Star Trek and Green Lantern and the War of Lettuce
Dear World:
I would like to apologize in advance for the capslock that will be making abundant guest appearances in this LJ entry.
Okay, bitches. We're gonna talk some Star Trek.
But first? Via the_croupier -- and I cannot BELIEVE that I have not seen this already - the BEST fan-made trailer I have ever seen. You know what it's a trailer for?
GREEN LANTERN. The last Green Lantern fan trailer I posted was good, but this is probably BETTER than any possible official trailer could be whenever the actual film comes out of the Sea of Nebulous Status and gets green lit to go ahead. I mean, I can't believe how good this trailer is.
I'm warning you, I'm about to CAPSLOCK.
GREEN LANTERN:
Okay, in no particular order:
1. ABIN SUR.
2. KILOWOG. KILOWOG. KILOWOG.
3. TOMAR-RE.
4. OTHER EQUALLY AWESOME GREEN LANTERNS.
5. OA IN ALL OF ITS GLORY.
6. A SHIT TON OF LANTERNS RECITING THE OATH.
7. SINESTRO.
8. Someone who I very much hope is John Stewart telling Hal "this sounds like some Captain Tightpants bullshit."
9. GREEN LANTERN RING LIGHT CONSTRUCTS.
You know how in Alex Ross' Justice -- which itself was a full-blown geekgasm of the most extreme magnitude -- Hal Jordan and John Stewart together were unto an ARMY OF AWESOME running rampant over Alex Ross' brightly colored landscape and then we finally got that mind-blowing two-page spread of everything that the Green Lantern Corps is supposed to be about? That's what this trailer is like.
What's that, you say? I don't remember those scenes/never read Justice.
John Stewart being awesome:
The Green Lantern Corps: why I love them explained in one piece of art.
Everyone got their moment to shine in Justice. Come on, it was nothing BUT twelve issues of every character in the main DC pantheon having glorious character moments of pwnage. But in my mind? The Lantern Corps, when they show up on Earth, have the BEST. The art isn't as kinetic as Van Sciver's Lanterns, who pulse with baroque and almost Noveau auras of light, but it's a completely awesome piece.
(If you can name all the GLs pictured on those two pages, I will give you freshly baked cookies.)
Okay. Now to Star Trek.
I finally saw it on Friday night accompanied by my darling friend D. and her darling son J. Darling son J. is fifteen. On the way to the movie theater D. confessed that she'd never been into the original series and knew virtually nothing about the Trek verse except what she'd absorbed secondhand. J. promptly (and very calmly) asked me to stop the car so that we could kick D. out and leave her on the street because he was ashamed to be in the same car/room with her.
D. actually has three sons. There's Miles, who is the eldest and whom I've written about before as my Film Threat-ish co-conspirator of guerilla movie reviews, and the teenage twins J. and L. D. is a gourmet cook and has raised her sons to be utter gourmands. Naturally, I was thrilled that she made dinner before we saw the movie, but a War of Lettuce and Other Assorted Greens erupted in the post-gluttony blissful haze after dinner as D., Miles, and I sat at the dinner table and talked how awful The Reader was:
MILES, with deep graveness: Mother, you cannot use a mesclun mix for this salad.
D.: Why not?
MILES, with the suffused tones of someone trying to explain quantum mechanics to a two-year-old: There is a Caesar dressing on this salad. Caesar dressing doesn't go with anything but Romaine, and you've got baby greens in here. *pokes at salad in illustration and spears a Caesar dressing-drenched leaf of baby Rouge D'Hiver with fork, holds it up, and shakes it*
D.: What did you just say?
ME: Oh, shit. Miles got out the Rouge D'Hiver.
MILES: I'm just saying, a creamy CAESAR DRESSING doesn't blend with a mesclun mix.
ME: Miles, is this, like, a philosophical objection or is this really about texture? What about the radishes?
MILES: *baleful glare*
ME: *scoots chair away to avoid crossfire* I'll...be in the living room with the twins. *exeunt stage right with alacrity*
Thankfully, casualties were low and we proceeded to the theater in good order.
So. The movie.
NOW I understand why people in the blogsphere have been cryptically posting Spock/Uhura fanvids from TOS.
That being said, this film was desperately in need of some Klingon-style high theatrics and drama. I never got the sense that anyone in the film was in tangible danger.
