"Accomplishments"
At home: After two seasons of The Orville, I can definitely it's one of my favorite iterations of Star Trek. Comes in fourth place or thereabouts. Seth MacFarlane's love letter to Next Gen gives me all the same feels, as if the show were back on the air, and yet giving us an entire new universe to discover in the kind of episodic format Star Trek today isn't particularly interested in. It's a comedy, yes, and MacFarlane has trouble getting away from juvenile body fluids humor at times, but the jokes calm down by the middle of the first season, allowing for some epic and even tragic moments. And though there is that comedy element to it, it's still hitting all the great Star Trek themes, the moral dilemmas, and some down right poignant character beats. By the second season, the characters feel like a family as much as "proper Trek"'s casts did, and I found myself both laughing out loud and tearing up at the appropriate moments. And if you ARE a TNG-era Trekkie, there's lot of connective tissue, as the show seems to cast from Trek alumni as often as it can (possibly thanks to Brannon Braga). After a year's hiatus, the show is going to be shunted to Hulu, because of course a sci-fi show that premiered on Fox needs to have a difficult and checkered broadcasting history. I'll be there when it returns. And don't be too surprised if The Orville winds up on my blog's review docket some day... FAVORITE OF THE WEEK
It's rare that a true story seems so perfectly-suited to the stupid bro comedy genre the way Tag is, and of course, it's been streamlined, prettified, and severely adapted from what was in the original Wall Street Journal article. But it works. With a boppin' soundtrack and real heart to balance out the slapstick and crass humor, Tag amiably tells the story of a group of friends who, every May, play a crazy game of tag that disrupts their lives, loves and work. Their holy grail is tagging Jeremy Renner's character, who has never been tagged in 30 years, on the weekend of his wedding. Basically, it's Renner out of The Bourne Legacy, with Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes analysis skills, which means the action is pretty fun too. I don't watch a lot of this type of movie, but I'm slowly finding out Hannibal Buress is often their secret MVP. Ed Helms manages to pull off being the emotional center of the story. All in all, a nice little surprise given its dubious DNA.
The movie that, in a one-two punch with Niagara, made Marilyn Munroe a star, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a glittering Technicolor musical comedy that had me grinning from ear to ear practically all the way through. Jane Russell and Marilyn play a cabaret double-act, best friends, and playing to type, Jane is the wise one, arching perfect eyebrows at the shenanigans, and Marilyn the naive dove who gets into trouble and needs to be bailed out. And despite those very clear traits, it's the streetwise girl who tends to fall for all the boys, and the dumb bunny who is very pragmatic about marrying rich. As the plot goes, her fiancé's father hires a private detective to prove she's un untrustworthy gold digger and hilarity ensues. I mean it, I laughed quite a lot, in particular at director Howard Hawkes managing to cram what, for 1953, is very saucy material - double entendres, flesh-colored swim trunks on the Olympic team Jane is collectively courting, and at one point the girls rip a man's pants off. At the very least, the movie has a place in film history for the oft-imitated "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number. It's the harmless gold-digging comedy everyone should see. Delightful.
Wes Craven's Scream reinvigorated the slasher genre back in 1996, and still holds up reasonably well despite Ghostface's identity being pretty clear in my mind on the rewatch almost 15 years later. There are some very effective moments of terror, but make no mistake, this is the slasher by way of comedy, and in any case, slasher films, for all their specific rules (which of course the movie plays with), arguably fall in the thriller section as much as horror's (as they are rarely supernatural), and if the murderer's identity isn't known but sought, it can also be a mystery. This is true of Craven's nascent franchise here. Properly iconic for its opening scene that played with audience's expectations from the get-go and for having fun with characters who knew the slasher tropes as well as the audience does, it's greatest sin, I suppose, was inspiring Scary Movie and a veritable cornucopia of generic parody movies. And perhaps putting Matthew Lillard's unbearable performance on screen. Note that he's just the worst of what is a "desensitized" graduating class of characters that are just horrible - if I'm on Principal Henry Winkler's side, does that mean I'm old? - and that is a slasher trope after all. Scream also does a lot of clever juxtaposition with Halloween, and provides us with our first horror heroine in ages, in the character of Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott.
