other side unscathed.

Why does Pike have Kirk, Sulu, and the red shirt make a highly risky space drop onto the drill to plant explosives when the Enterprise could just shoot it?

Why does Sulu say he's a fencer but then whip out a katana instead of a rapier?

Why does Spock order Kirk to be kicked off the Enterprise? The ship has a brig for a reason. It can't be standard Star Fleet operating procedure to stuff mutineers into escape pods and send them off to the nearest habitable planet instead of locking them up in the brig. Why doesn't anyone protest this obvious breach of regulations? You would think at least McCoy would object to marooning Kirk.

Why doesn't the Enterprise inform the Federation outpost on the ice planet that they're sending Kirk? You'd think they'd at least want to warn them that they're sending the outpost a mutineer. But they must not have done so because Scotty and his assistant are taken by surprise when Kirk shows up. Good thing that Kirk didn't listen to the escape pod's computer when it told him to wait for someone to come get him because obviously no one was looking for him. Even if the Enterprise didn't alert the outpost, shouldn't the escape pod have some sort of emergency beacon to alert them?

Given that the ice planet is in almost the same orbit as Vulcan, it must be given how large Vulcan is in the sky, how is it possible that it's covered with ice while Vulcan is a desert planet? Shouldn't they be close to each other in terms of temperature?

Wouldn't natural selection tend to eliminate red creatures in an arctic environment?

How is it possible that in the time it takes Kirk to travel 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) on foot in an extremely harsh environment while avoiding predators that Scotty and his assistant haven't noticed the destruction of Vulcan and the sudden appearance of a black hole in their backyard. Have they received no distress calls at all? Or is Scotty really more interested in food than the deaths of several billion people?

How big a psychopath does Scotty have to be to have tested a new type of transporter on a living subject instead of an inanimate object? And how stupid does he have to been to have chosen an important official's pet for the test?

Why does Spock Prime, who once told us that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, put billions of lives at risk by making Kirk think bad things will happen if the two Spocks ever meet in the hopes that Kirk and Spock will bond over Kirk making Spock lose his emotional control in order to remove him from command of the Enterprise?

They said that Nero had the faster ship so how does the Enterprise beat him to Earth when Nero headed straight there while the Enterprise headed off to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet first?

Again why doesn't the Enterprise just shoot the drill instead of relying on the risky plan of beaming Kirk and Spock onto Nero's ship so they can disable it from the inside? And, again, why does Nero even bother using the drill?

Pike lost 87% of his fleet and turned himself over to the enemy so he could be tortured into revealing the access codes for the Federation's defenses and for this he's promoted to Admiral?

Kirk hasn't graduated from Star Fleet Academy and was facing a disciplinary action for cheating but they promote him straight to command of the Enterprise anyway?

Watching the Watchmen

As it enters its second week in theaters, Watchmen has seen a substantial drop in box office and seems to be receiving a lot of negative word of mouth. I blame this on an advertising campaign that has led people unfamiliar with the comic book to expect a standard superhero movie when Watchmen is a far cry from a typical superhero movie. So I thought it might be a good idea to address some of the misperceptions as well as some of the more common complaints so that people who haven't seen the movie yet will know what to expect.

First of all you should take the movie's R rating seriously. The movie contains scenes of graphic violence including an attempted rape. The movie contains several sex scenes including one that's about as graphic as you can get without earning an NC-17 rating. The movie contains full frontal male nudity. Lots of full frontal of male nudity. If you don't want to see a guy getting a face full of hot grease or a woman being brutally beaten and then bent over a table or two superheroes getting it on or lots of blue wang then you should probably go see something else.

Secondly this is not an action movie. It has some action sequences in it but they are relatively few and far between compared to a typical action movie. Think of it instead as a murder mystery in which the hardboiled detective just happens to wear a mask. Even that is just a framework that the author uses to explore what sort of people would consider it rational to try and make the world a better place by dressing up in tights and running around beating criminals up. There is a lot more talking than there is fighting.

Now to address some common complaints I've heard:

Watchmen isn't kid friendly!

