Maria Aspan

Questions About Star Trek Into Darkness

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:13:00 -0400

(Pretty much my expression after the movie.)

So on the upside, Star Trek Into Darkness did a lot to win me over to the cult of Benedict Cumberbatch. But … (spoilers, and many questions):

… is he not the whitest possible dude you could cast as a “Khan Noonien Singh”?

So many other questions. Why do Starfleet’s top strategy sessions happen in a window-filled penthouse conference room with no discernable security measures or protections from the aircraft that Starfleet is in the business of defending itself against? Given the multiple attacks on Starfleet headquarters over two movies, how is San Francisco still populated? And why do its residents still drive minivans and ride street cars when they could use hovercars instead? Did the CGI set designers borrow the footchase-enabled hovercar highway from Colin Farrell’s True Recall remake? Or did they find it in the half-price consignment bin at the Futuristic Action Movie Design Depot?

If you’re going on a stealthy undercover mission, complete with an unmarked ship and anonymous black leather outfits, is it really a good idea to announce your plans to your entire ship? Even better, if you’re going on a stealthy undercover mission to a hostile planet, is it really a good idea to call up your target on that hostile planet and announce exactly who you are and what you’re planning on doing? Don’t the Klingons – an empire so threatening that Starfleet acknowledges an entire demilitarized zone around their home territory – seem like they’d have halfway decent eavesdropping technology, especially for phone calls directly to their planets?

I’m not saying that The Search for Spock was the greatest movie ever, but did you ever consider spending more than 15 minutes letting our heroes mourn the death of the series’ main character and figuring out a way to resurrect him? Doesn’t resurrecting him in a flat 15 minutes hopelessly cheapen what was presumably meant to be a moving and significant sacrifice? And when you decided you were going to handwave that sacrifice and resurrect him in 15 minutes, couldn’t you come up with anything better than magic tribble-reviving blood?

Magic blood, really? Can anyone die in the Star Trek universe now that McCoy has discovered the Khan Everlasting fount of magic tribble-reviving blood? Doesn’t poor Pike wish he’d modified his DNR order and asked to be cryofrozen for another 24 hours, until someone stumbles over the magic tribble-reviving blood? And now that Pike has become at least the third loved one in two movies to die in the service of motivating Kirk or Spock towards Revenge and Becoming a Better Man, is there any chance of Uhura surviving the next one? (And can someone warn Carol Marcus?)

Speaking of Carol, why did she get to wear pants on the shuttle but have to change into a miniskirt on the Enterprise? And what’s behind everyone’s multiple uniforms, anyway – doesn’t having six or seven different available outfits defeat the whole purpose of a uniform? Is Bones so bored with his role as semi-lecherous comic relief that he sits around between scenes, pondering which futuristic white tunic he’s going to show off in his next one? Or did he lose some bet with Kirk about how many medical officer uniforms he can wear in a 24-hour period? When did Karl Urban’s Bones go from Hot and Gruff to Cheesy and Kinda Gross, anyway? And by the way, if McCoy was going to be the one to accompany Carol Marcus to the weapon-disarmament planetoid thingy, why did she rush to strip out of her uniform in front of Kirk? Was she auditioning for the obligatory underwear-model role in whatever TV show airs after next year’s Super Bowl? Or did she spend the next 15 minutes, while Kirk called Bones and told him to go on the disarmament mission and by the way to get into a space suit for that mission, sitting around realizing that she could have found a closet or a bathroom in which to change clothes?

Why was Scotty able to knock Khan out temporarily with one phaser blast, while Uhura had to shoot him several times and then wait for her boyfriend to finish the job with his manly anvil? Does Starfleet hand out weapons with different power levels for boys and girls? Did Uhura know she was confronting a superhuman supervillain with a Bic for Ladies blaster? And if her boyfriend runs away with Kirk to consummate their increasingly explicit bromance, does she get to survive the next movie?

withapassion: thisistheverge: Director Alfonso Cuaron is back...

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:19:32 -0400

withapassion:

thisistheverge:

Director Alfonso Cuaron is back with a teaser for Gravity, his first film since Children of Men. Watch it here.

I will watch this. Though in the annals of amusingly inappropriate juxtapositions, I’m pretty sure the first half of this trailer is using the soundtrack to the BBC’s North & South (Victorian romance amidst the union-busters and milltowns of the industrial revolution, plus death and trains!)

This photo amazes me - it’s so bored, so unremarkable...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:11:33 -0400

This photo amazes me - it’s so bored, so unremarkable except for the identity of the guy posing with his CNN interviewer. The banality of evil, etc. I hadn’t come across this photo before seeing Greg Barker’s documentary Manhunt, based on the (above) journalist Peter Bergen’s book about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. (Bergen interviewed bin Laden for CNN in 1997; at some point they snapped candids to mark the occasion. When Bergen spoke at a screening of Manhunt I attended last week, I had the weird realization that I shared a room with someone who had once shared a room with bin Laden. It’s more sobering and somehow more difficult to believe than the usual journalistic proximity to prominent figures.)

