Starring 7th Trek

It's the trade off movie where they hand over the movie series now that the second tv series has ended.

Some pointless astronomical plot is going on that leads to the destruction of a stellar system. To stop this, two captains of the Enterprise team up and... end up with a rather useless death scene, which is then taken over and dealt with far better in the books. In fact, go read the books, because they are the only good thing relating to the story in this movie.

There is fine acting here, especially from Patrick Stewart. Brett Spiner is also good, but LeVar Burton is hampered by his token minoritism (ie having the play the blind guy as well as being the black guy). Malcom McDowell... is in this movie.

But the problem with the movie is that... well... the script sucks. Despite being about emotion and humanity and time creeping up on you, there is no emotion in this movie. This feels like a small movie, with basically the TNG cast wandering around, and a couple of cameos from other actors. Yes, stars are exploding, and a planet gets blown up... but we don't have any connection to the people who suffered. and... it's nothing.

And many things still bug me. The model shot of the saucer landing feels like a model shot. The amount of time that Kirk and Picard spend dealing with Soran is about ten times the amount of time Picard and Soren spent when Soren didn't even need to do anything. And the damn orange light in the earlier shots just look terrible, however evocative of hell / sunsets ending time it was supposed to be (although wasn't).

This was a movie was more about passing the baton rather than telling a story worth in an of itself. Let's just move on to proper TNG stories.

[END]

Read more!

Cul de Sac, The 2

The great New Zealand science fiction continues! This is created by Stephen J Campbell, who has written for a fair few shows, although no science fiction. I can't say this is a shocking revelation.

There's exposition given in this episode as a plane turns up that happens to be the one plane containing the one person who could explain everything, and happens to be related to the main character. Because why bother with hinting at coincidences, when you can just go ahead and have the universe contain about five people. Anyway, there seem to be adults, but the kids are still alone, so we watch them go from the school to the home to the army base... and that's about it.

Oh, and there are strange creatures that are badly imaged large humanoid beings. The CGI just isn't impressive in this series. However, I will give props to the empty city. There are a few shots of the character walking through town with no sign of any other people or lights... or cars, or trash? That's a bit odd, unless the wave is very cleaning. Oh, and despite electricity not working, batteries do, so stored chemical energy is fine... does that mean electricity can be generated, and the water plants should be able to get back up and running easily? Ah, but I'm picky.

This series is just feeling small and compact, in a way of 'let's just get the main story told without taking time to relax and decently craft the story'. We are only two episodes of six down, and it feels like things are racing to try to tell everything.

[END]

Read more!

Hebrew Bibble

Another iTunes course, this one on the Hebrew Bible as presented by Shaye Cohen. I have to admit that I like him. He's a rather liberal modern scholar, willing to accept that the bible is a constructed work and there are some things we don't know about it.

But going through it, this is making the bible feel like Post Hoc Rationalisation. The bible is often used for that, but in this case, it's more that the Israeli people did things, needed to explain and justify why they did things, why there were the way they were, and this is the story they came up with.

Cohen did a follow up course looking more at the Hebrew bible and Christianity... on to that next!

[END]

Read more!

One more thing to say...

Okay, I guess I do have something else to add in about the YouTube speed thing. I've mentioned before that I tend to watch at speed, in particular around Let's Plays. While this could say something about my personal habits, I like to think this says more about informational content.

When watching LPs, or any computer game, there's a lot of just fighting or walking around. So basically there isn't much going on that you need to pay attention to. So double speed is an easy to have it go by without needing to wait through every damn minute.

I also felt this lack of informational content when I watched anime (although mainly towards the end of my time watching, which might be related). The scenes were either fighting, in which nothing much story wise is happening, so I don't need to pay attention; or it's mainly characters just standing around espousing tons of plot without it actually mattering because it's all exposition without emotional relating to the characters. Either way, it doesn't mean much to me, so double speed it is. (Otherwise, when I am paying attention, I can read fast enough that I can go with subtitles watching at double speed and keep up with the story.)

And now I can do this with YouTube without needing to download them and interrupt other things I'm watching with VLC... not that I would of course...

[END]

Read more!

One thing to say...

I'm glad I found out that YouTube has speed controls! Woo!

[No, it's not much of a post, but that's all I'm capable of at the moment...]

[END]

Read more!

Nga Manu

A week or so ago I went to Nga Manu! This is a wildlife reserve just north of Waikanae.

They have several bird species, including nocturnal birds. And tuataras. And eels, with feeding time. And there's a long walk through the bush where we see many various New Zealand trees and other flora.

It's a nice walk, and I have photographs here. Check it out!

[END]

Read more!

A Love What?

So I saw this yesterday, and took a moment to go... wtf?


Um... so this video makes the woman in the store go around kissing people, and they all see the video and start mass kissing.

What we have here is a case of sexual harassment. To be clear, I'm only talking about the video, not the song itself, so I'm looking at Youth Hymns here as the directors. Oh, and the video is basically drugs, with the tape put there by Ladyhawke herself, so she's to blame for drugging them. There is no sign of consent anywhere in this.

People will just say "it's just a harmless video, stop complaining", but then those people aren't helping matters. And I'm sure other people will say "what are you seeing in this video?" but it wasn't like I was trying to. I just saw the woman grabbing people and kissing them... I can't say I'm reading into it here.

Just... really?

[END]

Read more!