I will say this, though, right up front: Spock's "Live long and prosper, BITCHES" to the Vulcan high council -- sung to the dulcet subtext of "Fuck off and DIE" -- was a psychic ray supreme of untrammeled beauty:
No, really, it was. As soon as he uttered that line, my mind went to this:
Anyway. Other observations of a non-spoilery nature:
- I'm feeling very conflicted about this film. I'm obviously going to have to see it a couple more times to absorb everything, although after a volley of e-mails with mercuryeric, it appears that the IDW comic prequel series AND the novelization are crucial to understanding and comprehending backstory and character motivation in a more holistic fashion. (That is then, frankly, a weakness of the film; the film should stand alone and not need newfangled transmedia/cross-media material to give us a more comprehensive view of the new!verse.)
- Every time Leonard Nimoy opened his mouth, the film came to life. He owned every single scene he was in.
- The brings me to this: say what you will about TOS, when Shatner, Nimoy, and Nichelle Nichols opened their mouths, you listened. The original series had incredibly differentiated characters, each a hefty and charismatic counterweight to the others, each incredibly vivid. The new characters? Not so much yet.
- MAJEL DID THE COMPUTER'S VOICE. YES!
- SO MUCH SCIENCE AND LINGUISTIC FAIL IN THIS FILM.
- Holy SHIT, how awesome was Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike?! Every time he was in a scene, everything and everyone else receded far into the background. That Pike was exactly what I think of when I think "Starfleet Captain." Charisma. Presence so palpable that he sucks the air out of the bridge when he walks in. Authority. Gravitas. Leadership. Thinking faster than greased lightning, multitasking like a mofo, and man, he owned.
- So, we get one...no, TWO fridgings in this film. Actually, we get three, but that's for below the cut.
- My one biggest complaint: female characters in this film had nothing to do. I loved Saldana's Uhura, but except for that one scene of Linguistic Pwnage -- and that's a scene where we're TOLD she's awesome rather than her getting to SHOW US that she's awesome -- she really had little to do but walk around and shoot Pine!Kirk dirty looks (and she's entirely justified in so doing, I might add).
- SAREK? ALSO AWESOME.
- WAIT, SIMON PEGG AS SCOTTY WAS AWESOME, TOO. Sadly, he's only in the film for five minutes.
- KARL URBAN. Yes.
- Chekhov's "I can do this! I can do this!" Yes, I LOLed. LOLed HARD.
- Sulu and his...never mind, I'll put that below the cut.
- This film displayed EXACTLY why you never, EVER want to truly piss off a Vulcan.
FOREMOST: So, future!Spock inadvertently creates an alternate universe where HE'S the mack daddy getting all the hot chicks. I APPROVE OF THIS.
We have two fridgings as Major Plot Points: Spock's mother (I thought Winona Ryder was rather unexpectedly great as Amanda Grayson) and Nero's dead!wife. C'mon, Abrams, you can do better than that. Also? AN ENTIRE PLANET GETS FRIDGED.
Spock and Uhura: I absolutely loved their scenes together; there was a centeredness to Uhura in that scene in the transport tube with Spock, while he's gently and quietly losing it, and you expect it to be exactly the opposite. I just loved their chemistry; such tenderness -- she hugs him and he hugs her back, and I was on the verge of tears. Quinto and Saldana played that scene FABULOUSLY. Oddly, that's the only time where I saw Saldana channel Nichols and become the Uhura that I know and love.
I know people have shipped Spock/Uhura for decades. It's so nice to know that Abrams decided that that ship's time to sail is NOW, baby.
I thought Quinto's Spock was a little tremulous, tentative, and fey. I realize that this is supposed to be young Spock, but he just....didn't have the presence that I expect Vulcans to have. In particular the sequence where he's unable to assert his captaincy (this is before Kirk emotionally compromises him), with people arguing on the bridge around him? That just didn't read as Spock-ish to me.
Nero overall left me cold (although I dearly love Eric Bana). Well, not entirely. The precise restraint in his performance was effective at times, but really, that's more of a KLINGON trait, what with revenge being a dish best served cold, etc. What happened to Romulans being passionate? Also, the Romulan ship - externally I can buy it as mining vessel, with lots of exposed surfaces and bays, but the interior looked hokey, like something out of TOS. Did someone send out a memo stating that Romulans are impervious to death when falling from great heights? Because the exposed walkways in the interior were RIDICULOUS. However, I am informed by mercuryeric that the novelization/comic series make it clear that the ship has Borg tech, so that amounts to the OSHA-spurning exposed walkways and lack of sensible things like, you know, railings.
I did like a lot of the visual and audio aspects of the film. The updated interior sounds of the Federation ships were fantastic - I immediately thought of Pierre Cardin's designs for Kubrick's 2001, and when I got home and promptly read the production notes, I was totally right! They were an homage to Cardin's work.