Scream 2: Scream Harder takes Sidney Prescott to college, where it's all gonna happen again. And it looks like no matter who's behind the mask, Ghostface will go down in history as the movie slasher who takes the biggest beatings. Sure, he kills a lot of people, but man does he ever take it in the nuts. While a sequel is necessarily derivative, this one provides another cool mystery (Craven is very good at presenting suspects) and the usual metatextual shenanigans (the movie of the true story of the previous movie is a highlight), with Courteney Cox becoming more sympathetic in the role of cutthroat report Gale Weathers - I think her arc is one of the things I enjoy most about the Scream movies. Craven even pulls some of the same tricks he did in the first one and still managed to surprise me with them. There are some nice, tense moments, like the claustrophobic bit in the cop car, and Gale and Dewey with the killer in the studio, plus an epic final confrontation in the drama department's theater when Sidney faces her fate. Extra points for all the recognizable faces in this, several from before they were stars, though taking their cue from the first film, some people just can't help but go over-the-top. A feature rather than a bug?
Scream 3: Scream with a Vengeance is a bit of a patchwork, honestly, but the quilt eventually resolves in a satisfying end to a trilogy. In the world of the movie, Hollywood doesn't wait for a third series of murders and a fictional one is being produced as Stab 3. And then a rash of Ghostface murders start happening in the cast. On the one hand, it's a good, if at times blunt way of bringing the meta-textual elements the franchise is known for. On the other, it feels so separate from Sidney's story at first that it's harder to care about. But stories will converge, and provide a last hurrah for Sidney, Gale and Dewey that links back to the first one fairly effectively, even though we're strictly in la-la land when it comes to strict plot mechanics. Is it scary? It's got its moments. But I dare say this leans even more in the mystery and comedy genres, the latter serviced by some rather outrageous cameos. Your mileage may vary on the revelations here, but Sidney kind of prefigures the hardened survivalist Laurie Strode of 2018's Halloween, and the movie ends on a note that immediately made me forgive it its weaknesses.
15 years after the first one, and still a whopping 11 years after the last, Wes Craven comes out with Scream 4. Sidney's fixed her life, Dewey his limp, and Gale her hair (no really, what was happening in Scream 3, a bad wig?), but was it worth breaking the trilogy's closure? Only if Craven had something new to say about the horror genre, and he does. Since he started Scream, horror cinema has moved on, and there are notes about that, most prominently about Hollywood's remake craze and how it meta-textually interacts with beloved original films, but he takes a shot at mumblecore too, and the life-broadcasting that's still a part of life today. Again Craven populates his film with recognizable faces from television (a good way to make a star-studded movie on a small budget), but I think if the franchise kept churning out good entries, it's because he never farmed out the direction (as frequently happens in such franchises) and kept his core ensemble coming for more. Neve probably has one of the best one-liners in the whole series at the end there.
I remember renting Screamers when it was new - the people who were with me wanted to see Roy Dupuis, a hot French Canadian actor at the time, though I was perhaps more interested in "based on a short story by Philip K. Dick". Well, Dupuis' OTT performance wasn't going to translate into English-media stardom for him, and like most Dick adaptations, it uses the ideas and errs on the side of action flicks. That said, it actually does a better job of bringing out the story's themes, even if it's not quite Blade Runner. Shot in a wintry abandoned mine somewhere in Northern Quebec (and really making the best use of that), "Sirius 6B" is a colony planet forgotten in the wake of a war between a government and a corporation, people from both sides left to fend for themselves against "screamers", mobile mines that learn, adapt, and evolve. The script is actually pretty good, allowing for hope in its bleak statement about humanity, and I always like Peter Weller, an underrated screen presence in my opinion. The failures are mostly technical. 1995 is way too late to have shoddy blue screen and twitchy stop-motion, even if the designs are cool, though we're right on time for bad CG. The practical effects are much better and I got a thrill out of the "catchphrase monsters" which are now a staple of Doctor Who. Some amateurish fight choreography and editing that throws the shocks away from the twists sink the movie further. And yet, if you forgive it its technical flaws (or imagine it as having been made 10 years earlier), there's a bit of a cult classic in there.
