A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Little Green Men"

"Little Green Men"
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Spacerguy has explained in his participation of the challenge this year how Worf ended up in The Next Generation.  I mention this because originally Gene Roddenberry didn't want Klingons, or any other familiar aliens, in Picard's adventures.  Instead, it would be all-new ones, like the Ferengi.

Now, the Ferengi as originally depicted in Next Generation were...not quite worthy successors to the Klingons.  There was the episode ("The Battle") where Picard's backstory begins turning things around a little, but it wasn't until Deep Space Nine that Ferengi could truly be taken seriously.  Still, "Ferengi episode" is a common term among even this show's fans, and it's not uttered with affection.  In fact, the episode that's generally regarded as the show's worst, "Profit and Lace," is of course a "Ferengi episode."

Perhaps tellingly, every time Deep Space Nine visited the Mirror Universe (the alternate reality first introduced in the original series episode "Mirror, Mirror"), a Ferengi is killed off.

All that considered, especially in Deep Space Nine, I personally loved the Ferengi.  Bartender Quark, ever the scheming pragmatist and therefore thorn in the side of Odo (chief of security, shape-shifter, eventual love interest of Kira Nerys), alone did an excellent job of redeeming them.  Eventually his brother Rom and nephew Nog became worthy companions in this crusade.  "Little Green Men" is the episode where they all undeniably shine together.

It's a time travel episode.  As the title implies, it's one of science fiction's many explanations for Roswell, New Mexico, and its long association with UFO conspiracy lore.  Nog has become the first Ferengi admitted to Starfleet Academy, but of course this doesn't stop Quark from attempting to make a side profit as the family journeys to Earth, which backfires so spectacularly they end up thrown into the past.

Watching as Army officers attempt to understand these strange aliens, before a bobby pin is used to repair Universal Translators hilariously hidden inside the outsize ears of our unusual heroes, it's pure comedy gold.

To say nothing of a more subtle in-joke that sees Nog digging through Earth history and coming across the profile of Gabriel Bell, who looks suspiciously like Captain Sisko.  This is because Sisko became Bell in the classic two-part "Past Tense" the previous season.  (You could do a lot worse to introduce yourself to the whole series, if you've never seen Deep Space Nine, with a viewing of both "Little Green Men" and "Past Tense."  And then throw in "Trials and Tribble-ations" for good measure.  And then "The Visitor," one of the best episodes of the whole franchise.)

All of which is to say, this is definitely an experience you need to see to truly grasp how awesome it is.  It may even have you liking Ferengi, and then you will have a totally different interpretation when you hear the term, "Ferengi episode," because there are plenty more good ones to discover.

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "The Killing Game"

"The Killing Game"
Star Trek: Voyager

This two-part episode features the aliens known as the Hirogen, hunters who hounded Janeway and her crew for a while (in the ship's defense, the Hirogen had a sweet data plan complete with tech specialist Andy Dick).  For one reason or another, the Hirogen choose to stick the crew in a holodeck program where they act out WWII, and everyone pretends this is completely logical, even when the lead Hirogen intones, "This is not a game!" even though, ah, it clearly is.

And incredibly, this is not the only Star Trek two-parter to features aliens masquerading as Nazis!  (There was also Enterprise's "Storm Front.")

Okay, and so while I'm being somewhat flippant today, "Killing Game" is actually a lot of fun (which is always odd to say in relation to Nazis; see also: Inglourious Basterds), and is also indicative of how so much of the franchise after the original series, which was clearly modeled on the Cold War era, was kind of fixated on WWII (Deep Space Nine's Dominion War, certainly).

Also, in the program, Janeway becomes a leader of the French resistance, while Chakotay is an American soldier.  This is ironic, because in some ways the Maquis (as the name implies even in an obvious way) were modeled after the French resistance and Starfleet would be analogous to Americans, meaning for "Killing Game" Janeway and Chakotay swapped backstories.

The Hirogen, no matter if I've spent a little too much time making light of them, were actually some of the best aliens Voyager featured.  One of them even gave the famed Species 8472 (the CGI beings who at one point were kind of set up to be the show's answer to the Borg, until it relented and just mad the Borg the show's Borg) a run for their money.  A lot of fans tended to question when the series featured any one adversary for an extended period of time, but it made a great deal of sense, especially if the enemy in question was nomadic or sprawling in some other way, as the Hirogen were and certainly the Kazon (the guys who looked like even grubbier Klingons and were most famous for involving themselves in the treacherous affairs of Seska, who helped make the early seasons some excellent material to revisit) as well.

#811. Songs that have helped me through the process

Over the past year, when the whole process of my mother dying began to take shape, I had an opportunity to channel my thoughts through music I had already been listening to.  In a weird sort of way, you might even say I was drawn to that music in the first place because I knew I would eventually need it.

"I Shall Not Walk Alone" was a song I first encountered on Lost, and it instantly connected with me more than ten years ago.  And yet, as my mother progressively and quite literally lost the ability to walk on her own, it took on new resonance.

"Sad Caper" was one of those Hootie and the Blowfish songs that helped me to see the band as something other than a musical fad, which was what it was twenty years ago.  I knew these guys had a lot more to say.  "Control has left me / and I can't feel another thing / so let me hold you down," is actually repeated at the start of another track from their Fairweather Johnson album, and again, I could not possibly have scripted a more appropriate sentiment in watching my mother deteriorate.

"Exodus," also sung by Darius Rucker, is perhaps the most personal of the bunch.  I moved back home a year and a half ago in part to help my mother, and it became a special kind of privilege to help her as she struggled, because there were of course moments when the emotional turmoil was greater than the physical one, and she needed someone to support her in that way.

And now that she has passed away, even the grieving process is made easier by remembering these songs.  I had one more privilege during this time, and it was delivering the eulogy at her funeral, and I chose to use that opportunity to spotlight how important music was in her life.  That's why I posted the last batch of videos, all of which (plus more) I referenced in the eulogy.  It made for a mostly lighthearted moment in the midst of a sad one, and I think that's another of music's great abilities.  It can take you anywhere.  And that's what my mother meant to me.