SULU WITH HIS TELESCOPING SWORD OF AWESOME, GO SULU GO! Badass. BADASS. And Kirk FLINGING himself off the drill on Vulcan to save Sulu was a consummate Kirk moment; that was a perfect bit of characterization on the part of Abrams and the writers. It was very...Hal Jordan. Very Carter Hall. Fling yourself off a precipice knowing that you'll figure something out by the time you get close to the ground.
All the Vulcans were fantastic. Just fantastic. Sarek in particular.
Oh, the updated phasers were also cool, and by the time we FINALLY got an action sequence where Kirk and Spock are shooting the everloving shit out of Romulans on Nero's ship, it was long overdue. But that was indeed a great sequence, because it was exactly the type of frenzied melee that I would expect, yet despite the frenetic pace, both Spock and Kirk are completely cool, chill, and trained for this.
But the drill on Vulcan? PLOT HOLE. Why didn't the Vulcans see this coming from 10,000,000 miles away? Vulcan doesn't realize that something's entered its system until it DROPS A FUCKING DRILL onto the surface? I'm sorry, but no. Nero's ship would have never made it past Vulcan's planetary defenses. That was absurd. Ugh.
On the other hand, the film showed that Vulcan is indeed an arid planet with plenty of volcanic activity, so at least they got THAT part right.
Scotty was on DELTA VEGA. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Continuity fail in terms of astro-geography, but awesome in its own right.
I didn't warm up to Pine's Kirk until the very end. mercuryeric pointed out to me that he became more Kirk-like only after his mindmeld with future!Spock; that's a nice touch that I utterly and completely missed on first viewing.
Conclusion: I'll definitely be giving it additional viewings; there's a lot I'm still undecided on, and another viewing will let me figure out where I stand on things that I haven't talked about. And no, I don't want to read your Spock/Kirk slash; I'm quite happy with my awesome Spock/Uhura now that it's canon.
All that now being set down for posterity, can someone point me to ANY preceding canon in the Trek verse where a Klingon would use the word "whore" as an epithet? That was gratingly out of character.
And finally? This new!Spock is not someone to be fucked with. Piss him off at your peril.
Wait, I'm not quite done. What does it say about me that I so loved the traffic cop and was hoping he'd bust Kirk into juvie?
I would like to apologize in advance for the capslock that will be making abundant guest appearances in this LJ entry.
Okay, bitches. We're gonna talk some Star Trek.
But first? Via the_croupier -- and I cannot BELIEVE that I have not seen this already - the BEST fan-made trailer I have ever seen. You know what it's a trailer for?
GREEN LANTERN. The last Green Lantern fan trailer I posted was good, but this is probably BETTER than any possible official trailer could be whenever the actual film comes out of the Sea of Nebulous Status and gets green lit to go ahead. I mean, I can't believe how good this trailer is.
I'm warning you, I'm about to CAPSLOCK.
GREEN LANTERN:
Click to viewOkay, in no particular order:
1. ABIN SUR.
2. KILOWOG. KILOWOG. KILOWOG.
3. TOMAR-RE.
4. OTHER EQUALLY AWESOME GREEN LANTERNS.
5. OA IN ALL OF ITS GLORY.
6. A SHIT TON OF LANTERNS RECITING THE OATH.
7. SINESTRO.
8. Someone who I very much hope is John Stewart telling Hal "this sounds like some Captain Tightpants bullshit."
9. GREEN LANTERN RING LIGHT CONSTRUCTS.
You know how in Alex Ross' Justice -- which itself was a full-blown geekgasm of the most extreme magnitude -- Hal Jordan and John Stewart together were unto an ARMY OF AWESOME running rampant over Alex Ross' brightly colored landscape and then we finally got that mind-blowing two-page spread of everything that the Green Lantern Corps is supposed to be about? That's what this trailer is like.
What's that, you say? I don't remember those scenes/never read Justice.
John Stewart being awesome:
The Green Lantern Corps: why I love them explained in one piece of art.
Everyone got their moment to shine in Justice. Come on, it was nothing BUT twelve issues of every character in the main DC pantheon having glorious character moments of pwnage. But in my mind? The Lantern Corps, when they show up on Earth, have the BEST. The art isn't as kinetic as Van Sciver's Lanterns, who pulse with baroque and almost Noveau auras of light, but it's a completely awesome piece.
(If you can name all the GLs pictured on those two pages, I will give you freshly baked cookies.)
Okay. Now to Star Trek.
