These Are the Voyages of the J.J. Abrams Enterprise: Star Trek Into Darkness

The first J.J. Abrams “reimagining” of the Star Trek (2009) world involves time travel that changes history so that means his Star Trek takes place in an alternate universe and Abrams can mess around with sacrosanct Trek tropes a little – or a lot. That makes many Original Series veteran Trekkers (don’t call ‘em Trekkies), like my wife and her brother, very angry, but even though I watched the Original episodes when they first came out on TV when I was in high school – geez, that’s old! – I’m not a Trekker. So I didn’t mind this “reimagining” that makes free with an Original episode. We get a flip-flopped ending; a familiar villain, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, makes his appearance; and Spock sheds a tear! Well, he is half human!

Admittedly, Star Trek Into Darkness plays freely with the canon, but there’s no denying that there’s never a dull moment in this new movie. A volcano erupts. Galactic terrorism strikes San Francisco in the beginning, and a massive starship smashes into the city at the end. We get photon torpedoes, phasers on stun, lots of beaming hither and yon, and even aggressive Klingons.

Abrams also plays freely with the science side of the genre. McCoy (Karl Urban) and Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) land on a barren planetoid, but they don’t need oxygen tanks? The water just off an island is deep enough to conceal the Enterprise? As for the fictional science of the Star Trek world, Abrams makes it up as he goes along. Can’t beam him up because he’s too close to something here – yeah, now we can beam her up even though she’s on the crowded bridge of the Enterprise. The science of beaming has never been an exact science.

But if you like Abrams’s characterization of James T. Kirk, or if you have a thing for Chris Pine, you’ll love this movie because it’s all about Jim Kirk, shooting, punching, jumping, flying. No kissing!? Well, he wakes up in bed with a couple of cute cat-tailed Na’vi. Yep, Jim’s a real hot dog. Love how he ogles the co-ed honeys at Starfleet Academy.

Yes, there’s never a dull moment, but perhaps that’s one of the film’s problems. Trekkers love character development, but even I could have used some quiet moments for the Holy Trinity of the 23rd century to sit down and schmooze. Nevertheless, the film moves along expeditiously, I enjoy Zachary Quinto as Spock, Simon Pegg as Scotty is wonderful, and there’s an intense airlock-to-airlock mid-space transfer. Starships didn’t have airlocks until this movie, but what the hell!

Although Star Trek Into Darkness is not everything one could wish for in a summer movie, along with Iron Man 3, it delivers the noise and action Hollywood thinks viewers expect from a summer movie. I guess that’s what many viewers DO expect from a summer movie, and they’re satisfied, but remembering summers that offered films like Minority Report and The Village, here’s one viewer who always wishes for just a little bit more.

Classic Comic: Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

Watching Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is like watching a movie when you have a fever. Ever watch a movie when you’re home sick, really sick, and whatever movie it is, you see it as an absurd, surrealistic fantasy? That’s how Luhrmann’s Gatsby plays, and that’s how it looks.

With its reliance on CGI vistas rendered in blunt color no more impressive than the comic book special effect on iMovie, along with its gratuitous shots of snowflakes or confetti flying out for 3D effect, the movie is more comic book than film. As I watched, I found myself remembering the Classics Illustrated comics I used to collect and read when I was a boy.

Classics Illustrated (originally Classic Comics) were comic book versions of works of classic literature. My favorite issues were The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Toilers of the Sea, The Octopus, and Lord Jim. Their colorful, realistic line drawings never detracted from the drama of the story or the words of the original. Artwork varied throughout the issues. Some of the more distorted, surrealistic artwork competed with the story. Nevertheless, each comic book carried a postscript that, to this day, is responsible for my being a voracious reader: NOW THAT YOU HAVE READ THE CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED EDITION, DON’T MISS THE ADDED ENJOYMENT OF READING THE ORIGINAL, OBTAINABLE AT YOUR SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY. I did exactly what the postscript suggested.

As a Classics Illustrated, Luhrmann’s Gatsby would have been one of the more oddball editions. Its flamboyant visuals smother the drama and emotion. And don’t get me wrong. I’m not speaking as an outraged fan of the novel. In fact, The Great Gatsby, a watered-down, Americanized take on Heart of Darkness, is not one of my favorite works of American literature.

As a film, however, The Great Gatsby is choked to the point of emotional inertia by smothering CGI, harsh noise, and frenetic motion. Gatsby drives fast, likes to throw big parties, his guests drink a lot. We get the point!

As for the performers, Carey Mulligan plays Daisy like she’s drugged by all the flowers that surround her in a number of scenes and Joel Edgerton renders Tom Buchanan as scary caricature. Tobey Maguire has trouble keeping his eyeballs from popping out of his head, but his languorous voice-over narrative captures some of the spirit of the story. Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio makes you see and feel the character of Gatsby, a golden hero with an enigmatic past. As the film sags under the bloat, DiCaprio gives us a Gatsby to care about. In his winning but tortured good looks you can see the passion that drives him and the innocent vulnerability that is his undoing.