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "The Jihad"

"The Jihad"
Star Trek: The Animated Series

A group of bloggers I've followed for a few years now has chosen to watch The Animated Series all the way through.  They're writing about their experiences, which you can find every Wednesday (or Fridays in the case of The Geek Twins as part of their Geek Bits feature; the others are Armchair Squid, Mock!, and Spacerguy).  I actually recently just finished writing about each episode in the series for another of my blogs, Star Trek Fan Companion, where I've been working at reviewing every episode of the franchise for several years now.

But chances are, if you've seen this series at all, you might have been one of the viewers who watched its original run forty years ago, because since that time it's been considered less than officially part of Star Trek canon.  Until a new home video release a few years back, it was just something a lot of fans knew about but had never had a chance to see for themselves.

"The Jihad" is not particularly an episode worth recommending.  The episode everyone who knows anything about the series knows is "Yesteryear," which has been drawn on for years in canon material, most recently in 2009's Star Trek.

So what is "The Jihad"?  Less favorable for its legacy is that by the title alone it's perhaps the most obvious of the many, many Star Trek references that might look a lot less innocuous post-9/11 than it might have previously.  I plan on writing a whole article on Star Trek's famous terrorists.  Understand that none of them exist in material post-9/11 itself (when Enterprise was launched, actually).  "The Jihad," mind you, doesn't have anything to do with terrorists, but today hearing that term seems less acceptable than it would have when the episode's title debuted.  That must be acknowledged.

(It might also be stressed that "jihad" is an Islamic term concerning holy war, and does not specifically refer to terrorism.  But today, it's hard not to associate radical Islam with terrorism.)

So if not terrorists, who?  Basically it's an episode featuring a bunch of alien species, of which prototype, famously, was the original series' "Journey to Babel."  And since this is The Animated Series, which felt free to come up with the most wild alien designs it could imagine (to be outdone later by the five Xindi species from Enterprise in the CGI era), you can expect to find a lot of wild alien designs indeed, all of which are much like all those alien designs the Kirk movies liked to populate in the background, none of which were ever seen again (amazingly, even the species responsible for the Federation president in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Impulse"

"Impulse"
Star Trek: Enterprise

During the Xindi arc that was in fact the entire third season of Enterprise, Star Trek finally got to do zombies.  Let me rephrase that for maximum awesome: Vulcan zombies.

Enterprise, as you may or may not know, was a "prequel," in that it was set before the events of any other Star Trek.  As such, there were a lot of expectations, and quite gleefully Enterprise more or less subverted all of them.  The biggest subversion concerned Vulcans.  Vulcans in Enterprise hated humans, and they made no bones about it.  Remember Star Trek: First Contact and that feel-good moment at the end when it turns out the title refers to Vulcans?  And Enterprise was more or less a sequel to First Contact, mind you (there was even a whole episode dedicated to what happened to all the Borg remains, "Regeneration").  That whole idea turned out a lot worse in practice than in theory, as it turns out, Vulcans interacting with humans.

And while Vulcans were still more or less completely recognizable, as a culture they exhibited a distinct break from how Spock would later represent them.  The biggest break was in fact how the idea of mind-melds were treated at this time.  "Stigma" famously presented Vulcans who practiced them as more or less analogous to the LGBT community.  Fans were pretty livid about Vulcans in Enterprise.  By the fourth season, Captain Archer helps revive the philosophy of the famous Surak, founder of Vulcan logic, as the fourth season made continuous efforts to appease fans.  But of course, the fourth season was also the last one of the series.  (Too little too late.)

So what do Vulcan zombies have to do with any of this?  In short, T'Pol's arc in the third season, which itself was a manifestation of the inner turmoil she'd experienced all along, the lone Vulcan in a ship crewed almost exclusively by humans (aside from the dear Dr. Phlox, naturally).  Some fans remember T'Pol best for the sexy times she spent in various states of undress (a significant moment of which occurred in the third season), but she was in fact a notably nuanced character whose journey in the series closely matched that of Trip, arguably the best thing about the whole series and with whom she shared most of her screen time.

Zombie Vulcans is what would have happened to T'Pol, too, if she hadn't known what to do that season, even if there were a few stumbling blocks along the way.  The region of space where the five species of Xindi inhabited was bad for Vulcans, so bad that if entered without precautions taken, they became zombie Vulcans.  "Impulse" is full of zombie Vulcans.  That's the whole episode.

And Spock was at the receiving end of human bigotry, it must be remembered.  How do you think that happens, anyway?  Because the road to what has always been described as the perfect future was in fact a bumpy one.  Along the way, zombie Vulcans.  Because there ought to be some fun involved, right?

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Heroes and Demons"

"Heroes and Demons"
Star Trek: Voyager

This was one of several episodes Voyager got to much quicker than fans might have expected (B'Elanna Torres being split into her human and Klingon components in "Faces" was another).  It's a holodeck episode, which was one of the more notorious story types from The Next Generation.  But in Voyager there's a unique reason to have a holodeck episode: The Doctor.

No, I didn't randomly switch topics again.  The Doctor, not as in Doctor Who but rather the Emergency Medical Hologram, who in the early seasons was confined exclusively to sickbay because that was the only area of the ship equipped to project him.  Except, y'know, the holodeck.  So this was the episode where that finally happened.

"Heroes and Demons" might otherwise be known as the Beowulf episode, because that's the holodeck program that ends up being corrupted and needs to be played out.  And the only person aboard the ship qualified to complete it is also the one who seems least qualified: not only an individual who technically did not exist until he was activated in the wake of the ship's catastrophic entrance into the Delta Quadrant, but an apparent balding man who when he isn't being acerbic is actually quite nebbish.

In other words, this is the episode that establishes what The Doctor is truly made of, and I'm not talking about his programming.  (Much like the Moriarty hologram from Next Generation, "Doc" seems to have gained sentience simply from the unique circumstances in which he first appears.  One minute he's uttering, "Please state the nature of the medical emergency," for the first time and the next he's being told that everything he knows about his programming is in fact being thrown out.)

