The Worst Ever

Fortune Favors the Bold

I do not think I have ever successfully sat through an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series or of any of its television progeny. Until last night, I'd never seen any of the movies spawned by the TV franchise, either.

Fortunately, J.J. Abrams's reinvented Star Trek doesn't require any prior familiarity with Gene Roddenberry's creation. It starts from the beginning, with the birth of our protagonist, James T. Kirk, whose mother goes into labor just as the evil Nero attacks the USS Kelvin, where Kirk's father, the spaceship's new captain, dies moments after his son takes his first breath. The opening struck me as too frenetic, too eager to grab our attention with lasers and explosions and the screams of childbirth.

Star Trek doesn't slow down much during its 127-minute running time, but I soon became accustomed to its headlong pace. It's actually a rather wonderful action movie, directed with a childlike enthusiasm for pilots hurtling through faraway galaxies; for giant, bloodthirsty monsters; for time travel; for interplanetary warfare; and for good triumphing over evil. It is unburdened by maudlin romantic subplots (Kirk never falls in love), heavy moralizing, and excessive background information about the futuristic universe that Star Trek inhabits: We're thrust directly into the story, which has Kirk joining the Starfleet Academy in San Francisco; meeting a half-human, half-Vulcan named Spock; slipping onto the USS Enterprise; and eventually coming face-to-face with his father's killer.

A great deal of the plot seems silly to me (most sci-fi plots do, but I really don't see why Kirk had to be exiled to Hoth midway through the picture), but it doesn't matter so much because the characters are thoroughly comprehensible. Kirk is a brash, youthful genius, whose jocular insouciance masks an insurrectionary spirit. Spock, sedate and judicious, though conflicted about his mixed heritage, subdues his human passions in favor of logic. Their relationship, transpiring alongside the individual advancements and crises of each, forms the modest emotional crux of the film, with irritation and enmity transforming into respect and partnership. As a portrait of friendship among young servicemen, it's no Gallipoli (with aliens threatening Earth, Kirk and Spock don't have much time to get to know each other), but it helps that the two leads are fresh, amiable performers, each previously unknown to me. Chris Pine is not quite so suave as to render Kirk unbearable, and Zachary Quinto looks just right as Spock. Even without the makeup or the haircut, he probably could be mistaken for a Vulcan.

Abrams also intersperses cameos by more familiar faces. I was pleasantly surprised to spot Winona Ryder, Simon Pegg, and John Cho (the latter two add a few unobtrusive moments of comic relief), and I even enjoyed Tyler Perry for his sheer incongruity. Meanwhile, Eric Bana, whom I took a little while to recognize as the Romulan villain, finally appears to be having a good time on screen. Since everyone has already seen the film, I don't mind revealing all this. In any case, every reviewer has mentioned the appearance of Leonard Nimoy, whose substantial, deep-voiced presence lends the the movie an inoffensive dose of gravitas.

The special effects here are, of course, first-rate, though none of the astral battles carry the same thrill as those in the original Star Wars did. What really makes this movie work is the high-spirited approach that J.J. Abrams and his writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, have taken to the material. Another director might have approached Star Trek with a rigid, geeky reverence; yet another might have decided that only a spoof of its predecessor, like 2004's Starsky & Hutch, could satisfy modern sensibilities. Abrams's Star Trek is neither camp nor parody. Its ebullience never gives way to carelessness, nor its respect to imitation. It avoids the staid earnestness that, in my perhaps mistaken recollection, characterized the show; it has fun without making fun. Its only really unfortunate dip into hipness involves the overuse of lens flares, which appear with an almost comical frequency. At the same time, it freely borrows the hoariest cliches of space opera, but we're moving too fast to care. It's pure adventure, and in this way it resembles 2007's Transformers and, yes, the first Star Wars.

'Sherlock Holmes' Trailer

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, obviously has very little in common with Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. It does, however, look like a good time:

The question is whether the relatively commonplace pleasure of a funny and exciting action picture can satisfy amid reminders of the more exquisite pleasure of the original Sherlock Holmes. I'll definitely see this, but I wonder if Ritchie wouldn't have been better off calling his movie something else.

We'll find out this Christmas.

'The Road' Trailer

John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's not-bad, Pulitzer-winning book The Road, which I guess was actually a novelization of The Day After Tomorrow, has yielded its first trailer:

I didn't like the book quite enough to care that this is going to suck, but yeah, this is going to suck.

