I have a couple of confessions to make. I run a Tumblr about accidental Star Trek cosplay, but as an adult, I've never cosplayed as anybody, and I don't plan to ever do so. It's just not for me, even though I admire the artistry that goes into a lot of professional cosplayers' recreations of their favorite fictional characters. Also, I do love Star Trek for its progressiveness and the banter between the actors, particularly the original cast members, and I'm enough of a fan that I could rattle off some of the names of authors who received credit for writing the '60s episodes, even though Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry heavily rewrote their shit ("The Enemy Within"?: I Am Legend author Richard Matheson; the episode with Andrea the sexy android?: that was a Robert Bloch joint), but I haven't watched every single thing with Star Trek's name on it.
As a kid, I knew that the third season of the original Star Trek was mostly trash (the budget was clearly slashed, and the actors were told to compensate for the budget cuts by constantly acting as if they were starring in what we now call a telenovela), so I've avoided watching most of that final season. I skipped most of the sixth and seventh seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation when they first aired on syndicated TV, and I did the same with most of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's first season, so there's a whole bunch of Next Generation and DS9 episodes I have yet to catch for the first time. I got bored with Star Trek: Voyager and quit after the first season, although I would occasionally check out a later Voyager episode like "Memorial."
The sci-fi franchise, which celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year, has produced so many hours of episodic TV and spawned so many feature films that I now see how it would be intimidating, especially for anybody whose familiarity with Star Trek is limited to the 2009 J.J. Abrams movie, to decide which episodes of the '60s version (or any of its spinoffs) to stream if you want to further understand what all the fuss over Star Trek is about. I just realized how daunting it would be for a newbie to step into that shared universe when I recently told a Harry Potter fan who happens to be the wife of a friend at my apartment building that I found Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to be a tedious movie when I watched it on DVD in 2002, and it put me off Harry Potter for good.
The friend's wife said she felt the same way about the subject of my Tumblr, Star Trek. So she proposed a deal: she would finally watch a Star Trek episode or movie if I put aside my disdain for the first Potter movie and agreed to watch the rest of the Potter movie franchise. I said, "It's a deal!" The only problem is that I have a novel manuscript that's kind of in the way, so how the fuck can I find the time to watch all eight hours and 17 minutes of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets?
Oscar-winning Room star Brie Larson has had a killer year as a dramatic performer, so it's time to revisit my March 5, 2015 discussion of an offbeat cult movie in which Larson got to revisit her little-known past as a teenage pop singer, as well as experience a taste of her future. In this 2010 movie, Larson briefly dabbled in the same kind of pulpy material she'll be tackling soon as the star of the forthcoming tentpole blockbusters Kong: Skull Island and Captain Marvel. This 2010 movie has also been on its director's mind lately. When it aired on Channel 4 in the U.K. last month, the director live-tweeted a bunch of crazy behind-the-scenes details about the movie.
The 2010 coming-of-age flick Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an interesting anomaly in the work of Edgar Wright, the great British director behind the innovative sitcom Spaced and the irreverent Cornetto trilogy with Spaced stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End). It's his only adaptation of someone else's creation so far, it doesn't take place in England, neither Pegg nor Frost are in the cast and it was his first studio movie, so that meant he had to deal with the often absurd American test screening process.
I recently listened to Wright discuss gauging audience reactions in his Blu-ray audio commentary for Scott Pilgrim's deleted scenes, which include the film's original ending before it was reshot (should Scott have ended up with Knives Chau or Ramona Flowers?: I think the film should have ended either with Scott being single or Scott, Knives and Ramona becoming a threesome because a fight like the ones they had versus Gideon Graves is bound to make everyone horny). Something during that commentary didn't sit right with me. A brilliant and unique comedic filmmaker like Wright should not have to make decisions based on test screenings, even though he has said he considers it "a good thing to do because you see where the laughs are and where you can change things by half a second to get a bigger laugh."
Aside from comments from test screening audience members to DreamWorks Animation that Hiccup should be left disabled at the end of the first How to Train Your Dragon movie, have those test screenings ever been really useful? If Martin Scorsese tried to win back the 40 GoodFellas test screening audience members who walked out after the movie's first 10 minutes, GoodFellas wouldn't have been the GoodFellas we know and love. Unless I'm mistaken, neither of Wright's Cornetto flicks were tweaked due to test screening reactions (in fact, when Hot Fuzzdid go through the test screening process in America, Wright defied a suggestion to change Hot Fuzz's title). I hear those movies turned out okay.
While Wright has said he's proud of Scott Pilgrim's final cut, that first experience of trying to please studio execs during the making of that movie had to have colored his heartbreaking decision to quit directing his longtime pet project, this summer's adaptation of Marvel's Ant-Man, where Wright was replaced by Bring It On director Peyton Reed. While squabbling with Marvel Studios execs over the direction of Ant-Man, I'm sure Wright was thinking, "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"
The Star Wars franchise had quite an artistic comeback last winter. Not everyone was over the moon of Yavin about The Force Awakens, but when even my former colleague Richard von Busack--the Metro Newspapers film critic who prefers the Bond movies and Alexander Salkind's Superman movies over the Star Wars franchise as '70s and '80s tentpole entertainment and has found the Star Wars flicks to be too much like bad '70s Sid and Marty Krofft kids' shows--considered parts of The Force Awakens to be genuinely moving and more akin to something like Robin and Marian rather than a Krofft show, you know it's an above-average Star Wars installment.
I found The Force Awakens to be satisfying as well, even though the film totally wasted Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones reduced her screen time as Brienne of Tarth last season for this, a role where she never says anything memorable and never takes off her helmet?) and Raid stars Yayan Ruhian and Iko Uwais. You don't hire Mad Dog and Rama to just stand around and become people-shaped snacks for a giant space monster two minutes later. You hire them to smash people's noggins in with their knees and break motherfuckers' legs with their bare hands.
Now it's Star Trek's turn to experience an artistic comeback as a sci-fi multimedia franchise after a major low point, and the timing for its potential comeback is perfect because 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek's premiere on NBC. I don't know why Paramount doesn't acknowledge 1964 as Star Trek's birth year: that was when Lucille Ball, who was breaking ground as the female head of an indie TV studio, took a chance on Star Trek, and Ball's Desilu studio, writer/producer Gene Roddenberry and director Robert Butler began filming "The Cage," the first of two pilot episodes for Star Trek. So Star Trek is actually 52 years old, but who's counting--aside from Poindexter in a basement somewhere in Yonkers, who claims to be the world's only expert on the exact time and date when Roddenberry first started typing up the "Cage" writer's bible about "Captain Robert M. April"?