Yes, this is the first time they tease The Doctor getting an actual name and no, it never happens in seven seasons (in the series finale he does settle on one, in an alternate future timeline).

Most of The Doctor's early development comes from his unique relationship with Kes, another apparent innocent with a few tricks up their sleeve.  Of all the original characters from the series, they most embody the fresh start envisioned in the pilot (Tom Paris and certainly Torres are their closest rivals, until Seven comes along and kind of blows everyone out of the water, which in hindsight was probably appropriate, considering she was a bombshell) and undergo the fiercest trials during their time.  Just when Kes seems like she's gotten her peace, she comes back a couple seasons later in the controversial "Fury," an episode that actually encapsulates the true legacy of Voyager quite well (you understand, not in a negative way; I love this series).

Two additional standout Doctor episodes would be "Latent Image" and "Author, Author," both of which completely deconstruct Next Generation's more famous "The Measure of a Man."

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Genesis"

Something-something-something Zola makes a movie called Genesis, which is about Eve.  It's animated and Zola sings and as such it's everything Tim loves about her.  And it's a good movie, too, which deconstructs the idea of the princess while at the same time telling a biblical story without being particularly biblical about it.  Except, of course, because it is biblical without being biblical, it has a hard time finding any appreciation, from either audiences or critics.

Then again, you should know that Tim has an overly active imagination.  Zola did not actually make Genesis.  It's in fact a version of a story Tim himself would writer later, after seeing Hollywood Minute.  This is part of the fantasy.  The only movies in this whole sequence that make any difference at all are Hollywood Minute, Fall of Troy, and maybe Little Green Men (just because).  

...The truth is, Tony Laplume (the author) realized he was no longer interested in doing this year's challenge the way he originally conceived it, and this was before the month actually began.  As you may or may not know, his mother passed away at the end of March.

So here's what the idea was, pulling back the curtain:

Joe and Zola and Hollywood Minute are analogues for (500) Days of Summer.  Which is to say, Joe is Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zola is Zooey Deschanel.  At various points in this would-be chronicle of their careers, the actors Heath Ledger and Kirsten Dunst (the latter usually in tandem with Sofia Coppola, who was the model for the director Penner) were also to be substituted where appropriate. 

Which is to also correlate (to date):

• Albatross = The Patriot (making it a Heath Ledger movie)
• Bounty = Ned Kelly (making it another Heath Ledger movie)
• Child's Play = Our Idiot Brother (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie)
• The Dauphin = Marie Antoinette (making it a Kirsten Dunst/Sofia Coppola movie)
• Equinox = Looper (making it a Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie)
• Genesis = Noah (making it an Emma Watson movie)

And later movies already referenced:

• Heroes and Demons = The Virgin Suicides (making it a Kirsten Dunst/Sofia Coppola movie)
• Impulse = Candy (making it a Heath Ledger movie)
• Little Green Men = Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and/or Mars Attacks! (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie and/or a Natalie Portman movie)
• The Savage Curtain = The Dark Knight (making it a Heath Ledger movie, although the idea was to also mix in The Phantom of the Opera)

I also sketched in:

• Rascals = Elf (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie)

Now, I didn't make Fall of Troy synonymous with anything, mostly because I hadn't really been thinking about what the reunion project might be until I'd actually begun writing posts last week.  As it is, I love the Trojan War as a story.  If I were more clever, I would have done the whole challenge with that as my topic.  

Tim, by the way, is my fictional alter ego.  This was much more obvious from my perspective, as I've been writing Tim stories for the past few years now.  The bit about Tim killing Stephen King is actually a riff on a story I wrote recently, which references the incident King experienced in 1999 when a passing motorist struck him, which I crossed with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (making it a Zooey Deschanel reference).  Hollywood Minute, this future relationship with Zola, and explaining away killing Stephen King as described in the original story, is the first time Tim has branched into his own life, which is to say, the whole thing became a fantasy concerning not Joe and Zola, but Tim and Zola, which is to say, Tony Laplume and Zooey Deschanel.

Which will clearly never happen in real life.

Going forward, I'm really just going to deconstruct yet further, because there is another layer that I had hinted at previously:

• "Albatross" (an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series)
• "Bounty" (an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise)
• "Child's Play" (an episode of Star Trek: Voyager)
• "The Dauphin" (an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation)
• "Equinox" (a two-part episode of Star Trek: Voyager)
• "Favor the Bold" (an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
• "Genesis" (an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation)

And so on.  I think going forward I'm just going to talk about Star Trek episodes.  Coming up with an episode for every letter of the alphabet and have the titles sound somewhat plausible as movies was itself a tricky task.  I learned "xindi," for instance, is not necessarily a name coined by the writers of Star Trek: Enterprise, but also the name of a Chinese flute.

One final piece of trivia concerning what this was originally intended to be: The characters were supposed to have first and last names.  Zola's was Zola Beck.  Which, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I more or less knew it from somewhere else.  Jolene Blalock (Star Trek: Enterprise) plays a character named Lola Beck in Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.  It only figures.

I like to talk Star Trek.  Half my first year doing A to Z was spent talking Star Trek.  So coming back to it will not, for me, be much of a problem.  And I suspect no one will much care my abandoning what I clearly was approaching tepidly at best, ultimately being completely uninterested in doing much more than I had settled into already.  The Fall of Troy bit was actually the most useful thing I've done this month, because I have been planning on writing a version of Troilus and Cressida for years, and this is the first time I've made any real headway on how to approach it.  (Not necessarily set in space, though, or in stop-motion animation.)

All of which is to say, tomorrow will be completely different.

A to Z 2015 Hollywood Minute "Favor the Bold"

Hey, let's face it.  Even though the usual scheme is to follow the movie careers of Joe and Zola outside of Hollywood Minute and Fall of Troy, which here would lead to a tepid discussion of Joe's Favor the Bold, you don't want to read about that.  You want to know about Fall of Troy.  And let's get the obvious out of the way, too:

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Favor the Bold: Minimal.  It's not a bad movie, to Tim's reckoning, and would have led to some interesting talking points, if something else hadn't hogged all the attention.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Fall of Troy: This is when the fantasy ends, of course.  During the making of this movie, Zola and Tim fall in love.  Rest assured, just because you know the ending, doesn't mean the rest of the story isn't worth exploring.