I enjoyed Manhunt - it’s in many ways a more satisfying mirror to Zero Dark Thirty, charting much of the same ground with more depth (the team of women CIA analysts who tracked bin Laden for years, their petty jealousies and team dynamics and the politics that followed them; the tragedy of Jennifer Matthews; the torture debate). Like Zero Dark Thirty, I think Manhunt tried to do too much and left me wanting more closure on certain characters. But it’s an engrossing 100 minutes that would have held my interest for even longer.

The Pretty One: "Something for the Ladies."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:23:00 -0400

So this was irritating. Last night I saw The Pretty One, Jenée LaMarque’s California version of Amélie (sweet, funny, a feature-length Anthropologie commercial; not the irritating part). The screening, at the Tribeca Film Festival, was followed by a Q&A (also not the irritating part), with the (pregnant) writer-director, the star (Zoe Kazan), many of the other cast members, a handful of producers and other crew members, including the costume designer. Kazan, in heels and a Heidi coronet-braid, ran the microphone back and forth down the conga line of cast and crew to make sure everyone could answer audience questions.

Also not the irritating part: Of the impressive dozen-person lineup on stage, about half of them, including the main creative types and at least some of the money types, were women. The film was about a woman, trying to figure out this whole life/family/romance/career/friendship thing. (Note where “romance” came in that list - central but not exclusive or even primary.) The Tribeca employee moderating the event and asking the bulk of the questions was a woman.

This was the irritating part: When the Tribeca moderator eventually asked a question about the romance in the film, she felt the need to excuse it, or excuse her asking of it, or something: “It’s something for the ladies,” she added. Right. The romance. Something for us ladies, because the rest of the film about figuring out how to be a sister and a daughter and a friend and a twin who may or may not be “the pretty one” obviously wasn’t “for the ladies.” The lady writer-director, lady star playing a lady main character, lady producer and lady costume designer weren’t there for the ladies and hadn’t said anything up to that point that could be “for the ladies.”

I’m being harsh. I’m sure it was just filler talk, one of those things you say when you’re on stage with a number of semi-famous and/or accomplished people and nervous about sounding smart with them. But it was still pretty depressing. Romance is only the province of “the ladies,” really? And apparently you can make an entire movie about what it actually means to be a lady, with ladies in front of and behind the camera, but unless it has a romantic subplot, none of it is actually going to be for, about or by us.

Retro self-help book or presidential memorial? (Of course Teddy...

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 23:26:17 -0400

Retro self-help book or presidential memorial? (Of course Teddy Roosevelt has gigantic slabs of MANHOOD marble on his island.)

The Awl on Reasons to Watch The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:28:18 -0400

The Awl on Reasons to Watch The Lizzie Bennet Diaries:

Yes to all of these, especially the first two (well, three. This Darcy is wonderful, but also wonderfully not the main attraction). There’s so much I enjoy about this series: the in-jokes about Colin Firth and how everyone always forgets about Mary Bennet; Lydia’s sidekick-sister Kitty Bennet is an actual cat, while Anne de Bourgh is her mother’s literal lap-dog. The casting is quietly diverse and much of the acting is great; I was impressed to learn that Darcy was only cast half-way through the series, since Daniel Gordh managed to perfectly inhabit the character that everyone else had been impersonating for 50 episodes. Lydia is more than reckless and silly; she’s fun, and sweet, and just young. (The friend with whom I started watching LBD compared Mary Kate Wiles’s Lydia to Kenzi, the young exuberant sidekick who’s the best part of Lost Girl.)

This is a real modern update, one that really gets the time to worry about more than finding appropriate boys for all of the heroines. Lizzie’s relationship with her friends and her sisters, and her efforts to figure out a career and a future and who she wants to be, are all as or even more important than who she ends up with or even whether she ends up with anyone. And Lizzie’s relationships with the women in her life, whether her sisters or her mother or her friends, all get more screen time than her relationship with her destined soulmate.

Most of the characters get to be nicer, but still interesting, versions of their book originals, including Mr. Collins and Caroline Bingley. And I especially love that both Charlotte and Lydia are three-dimensional characters and get to be more than cautionary tales for Lizzie. Most versions of Pride and Prejudice, including the book itself, frame Lydia’s downfall as, “Isn’t it awful what Lydia’s mistakes and Wickham’s malevolence could do to the Bennet family and the fortunes of Lydia’s sisters?” The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is one of the first versions to really frame Lydia’s downfall as, “Isn’t it awful what Lydia’s mistakes and Wickham’s malevolence could do to Lydia?”