Paramount has two major Star Trek projects on the horizon: Justin Lin's Star Trek Beyond in July and an hour-long Star Trek anthology show from Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller for the CBS All Access streaming service in 2017. I'm a fan of the episodes Lin directed for Community and the Lin movies Better Luck Tomorrow and Fast Five, so I have some faith that Star Trek Beyond won't be atrocious, especially when--in addition to a director who grew up watching the original Star Trek on KCOP and isn't going to turn Trek into godawful 9/11 truther propaganda--the threequel is co-written by cast member Simon Pegg, whose past writing credits include the terrific Cornetto trilogy. The current J.J. Abrams-produced Trek movies appear to be echoing the path of the Mission: Impossible movies: the first one is a highly entertaining action flick, unless you're a hardcore fan of the source material who can't stand the changes that have been made to the material; the totally dumbed-down second one sucks ass; and the threequel appears to be a soft reboot after nobody--not even a lot of the more casual fans of the franchise--would admit to liking the second one, despite the second one making a shitload of money.
Star Trek Beyond (Photo source: Wired)
But I'm more enthusiastic about Trek's return to TV--the medium where Trek can be as cerebral as it wants to be and it doesn't have to dumb itself down in order to satisfy international audiences, who have always been indifferent to Trek movies--because Nicholas Meyer, the director of two of the best Trek flicks, The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, is attached to the project. Also, Fuller--who wrote for both Deep Space Nine and Voyager before going on to create several short-lived and weird but enjoyable shows and envisioning, as he was working on those cult favorites, a nicely progressive take on Trek in which Angela Bassett would get to be the captain and Rosario Dawson would be her first officer--is the perfect person to be at the helm.
I like three of the seven Star Wars movies and Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars animated shorts, but my heart belongs to Trek because at its best, Trek has a lot more on its mind than just action sequences and space battles, and it cast Asian actors in major, non-stereotypical roles, long before Star Wars did the same this year when it cast newcomer Kelly Marie Tran in a leading role for the eighth installment. Though I like Trek slightly more than Wars, I don't believe in pitting these two sci-fi franchises--or any other pair of sci-fi franchises--against each other as if they're Drake and Meek Mill, which is why I've rolled my eyes when Scrubs star Donald Faison, a Wars nerd, publicly bashes Trek to create beef between the Wars contingent and the Trek heads, or when Kevin Church, a writer who runs They Boldly Went, a Tumblr about the '60s Trek, uses his Tumblr to bash Doctor Who. A person can like both Wars and Trek at the same time (or Trek and Who at the same time), just like how someone doesn't have to be a Nas person or a Jay Z person. Can't a motherfucker be both? Nas and Hov are about the same quality-wise. They've both had the same amount of above-average material and lousy material. The same is true about Wars and Trek.
That being said, Trek, its first three spinoffs and nine of its first 10 films are also home to some of the ugliest futuristic clothes ever stitched together in Hollywood (the outlier out of the 10 films is First Contact, which marked the first time when, thanks to Deborah Everton, the costume designer for The Craft, Trek's ideas of futuristic attire looked sensible and GQ-ish for a change and they didn't suck). Trek costume designer William Ware Theiss' offbeat work on the '60s show isn't totally ugly. I'm a red-blooded male--I like looking at the female guest stars slinking around in skin-baring costumes created by Theiss. Those costumes are the highlights of Theiss' work. But the uniform tops Theiss designed for Starfleet, especially the male officers, don't look like uniform tops made for a futuristic space Navy. They look more like softball ringer T-shirts. I keep expecting to see Spock run out a bunt. The brightly colored Starfleet uniforms were intended to capitalize on the rise of color TV and showcase NBC's visual advances as the self-proclaimed "Full Color Network," but in 2016, the cartoony and cheap-looking velour shirts just look strange and can occasionally take attention away from the drama during a dead-serious, non-campy and exemplary episode like "Balance of Terror."
At least the '60s uniforms aren't as hideous as costume designer Robert Fletcher's Starfleet uniform redesigns in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Sure, it's great that female officers finally got to wear pants again, 13 years after "The Corbomite Maneuver" threw away their pants and required them to wear only miniskirts, but otherwise, the Star Trek: TMP outfits are the ugliest clothes in all of Trek. Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich, who's been reassessing each of the Trek movies because of the franchise's 50th anniversary, came up with a great description for the epic fail that was the TMP revamp of both the uniforms and the Enterprise set design color schemes: the beige, gray, light brown and off-white clothes look like furniture, and the furniture looks like clothes.
Jason and the Argonauts (Photo source: DVD Beaver)
I had no idea the Oakland film score album label Intrada is actually 30 years old until reading about the label's 30th anniversary reception, which took place at L.A.'s Walt Disney Concert Hall over Labor Day Weekend. Besides being one of my favorite score album labels--selections from four of Intrada's expanded score album reissues are currently in rotation on AFOS--Intrada is one of the most professional score album labels/businesses when it comes to either handling production mistakes (when the label realized an expanded reissue of Alan Silvestri's Judge Dredd score contained a previously released re-recording of Jerry Goldsmith's beloved Dredd trailer music rather than the original recording as listed, it immediately stopped shipping copies and went back to correct the error) or simply being a music retail store.
Intrada is also a store that specializes in soundtrack albums. In fact, before Intrada started venturing into producing and releasing score albums in 1985 (its first release was the Basil Poledouris score from the original Red Dawn), it originated as a brick-and-mortar soundtrack store on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. When Amazon ran out of physical copies of Daniel Pemberton's excellent score to the new Man from U.N.C.L.E. two weeks ago, and I needed a physical copy of the U.N.C.L.E. score album for AFOS airplay (my laptop hard drive never has enough space to carry full albums in digital form), the first store I clicked to was Intrada. That's simply because of the Intrada online store's reliability in the past (whereas I had a lousy experience with some other soundtrack label/store, and unless I've thrown shade at it before, that store shall remain nameless). In just a few days rather than one week or more recently, three weeks, there it was in my mailbox, ready to be U.N.C.O.R.K.E.D.