Which leaves us here:

Fall of Troy 

We begin in live action as Cressida's father defects to the Greeks.  As this is discussed among the Trojan ranks, Troilus argues the merits of handing Helen over, ideally in the form of a trade, in order to facilitate the end of the war, when he sees: 

The face to risk it all,

against the ships,

to defy the fall. 

Their romance is instance and intense.  Here's where we switch to stop-motion animation, contrasting young lovers with the horrors of the battlefield, as mighty warriors clash in epic duels (particularly spotlighted are the brave Hector, fighting on the side of the Trojans, and the sullen Achilles, who sings everything as a hopeless ballad even though he wins all the time).  To make it all the more thrilling, of course, the whole thing is set in space, with the fighting taking place between single-pilot ships as they dramatically pursue each other looking for the best angles at which to fire (very much like a gunfight in a Western, actually). 

We are once again in live action.  When Cressida is forced to choose between loyalty to her father and her love of Troilus, she sings her own version of the first song: 

The face to risk it all,

against all hope,

to defy the fall! 

She knows as well as anyone that the Trojans were doomed all along.  She makes an impassioned plea for Troilus to join her, but he refuses, instead opting for one last assault against Achilles.  The movie ends with Cressida having decided to try and intervene, not on the side of the Greeks or Trojans, but on behalf of Troilus.  True love.

That's what happens in the movie.  During the making of the movie, Zola finds herself equally torn.  She has never seriously considered a romance with Joe before, and so making a movie with him again is the moment when she must confront the idea for the first time.  And in a weird kind of way, Tim undergoes the same torment.  Before writing the screenplay, Tim had never been in a position to actually meet Zola, and so he had still been clinging to the idea of the Joe/Zola fantasy.  Then everything changes.  True love.

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Equinox"

It's worth noting that Joe never really became a reliable box office draw.  Every now and then it would seem as if he might be, but then an effort like Equinox would be released, which was not even strictly sold as a Joe movie so much as a must-see experience on a number of levels, and it still wouldn't be much of a hit.  Seriously, and Tim had every reason to care, too, not for the least because it was one of several movies that was almost a reunion for Joe and Zola, who would have been the third lead, the woman Joe comes across while he's on the run, not only from thugs but from a version of himself, played by veteran action star Clark Bridges.

As Zola explains years later, she'd already had her fill of movies like that, or thought she had.  Which might explain why The Fall of Troy is set in the future.  And is done in stop-motion animation.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Equinox: At first not very good, but getting better.

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "The Dauphin"

The best movie Zola appeared in (besides Hollywood Minute) was definitely The Dauphin, which was also one of her collaborations with Penner, a director who came from industry royalty but redeemed her reputation behind the camera after a disastrous debut in front of it (don't ask).

Penner, by the way, is the one Tim first approaches with the screenplay that will reunite Zola and Joe.

As their numerous collaborations imply, Zola and Penner became close friends quickly, trusted creative partners who could count on each other when other avenues closed to them.  Zola had been part of an ensemble for Heroes and Demons, but she was the clear standout.  This was early in her career.  Every actor does ensemble work at some point.  Sometimes it comes down to the merits of the project itself, and sometimes the director, and sometimes, because this is how it works, whether or not the actor has had general exposure previously.  It's a cruel game of novelties.

And yes, The Dauphin is a period piece, which is one way Zola and Joe's careers converge even before Hollywood Minute.  Stick a pretty girl in an elaborate dress, right?  But the thing is, she stood out in a genre that normally swallows actors whole if they're not careful by using all conventions against themselves.  In essence, Zola proved herself timeless.

Well of course.  Zola's daughter will one day view this movie and wonder, Is that what she was really like?  And Tim will say, She still is.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to The Dauphin: A head above.

(By the way, the big reunion project is The Fall of Troy.  You know, Paris and Helen.  Troilus and Cressida.)

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Child's Play"

Sadly, Zola does not get a lot of great movie parts, even though she's awesome.  Even Tim loses track of her film career after a while.  She starts appearing in stuff like Child's Play, where her role is completely insignificant, a complete reversal of where she'd been heading before Hollywood Minute.  Typical chauvinism.  She ends up on TV, but even in her own show (That's New!) she competes for screen time unsuccessfully with a significantly larger group of men against one female colleague who in fact doesn't have much to do with her.

That's about it, really.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Child's Play: Terrible.  Does even Zola realize she's in it?  Granted, the movie isn't actually all that bad, and Tim would have watched it for any number of other reasons, but in the future, when they talk, they don't talk about Child's Play.  Especially not around the children!  Okay, okay, so Joe definitely does, when they get together (amicably, all three of them), but the fun he's having at Zola's expense is out of love!  Really!

(And then, yes, Tim kills Stephen King.  By accident.  After a few years, they laugh about that, too.  Because the version the public knows about these events is a fictional account written by Stephen King's son.  No, not Joe Hill.  The other one.)

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Bounty"

In the not-too-distant future, before he accidentally kills Stephen King (so far as his defense attorney claims), Tim becomes married to Zola, by the way.  Call this fantasy if you'd like, but that's what happens.  Tim is also the screenwriter for the movie that eventually pairs Zola and Joe again, years after Hollywood Minute.  He pens a full-blown musical, which incredibly, neither actor has done before despite exhibiting ample talent in that regard, Zola in particular.

But this is well before that happens.  As Zola dreams of working with Joe, Tim dreams of working with Zola, and the odd journey involves the making of Hollywood Minute, and dreaming that Joe and Zola will one day work together again.  Got it?

Tim spends a lot of time bugging Ozzie, his reluctant best friend, about these things.  Sometimes Ozzie has no idea why he humors Tim so much.  Maybe because he's morbidly interested to know how it'll all end.  Probably in hilarious tragedy, right?  Except even though life tends to work that way, sometimes it doesn't.  It's just that, life works in slow motion.

