If there’s one thing we Star Trek fans may want to get our hands on more than a decent picture of the new Enterprise, it’s a good look at the new guy who thinks he’s going to play Captain Kirk.
His name is Chris Pine, and unless you’re willing to go out and rent the awful movie he made with Lindsay Lohan a few years ago (and trust me, it’s not worth it), then your first place to get a feel for what he’s all about will be in the upcoming movie Bottle Shock. In it, he plays the son of Bill Pullman, a
Dear Mr. Abrams,
I’d like to talk to you for a moment as a Star Trek fan. It stopped being fun to be a Star Trek fan some time in the 90s (probably when Voyager got lost on television), but hey we’re still around. We do other things these days, we watch romantic comedies with our wife, and when she’s not looking we get excited about Battlestar Galactica; but for a lot of the people who have recently been waiting in line for movies like Star Wars and The Matrix, it’s Star Trek that’s their first love. The old girl just hasn’t been treated properly in awhile. We have high hopes that you’ll be treating her better.
Except some of us were wondering, do you know what you have your hands on here? I ask, because so far your efforts to bring a new Star Trek movie to the screen have been shrouded in absolute secrecy. I understand that you might not want to spoil the entire plot and that you can’t exactly announce cast members until they’ve been hired (I’m warming up to John Cho as Sulu by the way), but that’s not what I’m talking about here. The problem you see, is that this is not Cloverfield or Mission Impossible. Those properties don’t have decades worth of dedicated fans and history behind them. This is Star Trek. It’s been around since the 60s, and the eyes of millions upon millions of devoted followers are upon you around the world.
I question whether or not you’re aware of Star Trek’s fan base, because so far you’ve been treating your project as if it’s Cloverfield, when in fact it is not. I’ve heard you mention us, your film’s fan base, in several of your interviews; but simply mentioning us doesn’t necessarily accomplish anything. You’re playing your cards awfully close to your vest. As with Cloverfield, we’re not even entirely sure what you’re calling this new Trek adventure, let alone what this movie is about. With Cloverfield it’s exciting, because you’re producing something brand new and unknown. With Star Trek, well I have to be honest, it’s making us Star Trek fans pretty uneasy.
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The Iron Man movie got an awesome new trailer tonight. Everything I see from this movie leaves me speechless… and I don’t even really like the character. This trailer, like every other Iron Man trailer, will blow your little sci-fi geek mind. Watch it:
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I’ve given it a few episodes now, and I think I’m ready to declare Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles good. Really good.
Against all odds they’ve managed to retain the gritty, hard-edged action style of the movies while at the same time adding a more thoughtful, dramatic side to cater to the limited effects budgets and multiple episode requirements of television.
A lot of the credit for it working has to go to Lena Headey, who, I wish had been playing the character all along. No offense to Linda Hamilton, it’s just that unlike Arnold as the Terminator, her performances in the movies simply haven’t aged well.
I do have one question though. Are the scenes with the cops scripted by a different writing team? They seem entirely out of step with the rest of the series, and worse they’re incredibly clumsy. How many times do we have to watch Agent Ellison make some perfectly logical, intelligent point only to be shouted down by the gang of adolescent teens that serve as his colleagues? I’m getting a little sick of that dynamic. We get it, Ellison is on his own. No one believes in him. Now someone feed that blonde chick to this week’s Terminator.
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I’ve always been a major fan of Robert Heinlein. Actually, scratch that. I’ve always been a major fan of Robert Heinlein’s early work. Old age did not do well by Bob H, and as he got older his biting, pointed writing became bitter and the sexual freedom he espoused in his work turned into the mad ravings of a crazy old man who was clearly, despite his age, still very very horny. His early and mid-career work is genius though, and he’s one of the original fathers of meaningful, modern science fiction. He’s also written a lot of books, forty plus years of material actually, and even though I’m something of a Heinlein superfan there’s still some of his stuff I’ve missed. Stuff like “Farnham’s Freehold”.
