Why I hated "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"

This movie essentially pulls the same stunt that created Star Trek: Into Darkness (by the same Director):

1. Pick out the best of the series (in Star Trek, the Wrath of Khan is widely celebrated as the best of that cannon) and re-do it.  The Force Awakens is a tweaked copy of the original 1977 movie.
2. Follow roughly the same basic plot points, but make it hip and cool.  Cram in a bunch of referential jokes and a romance that doesn't really belong.

To be clear, this had excellent special effects, I really enjoyed seeing Harrison Ford play Han, and I think the character Finn (John Boyega) was genuinely excellent and has a great career ahead of him.  None of that prevented me from being really bored at the end.

Other issues:

• This force goes to 11.  Ray is now essentially Marvel's Jean Gray, meaning the force is now essentially a mutant psychic superpower similar to the X-Men character, where before it was a latent ability that required loads of training.  Also, you get to mysteriously know how to fly a space ship
• Dialog.  Even though I wouldn't call the original series dialog excellent, this script was particularly hammy and well out of step with the color of its original characters.
• Loads of plot errors.  Skywalker's location doesn't correspond to any known star charts ... oh wait, there it is.  Then there's a weapon that shoots across massive distances without entering hyperspace.  Later, R2-D2 wakes up a the convenient time to move this BS forward.
• Photography.  Changes dramatically over the course of the film.  It starts out looking very similar to the original Star Wars and then turns into a dyslexic and tedious laser festival.  Pew pew pew.

If you want to see J.J. Abrams do a very personal, beautiful sci-fi movie that's clearly HIS, go watch Super 8. Don't watch this movie made by committee.  Disney thinks if you put all the right sci-fi elements into a stew that it will taste good.  Instead, it's disjointed and lame, and nobody's going to be talking about it in 5 years.

Also see: Why Action Movies Suck - this also underlined a great deal of my angst.  You can cut to 4:40 to hear someone hit the nail on the head.

Why Star Trek - Into Darkness blows

I hated this movie. Spoilers!

• Flashing lights, loud noises, and things exploding!  Oh dear me!
• Chris Pine exudes authority like a scrappy dog: didn't feel he cared about anything even when he pulled a muscle trying to act like he did.  I think the two dimensions I got were "sad" and "risk taker".
• At no point did I feel the villain was anything but a tool.  Spock was boring.
• Everyone's flying out of the destroyed ship into space and nobody seems to give a f--k.  The Enterprise used to be the center of the show and now its something we can smash up like it's made of legos.
• Only person I cared about in the whole move was Captain Pike, who they killed off pretty quick.  The only person I really liked was Simon Pegg (Scotty).

Worst moments:

• After the ship get tossed and turned and everyone's flying around like confetti, 10 seconds later everything's normal again and looks at Spock like "what's he in a hurry about?"
  
• No efforts or energy put into plugging these massive leaks that should kill everyone.  No efforts to triage or even address the hordes of more-or-less dead people.  Oh except that pretty blonde girl?  Let's heal her up!
  
• They surgically removed a sequence from the first movie and inserted it this movie (radiation leak, main character sacrifices life to save the ship).  The first JJ Abrams movie just made a horde of references to the previous series, but ultimately went it's own way.  This one recycled and entire plot sequence.  I'm not sure it it was *exactly* the same because I walked out.

Anyway, this was all a big, stupid lark built from a whole bunch of other scripts, some from movies that had already been made.  I didn't care about the characters and didn't feel like anything took place anywhere other than a soundstage in Burbank.  In that sense, the painfully low-end budget old series beat them out here.  I really thought they were in space or on some other planet once in a while.

Now my personal message to JJ Abrams: For god's sake, hire a script supervisor or someone to work on continuity.  I get that Gore Verbinski can smash up a pirate ship and not really go back and address anything, but the assumption there is that pirates are disposable and these guys can take a knife or two in the gut.  I don't expect you to tie up all the loose ends, but pick 3 or 4.  Also, while we're on the topic, you should apologize for the final season of Lost.

Chinatown (1974) movie review

This is one of those movies that's impacted by current events.  Some movies get better over time, this one seems to have gotten worse.

When the fundamental storyline of a movie is that a rich man gets away with raping an underage girl created by a director who is a rich man who got away with raping an underage girl?  I guess the analysis that if you're not willing to see a movie or read a book made by a shitty person, you're missing out on a lot of good stuff.  Hunter S. Thompson, according to his biography, beat his wife, but I still enjoy his work.  Hemmingway was by all accounts a self-important douchebag, but undoubtedly part of the soul of American bravado.