Joe's next big project after Albatross was Bounty, the movie where he began to realize what every actor knows: he's become a "type."  He's the young actor who's supposed to make historical dramas relevant again.  Except as Christian Fletcher, Joe is given very little direction, has no real sense of character other than to be solemn, and so his performance is listless, the movie flops, and his career instantly begins to flag.  Does anyone at all notice Bounty?  It's not even that it's a bad movie, per say.  As usual, lively Robert Speed injects vitality into it, as he does in another of Joe's films, Impulse (more on that later), and maybe he's even the inspiration for Joe's best performance, the instantly legendary Savage Curtain (more on that later, too).

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Bounty: Retrograde.  No, actually Zola is a contrarian.  Ah, just like Tim.  She liked him in it.  To be clear, Joe is the third member of a fantasy love triangle.

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Albatross"

One of Tim's favorite movies is Hollywood Minute.  In a different era it would have the same reputation as When Harry Met Sally..., acknowledged as one of the great romantic films of our time, a definitive statement on the vagaries of love and fate.  Except it isn't, which makes it all the easier for Tim to view it as a personal treasure.  He's made little secret of the fact that he loves Hollywood Minute in part because of lead actress Zola, who infuriates Tim by the end of the movie because her character ends up rejecting the one played by Joe, although it's not really rejection so much as realizing that they weren't meant for each other.  (Rest assured, Tim couldn't really hate Zola.)  Except Hollywood Minute is so important in both their careers, they maintain an association that for Tim is easy to drag into the world of fantasy, where that happy ending really did occur.

And so he envisions their careers as a form of destiny leading to that moment where the distinction of fantasy no longer applies.  Because everything points back to Hollywood Minute, and not so much how it ends but where it leads.

Joe's first big success was Albatross, in which he was not the star but the up-and-coming young star intended to shine in a supporting role.  All that maddening calculation that went into engineering his breakthrough kind of backfires, because even though it's a hit, no one associates it as his hit.  To remember that he was in it at all is to realize that Joe was not considered important enough to play the lead.  Besides, he dies well before the end of the movie.  Bummer.  On to the next one, right?  

It's always been a favorite of Tim's.  He was a fan of Joe before Albatross, and after Hollywood Minute he had all the more reason to keep the rest of Joe's movies in mind when he wanted to watch something, but it's one he doesn't have to force himself to watch for the sake of watching, which he has to admit isn't always the case.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Albatross: Neutral.  Or maybe, it's what caught Zola's eye, too?  So not neutral.  Getting ready... 

#800. Some pertinent jingles

#799. Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time...

Jeannine Laplume (2/5/42-3/26/15)

#798. 2015 A-to-Z Challenge

Next week the next A-to-Z Challenge begins.  I first participated in 2012, and I owe whatever audience I've had in the ensuing years to that month.  I intend to take part for the fourth consecutive time.  Apparently I missed the theme reveal, though I do have one.

The thing is, I don't know whether I'll be able to complete it.  The past two Decembers I've given updates on my mother's battle with cancer.  Suffice to say, that battle appears about ready to conclude.  Her worsening condition is the reason why I've drastically reduced my blogging over the course of the last year.

Right now, I'm considering writing at least part of the Challenge in advance.  I've preferred in the past to leave each day to the day itself, although I cheated last year except in the actual production of the crappy comic strips I foisted on readers.

Or, I may not do anything at all.  We'll see.  But now you'll know.  The biggest change is that my half-hearted efforts to read along with other participants and/or offer comments, which has always been the heart of this community, may suffer most of all.  And I know how important it is to everyone else that they know they're being heard, because I know how directly they make it known when they haven't heard back.  (Yeah, I'm giving you all a guilt trip in the midst of making me sound sympathetic.  I'm just that awesome.)  My visitors tend to go away when I go away, too.  Don't try and pretend otherwise, yo.

I just thought I'd give you an explanation.

#797. Box Office 2014

1. American Sniper ($344 mil)
Late entry became a huge hit.  Good movie, too.

2. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 ($337 mil)
Third of four movies in the trilogy had the year's box office crown until it was taken away.  It's maybe time to think about telling a final book's story in one movie.

3. Guardians of the Galaxy ($333 mil)
Obviously American Sniper was a big surprise success, but this one might still be considered bigger.

4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($259 mil)
Arguably made Cap relevant.

5. The LEGO Movie ($257 mil)
Honestly, the fact that they made a watchable movie at all was another big surprise from the year.  Are you catching on to the fact that 2014 was basically one surprise after another yet?

6. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies ($254 mil)
Surely a respectable total for the conclusion to a movie experience everyone demanded up until the first entry was actually released.  As opposed to the Harry Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games model, Jackson's complete reworking of a single book is ultimately more justifiable creatively, although popularly a much harder sell.

7. Transformers: Age of Extinction ($245 mil)
Two former franchise titans in a row falling on much smaller totals.  It's okay.  Explosions still happen randomly, yo.

8. Maleficent ($241 mil)
Two big hits with female leads in 2014 should hopefully continue to shape the future of movies in a more equal direction.