Intrada's beginnings as a brick-and-mortar record shop in San Francisco (Photo source: Max Bellochio)
(Photo source: Bellochio)
Earlier this year, I vowed to never write a listicle again because 1) listicles at their worst are such lazy and vacuous writing; 2) the only list I want to read from anybody these days is the list of groceries I just scrawled down and stuffed into my shirt pocket a few minutes ago; 3) every time I see an article hed that consists of a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This," I feel like elbowing a millennial hed writer in the face; and 4) if your film music blog or pop culture site has posted tons of listicles where the hed begins with a numeral, and it continues to subject people to such lists, your blog or site sucks. So without ever succumbing to the listicle format, I will cite my favorite Intrada releases, just in time for the label's 30th anniversary. It's an intrada to Intrada, if you will. The first of these favorite Intrada releases of mine is the first Intrada release I ever snapped up for AFOS airplay, and this was back when AFOS was a college radio show and it wasn't an Internet radio station yet. Tombstone composer Bruce Broughton's 1998 re-recording of Bernard Herrmann's grand-sounding score from 1963's Jason and the Argonauts is no longer part of AFOS rotation due to station hard drive space, but if I did restore it to rotation, it would be the only film score re-recording that's part of any of the AFOS playlists.
I usually don't care for film score re-recordings because a lot of them don't sound like the film scores as I remember them--they sometimes don't even bother to replicate the same tempo--but Broughton's 1999 Jason and the Argonauts album is one of the better ones. Broughton and the Sinfonia of London's faithful and sonically pleasing reconstruction of Herrmann's score gives his Argonauts score the proper album release it never had. For many score album collectors, the 1999 Argonauts album is one of the first things that come to mind in regards to how Intrada label head Douglass Fake "pioneered re-recordings of scores unavailable on CD," as Film Score Monthly soundtrack CD artwork designer Joe Sikoryak once wrote on FSM's message boards.
Jerry Fielding's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia score album and the expanded score reissues for The Wind and the Lion (a rare collaboration between Goldsmith and director John Milius) and Kurt Russell's 1993 Wyatt Earp western Tombstone are three other Intrada releases that used to be part of AFOS rotation but currently aren't, and those three scores are indispensable parts of the action flicks they were written for. But of those three albums, the expanded Tombstone album is the most special for containing unused versions of Broughton's score cues and even Goldsmith's studio logo music for Cinergi (the '90s production company behind Tombstone), a logo jingle that could take on "Looking at Heaven," Broughton's imposing and swaggering Tombstone end title theme, in a duel of "¿Cuyos cuernos son más machos? ¿Bruno Broughton o Geraldo Goldsmith?"
The Intrada releases that do currently have selections that are part of AFOS rotation are, like the expanded Tombstone album, good examples of the high quality Intrada demonstrates in both extra content and packaging. The label's expanded reissues of the late James Horner's score from Clear and Present Danger--the score where a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, became an effective way to make a suddenly empty printer paper tray sound like the end of the world--and Craig Safan's spirited Last Starfighter score are huge improvements over previous editions, as are the label's expanded reissues of the late Leonard Rosenman's score from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Cliff Eidelman's score from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It's fitting that Intrada wound up reissuing these Trek movie scores because of the label office's Bay Area location and Trek's use of San Francisco as a central Earthbound setting. Intrada's series of Trek score reissues from IV to VI continues the series of Trek score reissues that FSM began with Horner's scores to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and uses the same artwork and remastering crew members from the FSM editions (Sikoryak, reissue producer Lukas Kendall and digital mastering engineer Mike Matessino). The reissues carry comprehensive track-by-track liner notes and give Trek heads the option of enjoying both the albums as they first heard them on vinyl (or cassette) when they were younger and the score cues in their original and complete form.
The bonus tracks on the expanded Trek IV and Trek VI albums are as golden as the fleece from Jason and the Argonauts. Though Wrath of Khan is the perfect Trek film (sorry, Star Trek: The Motion Picture defenders, but a three-way between a robot lady, a NASA satellite and a child-molesting star of 7th Heaven isn't as affecting an ending as you think it is), it contains some last-minute reshoots, particularly a final shot of Spock's casket on the Genesis planet that Wrath of Khan producer Harve Bennett added to soften the blow of Spock's death after some negative test screening reactions, and Horner had to insert some new music in order to accommodate the reshot footage. FSM's Wrath of Khan score reissue includes as a bonus track the version of the end title cue before Bennett asked Horner to squeeze in additional music, and the original version gives us a glimpse into an intriguing alternate reality where Spock never came back and nobody kept trying to remake Wrath of Khan by half-assedly killing off major characters during starship battle scenes. Intrada's Trek score reissues are filled with equally fascinating extras. Rosenman's mostly light-hearted Trek IV score is the most divisive of the scores from the first six Trek movies, and one of my favorite parts of Rosenman's score is a cue that didn't make the final cut. It's Rosenman's update of the late Alexander Courage's opening title theme from the '60s Trek, a cue that was intended to accompany the film's opening titles and was meant to, as described by the Trek IV screenplay, announce that "We're in for a classic, good old Star Trek time."
But when the late Leonard Nimoy, who directed Trek IV, heard the new arrangement of Courage's full theme, he thought the cue failed to properly introduce Trek IV as a jubilant and tonally lighter change of pace in the big-screen adventures of Kirk and his crew, so he asked Rosenman to take the cue he already completed for Trek IV's end titles, which was full of the sense of fun and adventure Nimoy wanted for the opening titles, and reshape that for the opening. Intrada's expanded Trek IV album saves Rosenman's unused arrangement like it's an endangered whale, and that's the version of the Trek IV main title theme that's currently in rotation on the AFOS blocks "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime."
One other bonus track that makes Intrada's Trek IV score reissue worthwhile is the complete version of the previously unreleased "I Hate You," the source cue during Kirk and Spock's encounter on a San Francisco bus with an '80s punk played by Kirk Thatcher, Nimoy's assistant and an associate producer on the sequel (his name is a familiar one if you read the puppeteer credits at the end of Muppet projects). The source cue Thatcher wrote and recorded for his scene is basically a typical '80s sitcom version of punk rock, even after Thatcher objected to all the songs MCA Records, the label that first released the Trek IV score album, recommended for the boombox in his scene because he didn't think they were punk enough--which makes me wonder if MCA absent-mindedly forgot to suggest to the Trek IV filmmakers a bunch of cuts off its terrific Repo Man soundtrack (a classic punk album that also contains selections that are in rotation on "AFOS Prime"). Although that punk rock scene is the most sitcommy and Republican-dolt-reacting-to-10-year-old-changes-in-music-ish moment in Trek IV, the presence of "I Hate You" on the expanded album reminds you how funny Thatcher actually is in his mute bit part.
