Movies!
some thoughts on some movie watching I've done over the weekend:
on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I had of course seen this one before, but not in years. It's still quite enjoyable of a film, and I think my favourite Trek film of all. It's got a lot of great, fun bits - like aliens quoting Shakespeare, and shapeshifters pretending to be members of the cast, only to fight themselves, and thinly-veiled political commentary. At the same time, though, it's also a perfect goodbye to that generation of characters, and the universe that they inhabit, as well as being a touching statement on getting old. Of course, all of that artistic goodwill was undone by having almost all the characters show up on The Next Generation, but I guess that's just the nature of corporate franchising.
No Country For Old Men - went and saw this tonight while I was downtown. It's an absolutely beautiful piece of film - the acting, direction, and writing were all amazingly well done. I'm not sure I fully grasp what they were going for, in terms of artistic commentary - I'm leaning sort of towards "violence is a force of natural chaos; don't try to make sense of it", as well as large amounts of "time makes fools of us all" but I think I would need to see it again to comment too deeply on it. The ending, however, was brilliant, although a lot of people in the audience with me disagreed - I heard one really vocal "oh, come on!" get yelled out when the credits started rolling.
on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I had of course seen this one before, but not in years. It's still quite enjoyable of a film, and I think my favourite Trek film of all. It's got a lot of great, fun bits - like aliens quoting Shakespeare, and shapeshifters pretending to be members of the cast, only to fight themselves, and thinly-veiled political commentary. At the same time, though, it's also a perfect goodbye to that generation of characters, and the universe that they inhabit, as well as being a touching statement on getting old. Of course, all of that artistic goodwill was undone by having almost all the characters show up on The Next Generation, but I guess that's just the nature of corporate franchising.
No Country For Old Men - went and saw this tonight while I was downtown. It's an absolutely beautiful piece of film - the acting, direction, and writing were all amazingly well done. I'm not sure I fully grasp what they were going for, in terms of artistic commentary - I'm leaning sort of towards "violence is a force of natural chaos; don't try to make sense of it", as well as large amounts of "time makes fools of us all" but I think I would need to see it again to comment too deeply on it. The ending, however, was brilliant, although a lot of people in the audience with me disagreed - I heard one really vocal "oh, come on!" get yelled out when the credits started rolling.