If Screamers: The Hunting had been made a little closer to the original film, it might have accepted to be the sequel Screamers seemed to promise back in '95. But 14 years later, instead of a proper escalation (and bringing the danger to Earth), it's back to Sirius 6B (this time played by Newfoundland) for more of the same, except with far more generic beasties and tech (not that those aren't kind of the same thing). Out with Peter Weller, of course, the eleventh hour grizzled veteran is here Lance Henrickson instead. Very much a by-the-numbers sci-fi monster movie with a reasonable ending but a lot of stupid character decisions and dialog along the way, even the effects make me think its makers wanted to be making a Resident Evil rather than a Screamers follow-up. Perhaps of interest to fans of the CW superhero shows, Stephen Amell is in this a year before he was cast in Arrow, and at times it sounds like it's his audition tape (though ironically, someone else is the archer... and also the only person who can make the claim to having a character to play, but spoiler, she doesn't make it).
National Theatre Live's presentation of Twelfth Night well demonstrates that some of the comedy in Shakespeare works best on stage, in front of an audience the clowns can play to. Case in point the "zanies" of this play, unbearable in, say, the Trevor Nunn film, are quite fun in this. Daniel Rigby as Sir Andrew almost steals the show here (I loved both he and Oliver Chris, who is Orsino here, in One Man Two Guv'nors, and they bring the same twinkle to these parts). The difficulty of the play, aside from its convoluted plot (which I think this version clarifies quite well), is the whole question of Malvolio's cruel punishment, a downer at the end of an effervescent comedy. The burden is Tamsin Grieg's, and with all due respect to Tamara Lawrence's cute and sympathetic Viola, she's rightly billed as the star of the show. As Malvolia, she makes us laugh as the haughty steward who deserves to be pranked, and then turns that around and makes us cry at her humiliation. The trick with this character is to make us change sides mid-course. Bit of a history lesson here: The title of the play stems from having been staged for Twelfth Night celebrations, which is to say the end of the Christmas season (12 nights after the Blessed Event), a holiday marked with the old tradition of becoming king or queen for a day if one found the bean in the pie. The tradition is about inversion of fortunes, where even the lowest in the family can become monarch, and so is the play about such inversions. A girl becomes a man, a castaway becomes husband, the ruler of a household becomes its most dejected member. Simon Godwin's staging leans into this harder than most by fudging the sexual identities and orientations of many characters, in a play that was already of "LGBTQ+ interest" (and guys, I desperately need to see a burlesque cabaret version of Hamlet now). The acting is perhaps uneven, but shines where it matters, with performances both funny and touching. I haven't mentioned Phoebe Fox yet, but she's an unusually modern Olivia, and one that isn't as keen on that ending as most, which I think better sells the Malvolia downer. If this is a play about unrequited love, Shakespeare really does dramatize different outcomes: Requited (Viola-Orsino), acceptance and moving on (Viola-Sebastian), and rejection (Andrew, Malvolia). If it hasn't been apparent to me despite this being the fourth staging of the play I've seen, I think resides in those specific performances.
Role-playing: No movement on my proposed Rippers game, but the Star Trek game is being finessed in time for some play next week. The group met on Discord to introduce themselves and create a couple connections, choose ship layouts, etc. and the GM asked us to write little bios and answer a few sundry questions. I thought in lieu of anything else to say, I'd present that fact file.
Descended from a long line of sailors, first of the vast Bolian oceans, and later of the spaceways, Skoid was born on the Bolian carnival ship Bital, from parents in the theatrical profession. A tradition among many Bolians, he was born near the warp core, a good omen for his members of his culture. Through his childhood and apprenticeship, he saw, worked on, and acted in many productions, on many worlds and ships, but surprisingly, never set foot on Bolarus IX (though he has spent time in the Bolarus system, which is filled with other astral bodies. Though one could say the arts are in his blood, putting on shows on Starfleet ships made him hear the call of duty and he joined the Academy when he came of age. Like many Bolians, he ended up doing a lot of extra credit work, and though his studies track was in security, he nevertheless did extra work in engineering (with a particular interest in force field technology and holographics) and navigation, as well as joining, heading and/or creating an unmanageable number (for non-Bolians anyway) of extracurricular clubs.