I finally saw it on Friday night accompanied by my darling friend D. and her darling son J. Darling son J. is fifteen. On the way to the movie theater D. confessed that she'd never been into the original series and knew virtually nothing about the Trek verse except what she'd absorbed secondhand. J. promptly (and very calmly) asked me to stop the car so that we could kick D. out and leave her on the street because he was ashamed to be in the same car/room with her.
D. actually has three sons. There's Miles, who is the eldest and whom I've written about before as my Film Threat-ish co-conspirator of guerilla movie reviews, and the teenage twins J. and L. D. is a gourmet cook and has raised her sons to be utter gourmands. Naturally, I was thrilled that she made dinner before we saw the movie, but a War of Lettuce and Other Assorted Greens erupted in the post-gluttony blissful haze after dinner as D., Miles, and I sat at the dinner table and talked how awful The Reader was:
MILES, with deep graveness: Mother, you cannot use a mesclun mix for this salad.
D.: Why not?
MILES, with the suffused tones of someone trying to explain quantum mechanics to a two-year-old: There is a Caesar dressing on this salad. Caesar dressing doesn't go with anything but Romaine, and you've got baby greens in here. *pokes at salad in illustration and spears a Caesar dressing-drenched leaf of baby Rouge D'Hiver with fork, holds it up, and shakes it*
D.: What did you just say?
ME: Oh, shit. Miles got out the Rouge D'Hiver.
MILES: I'm just saying, a creamy CAESAR DRESSING doesn't blend with a mesclun mix.
ME: Miles, is this, like, a philosophical objection or is this really about texture? What about the radishes?
MILES: *baleful glare*
ME: *scoots chair away to avoid crossfire* I'll...be in the living room with the twins. *exeunt stage right with alacrity*
Thankfully, casualties were low and we proceeded to the theater in good order.
So. The movie.
NOW I understand why people in the blogsphere have been cryptically posting Spock/Uhura fanvids from TOS.
That being said, this film was desperately in need of some Klingon-style high theatrics and drama. I never got the sense that anyone in the film was in tangible danger.
I will say this, though, right up front: Spock's "Live long and prosper, BITCHES" to the Vulcan high council -- sung to the dulcet subtext of "Fuck off and DIE" -- was a psychic ray supreme of untrammeled beauty:
No, really, it was. As soon as he uttered that line, my mind went to this:
Anyway. Other observations of a non-spoilery nature:
- I'm feeling very conflicted about this film. I'm obviously going to have to see it a couple more times to absorb everything, although after a volley of e-mails with mercuryeric, it appears that the IDW comic prequel series AND the novelization are crucial to understanding and comprehending backstory and character motivation in a more holistic fashion. (That is then, frankly, a weakness of the film; the film should stand alone and not need newfangled transmedia/cross-media material to give us a more comprehensive view of the new!verse.)
- Every time Leonard Nimoy opened his mouth, the film came to life. He owned every single scene he was in.
- The brings me to this: say what you will about TOS, when Shatner, Nimoy, and Nichelle Nichols opened their mouths, you listened. The original series had incredibly differentiated characters, each a hefty and charismatic counterweight to the others, each incredibly vivid. The new characters? Not so much yet.
- MAJEL DID THE COMPUTER'S VOICE. YES!
- SO MUCH SCIENCE AND LINGUISTIC FAIL IN THIS FILM.
- Holy SHIT, how awesome was Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike?! Every time he was in a scene, everything and everyone else receded far into the background. That Pike was exactly what I think of when I think "Starfleet Captain." Charisma. Presence so palpable that he sucks the air out of the bridge when he walks in. Authority. Gravitas. Leadership. Thinking faster than greased lightning, multitasking like a mofo, and man, he owned.
- So, we get one...no, TWO fridgings in this film. Actually, we get three, but that's for below the cut.
- My one biggest complaint: female characters in this film had nothing to do. I loved Saldana's Uhura, but except for that one scene of Linguistic Pwnage -- and that's a scene where we're TOLD she's awesome rather than her getting to SHOW US that she's awesome -- she really had little to do but walk around and shoot Pine!Kirk dirty looks (and she's entirely justified in so doing, I might add).
- SAREK? ALSO AWESOME.
- WAIT, SIMON PEGG AS SCOTTY WAS AWESOME, TOO. Sadly, he's only in the film for five minutes.
- KARL URBAN. Yes.
- Chekhov's "I can do this! I can do this!" Yes, I LOLed. LOLed HARD.
- Sulu and his...never mind, I'll put that below the cut.
- This film displayed EXACTLY why you never, EVER want to truly piss off a Vulcan.