The Last King of Journalism

State of Play, a middling thriller about a newspaper's investigation of a political scandal, has an atypically star-studded pedigree, with three Oscar winners in its cast in addition to an Oscar-winning director. Russell Crowe plays Cal McCaffrey, a shaggy, old-school reporter for the Washington Globe and a former roommate of Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), a congressman who breaks down in tears on television when he hears of the death (suicide? murder?) of a female coworker, which leads to suspicions of an affair. Rachel McAdams is Della Fry, the young blogger who becomes McCaffrey's sidekick as he investigates the Collins story. Helen Mirren, Robin Wright Penn, Jason Bateman, Jeff Daniels, and Viola Davis all make appearances as well.

The movie has, from newspaper critics, also received atypically admiring reviews for a middling thriller. We must, I suppose, attribute these to the mournful material about the death of newspapers that director Kevin Macdonald has woven into the picture. State of Play's theme is the importance of those journalists who ferret out the truth from matters clouded by gossip and sensationalism. They ask the questions that need to be asked and care about the issues that matter. I'm talking, of course, about print journalists, whose ostensible nobility would not interest Hollywood much if their work did not involve murders and other glamorous crimes. As it is, however, State of Play offers an encomium for the profession that has provided us with so many dressed-up, kinda boring versions of P.I. movies.

Certain writers apparently believe that, even though people care so little about newspapers that they'll allow them to die, they nevertheless care enough about the death of newspapers to read articles and watch movies about it. If we judge by State of Play's box office take, this looks like an erroneous assumption. The filmmakers here, however, are concerned about the decline of journalism. So Cal McCaffrey, the seasoned professional, must teach Della Fry, the rookie who -- let me remind you -- writes a blog (and probably has a Twitter account for God's sake), the difference between chitchat and news, hearsay and truth, scandalmongering and making a difference. Eventually, she learns that some stories are too weighty merely to post online. To hammer the point home, McCaffrey types on a computer so ancient that it can run only MS-DOS, and the film ends with a celebratory (or elegiac?) montage where we see the morning's papers printed and shipped. Actually, that last part is sort of fun; I'd never seen a printing press before.

State of Play is based on the BBC miniseries of the same name, but it will remind more American viewers of All the President's Men -- although the politician, the reporters, and the newspaper are fictional this time. All the President's Men was less steeped in triteness than State of Play -- the latter with its pissed-off, demanding editor and its scenes of reporters having doors slammed in their faces, stumbling out of bed in the middle of the night to pursue a lead, bending the rules, struggling to clarify the thin line between public service and exploitation, and subsisting on Cheetos and coffee -- but even as the apotheosis of its genre, All the President's Men feels merely workmanlike, and State of Play (whose mystery, unlike that of its forebear, never really seems crucial) is the same way. The plot thickens and then unfolds roughly as it should, with killings and personal revelations and outbursts and only a few twists that are a bit too silly, and then things wrap up quite neatly, and by the next day you can hardly remember what it was all about. The tone is sober (Macdonald made sure to shoot our nation's capital mostly on rainy days), however, and so State of Play is described as a "mature" film, but really it's about gunfire and chases and shady doings and guessing what will happen next, and even though it's a little talkier than the average thriller, there's very little happening on the human side. When Jason Bateman's character -- a fast-talking, stressed-out, helplessly repellent P.R. man -- shows up in the third act, we realize how dull our protagonists are, simply because Bateman's character is allowed a few personal characteristics that don't exist solely to serve the plot. He's more colorful than he needs to be; it's a great relief.

Crowe is less powerful here than he was in 3:10 to Yuma, where I last saw him, and Mirren, as the editor, is similarly unable to enliven the cliches with which the script has supplied her. Wright Penn, as Stephen Collins's wronged wife, is a bit too subdued; I preferred Affleck and Daniels, the congressmen, though both are underused.

Afterward, I wondered what the point is of this sort of movie -- intricate and fairly intelligent and clearly designed for adults yet devoid of all the stuff that makes movies satisfying to adults. It's comparable in some ways to Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, but Michael Clayton was morally and psychologically richer. Tony Gilroy also co-wrote State of Play, which is smart enough but is not really thoughtful; it's serious without being serious.

In any case, I hope the filmmakers don't mind that I'm blogging about it.