As interesting as those two Trek IV bonus tracks are, even they're outgunned and outwarped in terms of specialness by the two most noteworthy bonus tracks on Intrada's Trek VI score reissue: two versions of the exhilarating Trek VI trailer music, which marked the first time a Trek movie had original music written for its advertising campaign by the movie's composer, who was Cliff Eidelman in this case. Back in fall 1991, Eidelman's trailer music tantalizingly hinted at the more serious and dramatic direction Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer wanted for both the 1991 sequel and Eidelman's score (Meyer envisioned quoting Holst's The Planets throughout the sequel, but The Planets was too expensive for his blood, so he settled for a Planets-style score), and it did so in only less than two and a half minutes.
Fully loaded score album reissues and lavishly produced re-recordings are among Intrada's finest moments as a label (the same goes for Varèse Sarabande). But when Intrada presents a previously unreleased film or TV score in its entirety for the first time, more than 25 years after the film or show debuted, that's special too, especially when that world premiere release allows listeners to pay closer attention to subtleties in the music that could easily be overlooked due to action sequence sound FX or other circumstances.
Director Peter Hyams' 1977 NASA conspiracy thriller Capricorn One is one of the weirdest conspiracy thrillers from the '70s: O.J. Simpson plays one of the good guys; Telly Savalas shows up for a comedic cameo where he's basically playing Ernest Borgnine; Sam Waterston tells a lengthy joke to himself that turns into a monologue that's as crazy as the one his actress daughter Katherine delivers completely nude 37 years later during Inherent Vice; the reporter characters, who are often either expendable or simply evil in other films, actually get to live through the whole film and triumph; and the film is more concerned with pleasing the audience than with becoming as bleak as The Parallax View or Chinatown. It's a crowd-pleasing and enthralling conspiracy thriller in a lot of the same weird ways that the late Tony Scott's Enemy of the State is a crowd-pleasing and enthralling conspiracy thriller (speaking of Enemy of the State, what's with all the shots of people's pets, and why is the scene where Frasier regular Dan Butler barely says a word to Jon Voight and looks like he's about to jump out of his seat and fuck Voight up in front of the NSA my favorite scene in that flick?). Capricorn One wouldn't have held up as a thriller without either Hyams' action filmmaking skills, particularly during a still-remarkable-looking helicopter chase Hyams wisely left unscored, or Jerry Goldsmith's thunderous and menacing score, which was only available in the form of a less avant-garde-sounding Warner Bros. Records re-recording before Intrada got its hands on the score recording sessions and released in 2005 the score cues as they were featured in the film.
"The actual soundtrack has more to say [than the re-recording]. It still leaps out of the starting gate but then heads off to explore. It's more complex," wrote Douglass Fake in the liner notes of the Capricorn One score album, which went out of print and was recently reissued by Intrada with remastered sound. The album allows Capricorn One fans to discern those aural complexities, particularly in the film version of the end title theme, which is currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime."
Instead of the triumphant composition Goldsmith chose as the final track in his Capricorn One re-recording, Fake restores to the conclusion the end titles' restatement of the menacing motif Goldsmith created for the helicopters that chase the terrified astronauts who refuse to play ball and pretend their faked mission to Mars was real, a cue that's "neither triumphant nor in major" and is, as Fake adds, "powerful and thought provoking." My first encounter with that helicopter theme wasn't in Capricorn One itself. The helicopter theme was a fixture of '90s KMEL afternoon drive-time host Rick Chase's show, and whenever I'd hear that instrumental bed during Chase's show, I'd be like, "I wanna see the movie that instrumental's from because the movie's probably bonkers." When I did finally watch Capricorn One, I was right about its bonkersness.
We have Intrada to thank for allowing the audience to enjoy all these exemplary scores in their purest form and in the best possible audio quality. Listening to these scores in that caliber of audio quality and in their entirety really makes you feel like you're either an Argonaut, an Earp, a heroic Starfleet officer or a crusading reporter. Here's to 30 more years of bonus surprises and passionate reassessments of old but outstanding scores from Intrada.
Selections from Intrada's releases of the scores from Clear and Present Danger, The Last Starfighter, Star Trek IV, Star Trek VI, Capricorn One and Marvel's The Avengers can currently be heard on AFOS.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
The 2010 coming-of-age flick Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an interesting anomaly in the work of Edgar Wright, the great British director behind the innovative sitcom Spaced and the irreverent Cornetto trilogy with Spaced stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End). It's his only adaptation of someone else's creation so far, it doesn't take place in England, neither Pegg nor Frost are in the cast and it was his first studio movie, so that meant he had to deal with the often absurd American test screening process.
I recently listened to Wright discuss gauging audience reactions in his Blu-ray audio commentary for Scott Pilgrim's deleted scenes, which include the film's original ending before it was reshot (should Scott have ended up with Knives Chau or Ramona Flowers?: I think the film should have ended either with Scott being single or Scott, Knives and Ramona becoming a threesome because a fight like the ones they had versus Gideon Graves is bound to make everyone horny). Something during that commentary didn't sit right with me. A brilliant and unique comedic filmmaker like Wright should not have to make decisions based on test screenings, even though he has said he considers it "a good thing to do because you see where the laughs are and where you can change things by half a second to get a bigger laugh."
Aside from comments from test screening audience members to DreamWorks Animation that Hiccup should be left disabled at the end of the first How to Train Your Dragon movie, have those test screenings ever been really useful? If Martin Scorsese tried to win back the 40 GoodFellas test screening audience members who walked out after the movie's first 10 minutes, GoodFellas wouldn't have been the GoodFellas we know and love. Unless I'm mistaken, neither of Wright's Cornetto flicks were tweaked due to test screening reactions (in fact, when Hot Fuzzdid go through the test screening process in America, Wright defied a suggestion to change Hot Fuzz's title). I hear those movies turned out okay.
