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Star Trek

This is a reboot. I really can’t emphasize that enough. This is not your father’s Star Trek. The writers here took all the main characters you remember from the original series, many of the most famous lines, various alien races (most humanoid, a few very much not humanoid), and a few little in-jokes referring back to previous movies and shows, threw them all into a blender, mixed them up for a while, and served up something that’s almost Star Trek, but different.
So yes, Vulcans still bleed green and practice never showing emotion; and Spock (Zachary Quinto of Heroes fame) is still half-human. But now his mother is Winona Ryder, and there are two Spocks. Sort of. See, since this is a sci-fi series, the writers took advantage of that fact and also rebooted it internally, so to speak — there’s a pinch of time-travel and a dash of alternate reality in this recipe, too, so if you want to believe that the entire original series is real and this is just a pale imitation spinning off from that timeline, you can do that. So I’m not sure why there are Star Trek purists up in arms about this movie, though admittedly I was never a Star Trek purist myself.
The point is, it’s a good sci-fi movie; but if you go in expecting a big-screen version of the original series, you’ll be disappointed. It’s good to know the series and the movies — there are in-jokes all over the place, of course. Most of the audience either laughed or went, “Ooh!” when Bones (Karl Urban from The Bourne Supremacy, totally channelling the spirit of DeForest Kelley) first asked Spock if he was out of his Vulcan mind. Ditto when Bones insisted, “I’m a doctor, not a physicist!” And they keep threatening San Francisco in these movies, I suppose because Starfleet Academy is there.

trekreboot.jpg
Left to right: The pointy-eared hobgoblin, the Russian wunderkind, Uhura (no longer first-nameless), the captain, the Scotsman, helmsman Sulu (who gets to swordfight!), and the crusty old Southern doctor.

Most of the crew is in the Academy, though they had to strain credibility a little to do that. For one thing, they don’t quite explain why Bones, who could be anywhere from thirty to fifty but is definitely not a young pup like everyone else, is there. I seem to recall that in another movie he mentioned being drafted (though I’m pretty sure Starfleet doesn’t do that), but here he seems to have signed up to avoid being bankrupted by a vengeful ex-wife. He and a young Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) become friends because they’re the only two cadets not wearing the bright red uniforms. All the uniforms kinda look like they came from Old Navy, actually.
Kirk hasn’t grown into his luck yet. He’s usually right about the best strategy and such, because if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be Kirk, but he fumbles through everything, sort of like Indiana Jones. He gets beaten up in a bar fight (though to be fair, he was seriously outnumbered), and Spock somehow manages to have better luck with the girls, so you know this is an alternate reality. But it’s got a lot of the feel of the original series, that recklessness, and now that they have a budget, they can really make this an action flick, with high-tech gadgets, black holes, and alien spaceships that were designed by someone with absolutely no sense of spatial relationships or even the simple ability to walk, safely, from one computer station to the next. The Enterprise even looks like the Enterprise — more modern and sleek than the sixties version, but without looking very different, really. Except on the inside. There, everything’s all white and blue and shiny and absolutely nothing like it used to be. Only a few of the noises are the same.
In spite of the time travel angle, the plot actually isn’t terribly confusing. For a while, I was waiting for everything to get weird and inexplicable, but that never happened, thankfully. So for avoiding that pitfall, for making this a sometimes funny movie without making fun (or making me cringe), and for letting Scotty (Simon Pegg from Hot Fuzz, which seems like a really weird casting choice but actually works out quite well) get one more chance to say, “I’m givin’ it all she’s got, Cap’n!” this movie gets four and a half idols. I think this is what Star Trek would’ve been like all along, if Gene Roddenberry had been around to think it up now, and I like that idea.

