Casual Friday, Casual DIE Day!

Insert Erection!

The dancing! The singing! The bearded guy in the bathtub! Are we on a star trek or a pride parade?!

STAR TREK: INSURRECTION is another example of an excellent idea – and I’m not being sarcastic! – ruined by small screen sensibilities and mediocre production values. The very first TREK movie, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979), also had a magnificent “idea” but could not convey the gravitas of that idea, buried beneath the silliness of computer caramel swirls and Shatner death-pauses.

INSURRECTION, the third TREK film featuring THE NEXT GENERATION (TNG) cast, pokes at the very conscience of America; at that fascist idea of a belligerent alien civilization overpowering a weaker indigenous one. Written by Rick Berman and Michael Pillar, it is framed to constantly remind us of America “relocating” the Native tribes of the Land so courteously. So killingly.

The Federation is aiding a bunch of belligerent aliens with ugly loose skin called Son’a, that want to overrun a planet already inhabited by a race called Ba’ku. The planet’s rings emit a regenerative radiation that keeps the Ba’ku young, which is like catnip to the Botox-challenged Son’a.

But Federation captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) heads an INSURRECTION with his crew of girl scouts aboard the Starship Enterprise-E – against the Federation itself, reminding the Federation leader, Admiral Old Guy (Anthony Zerbe – watch out! He tried to kill KISS!) that by “relocating” the Ba’ku the Federation is contravening the Prime Directive; the prime directive being a No Interference Clause regarding civilizations led by people who are hot.

Head MILF of the Ba’ku is Anij (Donna Murphy), who is around 300 years old, but looks a smokin’ 42. She touches Picard’s smooth bald head sensually: “I wonder if you’re aware of the trust that you engender?” And we wonder how long it’s gonna take this starship captain to just lean in and insurrect her. But he keeps talking, which is the surest way to lose that ancient minge: “Some of the darkest chapters in my world involve the forced relocation of a small group of people to satisfy the desires of a larger one.” (Though it is more proof of Picard’s smoother approach to women, as opposed to Kirk’s tackle and grope. And speaking of Kirk, the Ba’ku main man is a Shatner lookalike – Daniel Hugh Kelly!)

Admiral Old Guy cockblocks Picard to continue the relocation argument: “It’s just 600 people” being forcefully moved off-planet. With a boner the size of a baseball bat, Picard retorts, “How many people does it take before it becomes wrong? A thousand, fifty thousand, a million?” Old Guy replies, uncomfortable around Picard’s erection, “These people were not indigenous to this planet. They will be relocated to continue their evolution–” Picard shouts, obviously near orgasm: “Who the HELL are we to determine the next course of evolution for these people?!” And what happens next is too sexy to bear.

Pulled pork killed Mozart!

The Son’a are led by Ru’afo (F. Murray Abraham in a stretchy, loose-skinned face). The Federation owns the planet, but Ru’afo has the technology to harvest the regenerative radiation from the rings. Old Guy deludes himself it’s to help billions of people, but Ru’afo just wants to pick up chicks again. The process would wipe out life on the planet – that’s why the relocation effort, that’s why the unholy alliance. But Old Guy shoulda guessed the Son’a had ulterior motives because – ugly people are evil, right?

Such is the conundrum facing Enterprise-E and its cast of glorified extras: feeling youth’s invigoration returning (which accounts for Picard’s singing and dancing), whilst knowing they have to give that up to stay principled. Geordi (Levar Burton) is regaining his sight being in the proximity of the rings, but would gladly give it up to peer through an air filter for ethics; Worf (Michael Dorn) is going through puberty, because even in space, we need a token Klingon; the two window dressing females (Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis) feel their boobs firm up, but the rings don’t seem to have improved their abysmal acting; and speaking of boobs, there’s first mate Riker (Jonathan Frakes), whom we meet coming onto Sirtis creepily, and are then tortured with the sight of him in a bathtub with her shaving his body hair. While the most beloved TNG character, Data (Brent Spiner), learns how to roll in the hay, literally. He makes the point that due to feeling rejuvenated and young, the crew feel frisky enough to rebel.