But DiCaprio’s performance is not enough, and even during the film’s final recital of the novel’s famous last lines, you wonder where The Great Gatsby was in all the shallow glitz. Well, I guess, NOW THAT YOU HAVE SEEN THE LUHRMANN COMIC VERSION, DON’T MISS THE ADDED ENJOYMENT OF READING THE ORIGINAL, OBTAINABLE AT YOUR SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY.

"It's a hard-knock life": Iron Man 3

Tony Stark is back in action in Iron Man 3. This time around the villain is Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a bitter inventor who has appropriated the “Extremis” regenerative virus developed by Dr. Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) to repair his crippled legs and create a race of super beings with fiery regenerative limbs. I’m not clear what Killian intends to do with his super beings, who have a tendency to overheat and blow up. This leads Killian to employ a terrorist named The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) who claims responsibility for the “bombings.”

I guess Killian wants to take over the world, or something. Superhero villains always want to take over the world. It’s not clear what he wants to do, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Downey, Jr. carries the story with his humor and glib delivery. Seems that Tony is suffering from anxiety attacks and is weary with his lot in life. His one-liners elicited laughs from me, and some of the best moments in the film are his reactions to a number of setbacks that provide nice surprises. As often as Tony's Iron Man pieces fly to him on command and click into place in that oh-so-cool way, his clinking, clattering parts fall to the ground. Technology doesn’t always work for Tony Stark, and at one point he has to rely on the help of a fatherless boy (Ty Simpkins) with whom he develops a touching father-son relationship, a thoughtful interlude that provides a nice change of pace.

As always, Gwyneth Paltrow is radiant, and she gets to wear an Iron Man suit and kick butt. As always, too, there’s lots of action: some satisfying destruction as Stark’s Malibu crib crumbles into the Pacific; tense moments when Tony attempts to rescue free-falling passengers sucked out of Air Force One; and epic combat amidst all sorts of collapsing cranes and derricks involving multiple remote-controlled Iron Man suits.

By the end of the story, Tony Stark has been bashed and wounded and presumed dead. He nearly loses Pepper, he acknowledges past mistakes, and he resolves to turn over a new leaf. He has journeyed into his heart of darkness and, like Marlow, he has narrated his confessional tale, as the opening voice-over suggests. SPOILER - IF YOU WAIT TILL THE END OF THE LENGTHY CREDITS: But as the whimsical post-credits epilogue reveals, “Marlow” has been telling his story to Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), but the Hulk has fallen asleep at the beginning and hasn’t heard a word of it.

Theater of the Absurd: Pain & Gain

Since last year’s Contraband, it seems like it’s been wall-to-wall Wahlberg in trailers for movies about tough guy special forces operatives or tough guy heist masterminds or tough guy playboys who talk to teddy bears. With his muscles, I suppose there’s something convincing about Mark Wahlberg as a tough guy, but there’s something about his round, boyish face and his single-note, golly-gee, blank-eyed acting that doesn’t seem true to the tough guy persona. I can’t stand Mark Wahlberg, and I only go to his movies out of desperation, but I have to say he is perfect as Daniel Lugo, the narcissistic, body-building fitness trainer who decides to eke out a big slice of American prosperity by kidnapping a rich client, Victor Kershaw, (Tony Shalhoub) and torturing him until he signs over all of his assets.

This outrageous, unbelievable true story of greed and stupidity in the sleazy world of glitzy Florida wealth and decadence is mostly entertaining in its outrageousness and absurdity. Wahlberg glibly delivers manically hyper monologues as he articulates his absurd schemes, and you can’t help but be entertained by the writing and Wahlberg’s dominance of the whole amazing story. Anthony Mackie is also excellent as Adrian, an obsessive body-builder, but Rebel Wilson steals his scenes in her hilarious portrayal of a penile dysfunction therapist who becomes Adrian’s wife. As the third member of the criminal trio, Paul Doyle, Dwayne Johnson becomes tedious in his role as a born-again ex-con body-builder who turns to cocaine to hide his guilt.

The film sags in the middle as too much time is spent torturing Kershaw in a sex-toy warehouse, and later as Kershaw suffers in a hospital room he shares with a patient with explosive diarrhea, and as Doyle squanders his ill-gotten gains on cocaine to hide his guilt, robs an armored car guard, and loses his big toe, while Lugo tries to build up his image as an upstanding wealthy citizen by training neighborhood kids and starting a neighborhood crime watch. The film’s hyperbolic details seem gratuitous when the bizarre trappings of the event are riveting in themselves.

But Ed Harris, as ex-detective Ed Dubois, picks up the pace and brings the story back to reality as he takes on Kershaw’s case, which is too fantastic for police to believe, and eventually collects the evidence that brings the three bad guys to justice. During the closing credits, news photos show us the real faces, settings, and actual props (the chain saw used to cut up bodies and the oil drums that contained the severed parts) from the true story, and although this is kind of cool, the film has already convinced us that the madness of blind greed can actually lead stupid humans to the absurdly disgusting extremes to which this trio of “doers” goes in an attempt to nab their part of the American capitalistic dream.