Just because a story involves superheroes doesn't mean its target audience is children. Watchmen is one such story. It is unfortunate that some of the movie's marketing has been aimed at children because it really isn't a story that kids are likely to enjoy or that their parents will want them to see. The average age of comic book readers has been rising as people who grew up on comics continue to read them into adulthood. Today there are many comic book readers in their 20s and 30s and even older. Watchmen was written with that adult demographic in mind.

Watchmen is too violent.

A strange complaint to make given that the genre is based around the conceit of people in costumes running around beating each other silly. The violence in Watchmen serves a point. It illustrates the brutality of the lives these people have chosen. In a comic book world superheroes get away with taking the most outrageous risks because the writers are on their side. The real world tends to be more unforgiving. If the heroes don't want to wind up like Dollar Bill, shot dead after his cape was caught in a revolving door while trying to stop a bank robbery, they can't afford to pull their punches.

The sex is too much.

As with the violence, the sex in Watchmen serves a purpose. Sex is part of the human experience and there's no reason to believe it would be any less important to superheroes than it is to normal people. Comic book fans have long speculated how their heroes might apply their superpowers to their sex lives. The Dr. Manhattan scene addresses that speculation while demonstrating that the use of superpowers during the sex act wouldn't necessarily be a rousing success. The two scenes with Dan serve to show that as himself he feels rather impotent but as Nite Owl he's a virile stud.

There's too much blue wang!

Some people seem to be really worked up about the fact that Dr. Manhattan spends a lot of time walking around with his junk on display. Again this is something that is done for a reason though it was handled better in the comic book. In the comics when Dr. Manhattan first gets his powers he wears a fully body suit. As the years go by the full body suit becomes a Speedo and then finally nothing at all. Manhattan's shedding of clothes is a representation of the shedding of his humanity. Consider the scene where Speedo Manhattan protests the Comedian's actions but does nothing to stop them. Full Body Suit Manhattan would have stopped it while Naked Manhattan wouldn't have protested. His powers make it hard for him to relate to humanity and so the more time goes by, the less human he feels and the less bound by human conventions he is.

The ending is too ambiguous.

Life rarely wraps things up with a nice tidy bow. The hero doesn't always get the girl. Sometimes the villain gets away. Sometimes the world ends. Sometimes it doesn't. Alan Moore didn't want to give his readers a pat answer. He wanted them to think about the issues he raised. Moore wanted to explore what kind of person might become a superhero and he does that well. All of the major comic book archetypes are here. The cop who wears a mask so he can operate outside the law. The man who wants to clean up the streets he grew up on. The idealist who wants to make the world a better place. The scientist who had power thrust upon him unexpectedly. The romantic who wants to be a superhero for the sake of being a superhero. The woman who is continuing the family legacy. Questions about the morality of killing millions of people in order to save billions is outside the scope of Watchmen. Instead we have to answer those questions for ourselves and, really, we should be the ones to answer those sorts of questions instead of letting someone else tell us how to think.

Who Watches the Watchmen

As March approaches I'm eagerly looking forward to Watchmen.



Watchmen was a very important comic book series from the 80s that helped comics gain acceptance as being acceptable entertainment for adults.

The comic book is set in a dystopian world in which there is a single superhuman, the god-like Dr. Manhattan.



In this world, superheroes have been outlawed as dangerous vigilantes.



The comic opens with the last remaining mask, Rorschach, investigating a man's murder only to discover that the murdered man was the Comedian, a fellow hero and member of the Watchmen.

There has been some concern about translating the comic to the big screen. I think the concern is justifiable. The comic was a piece of art. A lot of thought went into it's creation. Not just into the story but the artwork, the back up feature, even the layout of the panels. It will be interesting to see how good of a job Zack Snyder has done turning that into a movie.

Those not familiar with the comic book should be aware that many issues, as was common with many comics, featured a "back-up" comic called Tales of the Black Freighter. This pirate comic at first appeared to have nothing to do with the Watchmen story but as things progressed it actually proved to be fairly important. This story won't be included in the movie but will be released separately on DVD on March 24th.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

You probably don't need to see it to enjoy Watchmen, otherwise they wouldn't release it two weeks after the movie, but if you enjoy the movie you might want to check it out. Though I may wait until Watchmen comes out on DVD to see if they include Tales of the Black Freighter as a special feature.