Jonathan Frakes directs, with the eye of a man well-versed in television sitcoms. After trying his hand at a few TNG TV shows, starting in 1990, his first directorial feature film was 1996’s STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT. His second film is this one. And since then (at the time of writing, February 2017), Frakes has directed only TV and two alarmingly mediocre movies (CLOCKSTOPPERS 2002 and THUNDERBIRDS 2004). Any wonder then, that his sensibilities run congruent with TV framing, TV production, TV acting and TV cockblocking?

Once the premise/allegory is set, the rest of the movie is a tiresome rehash of lasers going “pishew pishew,” warships “roaring” through the vacuum of space, explosions onboard starships with electrical sparks flying out of equipment to signify damage, camera tilts to signify being hit with lasers that go “pishew,” bad guys talking when they should be shooting, and the Enterprise-E battling the Son’a ship in a nebula cloud that ignorantly resembles a water-vapor cloud in Earth’s sky, only redder. I can’t even begin to explain how Trekkies have not the faintest clue why there is No Science in STAR TREK…

Even in the future, and even on a spaceship where living space is at a premium, Picard finds air ducts large enough for a man to crawl through.

Funniest moment in the film must surely go to F. Murray Abraham, who, as he is being vaporized, gives a scream that is half-rooster, half-dolphin.

Picard gets the girl – but must leave her when the mission is completed. But it’s not as tragic as he makes it sound. In a universe where warp speed exists, there is no need for goodbyes. If people are only a few seconds away from each other via warp drive or teleportation, there is no such thing as tyranny of distance or time. Picard can come back and see her any time he damn well pleases. He’s only making that excuse about “leaving” because he wants to hit it and quit it. (Hmm, he’s more like Shatner than we thought!) We boyz, Picard. We got your back.

When is he going to admit he only started insurrection to insert his surrection.

END

A Date With Density.

The pitch: Two men get trapped in a mine shaft. Nothing happens. Then they get rescued. The end. The suits harrumph: where’s the drama? The screenwriter and her agent scramble: well, we flash back to generic good times with families and watch the trapped guys banally discuss heroism and loyalty and STARSKY AND HUTCH.

Imagine you’re really really short.

The suits aren’t buying it. The screenwriter and her agent squirm. Seen it a thousand times in movies and LASSIE episodes and probably on GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.

The screenwriter lightbulbs. Change “mine shaft” to “World Trade Center.” Suddenly: funding. And now, not only can they append the wholly untrue “Based on a True Story” with impunity, they can also afford Oliver Stone and Nicolas Cage and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello…

But it’s still just “two guys trapped in a mine shaft.”

Oliver Stone‘s WORLD TRADE CENTER is not about the World Trade Center. Nor does it posit stances or pose questions on conspiracies, religionism, racism, political ideologies, oil collusion or White House incompetence. Which raises the obvious question: why then make a movie about the World Trade Center at all?

To invoke a known audience. “World Trade Center” has become synonymous with “9-11” (itself a contraction of a culture-shocking event) and both have become shorthand for identifying the modern version of the Common Enemy and proselytizing on courage and heroism and misplaced patriotism. Attaching that moniker to any media – however tangentially – sells tickets.

Now imagine you’re seeing a big ice cream cone.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is about two beat cops, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) who are trapped in the rubble of Tower 1’s collapse before they even get the chance to rescue one civilian. (Guess we’ve added yet another criterion to the term “heroism”: anyone who intends to rescue people but needs to be rescued himself after doing nothing.)

The first act is restrained film-making at its best, as Stone shows us Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawning like any other mundane workday, New York populace going through the motions of city life. Comparisons with the unobtrusive camera of Paul Greengrass’s superior UNITED 93 are unavoidable, and – like that movie – a vicarious thrill builds in our bones, for we know something that the New Yorkers don’t: that today is going to be so far removed from mundane it will gouge out its own vernacular in history.