Skoid is not classically ambitious, which accounts for his relatively timid service record and low rank. He probably should have made Lt. Commander by now, but his goals skew perhaps more towards being a Renaissance Man than going up in the ranks. He is normally quite content with brig duty, where he can more easily multi-task, adding to his immense collection of plays from every possible world, planning whatever morale booster he has in store for the crew (his quarters are an organized mess of costumes, props, and data chips), or catching up on correspondence which he keeps with entirely too many people he’s worked with over the years. Two incidents nevertheless catch the eye when looking at his record. First is a spine injury caused during R&R, an incident in which he tried to show a Nausicaan Biolians had guramba. A spinal implant has regulated part of his nervous system ever since (he can give it a mental command to dull his pain centers for a short while, but too long and everything starts to go numb), but he doesn’t hold a grudge. In fact, he and the Nausicaan have kept in touch. The other is an extended assignment as bodyguard to the Klingon ambassador. The old warrior-diplomat took a shine to Skoid over those 10 months, and vice-versa, further fueling the Bolian’s interest in warrior cultures. It certainly helped that he had an iron stomach.
Skoid spent the last big chunk of his life aboard the USS Hood as part of its security department, but was transferred to the Beckett for it shakedown cruise. Captain DeSoto and crew were sorry to see him – and their weekly trivia night – go, but after Wolf 359, the slow rebuilding of the fleet required most every ship to make sacrifices to accommodate new commissions.
The story begins... next week!
Descended from a long line of sailors, first of the vast Bolian oceans, and later of the spaceways, Skoid was born on the Bolian carnival ship Bital, from parents in the theatrical profession. A tradition among many Bolians, he was born near the warp core, a good omen for his members of his culture. Through his childhood and apprenticeship, he saw, worked on, and acted in many productions, on many worlds and ships, but surprisingly, never set foot on Bolarus IX (though he has spent time in the Bolarus system, which is filled with other astral bodies. Though one could say the arts are in his blood, putting on shows on Starfleet ships made him hear the call of duty and he joined the Academy when he came of age. Like many Bolians, he ended up doing a lot of extra credit work, and though his studies track was in security, he nevertheless did extra work in engineering (with a particular interest in force field technology and holographics) and navigation, as well as joining, heading and/or creating an unmanageable number (for non-Bolians anyway) of extracurricular clubs.
Skoid is not classically ambitious, which accounts for his relatively timid service record and low rank. He probably should have made Lt. Commander by now, but his goals skew perhaps more towards being a Renaissance Man than going up in the ranks. He is normally quite content with brig duty, where he can more easily multi-task, adding to his immense collection of plays from every possible world, planning whatever morale booster he has in store for the crew (his quarters are an organized mess of costumes, props, and data chips), or catching up on correspondence which he keeps with entirely too many people he’s worked with over the years. Two incidents nevertheless catch the eye when looking at his record. First is a spine injury caused during R&R, an incident in which he tried to show a Nausicaan Biolians had guramba. A spinal implant has regulated part of his nervous system ever since (he can give it a mental command to dull his pain centers for a short while, but too long and everything starts to go numb), but he doesn’t hold a grudge. In fact, he and the Nausicaan have kept in touch. The other is an extended assignment as bodyguard to the Klingon ambassador. The old warrior-diplomat took a shine to Skoid over those 10 months, and vice-versa, further fueling the Bolian’s interest in warrior cultures. It certainly helped that he had an iron stomach.
Skoid spent the last big chunk of his life aboard the USS Hood as part of its security department, but was transferred to the Beckett for it shakedown cruise. Captain DeSoto and crew were sorry to see him – and their weekly trivia night – go, but after Wolf 359, the slow rebuilding of the fleet required most every ship to make sacrifices to accommodate new commissions.
The story begins... next week!
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