REMINDER: I’m reading at the NYRSF Federations event tonight! Now, to business.

Sometimes I see a movie and want to write about it immediately, like when I walked out of Moon and wanted to ask everyone in the theatre to go talk about it in some 24-hour living room. (Except the dude who stank of cologne and sat right behind me. He’s not invited. Anywhere. Ever.)

And sometimes I see a movie, and it confuses and disgusts me so much that I go months without watching it again, much less being willing to write about it, because part of me thinks, “No one else needs to know about that movie, right?” Except that whenever someone starts a conversation about the worst movie ever (invoking, say, Transformers 2), I get this urge to shove the DVD box at them and scream, “Look at this! JUST LOOK!”

Which brings us to today’s movie, Octane! AKA Pulse or Diesel, depending on which direct-to-DVD region you live in.

Nutshell: Mischa Barton and Madeleine Stowe’s new wax lips are on a road trip for no reason, being haunted by truck-stop people who may or may not be real, but since they are blue-collar we know they must be evil no matter what, so we’re good. Mischa Barton gets recruited to a car-crash cult that parties in nightclubs inside empty gas trucks, and is taken to have sex with Jonathan Rhys Meyers because she’s a perfect virgin sacrifice to the car-crash gods. And that’s the part that MAKES SENSE.

Casting directors for the O.C. should have paid attention to that sign, no?

Oh, Madeleine Stowe. WHAT are you doing.
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I am not the biggest Bond fan in the world. When he’s not a cardboard cutout in a tux, he’s a suave-slash-vicious example of British imperialist blahblah. Even as a kid I couldn’t see the appeal; Bond rarely entertained, the women rarely lived. I caught a couple of the Pierce Brosnan ones, and I like Daniel Craig in the role (though I still haven’t seen the latest one he’s in), so my cultural awareness of James Bond is more or less a vague impression of guns and boat chases and Timothy Dalton scrunching up his face all the time like he’d just smelled poop. Also, because his girlfriend was probably dead.

All this to say, I was totally unprepared to be surfing channels and to run across Live and Let Die. I couldn’t bring myself to turn it off, because I kept waiting for a punch line that never came, and then it was over.

And you guys, we need to talk.

You know, let’s just begin with the title card.

Yeah. So, that happens!

You think it can’t get ironically better / actually worse? Aren’t you sweet.
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So, I saw the new Star Trek movie. I wasn’t going to (J.J. Abrams is not what I would call a draw), but people loved it! People insisted! People told me it would be amazing!

All those people were high!

Talk about amok time, damn.

Okay, first blame first:

The writing. Flat, obvious, and more holes than a block of Swiss.

Absolute old-boy’s-club colonialism. Women exist to give birth or to make themselves available for men’s comfort. Thoughtless, ridiculous cockheads are recruited from bar fights they are losing badly because someone recognized that their dad accidentally got put in charge of a spaceship for twelve minutes that one time. Cadets fill up the flagships because the entire fleet is busy in another system (really, J.J.? The entire fleet? I mean, it’s certainly some ambitious handwaving, but come on).

A Romulan ship has come back from the future to make Spock sad. (The man in charge of the world’s spiniest ship decides not to save his own planet but instead blows up Vulcan.) Nobody really cares except Spock, and he only cares because his cameo-appearance mom died. Luckily, his human half wins out just in time for him to accept humanity as the only way to survive, which would be a totally racist philosophy if anyone was paying attention.

Also, that kid who got flunked from the Academy for cheating and broke laws to get on board because he was pissy about staying home gets to be the flagship captain forever.

The “big twist.” Ten seconds into the movie, Abrams decides he is already tired of recreating the original series and turns it into an alternate universe (his favorite!) by blowing up Kirk’s dad. This turns Kirk into an even more useless douche than normal. It also means that the villain has to hang around for 25 years picking his teeth with one of the prongs in his ship before he comes around to menace our hero again.

Our hero in this case is Spock, which would be an interesting twist except Kirk keeps photobombing the frame and running away with the plot, so forget that. Basically, when Vulcan explodes (spoiler!), Spock gets to emo around about his mom while Kirk does all the charge-taking. Now J.J. has made a huge AU high-school fanfic where he can do just as he pleases! Well done, J.J.

I mean, for real?

The aesthetics. You can try to explain to me why a backwoods mining vessel would have reason to look like a spiny sea anemone. You will not succeed.