The first intimation that there is something horribly awry with this particular September 11th is an ominous plane-shaped shadow whooshing over the cityscape…

Stone does not explicitly show airplanes impacting Towers (it would remove focus from his characters), but his scenes of destruction and mayhem are as good as cinema gets. And though there are still whiners puling “too soon,” the audience yet extracts a rubbernecker’s glee from watching this unimaginable tragedy unfold with astoundingly seamless special effects from a Ground Zero ringside seat.

Now imagine you’re Superman.

Stone has also captured excellent performances with the shock, surprise, horror and incredulity of the officers arriving at Ground Zero. Those of us who were not there could never hope to imagine what uncontainable emotions overwhelmed each First Responder’s breast as he gazed up at a tableau which the wildest imagination could never conjure.

And after injecting us into the heart of the action, with a breath-stopping sequence trapping our stars under mountains of rubble, the film – like the World Trade Center – collapses. For there is nowhere to go – literally and figuratively – and it becomes obvious that inexperienced screenwriter Andrea Berloff has formulaically set up a tearjerker just waiting to happen.

There’s a fine line between restrained and boring. And Stone’s hand seems so stultified by the gutless executives who funded this project that he resignedly points his camera over the wrong side of that line. Though he tries to retain relevance to the 9-11 Götterdämmerung (by inserting actual newsreel footage of slimy Mayor Giuliani, faux-President Bush, reports on United Flight 93, the Pentagon crash, et al), even the earth-shuddering impact of the WTC Towers collapsing is soon forgotten when the story turns its focus on the wives of the trappees (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello) and their maudlin, Academy-tilted performances. It turns into just “two guys trapped in a mine shaft.”

The movie also loses what little objectivity it strived for when Jimeno launches into an extended “heroism” speech (which veritably bends over and spreads its cheeks for the hero mongers). Meanwhile, Cage’s initial heartfelt performance of McLoughlin diminishes over time, as he uses up the film’s one allocated swear word (as decreed by the MPAA for PG-13 films) early in his desperation and then becomes non-believable, as no one in this mind-breaking situation ever swears after that one transgression, making it all as painfully PG-13 as any Freddie Prinze Junior debacle.

“What? No conspiracy?”

And while Jimeno has dumb Jesus dreams, McLoughlin inertly flashes back to his four kids with the hands-down hottest MILF in the neighborhood (Bello). The flashbacks are smartly executed: one partner is shown beginning the flashback and as the syrup reaches danger levels, the other partner is shown at the tail end of the flashback, making it seem like both partners were flashing back on the same LEAVE IT TO BEAVER moment. (If any of our lives were half as idyllic as the “real life” characters portrayed in any 9-11 movie, the Muslims who razed the Towers would have defected over to white-bread Christianity millennia ago. Or maybe that’s why they razed them.)

Nothing continues to happen, proving conclusively that not every true story is worth telling.

The rescue of the two men contains its fair share of nail-biting and was apparently instigated by an ex-Marine, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), who abandoned his job in Connecticut and traveled to Ground Zero because “God called him.” (While talking to Karnes, God must have neglected to head on over to Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Florida and talk to Bush about the attacks. Without a direct word from God, how could anyone be expected to abandon the compelling Pet Goat to lead a country? Evidently, only after the attacks does God deign to start talking with W.) As we learn of Karnes’s delusional nature (obsessing over Marine ethos to the point of asking to be addressed as “Staff Sergeant”), we realize this is the exact type of bulldog fundamentalist bred by the American Armed Forces, and that it wasn’t God calling him after all – it was his red neck.

Staunch performances by the supporting cast (Stephen Dorff, Frank Whaley, Brad William Henke) add little to the pat formula.

To its credit, the story does not make it seem like rescuing its two stars puts an end to the horror, and the unfinished nature of the rescues and aftermath are noted; Jimeno’s family walk past a wall posted with hundreds of Missing Person flyers, Karnes emerges from the rescue rubble talking of retribution, Dorff’s policeman laments the multitude not accounted for, and McLoughlin himself had to undergo 2 years of medically-induced comas and 27 surgeries – well, that’ll happen when a World Trade Center falls on you. Or maybe he just wanted to look like John Travolta again.

Only 20 people were pulled out of the WTC rubble alive. Only eighteen more True Stories with movie deals to go…

END