9. X-Men: Days of the Future Past ($233 mil)
About on par with series best (X-Men: The Last Stand, believe it or not).

10. Big Hero 6 ($221 mil)
Who's gonna pretend that anyone cares about this one for any reason other than Baymax?

12. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ($202 mil) Say goodbye, autonomy...
15. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ($191 mil) Megan Fox is totally the reason this succeeded.
16. Interstellar ($188 mil) Nolan's thunder has fallen, but he can still pack them in.
18. Gone Girl ($167 mil) A solid hit that in the pre-franchise era would certainly have been in the top ten.
19. Divergent ($150 mil) The just-released sequel will boost the series to greater awareness.
21. Ride Along ($134 mil) Kevin Hart's biggest hit of the year.
24. Lucy ($126 mil) Scarlett Johannson is a lot less naked in this movie than her other 2014 release, but she's also a lot smarter.
25. The Fault in Our Stars ($124 mil) Shailene Woodley is less divergent in this one, but is also in far greater mortal peril.
26. Unbroken ($115 mil) Angelina Jolie curses the North Koreans, Clint Eastwood, but still smiles her way to the bank.
27. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb ($112 mil) The last time wide audiences saw Robin Williams.
29. 300: Rise of an Empire ($106 mil) Honestly, chalk this one up to Eva Green.
32. Noah ($101 mil) Russell Crowe's biggest headlining act in years.
33. Edge of Tomorrow ($100 mil) Tom Cruise has probably lost the struggle for mainstream credibility at this point, but he can still pack them in.  And actually, a lot of people credited Emily Blunt as the real reason this movie was surprisingly better than they thought it'd be.
36. The Imitation Game ($90 mil) Benedict Cumberbatch is officially a box office draw.  Or it's Keira Knightley's biggest hit in years.
37. Dumb and Dumber To ($86 mil) Jim Carrey stepped so far away from hit movies in recent years, it's not surprising that he finally made his second sequel.
38. Annie ($85 mil) Have you seriously still not seen Quvenzhane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild?
39. Fury ($85 mil) He proved himself to be a brilliant directer with End of Watch but was completely dismissed with Sabotage, so the success here must have been gratifying for David Ayer.  Probably didn't hurt to have Brad Pitt aboard.
40. Tammy ($84 mil) Melissa McCarthy's hot streak cooled, but at least her passion project was still a hit.
42. The Other Woman ($83 mil) Totally a hit because of Kate Upton.
45. The Monuments Men ($78 mil) This highly unusual WWII movie will probably have viewers debating it for years.
46. Hercules ($72 mil) Dwayne Johnson basically apologizes for The Scorpion King.
50. Exodus: Gods and Kings ($65 mil) Ridley Scott returns to historical epics.
54. Planes: Fire & Rescue ($59 mil) My nephews are obsessed.
55. The Grand Budapest Hotel ($59 mil) Still haven't seen it.  But this will change.
62. Muppets Most Wanted ($51 mil) Well, slightly less wanted than the last one.
65. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit ($50 mil) Honestly, the marketers dropped the ball, considering this came out not long after Tom Clancy's death.
66. If I Stay ($50 mil) Chloe Grace Moretz is not going anywhere.  She's, yes, here to stay.
73. The Giver ($45 mil) Still haven't read the book.  Still haven't seen the movie.
74. St. Vincent ($44 mil) Bill Murray.  That is, St. Bill.
76. A Million Ways to Die in the West ($43 mil) I still want to see this.
78. Birdman ($42 mil) Would have been awesome to see huge support for this one.
85. The Theory of Everything ($35 mil) ...except how to make Stephen Hawking a box office smash.
89. Nightcrawler ($32 mil) Jake Gyllanhaal might not always have hit movies, but he always leaves his audience intrigued.
93. Deliver Us From Evil ($30 mil) Considering what he's done lately, this is actually a huge hit for Eric Bana.
100. Boyhood ($25 mil) In twelve years, this movie will be more popular than American Sniper.
107. Brick Mansions ($20 mil) Posthumous bid on the part of Paul Walker to be taken seriously as an actor.
113. A Most Wanted Man ($17 mil) I'll see this at some point.
123. Frank Miller's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For ($13 mil) Loved it.
125. Whiplash ($13 mil) In which J.K. Simmons is finally acknowledged to be awesome.
126. Winter's Tale ($12 mil) In which Colin Farrell and crew are once again awesome.
127. Foxcatcher ($12 mil) In which Steve Carell does Despicable Me in live action.  And is far less cuddly.
128. Belle ($10 mil) In which Gugu Mbatha-Raw is once again awesome.
129. The Drop ($10 mil) In which Tom Hardy is raw.
131. Magic in the Moonlight ($10 mil) In which Woody Allen is once again in relative obscurity.
137. Inherent Vice ($8 mil) Thomas Pynchon be box office magic, yo.
141. The Interview ($6 mil) North Koreans call this the feel-good movie of the year.  Right?
143. A Most Violent Year ($5 mil) In which Jessica Chastain is once again awesome.
145. The Skeleton Twins ($5 mil) In which Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader are once again awesome.
147. Snowpiercer ($4 mil) Chris Evans had a much smaller hit with this one, but about the same amount of favorable buzz.
152. Mr. Turner ($3 mil) Hey, would Timothy Spall make a better friend than pet rat?
156. Wish I Was Here ($3 mil) Actually, I'm sure Zach Braff wished it had earned a lot more.
161. Veronica Mars ($3 mil) And Kickstarter's chances of funding the next blockbuster are...
162. Before I Go To Sleep ($3 mil) I will see this.
198. Locke ($1 mil) Great, great movie.
199. Gimme Shelter ($1 mil) Vanessa Hudgens may yet be taken seriously.
200. Force Majeure ($1 mil) The French!  The French!
205. Hector and the Search for Happiness ($1 mil) I will see this, too.
224. Life Itself ($800 thou) The movie about Roger Ebert.
243. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby ($500 thou) Jessica Chastain is even more awesome here.
249. Dom Hemingway ($500 thou) In which critics love Jude Law.
304. The Zero Theorem ($200 thou) Seriously awesome.
329. Horns ($100 thou) Joe Hill has a long way to go before he's as popular as his dad.
351. Knights of Badassdom ($100 thou) Definitely need to see this.

Source: Box Office Mojo

#796. Hart's War

Being a fan of Colin Farrell, I tend to watch his movies with a tad more devotion than, oh, I'm not really sure who his fans are.  Every time I expect one of his movies to be a broad success, it doesn't happen.  I honestly thought Winter's Tale would be a hit last year.  I expected people to become fans after Saving Mr. Banks.  To speak only of the recent past.