While Wright has said he's proud of Scott Pilgrim's final cut, that first experience of trying to please studio execs during the making of that movie had to have colored his heartbreaking decision to quit directing his longtime pet project, this summer's adaptation of Marvel's Ant-Man, where Wright was replaced by Bring It On director Peyton Reed. While squabbling with Marvel Studios execs over the direction of Ant-Man, I'm sure Wright was thinking, "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"
It's remarkable that a movie as inventive as Scott Pilgrim survived such a maddening process where the comments from test audiences and studio execs often win out over what the filmmakers want--and did so with all its inventiveness intact. Scott Pilgrim is such a perfect marriage of source material and filmmaker. Bryan Lee O'Malley's original Scott Pilgrim graphic novels feel like a Toronto indie rock scene version of Spaced. Scott and his roommate Wallace are basically Tim and Mike, except Wallace isn't obsessed with joining the military and is aware he's gay. While Spaced imagines that time when you're trying to navigate yourself both professionally and romantically through your 20s as silly fan film-ish versions of either Star Wars, Hong Kong gun fu, a George Romero flick or The A-Team, Scott Pilgrim cleverly envisions relationship drama as both Kung Fu Hustle and an 8-bit Nintendo game. Wright's film really gets video games like the 8-bit ones I grew up playing. (Speaking of 8-bit, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich's original score for the film, which can be heard during both "Hall H" on AFOS and "AFOS Prime," effectively combines 8-bit with orchestra, especially during the "Boss Battle" cue for the climactic moment when Gideon is handed his ass, and it goes completely 8-bit at times, like during that amusing cover of Jerry Goldsmith's Universal logo music at the start of the movie or the source cue Dan the Automator created for Scott and Knives' Ninja Ninja Revolution video game.) Along with Run Lola Run, The Raid: Redemption, Edge of Tomorrow and maybe Dredd, Scott Pilgrim is one of the best video game-style movies not based on an actual game.
Wright's understanding of another kind of visual language, that of comic books like O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim novels--and his ability to figure out which parts of that visual language work on screen and which ones don't--fortunately turn the Scott Pilgrim film into the opposite of Ang Lee's lead-footed overstuffing of 2003's Hulk with screen panels and visible page breaks, or as Stop Smiling magazine's Justin Stewart described the screen panels and page breaks in my favorite takedown of Lee's Hulk, "the cinematic equivalent of Karl Rove dancing." Also, thanks to action filmmaking skills he previously demonstrated in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and even a few Spaced episodes, Wright makes convincing fight scene combatants out of the least likely actors you'd ever imagine to be in a fight scene, whether it's Michael Cera as Scott, Mae Whitman as Roxy Richter or Jason Schwartzman as Gideon the girlfriend-beating music producer douche (Wright went on to do the same with Nick Frost during his fight scenes in The World's End, transforming him into the most agile rotund action star who's not Sammo Hung).
As believable as Cera is in his fight scenes, he's overshadowed in his own movie (it was supposed to turn the gawky and conservatively dressed teen from Arrested Development and Superbad into a bigger movie star, but nobody outside of Scott Pilgrim novel fans flocked to the movie in the summer of 2010) by funny turns by Ellen Wong as Knives, Kieran Culkin as Wallace and Brandon Routh as dim-witted vegan bassist Todd Ingram, one of the Evil Exes who used to date Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and are now challenging Scott to a duel. Scott Pilgrim proves that Routh, who brooded through all of his passable impression of Christopher Reeve in Superman Returns, is at his best as a light comedic actor, which is why I'm glad Arrow's current season is having him tap into those comedic gifts again as the Atom (it's refreshing to see a revenge-minded superhero--Ray Palmer's in the game to avenge his wife's murder--who's not brooding all the time).
As Knives, the clingy, too-young-for-Scott schoolgirl who doesn't take being dumped by Scott very well, Wong is a real find, and she deserves to go on to bigger and better things (since Scott Pilgrim, she's been a cast member on both the Canadian-made 2011 Afghanistan medical drama Combat Hospital and The Carrie Diaries). Part of me wishes the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and movie version were mainly about Knives instead of Scott. It's interesting to read Asian moviegoers' varied reactions to Wong's performance as Knives five years after the movie's release. They were as divided about the Knives character as black moviegoers were divided about Denzel Washington's heel turn in Flight in 2012.
Writers from YOMYOMF would say things like "Ellen Wong alone was worth watching the film. She was freakin' ADORABLE. Dolls should be made of her," and Asian American Scott Pilgrim fans dug Knives so much that they've cosplayed as her. Meanwhile, a discontinued Asian Canadian collective of bloggers that called itself "the invazn" felt that "It's kind of sad to see Asian women be the 'exotic in-between' girlfriends who aren't even real girlfriends, but pure ego boosters for the main character's lack of masculinity" (someone should have told them O'Malley himself is half-Asian and not some white graphic novelist writing from the outside about people of color he's never interacted with), although the blog's reviewer enjoyed seeing Knives take charge towards the end of the movie and battle both Ramona and Gideon.
"I was just super-proud that I had created a plum role for someone like Ellen Wong, who otherwise may never have been in a major movie, just by being born Asian and Canadian," wrote O'Malley in a fascinating 2013 Tumblr post. He admitted in that post that the cast of mostly white characters and a few Asian characters in the original novels reflected an unenlightened attitude towards race he had for the first 20 years of his life, and he ended up being appalled by how white the movie looked. His willingness to admit those things must have taken as much guts as it does for Scott to admit to his exes Knives and Kim Pine (Alison Pill), the snarky and sullen drummer in Scott's band Sex Bob-omb (notice how all the drummers in the movie are female), that he shouldn't have been so careless about how he treated them when he dated them. Scott Pilgrim gets some flack for being an overly noisy and hyperactive movie that doesn't take enough time to breathe and be more naturalistic, but that scene where Kim briefly sets aside her snarky and sullen demeanor and wordlessly accepts Scott's apology is one of several human touches in the movie that make Scott Pilgrim more human than the average video game-inspired movie. It's also an example of how great an actor Pill is (watch her also command the screen in a much more broadly played way during her one scene as a fascist schoolteacher in Snowpiercer).
Scott Pilgrim does so many things well as a video game movie, a comic book adaptation and a coming-of-age farce that it's easy to forget what it also accomplishes as a movie about small-time rock bands. I knew Scott Pilgrim would be a solid battle-of-the-bands movie right when it had characters attempting to talk to each other inside a club, and they couldn't hear each other, a typical aspect of modern-day nightlife Hollywood rarely gets right. The running joke of the unenthusiastic MC who's as excited about introducing musical acts as Robert De Niro is about sitting through a press junket is another funny, straight-out-of-real-life touch during the movie's band scenes, as is the way that Beck, who wrote and recorded Sex Bob-omb's material, purposely downgraded the quality of his own sound to capture what a not-so-great band in the Toronto indie scene would sound like. Scott and his bandmates view the glitzy Clash at Demonhead--led by Scott's hot ex-girlfriend Envy Adams (Brie Larson)--to be evil corporate sellouts, but the ironic truth is Envy and her band don't sound as mediocre as Sex Bob-omb do, as we discover during "Black Sheep," sung quite nicely by Larson very briefly in the film (while it's sung on the Scott Pilgrim ABKCO song album by Metric frontwoman Emily Haines, whose Toronto-based band provided material for The Clash at Demonhead and whose fashions O'Malley used as the basis for Envy's in the novels). I wish the regular release of the ABKCO song album included the Larson version of "Black Sheep" as a bonus track, but fortunately, it can be heard in its entirety as a Blu-ray extra or right below.
