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Monthly Archives: November 2003
A Long Trek Down a Short Pier
Star Trek: Nemesis (Stuart Baird, 2002)
There has been a long-standing tradition that the even-numbered Trek films are good and the odd numbered ones mediocre or bad. Star Trek: Nemesis - the tenth Trek film, and almost certainly the last involving the full “Next Generation” crew – mixes enough good, bad and indifferent elements that it would have been held up as vindication of that theory whether it was been odd or even numbered. The villain of the piece is Shinzon, who has masterminded a political coup in the Romulan empire by the empire’s underclass, the Remans. Story logic would dictate that Shinzon would be Reman himself, but Nemesis is founded on twin contrivances: firstly, that Shinzon is a clone of the captain of the starship Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, and secondly, that Shinzon has somehow come into possession of a prototype for the android Data. These plot points are, on close examination, patently absurd, but they serve their purpose of providing a personal link between the villain and the hero of the piece.
Star Wars on DVD and the Pink Panther Remake
The last week or so has seen the news splash around the internet that Star Wars will arrive on DVD in September 2004, without the real question being answered: which version? Despite the breathless headlines “Original Trilogy on DVD,” nobody knows if we will in fact get the original trilogy as released in 1977 to 1983 (although those willing to take a punt have tended to state that we will get the 1997 Special Editions instead).
The Matrix Reduced, Reused, Recycled
The Matrix Revolutions (Larry and Andy Wachowksi, 2003)
I didn’t enjoy The Matrix Reloaded as much as the original, but I think one of the principal pleasures was mulling over the questions it raised but did not answer. The months between the two films have led to in-depth debate about the implications of Reloaded.
Phone Home
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg), 1982
Accounts of the early development of, and inspiration for, Spielberg’s wonderful E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial talk of two early ideas that merged into one. The first was the idea of a thriller about aliens called Night Skies, involving aliens menacing a farmhouse, which included a subplot about an alien being left behind on Earth. The second was a nebulous idea about a film based on the life of children. The latter idea seems to have gone through many incarnations, being referred to variously as Clearwater, After School, Growing Up, and A Boy’s Life. Some of these may nominally have been considered separate projects (Clearwater seems to have been based on a treatment by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, while Growing Up was a Robert Zemeckis / Bob Gale script), but the common thread was that Spielberg wanted to do a small scale, intimate film about children. The greatness of E.T. can be linked to its origins in this premise: it works so well because it would be an interesting movie even without the alien.
Pulpy
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up to Reservoir Dogs is superficially in the same vein, but it expands the scope of Tarantino’s world enormously. Where Dogs was taut and focussed (telling the story of single bank robbery, with few locations and a small core of characters), Pulp Fiction is a wide-ranging journey through the low-life of Los Angeles. Its several interrelated story lines unmistakeably occur in the same world as those of Reservoir Dogs, but the film is in every way – story, messsage, form – more ambitious than Tarntino’s earlier film. It has an air of definitiveness: not just because it is a key film of its genre, but because it is the most focussed and well executed of Tarantino’s films. It enlarges and illuminates his other work.
Before Blogs There Were Logs
The Jaws Log: 25th Anniversary Edition (Carl Gottlieb, 1975 / 2001, Newmarket Press)
Click to buy through Amazon
As an enormous fan of Jaws, I looked forward to catching up with screenwriter Carl Gottlieb’s account of its making, and certainly it’s very valuable as the first hand account by a key participant of a particularly interesting project. Yet I was strangely disappointed by it.