Last night I watched 2002's Hart's War again.  This was Farrell's second major American release and his third after a breakthrough performance in Tigerland, which like the Jesse James film, American Outlaws, that followed featured him in full loose-cannon mode.  Hart's War was a departure, as was Minority Report, the one that came next.  These were movies that focused on a more subdued Farrell.  At the start of his career, every name director wanted to work with Farrell, and he was expected to become a big star.  Except audiences never warmed to him, and critics found it about as easy as everyone else.  He had a rare moment, in full Irish mode, when he won a Golden Globe for In Bruges, but then everyone forgot about him again.  

I've always found that impossible.  I have my favorite Colin Farrell movies, but Hart's War has never really been one of them.  That doesn't mean it's easy to forget.  In fact, it can be downright infuriating.  He's so subdued in it, you'd hardly know he's the lead.  Top-billed but in fact supporting player Bruce Willis had by that point in his career become well-known for subdued performances after a frenzied early popularity in action roles, which he works to perfect effect again.  Third lead Terrence Howard may actually be the best way to sell Hart's War to skeptics.  Like Farrell, Howard has had a tough time of keeping audiences engaged.  Luckily he's done the trick again with the surprise breakout hit Empire on TV.  He's at his best here.

The basic plot of the movie goes like this: Farrell is an officer in the fringes of the European theater during WWII thanks to the fact that his father is a United States senator.  On a lark he acts as a driver for a comrade, but ends up falling into the clutches of the Nazis, and is sent to a prison camp, where Bruce Willis is commanding officer of those being held there.  Early on the drama concerns whether or not Farrell broke down during interrogation and gave the enemy information.  Yet it soon becomes apparent that there's more going on than meets the eye.

I think the main thing that doomed Hart's War was its ambition.  The more expansive view of the film is that it is in fact a moral indictment of America.  In that sense it may actually be more relevant now than thirteen years ago.  Although clearly understood to be an army following the wishes of a monster today, Nazis at that time were perhaps better understood merely to be German, the soldiers of the opposing side.  Putting aside how many Americans actually agreed with the idea of eugenics, and how incredibly reluctant the country was to enter the war (and how today we view service in WWII as evidence of the so-called Greatest Generation, as close to a true golden age the country has ever seen), Hart's War is a study of ambiguity.  The enemy actually has more respect than many of America's own countrymen.

This is to say, blacks.  The prison camp has Americans separated from Russians by a barb wire-tipped fence.  Willis does his best to stay out of trouble, but tries to insist the harsh treatment the Russians receive is something Americans wouldn't being doing.  The camp commandant, the fourth lead, a chillingly calm individual who may be the most civilized of the lot, engages in a mental standoff with Willis through the film.  In many ways, Hart's War is a post-Western, not only in spirit but in depicting its time period as such, the end of an old world once and for all, when it became far harder to hide somewhere in the wilderness to escape your problems.  This prison camp is in the wilderness, a fact emphasized in the dramatic pullout shot at the end of the film, when it is finally seen outside the bleak landscape of winter.

Howard's best scene comes when he makes it obvious how German prisoners of war in the States receive far more dignity than natives, which is to say blacks, such as himself.  His whole presence is filled with outrage, but he tries his best to conduct himself with more tact than those around him, who are all tip-toeing around how they have been cheating on their acknowledgment of basic humanity.  Everyone wants to get some advantage.  Farrell is paralyzed by his awareness of privilege, until he realizes that Howard deserves legal defense after being framed for murder.  Suddenly he has no privilege except what's given him.

And everyone has something to hide, too.  Willis has been building a tunnel so that a munitions plant that has been mislabeled and thus overlooked by his superiors can be eliminated.  He allows the whole sequence of events to unfold in order to buy himself time.  By the time Farrell shares Howard's outrage, it seems too late for Willis to care about Howard's plight anymore than the jaded commandant.  This is a movie that allows us to see a Nazi as something other than a Nazi, which is not to say in a positive light, but at least as a man whose motives, although as twisted as everyone else's, can sometimes be trusted.  He is not just a Nazi.  This is another thing Farrell realizes, another thing that makes his path so difficult to walk.  Tellingly, Farrell's character is early given damaged feet that must be looked after by a series of benefactors.  

(Hey, this might be a good chance to plug another Farrell movie, The Way Back, in which he's once again a rogue.  A Russian, by the way.)

I don't think Hart's War is as bold as it could have been, but it is infinitely compelling.  And yes, hard to forget, even as Farrell recedes into the background, as he sometimes does, allowing the movie around him to breathe, as it were.  If he's your reason to watch, initially, like me, I guess the disappointment that has always greeted it probably is warranted.  Yet it's also the first time Farrell finds a new way to present himself.  He's a unique chameleon.  Most of the time an actor thinks this means putting on an accent or some cosmetic alteration.  Farrell has consistently demonstrated an ability to change personalities entirely.  Yet there's always that uncertainty about him.  Maybe that's the problem audiences have with him, and maybe his breakout with have to be in something as obvious as a spy thriller, not as a novice (he did that in The Recruit) but as an experienced agent (to date, Miami Vice comes closest).  The more years he has on him the better, then.  Which means the best is yet to come.

In the meantime, revisiting his older material remains a satisfying past-time.  Especially when it's something like Hart's War.  

#795. Mock Squid Soup: Superman Returns

via Flaming Skull
for Mock Squid Soup

I don't really get why audiences find Superman so hard to love these days.

Everyone hotly anticipated Man of Steel two years ago, and loved everything about it, until they saw the film itself.  This was what happened to Superman Returns in 2006 as well.  It figures that I love both of them.

Bryan Singer had been known as the director of The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men movies.  While Suspects gave him considerable film geek cred, it was, particularly, in X2: X-Men United where he gave superheroes an entirely new level of social commentary, marrying the outsider status of mutants with the ongoing struggle for the LGBT community to find acceptance.

The year prior to Superman Returns' release, Christopher Nolan had just delivered the first installment of his Dark Knight trilogy with Batman Begins.  Marvel was still a few years away from launching its hugely successful Avengers franchise.  Audiences were still hot for Sam Raimi's popular Spider-Man movies, which helped set the stage by proving how dynamic superheroes could look in the modern era.