You also have to be in lesbians with a movie that riffs on Goldsmith's Universal logo music not once but twice. While rewatching Scott Pilgrim in preparation for today's edition of Throwback Thursday, I completely forgot about Chris Evans cracking his neck to the pounding drums of the Universal logo music and laughed my ass off. What other movie has done a sight gag like that? It's also a moment where you're so relieved that those meddling kids from the test screening audiences who have attempted to ruin so many perfectly decent movies didn't get to intervene.
Selections from the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."
"I love technology, but not as much as you, you see... But I still love technology... Always and forever."--Kip Dynamite's wedding song
My favorite anthology show of the moment is one I watched for the first time when all six of its episodes so far became streamable on Netflix in America just last week, but international viewers, Americans who were able to catch it on DirecTV's Audience Network last year and, of course, torrenters have been aware of it for quite some time. Even though its first season premiered three years ago on Channel 4 in the U.K., Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror easily trounces Fargo and True Detective--or as a Yo, Is This Racist? reader wanted to rename it, White Men Talking, Black Men Listening--as an anthology show.
While Fargo and True Detective are anthologies with a self-contained season format that was first popularized by American Horror Story, Black Mirror opts for the older Twilight Zone/Outer Limits self-contained episode format. Before Black Mirror, I was only familiar with Brooker's work as a satirist in the mold of The Daily Show and The Soup and an essayist castigatingThe Dark Knight and Skyfall for being too po-faced as action entertainment, so I was initially surprised by the unrelenting bleakness and serious questions about technology, social media and celebrity culture on Black Mirror. It's akin to Daniel Radosh or his former fellow Daily Show staff writer Wyatt Cenac suddenly wanting to write and produce The Twilight Zone. As Brooker said during Black Mirror's first season in 2011, his show raises the question "If technology is a drug--and it does feel like a drug--then what, precisely, are the side-effects?" On Black Mirror, the side effects are, of course, not pretty.
The first season of the original version of The Outer Limits was noteworthy for featuring in each episode what Outer Limits showrunner Joseph Stefano referred to as "a bear," which he explained was "that one splendid, staggering, shuddering effect that induces awe or wonder or tolerable terror or even merely conversation and argument"--or in other words, the creature of the week. On Black Mirror, the bear is YouTube or the iPhone--or in the show's more fantastical episodes, it's a chip in your skull that can record everything you see (and then play the footage back to you in your head) or a digital incarnation of your dead lover that can replicate that deceased individual's personality and sense of humor. That particular Black Mirror episode about a dead lover's return, "Be Right Back," is, interestingly, like a precursor to those gender-reversed Her parodies that were all over the Internet earlier this year, but darker and sadder (and anchored by an effective performance by Hayley Atwell, a.k.a. Agent Carter).
Where Black Mirror differs from the '60s sci-fi anthology shows that influenced it--other than the sex scenes and profanity, of course--is its unwillingness to hold the viewer's hand as it immerses the viewer in whatever future world it posits in each installment. There's no Rod Serling or Control Voice to provide soothing exposition; Brooker never turns up on screen or in a voiceover with some overly flowery intro to set up the future world of the week. That's one reason why "Fifteen Million Merits" is my favorite Black Mirror episode. It's set in a future where the working class is forced to pedal exercise bikes that power an unspecified energy source--the workers are paid in "merits" that they're required to spend only on porno videos and pointless apps for their avatar or "doppel"--and the episode outlines the rules of this dystopia in only visual terms, a very cinematic approach to storytelling beautifully and confidently laid out by veteran modern Doctor Who director Euros Lyn.
Daniel Kaluuya stole The Fades as the lead hero's nerdy, Mork & Mindy-loving best friend (in fact, back when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't hit its stride yet and was struggling to figure out what to do with Fitz, the supergenius character played by Kaluuya's Fades co-star Iain De Caestecker, I initially wanted Agents to replace De Caestecker with Kaluuya), so it's a bit jarring to see this guy who was such a charismatic chatterbox on The Fades robbed of his voice at the start of "Fifteen Million Merits." Kaluyya doesn't speak for about the first 15 minutes, but he's terrific at expressing his worker character's ennui with just his face and posture--I had flashbacks to Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. In fact, that's what "Fifteen Million Merits" carries echoes of: a little bit of Modern Times with a smidgen of THX-1138 and a shitload of the Axiom from WALL•E, but with the added twists of both a reality TV talent show as the primary escape route for the working class (Brooker's wife Konnie Huq, who co-wrote "Fifteen Million Merits," skewers her own reality TV hosting past here) and a clever visual metaphor for "people who live in their phones."
Other than MC Bashy's hideous attempt at an American accent while portraying a talent show judge, the most disturbing thing about "Fifteen Million Merits" is how much this world where workers must live in cramped cells that look like smartphone menu screens--and where a female contestant like Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay, a.k.a. "Way Hot" from Downton Abbey) has such depressingly limited showbiz career options--isn't too far off from our own. I refuse to get a smartphone. I don't want to be a smartphone zombie. "Fifteen Million Merits" is a great argument for why some of us refuse to get bitten.
Kaluyya and Findlay's episode is Black Mirror's second episode, but it really should be your intro to Black Mirror if you haven't streamed it yet. It's where Brooker's blend of satire and despair first truly comes alive. Like Alan Sepinwall said, "Fifteen Million Merits" better represents what Black Mirror is capable of--and how unconventional and imaginative it is as an anthology show--than "The National Anthem," the more conventional premiere episode. However, "The National Anthem" is hardly as mediocre as "The Waldo Moment," Black Mirror's last episode before the show's return to Channel 4 next week (on December 16, to be exact) in the form of a Christmas special guest-starring Jon Hamm and Oona Chaplin.
I like what "The Waldo Moment" says about how an apathetic attitude towards democracy can be destructive; I just don't like the way it's executed. It's the show's only dud so far (the fact that "The Waldo Moment" was a rejected script idea from a completely different show explains much of its clunkiness). Remember the Star WarsMachete Order? A Star Wars fan suggested to other fans that they should try rewatching the pre-Force Awakens films in a different order: the 1977 Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back first, followed by Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and then Return of the Jedi as the final installment, with no need to suffer through The Phantom Menace again. Because Black Mirror's episodes are self-contained, they can be watched in any order, so for Netflix viewers who are about to discover Black Mirror, I've come up with the Black Mirror Machete Order.