Its a great movie.  Nicholson is fantastic.  In terms of cinematography, its unmatched by almost anything I've seen, save Touch of Evil (1958).  Amazon reviews are sparkling.

Despite all that, when the movie was over, I just felt sick to my stomach; I hated it.

Movie Review: Salt

Someone said it for me, although I'd give it fewer stars.

Note that in Salt II, Jolie's character will fly up into the atmosphere and spin the planet backwards, mysteriously making everything go back in time as if the rotation of the earth had fuck all to do with time moving forward.

Movie Review: Legion (2010)

An awesome B movie unfortunately ruined by moments of awkward, out-of-place, and terrific acting.

Picture the producer talking to the studio heads:

"Think machine guns and angels! ... We've got [insert good actor/actress] already signed up.  Its just like that Christopher Walken movie The Prophecy, except this time both God and all the angels are all pissed."

There's a flicker at the beginning of Army-of-Darkness-style Sam Raimi genius, but it quickly fades into a story that takes itself too seriously.  There's no flow in the actors or dialog from scene to scene, so its impossible to care about the characters, even when their copious talents are put into some outstanding monologues.

This movie should have embraced how absurd it was and pushed it over the top at every opportunity with the zeal of a teenager on too much caffeine.  Maybe next time, captain angelface.

Movie review: Twilight - New Moon

I don't hate vampire shows; if you ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you'll know that it was frequently well written, engaging, and delt with some very real, very heavy topics using a fictional backdrop.

Twilight is almost the complete opposite.  Dialogue so forced, hokey, and cynical its painful to watch.  I only made it about 15 minutes through the film before I became physically ill and had to leave the room.  It doesn't appear to be about anything other than obsession and self-destruction, undoubtedly a part of everyone's adolescence, but not something I wish to relive.

This isn't the worst movie I have ever seen.  Cool World was worse because I kept hoping it would get better and managed to stay through the whole horrid thing.  Fortunately, this time I opened the escape hatch before that plane could explode into the sparkly vampire mountain.

The Burn Notice formula

Though you shouldn't expect too much from a cable series, it happens. Unfortunately, one show in particular that really pulled us in fell into a stable format in its 3rd season:

1. Recap of the current situation in the form of one of the characters explaining to one of the other characters already knows, but needs to have reinforced.
   
2. Distant, overconfident spy entity contacts Michael and spars a little. Overall story of spy contact / big brother-ish observation furthered slightly
3. A "job" comes up that either is or becomes a charity case
4. Job has some kind of unexpected turn or difficulty. Never something that can't be handled.
5. Takes on a new secret identity or "cover" in almost every episode. Not always necessary.
   
6. Either juggle job with spy entity or wait until the end of the episode to 'top off' the episode with a little intrigue.

Each episode must contain:

• Sexual tension and/or sparring with with female lead (Fiona)
• Emotional situation or character-building moment thrown in there somewhere.
• Banter. Lots of banter. This is all old hat for these veterans, of course.
  
• Explosions, fights, car chases, etc. This isn't the show's fault. Anything on cable like this MUST contain this.

It isn't all bad:

• The show doesn't focus on the sweet ingenue or lush, sensual daredevil. The women in the show are almost always in their 30s, self-confident and hot. This is sort of refreshing considering everything else on TV.
• The format may be the same but the means to do so change almost every episode. You never get the sense that this is a "filler" episode.
• The main character's mother character (Sharon Gless) has genuinely changed and progressed over the course of the series. I always love seeing this -- something that even multi-part movies can't do.
  

Zimbra e-mail client review

Having access to Exchange server e-mail can sometimes be critical to doing your job, but if you're stuck with the sometimes painfully stupid Outlook 2003, you might go looking elsewhere.

Although the Linux-only Evolution is a great tool for this, Zimbra Desktop was an option available for Windows, Mac, and others. For a basic e-mail client that does everything you need it to do simply and easily, this is a real winner, but the program takes up enormous system resources.

The Good

• Excellent support for a wide variety of email systems both web (like gmail and hotmail) and POP/IMAP services. (Outlook can do this but not well.)
  
• Better interface, great calendar, overall much prettier.
• Good drag-and-drop support
  
• A strong "Find" tool. This is more of a knock on Outlook '03, which buries an extremely important component inside menus and "CTRL+F" is useless until you reply to the email.
  

