Some thoughts on Star Trek Into Darkness.

I am fortunate, because I have an editor and venue that is interested in hardcore Trekkie thoughts. Take a look, if you're inclined to dig deep (by which I mean Arex and M'Ress, a defense of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Klinzhai realness, and why Hollywood considers Wrath of Khan to be some kind of sacred ur-text). I welcome your thoughts, provided you're not just trying to be a jerkface.

I also made a point of not getting into my usual #1 Star Trek complaint (the abandonment of the Deltans in favor of their community college equivalents, the Betazoids), because the bald female navigator in this film (Ensign Darwin, as credited in the cast list), while she may not supposed to be Deltan, that is certainly the visual impression she gives. That she is an actress of color is even more awesome, because it's about time Paramount gave us some IDIC in action.

Also, here's a link to my take on the 2009 Trek, just to acclimate yourself to my perspectives. Cumberbatch is lightyears better than Bana, that is for damned sure.

At the movies: Salo.

You know what's an interesting challenge? Finding an image from Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, that doesn't trigger about a thousand different NetWatch alerts. 

So I wrote about the late, great Pier Paolo Pasolini's epic of defilement online at The Scene this week, and I hope you might find it an intriguing experience. I have only seen the film once, at a special double feature (with Seul Contre Tous/I Stand Alone) curated and hosted by Gaspar Noe at New York's IFC Center several years back. I share this tidbit not to namedrop, but rather to get at how the film can stay with you long after you see it.

So, Vanderbilt's International Lens series is showing the film, for free, on campus, which is gutsy and admirable. I do not welcome the eStorm of controversy and distraught underclassmen they may encounter, but I'd love to read the eMails after the fact. 

At the movies: Changeling.

For years, the quintessential Angelina Jolie performance was in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow; an interesting but somewhat inert film that exploded into Technicolor life anytime her one-eyed military advisor popped up to unleash an amphibious squadron. With the exception of the tragically underseen A Mighty Heart, she’s been toiling away in character roles with nuclear star wattage ever since her Oscar. So now we get Angelina front-and-center in a hard-hitting melodrama about suffering and persistence, and she’s just marvelous. It’s just a pity that the surrounding film isn’t up to the standard she sets.

Changeling isn’t utterly reprehensible like Absolute Power or The Rookie, nor is it perfunctory like Blood Work. Certainly, in the Clint Eastwood oeuvre, it sits securely above those films. But it’s a mess that feels surprisingly impersonal and atypical, stymied by a script that either lapses all too often into the ridiculous or allows too much ridiculousness from historical record to remain. I have no doubt that there were actual shocking reversals, multiple court cases, mass axe murders, an operatic hanging, and a dramatic jailhouse confrontation. But what we see onscreen doesn’t feel like a movie based on a true story, but rather a true story that seems to be engineered out of the iconography and history of the movies.

The story of the vanished child Walter Collins is a dynamic frame on which to hang the story, but there’s so much else stuffed into the film that it tears itself asunder. Better would have been to focus on the scenes between Jolie’s Christine Collins and the false child foisted upon her by the police. It’s in these three scenes that Changeling achieves the greatness it oh-so-briefly shows, and a leaner, more focused film might have been an emotional juggernaut. But because Eastwood and writer J. Michael Straczynski want to expand the story into a comprehensive portrait of 20s Los Angeles, the focus shifts and falters, and by the time the forcible commitment and quasi-pedophilic ax murders start coming, it’s just simply too late. Fortunately, Eastwood has another film coming later this year, and I’m still more than willing to see anything he puts out. But this isn’t nearly what it could have been. ** ½