1) 1.2, "Fifteen Million Merits"
2) 1.3, "The Entire History of You"
3) 2.1, "Be Right Back"
4) 1.1, "The National Anthem"
5) 2.2, "White Bear" (Skip "The Waldo Moment" or save it for another week. An underwhelming episode from Brooker is actually better than most American network TV.)
This rearranges the order of Black Mirror episodes so that the strongest episodes are first--"Fifteen Million Merits," "The Entire History of You" and "Be Right Back"--followed by the slightly lesser "National Anthem." Under the Machete Order, Black Mirror doesn't end with a whimper and wraps up instead with a gut-punch of an installment, "White Bear." It's best to not know anything at all about "White Bear" before watching it. Like "Fifteen Million Merits," "White Bear" excellently immerses the viewer into its future world through largely visual storytelling, and then like the most unnerving past works of horror anthology TV--the '80s Twilight Zone's "Gramma" comes to mind, as does "Home" from the quasi-anthology that was The X-Files--it proceeds to sock you in the nads. Then after you stream those episodes, read the thoughtful essays Emily Yoshida wrote about each episode back when she was a Grantland staffer (she's now with The Verge).
"White Bear"
At about this time last year, the Seattle hip-hop group The Physics released Digital Wildlife, a finely crafted concept album that could function as an aural companion piece to Black Mirror. Both the Physics album and Black Mirror explore the idea that digital advances may be improving a few aspects of our lives, but those advances haven't yet been able to delete human problems like loneliness or concealing lies. But Black Mirror goes a step further and straight-up says those problems can never be deleted. They'll only get worse at the rate humanity is going. Somewhere, Kip Dynamite is eating his words.
Both seasons of Black Mirror--just three episodes each--can be streamed on Netflix. The original Twilight Zone, a huge influence on Black Mirror, was turned into a 1983 feature film that remade three of the '60s show's episodes. The John Landis and Steven Spielberg segments suck, but the Joe Dante and George Miller segments are excellent, as is the late Jerry Goldsmith's original score. Goldsmith's Twilight Zone: The Movie end title music isn't currently in rotation on AFOS, but it ought to be.
My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.
* "Much as I scoffed at the very notion of a good MacGruber movie, I'd probably put it at the very top of SNL adaptations. At a minimum, it's the one SNL-to-screen adaptation to take a mostly one-joke sketch idea (e.g. 'It's Pat' or 'The Roxbury Guys') and successfully expand and reconfigure it for the screen. And while I'm here, I'll echo the praise for [Will] Forte's performance, which is committed and fearlessly self-deprecating. After all the things he does in this movie—the loud back-to-back sex scenes, the celery stick, the 'just tell me what you want me to fuck' scene—he can probably bid farewell to any Al Franken-like political aspirations he might have had."--Scott Tobias, The Dissolve, "The '80s ambience, jury-rigged gags, and dumb bravado of MacGruber"
* "Every good spoof needs a straight man. Airplane! had Leslie Nielsen's Dr. Rumack, who never cracked even as he pulled eggs out of a sick woman's mouth. Blazing Saddles had Gene Wilder's Waco Kid, who didn't bat an eye at outlaws punching horses in the face. [Powers] Boothe's unflappable Col. Faith is a sturdy presence throughout MacGruber, but the movie's true straight man is [Jorma] Taccone, who shoots MacGruber as if it were a legitimately badass balls-to-the-wall action spectacular. Most modern spoofs, shot on the cheap by hacks, look like garbage. MacGruber looks good enough to stand beside (or, in some cases, ahead of) its inspirations. No matter how broad Forte gets—and at one point, he's waddling through an action scene naked, with a celery stalk hanging out of his ass—Taccone never shoots him like he's in on the joke. There are many deadpan actors; Taccone is the rare deadpan director."--Matt Singer, The Dissolve, "From box-office bomb to cult favorite in the making: Classic MacGruber"
(NOTE: The Harold Faltermeyer-esque score cue from the "celery stalk hanging out of MacGruber's ass" scene starts at 2:00 of "MacGruber's Suite" by MacGruber score composer Matthew Compton. Don't miss the profane hidden track that starts at 5:30.)
* "There was no main title... and I didn't make a theme for [the end credits] either because I always wanted to leave on whatever tone the outgoing scene had. So there was a different end-title piece of music each time. It's one of the most important chunks of musical real estate because it's a chance to sum up your musical story, but there's no picture, there's no dialogue. It's not competing with any other sound. It's a great spot to showcase the music. So, the end titles became my favorite spot. But I also used it as a place to do something that was unexpected. One track is called 'Falling off a Bicycle,' and another one is called 'Goodnight Nurse Elkins.' Those started out as one-of-a-kind pieces. I hadn't written anything like that for the rest of the show. So, I threw my hardest musical curveballs for the end credits."--Cliff Martinez, discussing with TVGuide.com the electronic score music he wrote for the first season of The Knick
* "Composers were close, and often attended each other's recording sessions. One such day, Elmer and his friends were listening to one of their peers record a score with a strikingly memorable theme. They snuck a few musicians to a smaller studio, and recorded a jazz combo version of this composer's theme, arranging it from memory. That night, when they all got together socially, they played their tape, telling their mark it was the radio. Shocked to hear a small combo playing his own theme, the panicked composer turned white and asked what the music was. Elmer and his friends told him it was a hit song that had been on the radio for weeks. The poor composer thought he had accidentally ripped off a popular song, and momentarily contemplated the task of rewriting his entire score! Elmer and his fellow pranksters laughed, and poured him a drink."--Outlander composer Bear McCreary, recalling an elaborate prank that his mentor Elmer Bernstein told him he used to pull on other film composers
* "Even though that theme was used on The Next Generation, I associate it with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was like the coming of Jesus Christ to me. The score is super thematic, it's deep, it employs many modern sounds. Despite the fact that Goldsmith was traditional, he was always trying to find ways to be with the times that were, so he'd bring in the blaster beam, that thing that was the new thing and some of his efforts had dated themselves, like in the '80s we used some of those electronics, but Star Trek remains timeless. That Blaster Beam thing, a lot of the water phone sounds they use and so forth. you combine that beautiful sweeping version of that theme over the most beautiful thing ever created by man— the Enterprise— and it's just complete, absolute orgasm."--X-Men: Days of Future Past composer John Ottman on the one film score he'd take with him to a desert island