Perhaps "playful" is the more optimum descriptor.  Superman hadn't been on the big screen since 1986 (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace), although many viewers considered the climactic duel between Neo and Agent Smith in 2003's The Matrix Revolutions to be what it would be like to see the Man of Steel in a real cinematic fight.  Superman Returns didn't have anything like that, and it wasn't playful, either.

More like contemplative.  Now, I personally love contemplative.  The more contemplative the better.  My favorites movies are always like that: Alexander, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, even The Truman Show.  One of the things Singer clearly set out to do was update the classic Christopher Reeve version of Superman that for a decade had completely defined superheroes at the movies.  Superman Returns was billed as a sequel twenty years in the making.  Except, of course, it had an entirely new cast.

The only link was archival material featuring the late Marlon Brando, who had been featured in 1978's Superman as Clark Kent's Kryptonian father, Jor-El.  He'd been meant to reprise the role in Superman II, which in 2006 Richard Donner was finally able to present a facsimile of his own vision using a combination of test footage and computer trickery to round out an experience his successor, Richard Lester, had dramatically altered in the original release.  Lester heavily favored comedy, an approach that broadly defined the next two releases in the series.  Finally, Singer would bring back the idea of reverence for the material.

Wait, reverence for superheroes?  In a way, I think this has always been a problem for audiences.  Anytime superheroes are taken too seriously, they shy away.  Superman tends to bring this side out in filmmakers, a character so emblematic of the whole genre that even when Richard Pryor is hijacking the story, Reeve still spends all his time in dire problems of his own (literally battling himself in Superman III).

The idea of updating Reeve's Superman was in some respects something that Singer used mostly as a nod to his predecessors.  Superman Returns is very much its own statement on the character.  Tellingly, Lois Lane wins a Pulitzer for an article suggesting, "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman."

Lois herself, as embodied by Kate Bosworth rather than Margot Kidder, looks years younger, as does Brandon Routh's Superman.  According to the story, Superman has been gone five years.  If the leads look this young after five years, how much younger five years earlier?  Arguably the real connection to previous continuity is the presence of Jason, the son Lois had with Superman, presumably after their tryst in Superman II.  It's also the meditative representation of the saying Brando's Jor-El imparts on his own son, and which Superman later whispers to Jason: "The son becomes the father, and the father becomes the son."

Hey, and by the way, what does that even mean?  It may be the key to the whole movie.  The story of Superman is really about about loss and what can still be gained.  Jor-El saved his son from the destruction of Krypton, and of course Earth becomes a welcoming new home.  Unless you're Lex Luthor.  Kevin Spacey's version is brilliant.  Everything I always wished Gene Hackman's would be.  Menacing, still bothered by lesser minds around him.  Spacey's is very much a counterpart to his hated opposite number, wondering where his inheritance has gone.  Everything's displaced in Superman Returns, looking for realignment, just as Superman's story has been about all along.  Looking for acceptance.  Not being an alien.  Except with Superman, who as the ultimate superhero seems to have gotten that acceptance without much difficulty.  To find the alienation again, Singer takes everything away.  And gives him a son. 

 In a broad sense, you can probably figure out how one generation leads to the next, growing into and passing on responsibility.  In the case of Superman, it's trickier.  Lois struggles to admit it, but she was devastated when Superman left, all the moreso because of what he left behind.  Jason seems like such a frail boy, but during the course of the movie, he begins to exhibit his own great abilities.  Like Superman, and certainly Singer's Superman, the mild manners usually ascribed to Clark Kent are held as part of Superman's nature, a humbleness and protective instinct that belies someone who otherwise is completely vulnerable.  And it's telling that the only fight Superman gets into in the movie, he gets his (pardon my Kryptonian) ass kicked.  This is a vulnerable Superman indeed.

And I think audiences hate seeing that.  The consistent criticism against Superman in the modern age is that he's too powerful to be truly relatable, and yet for two movies now, he's been both powerful and relatable, someone just trying to fit in, find acceptance.  In a weird sense, Singer played that hand so overtly with mutants, that when he did it again with Superman, it seemed out of place, and even when it was done deliberately, in Man of Steel, suddenly, because everyone now had adjusted to superheroes as fish out of water, they wanted that archetype, Superman, to be the one superhero who was totally adjusted, who was everything every situation needed him to be.

To be a paragon.  That's Superman, right?  

Singer's Superman has a streamlined physique, a swimmer's body contrasted with his well-documented savior complex.  He's posed so often in the movie, whether with his arms stretched out or placing the globe of the Daily Planet safely down, the idea of the character becomes a challenge all over again: we're asked to consider him as more an idea than action hero.  He's only just recovered from a terrible beating and near-drowning when he realizes he still needs to save the day, and after that, crashes down to Earth and needs rescuing from ordinary paramedics.  

Anyway, I can't watch this movie without being impressed.  Christopher Reeve was Superman for an entire generation.  I don't know that Brandon Routh ever had a shot at replicating that.  But his Superman is one that yearns.  Much like all of us.  He might fly around in a red cape, but at heart he contemplates his place in the world.  He lost one he never even knew, and confirmed for himself as no longer existing.  He comes back home, and wonders if that term is still appropriate.  Superman Returns concludes with the idea, as Jor-El originally suggested, that the hero in question will always have another chance.  Maybe it's disconcerting to even think of Superman himself admitting to audiences that no matter how iconic he is, the story isn't really about him.  It's about fathers and sons, parents and offspring, one generation to the next, embracing the great and mundane challenges of life.  It's not about what Superman can do, but who he is.  And what he is.  He is not alone.  And there's still plenty to learn.  His son will help him with that.

#794. Leonard Nimoy

Some choice Leonard Nimoy moments:

Decades before Peter Jackson, Nimoy makes Bilbo Baggins cool.

In the best episode of The Big Bang Theory, Penny gives Sheldon the ultimate gift.  And it's not what she thinks.

Joining the mythology of Fringe as Walter Bishop's former partner in science, William Bell, Nimoy ended up playing a crucial role in the series despite only a handful of appearances.

And of course he was Spock as well.

As the saying goes, live long and prosper, in our memories...