“Farnham’s Freehold” fell into my lap courtesy of my brother in-law, who’s blind and therefore has awesome access to all kinds of free reading material online. He has access to thousands of books in plain text format, which he then plugs into a voice program to read it back to him. He had “Farnham’s Freehold” sitting on his computer, and when I saw Heinlein’s name on it I demanded he hand it over. So I spent the next few nights squinting into my Treo, where I’d dumped the text of the novel in a blatant act of literary piracy. Hey, give me a break here. It’s not like you can walk into a bookstore and find it on a shelf. I read whatever I can get my hands on.
As a Heinlein fan I know how hit or miss he can be as an author, but it only took a few pages before I knew “Farnham” was a hit. The book instantly sucked me in, with its Cold War era tale of a family hiding inside a home constructed bomb shelter when the doomsday clock strikes eleven and nuclear war lands right on top of them. The interesting thing about Heinlein’s writing, perhaps here more than in anything else he’s ever done, is the way in which he manages to convey such a vivid picture of what’s happening… but without bothering with actual visual descriptions of the environment in which he thrusts his characters. Rather than describing the way his world looks, Heinlein chooses instead to describe the way his characters react to it, and through them his readers not only get the picture, but sometimes a deeper understanding than you’d get had he described simple surface knowledge.
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Comedy Central’s golden boy Stephen Colbert took a minute out this week to honor people who are not white. Since he only had a minute to do it, he combined two cultures together and honored them all at once in his annual Ethnic Minute. And since he had to combine two cultures he needed to find someone who was both Black and Chinese to honor. He picked Commander Worf.
Worf a Chinese/Black America? Stephen Colbert presents the following compelling evidence:
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Sci-Fi filmmaking genius James Cameron hasn’t had much to do with Terminator since T2, though it’s gone on without him. Since his departure there’s been a third film, a television series, and now there’s a fourth movie titled Terminator Salvation in the works. Cameron’s still not involved, but it’s possible that he may actually approve of this particular Terminator incarnation.
Our sister site Cinema Blend is reporting that JC has been in contact with T4 director McG, and has been giving him tips on casting. Read the full story over at CB.
Knight Rider returned to NBC tonight in a 2-hour made for TV movie which may or may not end up being a series. But then if you’re any kind of science fiction geek, or if you grew up in the 80s, you probably already knew that. Actually if you grew up in the 80s, then you’ve probably spent the last two weeks gently caressing your vintage, metal Knight Rider lunchbox in anticipation. I know I have been.
Unfortunately, the whole thing got off on the wrong foot right out of the gate. Within the first five minutes Knight Rider gave us threesomes, lesbian cops having one night stands, and brutal death. Not exactly family television. NBC does know this is a show about a talking car… right?
To me that was the real problem with this new Knight Rider. It never quite knew what to be. It tries to walk a strange middle road between being the fun, cheesy, show we remember from the 80s, and being some sort of strange ripoff of the show Las Vegas. Luckily, it got better as it went on and when KITT finally gets his driver and heads out into the boonies the original show used to spend so much time in, things start to have that old familiar Knight Rider hum… assuming you can ignore all of the script’s ridiculous plot holes.
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This year’s batch of Saturn Award nominees have been announced, and they’re a little disappointing. In name they’re the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, but Science Fiction is very poorly represented this year. All of their most nominated films fit instead more comfortably into the Fantasy and Horror genres, which is perhaps a sad commentary on the waning popularity of genuine science fiction in modern pop culture. Nobody wants to think about the future, they want lame ass Harry Potter.
Still, a few movies like I Am Legend, Transformers, and Cloverfield did get their proper due, and in Television Lost scored big. Check out all their nominations below:
Tonight the guys at our sister site Cinema Blend were sent an amazing, incredible image from the upcoming second X-Files movie. It was from an anonymous source, and they had no way to verify its authenticity. But now, after a little digging and a lot of blind, stupid luck, we’re here to tell you it’s a fraud.
The picture is of David Duchovny, as Fox Mulder… turning into a Werewolf. There’ve been rumors for awhile now that the sequel’s plot might involved werewolves, but we believe it’s all a red herring being put out there by the movie’s director Chris Carter and his production team, to throw people off track. After a little digging, we discovered that the image they sent CB was actually a really well photoshopped version of a promotional image for Duchovny’s Showtime series Californication.
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