* "The heart of the film is that the Guardians are all adrift in their universes, emotionally and spatially lost. So, it's appropriate that the film starts on a song that croons, 'Nothin's a matter with your head, baby, find it/ Come on and find it/ Hell, with it, baby, 'cause you're fine and you're mine.' It's a mission statement as much as a stylistic choice, a ballad of inclusion in a cold universe. It's also Star-Lord's best way of seeking out maternal advice while lost in space; the song's inquiry of 'Don't you feel right, baby?' allows Star-Lord to converse with a woman that he's lost, one who he rejected right before her passing in a fit of childish sadness. The film is, among about 50 other things, the chronicle of Star-Lord's struggle to accept that he was just afraid and not a bad person."--Dominick Mayer, Consequence of Sound, "How Guardians of the Galaxy Topped the Charts"
* "I can't believe that the only name they got right was fucking Kumail Nanjiani."--Harmontown co-host Jeff B. Davis, mocking L.A. Times TV critic Robert Lloyd's typo-ridden positive review of Harmontown, which misidentified Davis as "Jim Davis" and misspelled "podcast" as "pocast" (in fact, Davis was wrong--not even the L.A. Times critic got Nanjiani's name right either)
* "It looks more like a colonoscopy than a costume. Plus, even if you have superpowers, it's impossible to crawl along the roof while keeping your back arched and your rear high. Too many covers like that, and Spider-Woman is going to need physical therapy."--Amanda Marcotte, mocking Spider-Woman's ass-up pose in the poorly received variant cover artwork drawn by erotic comic book artist Milo Manara for the first issue of Marvel's relaunch of Spider-Woman, as part of a Slate post called "This Week in Butts"
Mission Log is an excellent Star Trek podcast I've previously written about here and more recently here. Hosts Ken Ray and John Champion have undertaken an ambitious mission: to analyze every single episode of Star Trek and its TV and movie spinoffs, from 1965 to 2005 (I'm not sure if they'll reach 2009 and 2013, but I already know bits and pieces of what Ray thinks of 2013, and I assume a lot of it is going to be him saying, "Orciiiiiiii!").
The two Star Trek fans want to find out which older Trek episodes stand the test of time, especially in the age of both the antihero on cable and more sophisticated sci-fi shows like former Deep Space Nine writer Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica, former DS9 writer Ira Steven Behr's much-missed creation Alphas and the current BBC America hit Orphan Black. Anyone who either currently writes for TV or is, like me, considering transitioning to that kind of career ought to listen to Mission Log. The audience gets to learn a lot from Ray and Champion about the things episodic TV from any era does effectively and the things episodic TV--especially TV in the '60s, long before the game-changing, novelistic Hill Street Blues or Game of Thrones--didn't do so effectively. For instance, if the '60s Trek were made for TV today, Edith Keeler's death at the end of "The City on the Edge of Forever" would have deeply affected Kirk's character for the rest of the series, and exploring his grief and guilt over Edith's death would have been a much better move than how the '60s Trek handled her death afterward, and that was to oddly brush Edith aside and completely forget about her as if she were yet another dead Cartwright bride.
Ray and Champion have reached the '80s Trek feature films by this point, and after they did their analysis of Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture last week (Ray doesn't think the 1979 film stands the test of time, while Champion thinks it still does), a Mission Log listener from Norcross, Georgia named Alex Bales posted on the podcast's Facebook wall a fan-made TMP trailer he produced. Unless it's made by the people behind the Screen Junkies channel's Honest Trailers series or Ivan Guerrero, I don't care for fan-made movie trailers, but Bales' trailer is a rare fan-made trailer I actually like--and even more so than the 1979 film itself.
TMP is a mixed bag of a film. It's a rehash of concepts from both the 1967 Trek episode "The Changeling" and 2001: A Space Odyssey that were better executed in those '60s productions. TMP ripped off 2001's "evolution into a superior life form" finale (the film even recruited 2001 visual FX genius Douglas Trumbull, who was also involved with Close Encounters, a smash hit that, along with the success of Star Wars, spurred Paramount to rush a Trek feature film into production). I get that Wise and Gene Roddenberry wanted to make the last great old-fashioned space epic (TMP was one of the last Hollywood epics that opened with an overture before flashing the studio logo), and while I kind of appreciate how TMP chose to emulate the contemplative and moody 2001 instead of the then-frequently duplicated Star Wars, plopping crowd-pleasing heroes like Kirk and Spock and quippy secondary characters like McCoy and Scotty into the clinical tone of 2001 is like asking Kendrick Lamar to rhyme over polka music. It's not going to work.
We want to see Kirk, Spock and McCoy wittily sniping at each other and debating over serious ethical dilemmas or fighting their way out of trouble like they frequently did on the '60s show (and would later frequently do in Nicholas Meyer's superior Trek films). We don't want to see them gawking silently for 15 minutes at pothead-friendly laser light show FX. Even Wise's previous '70s sci-fi procedural, the equally clinically toned but much superior Andromeda Strain, had more humor and personality than this film, McCoy snarking about Spock being "warm and sociable as ever" aside.
Scottish Daily Dot writer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw runs Hello, Tailor!, a blog that analyzes costume design in geek-friendly movies ranging from TMP to the Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbusters, and in a biting Hello, Tailor! critique of TMP costume designer Robert Fletcher's ugly Starfleet uniform redesigns that's a must-read, she summed up TMP best. She called it "a three-hour screensaver interspersed with shots of William Shatner emoting into the middle distance."
Watching Bales' well-edited fan-made trailer made me notice that Paramount and whatever trailer house it hired in 1979 had no idea how to work around the weak material of this three-hour screensaver and market the film effectively, as evidenced in its Orson Welles-narrated teaser trailer and final trailer. Sure, the film wasn't finished and Jerry Goldsmith's incredible score--the strongest element of TMP--hadn't been recorded yet when the trailer house worked on the teaser, so they didn't have much footage to choose from. But aside from that still-amazing-looking model of the refitted Enterprise in drydock, they chose the least interesting footage--and the least enticing score music, some atonal, THX Deep Note-style synth piece.
Good God, Lemon, the Irwin Allen disaster flick music and the synth church organ cue in the final trailer are even worse than the THX Flat Note. And the announcer who's not Charles Foster Kane is the worst announcer in an illustrious history of Trek trailer and promo announcers that's included Welles, Hal Douglas, Christopher Plummer, Ernie "The Loooove Boat" Anderson, Don LaFontaine and Phil Terrence. The announcer in the final trailer has all the gravitas of Derek from Teenagers from Outer Space. I think maybe it is actually Derek from Teenagers from Outer Space.