In composing an email:

• Both HTML and plain text options
• Simple, easy attachment tools, draft, and otherwise
• Automatic email address detection

The Bad

• Doesn't seem to work with the Google Calendaring system (I had to click refresh). You can connect Outlook to Google Calendaring with a separate tool (note that this tool is probably not secured).
• Doesn't cut back on features for things that don't exist for Google's calendar (such as attachments and other Exchange-only features)
• After I added in all my addresses, takes up an enormous amount of disk space: 1.81 gigs.
• File saving tool "Breifcase"? Thought this service had been turned off.
• "Notepad" tool doesn't work with google docs. Its a mystery where it stores "notepad" files when you use non-yahoo accounts (probably locally).
• Not as customizable and no power features like Outlook 2003.
  

Calendar

• Google Calendar works great but many of the options available don't move over into google docs.
• Didn't work correctly with Exchange calendar
  

So unfortunately, Zimbra is helpful and good, but is not a replacement for Outlook 2003. If you do get stuck with Outlook, make sure you install the fantastic Xobni, which improves search, keeps track of contacts, and many other useful features.

Download Zimbra Desktop.

Pandora radio review

From listening to Pandora

 lately:

The Good:

• I've discovered a number of new albums and songs that may become passionate favorites.
• Compared to other internet radio which will alternately play great and terrible music, at least I know what I'm listening to and can skip ahead.  That makes it worth the commercials.
• Music genres can also be very restrictive and false, listing artists instead of genres has provided a much better level of quality songs.  Additionally, you find more stuff from artists you already know that you may not have heard yet.  For artists with a wide catalog, this can be a real eye opener.

The Bad:

One major problem is that it almost excludes a whole genre of music: electronic, which has a lot of outros and intros.  These are long, repetitive strings of music that are there just to allow the DJ to beat-match two records before seamlessly switching over, often giving the impression of a never-ending song.  Frequently these intros and outros from singles and studio albums are included in radio stations who don't know any better.  A very great song might await you after a very dull intro, but you've already voted the song down or skipped it.  This can also be heard on non-singles albums, where overlapping intro-outro sequences abruptly cut off.

Additionally, I rarely listen to individual songs in Electronic music, and instead aim for whole sets or whole albums.  Favorite music selections among fans like me usually aren't focused on individual songs.  For this reason, Pandora is a great way to discover new music, but in terms of overall listening isn't my first choice.

Terminator: how to run a theme into the ground

[Before I begin, I'm compelled to say that Terminator 2 was and is one of my favorite action movies and was an overall great movie.]

For the fictional world of Terminator, writers who take up the mantle have a real problem because the series has written itself into a hole. The issue of narrative fidelity is a particular problem for the TV series but for the movies as well, assuming there will be more.

The story happens over more than a generation with the original happening in 1984 and the most recent story occurring in 2009, which is by itself an invitation to problems. How to address the issue of trying to connect culturally is one issue but the lack of any structure continues. We're going to ignore the whole series' hinge schwarzenegger since he was so easily replaced.

The first movie introduced the problem (robots gone bad) and the second movie solved it (destroyed the inventor of the robots). Director James Cameron wisely rejected that ending making armageddon a continued threat in our world, which of course it is. The third movie at this point was fucked -- they had to reintroduce and the not even try to solve the problem because that might prevent further sequels and spinoffs. Simple survival the only real goal here so T3 turned into a plain old disaster movie with lots of catchphrases and colorful explosions. Doing what little rewrites they could, they threw out the problem and took the machine's nuclear bomb (cold war fears) and then added a worldwide computer virus (current fears)!

The only thing left was to bring on armageddon so they could work with some unknowns that would create dramatic tension, such as whether or not the main character will live through it. Even the movie preview describes a new environment as "this is not the future my mother warned me about," thus creating a new page.

That said, TV has its own unique challenges and trying to attract new viewers is one of those. Shows that require you to have watched previous episodes to understand the current one are few and require a pretty dedicated viewership such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica. What happens this week on the Sarah Connor Chronicles? Oh something related to robots and armageddon ... and of course boom goes the dynamite. There's not much flexibility to bring in real writing with meaty stories.

So I'm more sympathetic to the TV writers, although Star Trek TNG milked the android Data's brush with humanity for at least 10+ episodes and a good chunk of at least two movies. No one accuses Brent Spiner of being an amazing actor so surely they can figure out something compelling for at least one season with Summer Glau.

Unfortunately, I won't be there to see if they succeed.

Update: I saw Terminator 4 and was impressed in parts, bored in others. There were elements of Sci-Fi and some outstanding action sequences, but too big a percentage of the movie was a dull homage to the previous movies (though far less than the "new" Star Trek).