Jon and Kate Plus 8 Billion

Well, if you had to pick one mother for the whole human race, who better than TV’s Kate Gosselin, who’s managing to deal with eight kids of her own (in your face Carol Brady…)?  What’s another 7.9999999999 billion or so?  Send her back in time to the right moment, and boom.  There you go.  It just could happen.  Well, it’d be better than that Cylon Hera kid from Battlestar Galactica.  Wouldn’t it be cool if you could watch mitochondrial “Kate” Eve on TV?  You could be mystified by her self-reliance, restraint, and odd patterns of semi-autonomous asymmetrical hair.  Now that’s science fiction….

Sulu Jonses White Castle

 

Medical Personel Mystified By Unprecedented Gristle Cravings

The casting for the new Star Trek  movie was mostly top notch.    Well, okay, a lot of people really could have been Kirk or Spock, your basic angry hothead or cold logic-driven types.  Nah, the one that was really impressive was Dr. Leonard McCoy.  We all know and love DeForest Kelly’s performance, but how would you describe it, really?  Cantankerous?  Is that even a word anymore?  If it is, McCoy owns it.  No matter, Karl Urban pulled it off with flying colors. Makes you miss the old sickbay scanners just a tad, though.

And John Cho delivered a spot-on performance as Hikaru Sulu.  Cho is a Sulu of action, not slowly delivered repetitions of the same line (“Captain.  Phasers.  Locked.  And.  Ready.”)  And he’s so good in the role that it’s hard to recall his earlier performances as stoner accountant Harold Lee in the Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle movie and all its various sequels (Harold and Kumar Go To Amsterdam, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, and the forthcoming A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas…no, I’m not kidding….)  At least until you leave the theatre and start thinking about it.

I only had one gripe with the new ‘Trek and that’s no matter how big a metaphor it is, you just can’t build a starship in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa.  You’re going to get corn weevils in the warp nacelles.  As a comedy, I only had two gripes about the first Harold and Kumar:  1.  There are White Castles in both Edison, NJ and Greenbrook, NJ that are closer, and 2.  There is no actual hill in Cherry Hill to hang-glide off of.   So that’s why it made sense to go to Canada to film it, I guess: if the actual geography of New Jersey doesn’t match the script, go to Canada.  Do not pass White Castle, do not collect “Slider” pack….

Trek On.
–Raven

Star Trek: What’s the Matter?

So, what IS the “red matter” in the new Star Trek (2009) movie? Could it possibly be some exotic form of Silly Putty? Remember that stuff? It came in a little plastic egg, and you could squash it and stretch it, and it also bounced pretty good. It was actually a type of strange material somewhere between solid and a really slow liquid. The grooviest thing was the way you could flatten it onto a newspaper or comic book, and then peel it away to reveal a copy of whatever was on the page, which you could then proceed to deform as you wished. Hey, don’t laugh, Generation Facebook! This was before scanners and Photoshop, and even photocopiers weren’t that readily available back in the 70s when I was a kid (and Silly Putty was around since the late 50s, so it really was the “analog Photoshop” of its time).

I did think the whole red matter MacGuffin was awesome. Although, I’m not sure if it totally qualifies as a MacGuffin, since it actually provides a function in the movie, even if we don’t really find out exactly what it is – just what it does, which is to (spoilerz) create massive singularities with a convenient script-enhancing, cool-cameo-enabling time-travel component.

As a huge Star Wars fan myself, I have to say this new Star Trek was just incredible – J.J. Abrams and his writers definitely injected some Star Wars genetic material into the Trek DNA, bringing a lot more energy and higher special effects standards to the mix. But the characters really brought the story to life for me – all of them were excellently casted and portrayed spot-on by the actors, with just the right balance of homage to the originals and a fresh take on them.

Nero, the tattooed, Romulan villain of the movie, wasn’t the most interesting evil space alien, but he had a few cool stand-out moments when he wasn’t busy napping or trimming his five-o’clock shadow. His facial tattoos did remind me of another famous sci-fi prequel villain who also sought revenge… someone a bit redder and, er, hornier shall we say (see, everything always comes back to Star Wars for me – sorry Trekkies).

– Nigel Matrix

Why Kirk Can’t Date Normal Women

Famed Intergalactic Explorer Prefers "Salt Vampire" Test to Turing, Voight-Kamff

Long before he sold out to eBay and Priceline, William Shatner produced some very disturbing material.  And not just that “T.J. Hooker” cop show.  I mean those spoken word versions of famous pop songs.  Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.  (But please play loud enough that I can’t hear that spoken word dude next to you….) It’s kind of like a book on tape, except that it’s a song.  Or isn’t.  No, wait.  A song would already be on tape.  My point is, if you can’t sing, and don’t even want to try, why not make books on tape?  Oh, yeah, nobody uses tape anymore.  Except people who send things to random strangers across the country using eBay.  Tape, and bubblewrap.  Why didn’t Shatner make books on bubblewrap?  That would have been cool.  Oh, well.  At least he didn’t pull a “I Am Not Spock” and then turn around and say “I Am Spock” on his next record.  Well, he would have said “Kirk”, but you get the idea.   No, wait, I think he should have done “I Am T.J. Hooker” and then “I Am Not T.J. Hooker” thus ending the great Kirk/Hooker debate.  Which is irrelevant since due to all of his experiences with weird fem/aliens, he can no longer relate to normal human women.  Except for that time that he was one for most of an episode.   Ennh, he still probably couldn’t have related to them then anyway.  No matter.  Just remember the awesome, grusomely hysterical  expressions he made as Evil Kirk in “Mirror, Mirror” and try to sleep at night.  If that doesn’t work, put on some spoken word bubblewrap.