Stuff I Use

> I was wondering if you would do a blog post that mentions all of the
> different software and hardware you use to create your music.
> – Ken
Sure thing!
Hardware:
I have 2 computers, one iMac, and a white MacBook. 4 gig of RAM in each (depends on location)
MIDI controller: Axiom 61 from M-Audio
Audio Interface: 1 Firepod, and an AudioBox (depends on location)
Monitors: Mackie 824s
Software:
Logic Studio (sometimes Garageband)
Garritan sample sets, all the Apple Jam Packs, Steinberg Virtual Guitarist 2, and East West Symphonic Choirs.
Huh. I thought it was more complicated. Well, there you go!
– Kevin MacLeod

Overdue New Music

Oh, I’ve been working – just not posting much… here’s round one of catch-up posting.
Soporific
Cambodian Odyssey
New choirs:
Schmetterling
Darkness Is Coming
Meditations:
Winter Reflections
Tranquility

A Prayer


In the time of great economic turmoil comes a momentary reflection.

Do you have a pile of my music?

I received a request from Mark in Ireland who would like a DVD of my music. Somehow there is a monthly limit there that is insanely low for bandwidth.
For tax reasons impossible for me to understand – I can not ship a physical product (without incurring a pile more paperwork).
But you can! Let me know if you have a collection of music from my site that you’re willing to ship to Ireland.

State of Play

Yeah, Ben Affleck. *sigh* But he’s playing a politician, and they always seem to be kind of wooden and distant, so it isn’t so bad. It’s not a bad little thriller, but it reminds me of that Ewan McGregor/Hugh Jackman film whose name I can never remember, because it’s hard to remember this film, too.
It’s all political, though, I know that much. Ben Affleck plays Stephen Collins, the rising star of one political party or the other. They don’t say, so no one has to dislike his affiliation. He’s on a crusade (of course), running a committee that’s investigating government spending in the middle east. But this involves a big, rich, powerful corporation (naturally) that doesn’t care for being investigated (who would?), and when Collins’ head researcher for the committee gets crushed under a subway train, it looks like someone’s out to get him. At least, that’s old Ben’s story. Unsurprisingly, most people don’t believe him, especially when it turns out that he was having an affair with said researcher.
Russell Crowe to the rescue! He’s Cal McAffrey, mild-mannered reporter for the Washington Globe. Okay, not mild-mannered, but he is a reporter; and he was Collins’ college roommate, so he believes, or at least acts like he does. I think maybe he believes just because no one else does and he feels sorry for the guy. He does look pretty hapless. And the affair is huge news, of course, much to Cal’s special chagrin, because not only is he Steve’s best (and apparently only) friend, he has a giant crush on Mrs. Collins (Robin Wright Penn). It’s so huge that even the paper’s bunch of 18-year-old bloggers are on it, and one particularly brash specimen, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams, who is apparently around mainly to look dewy-eyed and innocent, and attract the male audience) tries to get a scoop from Cal. I don’t know if they really still call them scoops or not, but anyway. For some reason odd little questions like that are sticking in my head better than the plot.

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Cal helps prove my Good Guys Have Messy Offices theory.

A thief gets shot, along with an innocent bystander pizza delivery guy. Congressional hearings drone on and on, while Collins does his best to look impassioned about his quest to expose corruption. Reporters ask annoying questions, not least of all Cal and his eventual faithful sidekick, Della. Jeff Daniels (the blind ex-druggie from The Lookout) as Senator George Fergus is actually pretty good at looking friendly and sinister at the same time. The evil corporation looms evilly over everything. And Cal and Co. tie it all together into a neat little package for the front page. Okay, not completely neat, but they try.
And it isn’t bad. Jason Bateman (Hancock) gets to steal a couple of scenes as a strung out minor bad guy, and Helen Mirren as editor Cameron Lynne steals every scene she’s in, because she’s just that cool. Cal’s a little scared of her, and rightly so. So it’s easy to overlook the little loose ends and weird coincidences and just enjoy.
Three and three-quarter idols. The plot’s fairly predictable, but not so much to be boring, and the dialogue is good, though some of that may be thanks to its original British roots as a TV miniseries. Maybe it’s just me, but I think British writers are often better. But it was translated over to American pretty well, thankfully. Best of all, I think Ben’s finally found his niche, just like Keanu.