Movie Review: An American Carol

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Usually when a movie isn't shown to critics prior to its release, it's because there is an expectation that it will receive bad reviews. Such was the case with An American Carol. What's different about the movie not being screened for critics is that it wasn't because its a bad movie but because it was believed that movie reviewers' would find the movie politically unpalatable. Many of the reviews that have come out about the movie have shown those fears to be grounded in reality. Can we really expect an unbiased review that begins with:

Pity conservatives. They've got the lamest politicians and the lamest comics.

This is my review of An American Carol.

I went into the movie hoping for the best but expecting the worst. Hollywood has turned out a lot of really bad parodies in recent years and adding political commentary didn't seem like a formula for success. Though I've liked David Zucker's past work on films such as Airplane! and the Naked Gun series, the trailer for An American Carol seems kind of lame.



On the other hand, I was hoping the movie would be as funny as Zucker's past work so that it would do well at the box office and Hollywood might see value in doing more movies with a conservative bent.

That said, I think the movie landed somewhere halfway between my hopes and fears. It's got some very funny bits, such as Rosie O'Connell's film showing that radical Christians are just as bad as radical Islamists, but some other bits fall flat such as a joke about everyone in a terrorist group being named Mohammed Hussein.

Like most of Zucker's work, the movie is cheesy, cornball, and over-the-top. That's not a bad thing in this kind of movie but if you don't like that kind of humor, this movie probably isn't for you.

As far as I can tell, most conservatives seem to really like this movie and most liberals seem to really hate it. So where you fall on the political spectrum should probably be taken into consideration if you're thinking of going to see it. In my case, I found the movie to be very enjoyable. I certainly had more fun at it than I did at Tropic Thunder earlier this year. Judging by the laughter I was hearing from my fellow movie goers, I wasn't the only one.

If you do go see An American Carol make sure the theater box office gives you tickets to the right movie. There have been reports about some theaters trying to sabotage the box office by selling tickets to other movies. It doesn't effect your ability to see the movie but it does effect the reported box office and thus the perception of whether the movie is a success or failure.

Movie Review: Speed Racer

Rating: 2 out of 5

I went into Speed Racer with low expectations. I'm not a fan of the Wachowski brothers. I thought The Matrix was pretty eye candy but that was about it. I didn't like what they did to V For Vendetta in translating it to the big screen and I didn't care for the way they treated Alan Moore in the process. I thought the trailers for Speed Racer looked terrible. So why did I go see the movie? I went to see it because nearly 40 years ago I loved to watch the original Speed Racer on television and there was a part of me that hoped I was wrong and that the movie would be good. Sadly it lived down to my expectations.

What was good about it? Very little. Most of the casting is spot on. I thought Emile Hirsch was good as Speed and John Goodman made a great Pops Racer. In fact, the only bad casting was Kick Gurry as Sparky and Roger Allam as the villain, Royalton. Gurry doesn't fit at all and Allam comes across as a Tim Curry-wannabe, to the point where I wondered why the Wachowskis didn't just cast Curry in the role.

Neither the plot nor the dialogue is particularly good. Given the movie's 2+ hour length you have to question the decision to include Speed's origin story. It's not like Speed is an alien rocketed to earth from a distant planet or a high school student who gained superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. He's a guy who likes to drive fast. Do we really need to spend a lot of time on flashbacks of Speed as a little kid obsessing over racing? As far as plot goes, it can be distilled down to this statement: all corporations are evil and all races are fixed. Dialogue tends towards the heavily clichéd and the story isn't particularly well thought out.

I'm bothered that Racer X is fairly open about being a government agent. I'm also bothered that Pops isn't the one who tricks out the Mach 5. All Pops puts in, really, are the hydraulic jacks and pretty much every car in the movie has those. In fact most racecars seem to spend as much time airborne as they do on the ground. Pops does put a canopy on the Mach 5 but it takes the government to make it bulletproof. The government also gives Speed all his other gadgets. Remember kiddies, government is good, corporations are evil.