Oh, and here’s a drawing I made of the new Enterprise, based on how the ship is presented in the film.

That is all.

The bridge. The first time I saw the bridge, I thought, “There are way too many people in this shot.” Then I realized that it was for the best, since they needed the coverage: that movie was 40% “people leaving the bridge when they’re not supposed to.” I mean, fewer people left the TITANIC than left that bridge.

The ladies. You can explain to me how we only rate four ladies in this movie:
- mom who gives birth and then goes “offworld” so her son can rebel
- mom who is quietly supportive and then dies so her son can rebel
- skanky chick who sleeps with Kirk so he can be in the room for an important piece of exposition
- Uhura, who sleeps with an Academy teacher and then spends the rest of the movie with her face turned towards him at all times like she’s a fucking sunflower.

You will not succeed.

The performances. Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, John Cho, Bruce Greenwood – job well done. You may go home. The rest of you better be in acting bootcamp this second.

Its success as Trek. They used the same character names and costumes as the TV show. That’s…about it. (Fun fact about the bridge crew from TOS: a Russian, an Asian, and an African-American were groundbreaking IN THE SIXTIES. The fact that we have apparently not come any farther is just sad. Also, playing a character’s accent for laughs is sort of uncool in this day and age, I thought, but what do I know?)

Also there are Vulcans. For forty-five minutes.

I actually think the lack of thematic connection (not even talking about canon) to any existing Trek was intentional – aside from the minimal fan service, this movie was clearly made to attract people who would never otherwise have stooped to such a geek level. Mission accomplished! Lensflare!

Its success as a reboot. Well, I’ll say this much: now that J.J. has jettisoned all that canon, nobody even has to worry about watching that geeky TV show any more.* Well done, J.J.!

* Except for the people who are walking out of the theatre like, “Man, Kirk and Spock were really giving each other the eye!” and want to check out that hoyay for a while.**

** There is a squad of middle-aged women with back rooms full of mimeographed Kirk/Spock ‘zines who are going to strangle you in your sleep. Have fun with that!

This week I tackle The Governess, a 1998 faux-Merchant-Ivory picture about a Jewish girl who inexplicably decides that, instead of marrying an old rich guy who is clearly going to die in five years and leave her a wealthy widow, she is going to gain independence by pretending to be a Christian governess and riding off to Scotland, where she immediately falls in love with the old man of the house and becomes that shrieking girlfriend who wakes you up at night because she has loud fights about how she’s not sure if he even loves her anymore and then throws his shit down the stairs and you find underpants on the banister the next morning when you’re just trying to get to work.

Uh, spoilers. For the movie, and for my life.

The draws of this movie are mainly the cinematography, the evil girl-child, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers when he was, like, twelve years old. And then we’re right on to the stuff I don’t like, which is a LOT. It hardly even counts as Questionable Taste, except it’s so pretty that I can’t really lump it in with Prince of Thieves.

I will be doing a lot of talking about the costuming, which did something I never thought was possible, which is Excessive Chemise. (I know, right?)

Girl, your plastic dress is falling OFF.
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It’s always lovely when science fiction becomes real: when man flies to the moon, when man unlocks the secrets of the human genome, when man makes a female automaton to be his companion and house slave.

WHAT. Dude, I just report the news.

My favorite quotes from the article:

“She doesn’t need holidays, food or rest and she will work almost 24-hours a day. She is the perfect woman,” he said.

“Women are generally impressed and try to talk to her. But the men always want to touch her, and if they do it in the wrong way they get a slap.”

I actually feel for this guy – he was eight when he made his first robot, so he’s smart in that way where you never have a childhood because you can’t even relate to anyone. Plus, he’s [edit: 33] and he had a heart attack last year, which, dude, VACATION. No wonder he doesn’t want the stress of dealing with real people. (This is sort of also how I feel about RealDolls, which are totally creepy, but if guys who are a little nuts are happy sitting at home with a RealDoll, it means they’re not out on the streets, you know? I dunno.)

So yeah, I can see how he would just give up on real people and make himself a robot. Naturally it’s not a wisecracking guy sidekick, but a beautiful lady. Then again, in a sea of sex dolls, he made himself a genuine companion whose virtue he clearly respects, since he programmed her to slap anyone who grabbed at her (which is hysterical).

But, dude. Seriously. Vacation.