Lonesome Planet: Oblivion

I love science fiction movies. Ever since I was a boy when I would catch the “Creature Feature” on TV after school and my mother said I couldn’t watch anymore when she came down and saw some guy melting (head made of wax) from radiation, I have always been drawn to science fiction movies as some sort of tempting forbidden fruit. Of course, the first science fiction movies I saw and loved were 1950s classics like The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. During the 60s, I remember being blown away by Planet of the Apes.

But you wouldn’t call me a sci-fi geek. I don’t follow the serialized Syfy Channel shows; I don’t go to conventions; I don’t read the sci-fi book series; I have no graphic novels. I’m not a passionate enthusiast of the Star Trek world, and I consider Star Wars more fantasy than science fiction.

As for books, I love a classic one-off science fiction novel. I don’t like the books that lead to a series. I thought Ender’s Game was a bore, and that expels me right away from the geek pool. Recently I read and enjoyed 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson, a novel that sets its story on or in the environmentally transformed planets of our solar system, not on imagined planets whose worlds take science fiction more into the realm of fantasy. My favorite science fiction novel of the past ten years or more has been The Windup Girl, by Paulo Bacigalupi. I especially like these books because they are whole worlds contained, and they don’t lead to a series.

And that’s one thing I like about Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion. It’s a one-off story without the threat of a sequel, and you get the whole story in its nutshell. I am also a sucker for stories set on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The abundance of such films lately suggests we don’t see much hope in the future. But I never tire of seeing New York City, always emblematic of our entire country, in some state of post-apocalyptic disrepair. Here, the ubiquitous Empire State Building is buried up to its observation deck! Wow! That’s a lot of shifting sand! And we catch a glimpse of Liberty’s dismembered hand in a gorge. A key sequence takes place in the New York Public Library, which is now underground, an element that reminded me of the post-nuclear wasteland in Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971). Also, I dig the sci-fi re-positioning of the classic Robinson Crusoe character to a wasted Earth.

Modern Epic: The Place Beyond the Pines

The Place Beyond the Pines, directed by Derek Cianfrance, unfolds like an epic novel, Dickensian in its scope, its twists of fate, and its connections between characters from various social statuses, as it explores the bond between fathers and sons over a period of seventeen years and examines choices and consequences, honesty and dishonesty, and vengeance and acceptance. Set in Schenectady, New York, the film starts with the poignant portrayal of Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a wayward loser who does motorcycle stunts for a traveling carnival. When Luke, his arms covered with tattoos, his T-shirts full of holes, discovers that he has an infant son, he is spurred to act the father to the boy and to provide for the mother, Romina (Eva Mendes), but temptation leads him to make money by robbing banks, relying on his supreme confidence as a skillful motorcyclist for his getaways – the film’s most thrilling moments. But the pleasure I derived from viewing this film came from its many surprising layers and its shifting points of view, so I won’t ruin it for you by saying anything more about the plot.

Suffice it to say that this engrossing saga is well worth seeing. The cinematography closes in on the details of an ice cream joint and pulls long for vistas showing the piney ridges beyond the town - the place beyond the pines. I love the shot that follows Luke through the glitzy activity of the carnival. I also like the shot of Luke, framed by the colorful lights of the ferris wheel, after he parts with Romina in Schenectady; the same lights framing him when he is in a different town. Meanwhile, skillful camera angles and sharp editing inject the motorcycle sequences with tense excitement. The musical score, laced with forebodingly deep notes that call to mind the ominous scores of Bernard Herrmann, intensifies the drama, while the acting is excellent across the board.

Reminiscent of Marlon Brando when he mumbles shyly to Romina, Robert de Niro when he lashes out in anger, Steve McQueen when he jumps on his motorcycle and rides like hell, Gosling is engaging as the cool loser Luke Glanton (great name for an outlaw!) who tries to transform himself into a responsible father by ironically robbing banks. Eva Mendes, as Luke’s former lover, and Bradley Cooper, as a policeman, are both excellent. As Robin, Luke’s partner in crime, Ben Mendelsohn does another memorable take on the kind of greasy low-life he has played in Animal Kingdom and Killing Them Softly. Finally, Dane DeHaan is touching and believable as Luke’s adolescent son. Although the film’s final third slows down and wanders somewhat into predictable melodrama, The Place Beyond the Pines is the most enjoyable epic I’ve seen since . . . since . . . uh, since, well, I can’t remember the last epic I saw. Epics are a dying genre, but hopefully the solid structure and the stimulating vibrancy of this well-made saga will inspire other ventures as ambitious and satisfying as this one.


(Also - the dramatic poster is my favorite poster of the year so far.)