'Whatever Works' Trailer

The trailer for Woody Allen's latest, a comedy called Whatever Works, premiered last week, and I've just seen it:

I'm not sure what the point was of casting Larry David as the lead: Usually, when Woody gets someone else to play Woody, it's because the role requires a young man, like Jason Biggs or John Cusack or Kenneth Branagh. Larry David is a little more than a decade younger than Allen, but he isn't a particularly youthful 61-year-old.

With that said, I'm looking forward to this. I've never seen Curb Your Enthusiasm, but if Larry David is responsible for as much of Seinfeld as many claim, then I'm sure he's a funny guy, and the trailer has a couple laughs. Besides, it's Woody; no matter how many Vicky Cristina Barcelonas he gives us, I'll never stop looking forward to his movies.

Donkeys and Asses

As it turns out, Donkey Punch doesn't deserve any especially detailed analysis. It's the usual B-movie thriller that pretends to condemn hedonism despite depending on said hedonism for nearly all of its sleazy appeal, and only two things make it stand out: its title, of course, and its performers, all unknowns, who bear some of the most incomprehensible English accents I've seen in a movie since the heyday of kitchen sink realism. They make things worse by mumbling many of their lines.

Donkey Punch follows a group of seven young Britons on holiday in Spain. The movie is set almost entirely on a yacht, where the kids have fun with drugs, booze, and sex, until one of the yacht's passengers is killed by (you guessed it) a donkey punch. The rest then argue about the best course of action, and their argument gradually escalates into a fight to the death, with each character committing at least one action too stupid to be believed. All along, I was hoping that the comparatively nice girl and the comparatively nice guy would get together at the end and show that a donkey punch can also be a safe and tender act enjoyed by two people who love each other, but director Olly Blackburn seems to take his picture quite seriously, and seriousness without intelligence can yield only a grim unpleasantness. Even for those who relish grisly horror stories, Donkey Punch will be difficult to enjoy: There's no one to root for, since the less villainous characters are nondescript and tiresome, and the villains lack any spark of cleverness or style.

The film, despite taking place on the Mediterranean, is not especially picturesque. The ship leaves port very early, and once we're on the high seas, Donkey Punch takes on the claustrophobic atmosphere of a stage adaptation. This doesn't increase the tension (there is none); it just makes the movie feel cheap and cramped. Much of it was shot in a studio in England. Even the actors are a little less good-looking than they probably ought to be for a sexploitation flick.

If you must watch Donkey Punch anyway, remember the old warning: Don't try this at home.

Tonight's Film

This evening, I will be viewing the following:

We've selected it solely because we're so amazed that a semi-mainstream, ostensibly non-pornographic film is actually called Donkey Punch. This is a term that I assumed would get me arrested if I even said it in public. Thanks go out to Abe for locating this.

If you're not familiar with the phrase, by the way, you can look it up on Wikipedia (and then marvel that someone has managed to construct a whole movie around this idea), or if you're the sort of weirdo who prefers not to know about disgusting, horrible sexual practices, you can ignore this post altogether.

I, however, am pretty excited to see it. I usually restrict my movie reviews to new releases around here, but Donkey Punch may warrant a few words. Mostly, I just want an excuse to write "Donkey Punch" a few more times.

Man, I am ten years old.

I Don't Really Want to See 'Star Trek'

I may see it anyway.

You Guys Suck

I guess I was the only one who wanted to read about Observe and Report. Gosh.

'Observe and Report' Review

Observe and Report made a quick exit from most theaters, but before it did, Tony Yates (of De Grypis) and I saw it on a two-for-one Tuesday. You, loyal reader, doubtless are anxiously awaiting my slightly belated take on the movie, but I'm not sure I can give it to you. The fact is that I'm not the right critic to tackle the film.

Tony, our resident expert on the mall-cop genre, promised to review it, following his virtuosic analysis of its predecessor, Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Nearly a month after Observe and Report's release, he still hasn't fulfilled his duty and has even claimed, rather outrageously, that real-life, school-related obligations must take precedence over blogging. Before long, the public will have forgotten about Seth Rogen's foray into shopping center security, and Tony and I will have forgotten what was good or bad about the movie.

So I've created this post in the hope that you, reader, will use the comments section to remind Tony that you anxiously await his review and that he'd better get moving soon. I expect, also, a lame excuse or two from Tony himself about how he's too busy to write about Observe and Report. It's up to you to convince him otherwise.