My main quibble is kind of inevitable for a modern updating of Pride and Prejudice, especially one that revolves around new media and tech companies. (And it’s one that’s particularly hard for a business journalist who’s covered tech companies to ignore.) For all the use of YouTube and Twitter and Tumblr, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries appears to exist in a world without tech gossip blogs or Gawker or publicists. This William Darcy is the CEO of a Silicon Valley media company, and a grad student starts making popular YouTube videos about how much she hates him - okay, I could suspend my disbelief thus far. And it’s sweet and noble and romantic when a spurned Darcy, finally finding out that Lizzie has been slandering him by name to hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers, tells her he’s not going to sue. But somehow I doubt the lawyers and public relations staff of his apparently well-established company would agree with that decision.

History Day with Ann Richards

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:56:00 -0500

In junior high school, I competed in a fantastic, super-nerdy event called National History Day. It involved a months-long research project that culminated, my first year, in a sad diorama depicting the Silk Road.

But then I discovered the “performance” category. For the next two years, I researched, wrote and performed ten-minute one-woman plays about my chosen historical topics: people dying horribly in gunfire. In seventh grade, I played Anastasia Romanov; in eighth grade, not content with dying once on stage, I took on the Kent State Four. I listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on repeat for inspiration, which must have worked; I made it all the way to the national finals with my performance, which involved throwing myself onto the ground and sobbing like I’d both been shot and was watching my friends die around me. It was the most fun I had the entire year I was 13.

It’s not fair to the professionals, but my History Day performances have colored pretty much every one-person play I’ve seen since. I’m not generally a huge fan; they involve way too much breaking of the fourth wall, and stirring background music, and endless exposition. And even the good ones are usually way too long. That was my major complaint tonight when I saw Ann, Holland Taylor’s one-woman ode to former Texas Governor Ann Richards. Taylor is fantastic, and the scene that bridges the play’s two acts — Richards in her governor’s office on a whirlwind of an afternoon, wrangling staff and children and grandchildren and President Bill Clinton and protestors and the pope as she decides whether to grant a stay of execution — is worth the price of the (discounted nosebleed) Broadway ticket.

I suppose that for the price of those tickets, no Broadway play is going to confine itself to one act. But I wish Ann had. There’s a good twenty minutes of lead-in exposition at the play’s front end, and a bit of a whimpering return as Taylor recounts Richards’ funeral in 2006. Those were the parts that made me think of History Day, even if the rest of Ann doesn’t deserve to be compared to my teenage efforts to enact poor Anastasia’s basement execution.

Having a good day.

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:27:14 -0500

Having a good day.

“I’m Bella Cullen, and my stomach still hurts from...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:34:32 -0500

“I’m Bella Cullen, and my stomach still hurts from when my husband ate a baby out of it.” An excellent Twilight parody/sequel mashup, Lizzie Bennet Diaries style, including a Bing Lee cameo as Jacob. (Charles Bingley: Incurable romantic puppy dog, no matter the incarnation.)

eudaimonium: list of Jane Austen adaptations:↳ 08. Persuasion...

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:03:32 -0500

eudaimonium:

list of Jane Austen adaptations:
↳ 08. Persuasion (1995)

Perfect movie is perfect.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Probably my favorite romantic comedy of the last few years,...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 22:07:55 -0500

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Probably my favorite romantic comedy of the last few years, starring: Frances McDormand, being awesome and broke and hungry and snarky and wise. Ciaran Hinds, proving that an older and thicker Captain Wentworth is still hot (at least until he turns into Bill Clinton). Amy Adams, wearing great clothes as she does her adorably ditzy thing. Lee Pace, whose character I largely forget but who plays the younger romantic hothead hero with dash and aplomb.

I was reminded of it tonight, at an event where my every attempt to pick up a plate was foiled by something more interesting happening; there’s a running gag in the movie about Miss Pettigrew never managing to eat anything, like a reverse Brad Pitt from Ocean’s 11.

It’s a wonderful, fizzy period costume piece with just enough sadness to make the happy ending earned. I love the set piece near the end, where McDormand’s Miss Pettigrew and Hinds’ Joe reminisce about the people they lost during the last war and brace for the new one, or the way the movie cares as much about the relationship between Miss Pettigrew and Adams’ flighty, well-meaning chorus-girl as it does about any of the romantic exploits. It’s worth a rewatch on the next snowy Saturday afternoon.

Have I mentioned I’ve succumbed to The Lizzie Bennet...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:01:29 -0500

Have I mentioned I’ve succumbed to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries? I’ve succumbed to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. (At the risk of turning this into the All Pride and Prejudice, All the Time blog, go watch! All … seven YouTube hours and counting.)

