Thursday, May 21, 2009

Star Trash

Oh blessed be, nerds; oh happy day! Time to gambol. Star Trek is finally cool! HUZZAH! And here’s the bonus: J.J. Abrams, the director, and Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the writers, have found ingeniously oafish ways of crowbarring every single aspect of common Trek lore into the film. The single most moving line in the history of the entire Star Trek canon is destroyed to underline a scene that would have otherwise been quite powerful. It’s obvious the filmmakers studied Gene Roddenberry’s space saga closely, got to know it inside out, and it shows in their slavish and graceless dedication to the franchise. But, you know what they say: Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in your fruit salad.

5 comments:

Robert T. said...

Great review, Ali. But where did this come from, "Let's see how you deal with that hirsute fucker."? And when you wrote in Roger's blog that you disliked Star Trek intensely, I had no idea that it was this intense.

Still, thank you for alerting me to your review. I thought your hiatus would never end.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of your hiatus Ali, I'm still waiting for your Indiana Jones review...or did you forget that you said you were going to write that last summer?

Bobby said...

Dear Ali, I just read your thing about Armond White on Ebert's blog comments, and would like to respectfully disagree with you on one aspect. White's "comparisons that he makes are in the shape of his year-end list of contrarian opinions, which, as previosuly stated, is childish and risible".

If you read his review for "Coraline", you will know that it's 90% saying "Wall-E sucked, this didn't." Is that not a comparasion?

Ali Arikan said...

Hey Bobby,

I had not read his review for "Coraline," and you are right, of course. He does have an obsessive, almost pathological, hatred of everything that Pixar does, doesn't he?

The way he champions an unpopular film by pitting it against a popular one is stupid, but he doesn't do it often. I think it is his prose that is the biggest problem these days.

He is infuriating, sure, but he has a distinct voice. He is not my favourite critic, he is not even in the top ten (which, incidentally, consists of Ebert, Emerson, Uhlich, Seitz, Cozzalio, and Copeland, among others), but I do prefer the way he looks at film to quite a lot of other, rather pedestrian, critics.

That doesn't mean I agree with him, though. Because most of the time, I don't.

Ali Arikan said...

Anonymous - Getting to it. Sorry.