Harold Goes to Vulcan
“When I feel the masses in my hands, since they believe in me, or when I mingle with them, and they almost crush me, then I feel like one with the masses. However there is at the same time a little aversion, much as the poet feels towards the material he works with."
--Benito Mussolini
Paid money to see the Trek movie in an actual theater earlier this afternoon. I have little to add to colinmarshall's excellent review, and especially agreed with his appreciation of the alternate timeline choice "strategically tying off the main arteries of canon-related nerd bitching." Indeed, as I was telling my friend afterward, "it sets up an unendingly satisfying machine of correlation between timelines," miming with my fingers fen making correlations. Also, it was truly one goddamned thing after another: I tried to remember at what point a moment of PAUSE did occur and couldn't (maybe after Spock's recusal?).
My gripe: Spock's beard. I found one of colinmarshall's commenter's characterization of the actor playing Uhura apt ["horse faced anorexic"]. That whole subplot undermined any solid psychological footing either may have had (Uhura's sleeping with her perfessor). 33mhz is more optimistic than I am: "it has already acted as a Genesis Device set to full blast and fired at the Kirk/Spock slash scene." Me, I didn't see enough screen time between them to justify anything more than hatred for the one major female character in the show (dippy green chick notwithstanding). Was there any less satisfying kiss caught on film?? Or maybe that's the point. And we have to wait for sequels.
What else there is to add as follows:
--Fencing *does* come in handy!
--Didn't notice, but surely the third, obnoxious British guy parachuting was wearing red. "...kick some Romulan arse...."
--I always wish, when a catastrophic explosion on the order of singularities birthing takes place, that the POV would pull out and show its location in space. I left the theater with a worried little feeling for wherever it was that the final conflagration occured. Poor little region, I hope it's far away!
--Was it necessary to give Scotty a sidekick?
--Brad Pitt as Bones! Genius.
--I liked how densely packed the interior spaces on the ship seemed. Felt right somehow.
--The epigraph, if you're wondering, came to mind in the theater when, about ten minutes in (and another fifteen of previews), I could no longer suffer the woman seated two rows behind and her inane laughter, and my friend and I moved several rows forward. "This is why I watch movies illegally on Chinese websites," I was heard to grumble. It wasn't that she laughed too loudly, or inappropriately, it's that she was too close for me to screen my automatic sympathetic reaction to it. She'd skew any focus group in all the wrong ways (not that I care, but Jesus she was inane). Right now I'm finishing up some backfilling in chapter three, on 19thC crowd psychology, so the issue of influence is on my mind:
The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged (sic) for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself - either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant - in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer. The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject, the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotiser directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost.... He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. [Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd 15-16]
Word. This is what I get for paying $7.50 for a matinee.
--Here is a picture of Hippolyte Taine with a cat (to eliminate any ill will generated by the foregoing references to fascism, however tongue in cheek):
--Benito Mussolini
Paid money to see the Trek movie in an actual theater earlier this afternoon. I have little to add to colinmarshall's excellent review, and especially agreed with his appreciation of the alternate timeline choice "strategically tying off the main arteries of canon-related nerd bitching." Indeed, as I was telling my friend afterward, "it sets up an unendingly satisfying machine of correlation between timelines," miming with my fingers fen making correlations. Also, it was truly one goddamned thing after another: I tried to remember at what point a moment of PAUSE did occur and couldn't (maybe after Spock's recusal?).
My gripe: Spock's beard. I found one of colinmarshall's commenter's characterization of the actor playing Uhura apt ["horse faced anorexic"]. That whole subplot undermined any solid psychological footing either may have had (Uhura's sleeping with her perfessor). 33mhz is more optimistic than I am: "it has already acted as a Genesis Device set to full blast and fired at the Kirk/Spock slash scene." Me, I didn't see enough screen time between them to justify anything more than hatred for the one major female character in the show (dippy green chick notwithstanding). Was there any less satisfying kiss caught on film?? Or maybe that's the point. And we have to wait for sequels.
What else there is to add as follows:
--Fencing *does* come in handy!
--Didn't notice, but surely the third, obnoxious British guy parachuting was wearing red. "...kick some Romulan arse...."
--I always wish, when a catastrophic explosion on the order of singularities birthing takes place, that the POV would pull out and show its location in space. I left the theater with a worried little feeling for wherever it was that the final conflagration occured. Poor little region, I hope it's far away!
--Was it necessary to give Scotty a sidekick?
--Brad Pitt as Bones! Genius.
--I liked how densely packed the interior spaces on the ship seemed. Felt right somehow.
--The epigraph, if you're wondering, came to mind in the theater when, about ten minutes in (and another fifteen of previews), I could no longer suffer the woman seated two rows behind and her inane laughter, and my friend and I moved several rows forward. "This is why I watch movies illegally on Chinese websites," I was heard to grumble. It wasn't that she laughed too loudly, or inappropriately, it's that she was too close for me to screen my automatic sympathetic reaction to it. She'd skew any focus group in all the wrong ways (not that I care, but Jesus she was inane). Right now I'm finishing up some backfilling in chapter three, on 19thC crowd psychology, so the issue of influence is on my mind:
The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged (sic) for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself - either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant - in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer. The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject, the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotiser directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost.... He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. [Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd 15-16]
Word. This is what I get for paying $7.50 for a matinee.
--Here is a picture of Hippolyte Taine with a cat (to eliminate any ill will generated by the foregoing references to fascism, however tongue in cheek):