FOREMOST: So, future!Spock inadvertently creates an alternate universe where HE'S the mack daddy getting all the hot chicks. I APPROVE OF THIS.
We have two fridgings as Major Plot Points: Spock's mother (I thought Winona Ryder was rather unexpectedly great as Amanda Grayson) and Nero's dead!wife. C'mon, Abrams, you can do better than that. Also? AN ENTIRE PLANET GETS FRIDGED.
Spock and Uhura: I absolutely loved their scenes together; there was a centeredness to Uhura in that scene in the transport tube with Spock, while he's gently and quietly losing it, and you expect it to be exactly the opposite. I just loved their chemistry; such tenderness -- she hugs him and he hugs her back, and I was on the verge of tears. Quinto and Saldana played that scene FABULOUSLY. Oddly, that's the only time where I saw Saldana channel Nichols and become the Uhura that I know and love.
I know people have shipped Spock/Uhura for decades. It's so nice to know that Abrams decided that that ship's time to sail is NOW, baby.
I thought Quinto's Spock was a little tremulous, tentative, and fey. I realize that this is supposed to be young Spock, but he just....didn't have the presence that I expect Vulcans to have. In particular the sequence where he's unable to assert his captaincy (this is before Kirk emotionally compromises him), with people arguing on the bridge around him? That just didn't read as Spock-ish to me.
Nero overall left me cold (although I dearly love Eric Bana). Well, not entirely. The precise restraint in his performance was effective at times, but really, that's more of a KLINGON trait, what with revenge being a dish best served cold, etc. What happened to Romulans being passionate? Also, the Romulan ship - externally I can buy it as mining vessel, with lots of exposed surfaces and bays, but the interior looked hokey, like something out of TOS. Did someone send out a memo stating that Romulans are impervious to death when falling from great heights? Because the exposed walkways in the interior were RIDICULOUS. However, I am informed by mercuryeric that the novelization/comic series make it clear that the ship has Borg tech, so that amounts to the OSHA-spurning exposed walkways and lack of sensible things like, you know, railings.
I did like a lot of the visual and audio aspects of the film. The updated interior sounds of the Federation ships were fantastic - I immediately thought of Pierre Cardin's designs for Kubrick's 2001, and when I got home and promptly read the production notes, I was totally right! They were an homage to Cardin's work.
SULU WITH HIS TELESCOPING SWORD OF AWESOME, GO SULU GO! Badass. BADASS. And Kirk FLINGING himself off the drill on Vulcan to save Sulu was a consummate Kirk moment; that was a perfect bit of characterization on the part of Abrams and the writers. It was very...Hal Jordan. Very Carter Hall. Fling yourself off a precipice knowing that you'll figure something out by the time you get close to the ground.
All the Vulcans were fantastic. Just fantastic. Sarek in particular.
Oh, the updated phasers were also cool, and by the time we FINALLY got an action sequence where Kirk and Spock are shooting the everloving shit out of Romulans on Nero's ship, it was long overdue. But that was indeed a great sequence, because it was exactly the type of frenzied melee that I would expect, yet despite the frenetic pace, both Spock and Kirk are completely cool, chill, and trained for this.
But the drill on Vulcan? PLOT HOLE. Why didn't the Vulcans see this coming from 10,000,000 miles away? Vulcan doesn't realize that something's entered its system until it DROPS A FUCKING DRILL onto the surface? I'm sorry, but no. Nero's ship would have never made it past Vulcan's planetary defenses. That was absurd. Ugh.
On the other hand, the film showed that Vulcan is indeed an arid planet with plenty of volcanic activity, so at least they got THAT part right.
Scotty was on DELTA VEGA. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Continuity fail in terms of astro-geography, but awesome in its own right.
I didn't warm up to Pine's Kirk until the very end. mercuryeric pointed out to me that he became more Kirk-like only after his mindmeld with future!Spock; that's a nice touch that I utterly and completely missed on first viewing.
Conclusion: I'll definitely be giving it additional viewings; there's a lot I'm still undecided on, and another viewing will let me figure out where I stand on things that I haven't talked about. And no, I don't want to read your Spock/Kirk slash; I'm quite happy with my awesome Spock/Uhura now that it's canon.
All that now being set down for posterity, can someone point me to ANY preceding canon in the Trek verse where a Klingon would use the word "whore" as an epithet? That was gratingly out of character.
And finally? This new!Spock is not someone to be fucked with. Piss him off at your peril.
Wait, I'm not quite done. What does it say about me that I so loved the traffic cop and was hoping he'd bust Kirk into juvie?