With the Wachowskis making the movie you would expect it to at least be decent eye candy but even at that it's a failure. Everything just looked horrible. This is the latest movie to be shot with the actors in front of a green screen and then everything else added in with computer generated images (CGI). Other recent movies to use this technique would be Sin City and 300. Unfortunately Speed Racer doesn't do a very good job of integrating the live action actors with their CGI backgrounds and the results look horrible.

Perhaps most disappointing are the race scenes. In the world of Speed Racer all car races are a combination of drift racing and demolition derby. Being the best driver apparently means being the best at forcing other people to have accidents but its okay because every car has a special system to ensure the driver escapes even the most horrific of crashes without a scratch on them. Cars constantly slip and slide as if they're on ice no matter what the surface whether it's a racetrack, the desert, a dried out mud flat or a road. In fact there's a sequence where Speed, Trixie and Racer X, all driving separate cars on a winding mountain road at high speed, have a conversation via radio. At no point in the conversation do any of them stop fishtailing back and forth. Not even on the straightaways. There are even points where cars just spontaneously begin doing 360s for no apparent reason. When they're not busy driving sideways, which seems to be how most drivers in the movie spend their time, they're flipping through the air since everyone has hydraulic jacks.

My advice? Skip Speed Racer and go see Iron Man instead. Even if you've already seen Iron Man you'll still find it a more enjoyable movie than Speed Racer.

Movie Review: Iron Man

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I went into Iron Man with high expectations. I've been looking forward to this movie since I first saw the trailer. Back when I was reading comic books, I was a fan of Iron Man and regularly followed his adventures. I've long felt he was a good choice for a movie since I thought the armor would translate to the big screen better than some spandex costume. I'm happy to say that the movie didn't disappoint. This is easily the best Marvel superhero movie since Spider-Man 2.

Unsurprisingly the movie starts with the origin of the Iron Man armor. In the comics, Tony Stark was in Vietnam when he was captured and forced to build weapons for the NVA. In the movie, Vietnam becomes Afghanistan and the bad guys become the Ten Rings, a multinational terrorist agency. Otherwise the origin plays out pretty much as it did in the comics. Once Tony escapes from the Ten Rings he returns to the States where he works on building a refined version of his armor while trying to shut down his company's weapons division, setting up a conflict with his business partner, Obadiah Stane, and finding out who has been supplying his weapons to the terrorists. More anal retentive comics fans may be upset with the change in the Stane storyline from the comics but I thought it was a reasonable adaptation and it works well in the movie.

Robert Downey Jr. is excellent as Tony Stark. I had my doubts when his casting was first announced but he totally owns the role. At this point I can't imagine anyone who would have done a better job. I'm not a big fan of Gwyneth Paltrow but I thought she did a decent job as Pepper Potts and I certainly had no complaints with her performance. I thought Terence Howard was okay as Jim Rhodes but I think I would have liked to have seen a more forceful and dynamic portrayal of the character. This is the man who took over as Iron Man during one of the times Tony crawled inside a bottle and he does eventually become War Machine after all.

My one real complaint with the acting is Jeff Bridges. Obadiah Stane should, in my opinion, be intense and perhaps a little sinister. This is a man who is utterly ruthless in the pursuit of his goals but Bridges plays him as a rather relaxed and affable person. If I wasn't familiar with the character from the comics, I probably wouldn't have any problems with Bridges performance but as things stand it just didn't match how I've always imagined Stane to be.

Special effects are excellent and I enjoyed the action. Especially the sequence when Tony dons his upgraded armor and heads back to Afghanistan to deal with the Ten Rings.

What does the future hold? I'll be very surprised if this movie isn't profitable enough to kick off a new Marvel superhero franchise. The next Iron Man movie will hopefully feature Tony's nemesis, the Mandarin, as the head of the Ten Rings. There's also some foreshadowing of Rhodey donning the Iron Man armor so perhaps we'll see a little War Machine action as well.

Now why are you still reading this review? Go see Iron Man!