Anyway, this video won’t make much sense to non-viewers, but it made me laugh. A lot. Ricky “Mr.” Collins (who’s become my favorite Mr. Collins) does the RickRoll thing.

'The Hour' Canceled by BBC2 | Radio Times

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:15:28 -0500

'The Hour' Canceled by BBC2 | Radio Times:

popculturebrain:

notnadia:

Not cool, not cool, not cool.

Sad news, but if you’re looking for a solid, short series to watch I can’t say it wasn’t satisfying.

Disappointing, but I’m glad it went out on this season rather than on the first.

New favorite Tumblr.

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:41:44 -0500

New favorite Tumblr.

"Scores of silver parachutes rain down on them."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:28:21 -0500

At the halftime of Georgetown basketball home games, in the middle of Washington, D.C., Chipotle drops white parachutes holding silver-wrapped burritos into the clutching fingers of the stadium crowd.

…which may be a brilliantly meta Hunger Games reference, but is probably a marketing tactic Chipotle is going to want to rethink by the time the Mockingjay movies come out.

The Invisible War

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:39:25 -0500

“Those cases weren’t given to women [investigators]. … We were too sympathetic.”

The Invisible War is one of those documentaries that are hard to decide to sit down and watch. It’s about rape in the military, and systematic coverups of rape in the military. It has lots of women facing the camera and telling horrific stories, and sometimes crying, and quietly talking about their depression and their post-traumatic stress and their suicide attempts.

It’s full of infuriating details: more than one woman says that when she went to her commanding officer and reported an attack, she was charged with adultery – not because she was married, but because her rapist was.

One thing that I thought director Kirby Dick did especially well was defining the crimes in his film as violence, human-on-human brutality, disassociated from any relationship to consensual sex. The film is largely framed by the story of Kori Cioca, a Coast Guard veteran whose attacker dislocated her jaw before he raped her. Years later, Cioca waits in vain for the Veterans Affairs office to respond to her claim and fund surgery to treat her. Her story makes it more difficult to sweep the issues away as just a rape problem, just a woman problem, just a sex problem – it’s none of those. One U.S. military officer brutally attacked another, resulting in a lifetime of physical problems, and the U.S. military responded by punishing the victim.

For all of its justified outrage, The Invisible War is effectively low-key – it doesn’t try too hard to tug at your heartstrings, it doesn’t embellish its interviews with swelling music. There are moments of humor, if usually of the bleak variety. (The military’s victim-blaming “prevention” ads, which warned women not to walk around bases without a buddy, got disbelieving laughs at my screening.) It’s a sad and angry film, but not an unrelentingly grim one.

I also saw watched the Oscar-nominated documentary in one of the best possible environments: with an audience in New York, with a panel discussion afterwards, including the director and Jessica Hinves, one of the survivors interviewed in the film. She was funny and cheerful and poised, and quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. when an audience member asked if she ever “thought about taking justice into [her] own hands.” The panel discussion was a reassuring end to the movie in some ways – we the audience could have a cathartic moment, applauding the survivors and expressing our outrage to people we knew shared that outrage. I’m glad I saw The Invisible War that way, and that I saw it at all – I’m not sure I would have picked it out to watch at home, on my own, as a break at the end of the workday or over the weekend. But it is very, very worth seeing.

FT Alphaville: The Book of Bove

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:29:14 -0500

FT Alphaville: The Book of Bove:

“There’s something wrong with bank analysis. … This industry did come back,” he told a room full of journalists Wednesday. “We’re going to see fourteen years of higher earnings.”

The three-course lunch was hosted by his new employers, Rafferty Capital Markets, as a sort of comeback party for…

Writing this was fun.

theparisreview: “Reader, I married him.” Oh, oh, oh. In which...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:30:35 -0500

theparisreview:

“Reader, I married him.”

Oh, oh, oh. In which Barbie Liz Taylor plays “poor, obscure, plain, and little” Jane Eyre to Vincent Price’s Rochester. Adding this to my collection of wonderfully off-key vintage book covers.

Reposting this, because Darcy the gothic highwayman and Lizzy...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:02:48 -0500

Reposting this, because Darcy the gothic highwayman and Lizzy the American governess want to wish you a happy (belated) Pride and Prejudice day.

millionsmillions: Pride and Prejudice turns 200 this year, and...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 23:34:46 -0500

millionsmillions:

Pride and Prejudice turns 200 this year, and to celebrate, the artist Jen Sorensen drew this neat little graphic synopsis.

Weirdly skips over much of the book’s second half, including the road trip to Pemberley where Lizzy changes her mind about Darcy after seeing his massive crib, and also his dive into the pond (wasn’t that canon?). But still pretty great.