Shmee.Me

April 29, 2013April 29, 2013

My Favorite Star Trek Movie: First Contact!

Star Trek: First Contact is the first movie in the franchise to only feature the Next Generation crew. It is also the first feature film directed by Jonathan Frakes more commonly known as Commander William T. Riker. How does the new crew do on their first solo voyage? Splendidly.

The movie starts off with Captain Picard dreaming about his time as a Borg which happened six years earlier. He is then woken up by an Admiral explaining the new Borg threat. He will not be assigned to deal with the threat because the Federation is worried his past will affect his actions. Things do not go well for the Federation, so Picard takes the ship to deal with Borg anyway, and when they stop the Borg Cube a Borg Ball ship shoots out from the Borg Cube and travels in to the past. The Enterprise must follow it to save our future.

It sounds like a confusing plot, but it is actually pretty easy to follow, and works quite well. The Borg are my favorite Star Trek enemy, so to have a movie where they are the bad guys is excellent, and it allows Picard to deal with his feelings about the Borg captivity from the show. Their leader the Borg Queen is played excellently by Alice Krige. She gives the Borg a little life and attitude. The rest of the cast all know their characters, and play them well.

The special effects and sets for the most part work very well. My only critique is that the human camp they have to help in the past looks like a good Sci-Fi TV set not an A-List movie set, but it is a minor flaw in an otherwise great movie, but it seems like something they could have worked on a little bit.

This was always my favorite Star Trek movie. It had the Next Generation cast, and it featured a good story with a lot of action and a great villain, and while she may not quote Shakespeare like other villains, she is still quite memorable. Star Trek: First Contact is on the sadly very short list of truly good Star Trek movies.

April 26, 2013April 26, 2013

MST3K Triple Shot

I have watched quite a bit of MST3K lately, so instead of giving separate reviews I thought I would give you three little quick ones.

The Castle of Fu Manchu:

Christopher Lee stars as an Asian guy that is going to take over the world by threatening to freeze the oceans.

This movie is bad, and not in the good way that makes you laugh, but that it is incredibly dull. Once you get past the fact they dressed up Christopher Lee in the most racist way possible, nothing happens in this movie. The best jokes in this film are about how shaken the crew of the Satellite of Love is by having to watch this awful film. It is funny at times, but jut not enough happens.

Attack of the Giant Leaches:

This movie has a short about how the people of Atlantis are causing earth quakes, it is very funny. I can’t believe how awful the old serials were.

Attack of the Giant Leeches is kind self explanatory. Leeches start attacking people that live in a town near a swamp. This is a great bad movie. The dialog is nonsense, and the leeches are just plastic bags with circles stuck on them. I laughed a lot during this film, and the robots and Joel have field day. Thank you Roger Corman!

Swamp Diamonds:

This movie also has a short. It is about how to go on a date. Oh my gosh the 50’s were awesome. I couldn’t imagine having to watch these PSAs. It is very funny.

The movie is about an undercover cop and some women thieves looking for diamonds their gang boyfriends hid there before being sent to the electric chair. This movie is Roger Corman’s directorial debut, and he starts off his career like he ends it, making great bad movies. No one knows how to act, and it is filmed like the world’s worst nature documentary. I think this was my favorite out of the three just because the short was so good, and they followed it up with this just fabulously awful movie.

April 23, 2013April 23, 2013

A Star Trek for the Generations?

Star Trek Generations is the seventh film in the Star Trek franchise, and it serves as the hand off between the original Star Trek cast, and the Next Generation cast. Some say it is the best odd numbered Star Trek movie, and that is probably true, but it is a bit of faint praise.

The film starts out with Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov taking a tour of the new U.S.S. Enterprise B. They are on board as a publicity stunt to send off the new ship and take it on its maiden voyage around Pluto and back home, but as soon as they are underway they get a distress call from a couple of ships that are stuck in an energy ribbon. Kirk saves the people on one of the ships and the Enterprise, but gets zapped by the ribbon in the process. Two of the people they save are our villain Soran (Malcolm McDowell), and Guinan. It turns out the energy ribbon is a place of pure joy, and Soran was not happy to leave. Zoom ahead to the Next Generation, and we find that out Soran (he like Guinan lives for hundreds of years) will do anything to get back in to the ribbon even kill two-hundred million people. This story proves to be the weakest part of the movie.

With this movie I could see that they thought they needed a movie that would bridge the two series together, but they didn’t if it means we have to have a story like this. It is one of those stories that seems okay when you watch it, but it gets worse when you think about it. For instance they say you cannot just fly a ship in to the ribbon, but that is how Kirk gets there, and they say you never want to leave the ribbon and all you will ever do is think about how you want to stay there, but Kirk and Picard do just leave when they decide it is not real enough, so it turns out this movie could have been skipped if Soran had decided just to take a ship to the ribbon and teleport himself in to it, but killing two-hundred million people by collapsing stars is more fun.

Everything else about the movie is fine. The special effects are good and the actors all know their roles backwards and forwards by now, so they all do a great job. It is just a shame they weren’t given something good to do.

I was surprised by this movie because I remember it being awful, but instead it is just mediocre, and brought down by a bad plot, but it does pave the way for one of my favorite movies (not just Star Trek movies): Star Trek First Contact.

April 22, 2013April 22, 2013

What Do We Learn From The Life Of Pi?

Life of Pi is a 2012 film from acclaimed director Ang Lee based of the novel of the same name. It was nominated and won the Academy Award for Best Director. Did it deserve all the accolades? I think so, but the story itself left me a little cold.

The film starts out with a writer asking Pi Patel to tell him his story, so that perhaps he can turn it in to a book. The writer hadn’t heard the story before, he had just been told by Pi’s uncle that it would make him believe in God. Pi then begins to tell him his life story, and of course how he survived a trip across the Pacific Ocean in a life boat with a tiger named Richard Parker.

This film is beautifully shot, and the special effects are amazing. It makes you believe that Pi is indeed in a boat with a tiger. Which he was not because putting a kid in a boat with a tiger I am sure would brake more then a couple laws, and there a ton of just great show piece effects shots in this movie besides the boy and the tiger. If you have a Hi-Def TV then you need to watch this movie just to see some of the things they bring to life.

The actors all do a great job in this film, especially Suraj Sharma as the Pi on the boat. He conveys the loneliness and the resilience of the stranded young man, and since he is most of the movie, his acting is just as important as the effects are, if not more so.

Which brings me to the part of the movie I am not so sure of. We were promised that this story would make us believe in God, and as a believer in God I don’t need much help, but reason to believe is lame. <Spoiler> The real story is that he was on the boat with people, and the cook brutally murders a sailor and Pi’s mother, and Pi kills the cook, but since the story Pi made up was better, then we should believe in God. I Think that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. God is able to get you through real hard times, not just help you cover up the truth with an amazing lie </End Spoiler>.

This movie is still an amazingly filmed piece of art even if the thesis behind it is deeply flawed, and if you have a good Hi-Def TV it is amazing to watch. Ang Lee proves once again that he is among the industries current greats.

April 19, 2013

Bruce Campbell Vs The Army of Darkness!

The Army of Darkness is the third film in the original The Evil Dead franchise. It is Sam Raimi’s dark comedy send up to A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court. Is it as good as the classic Evil Dead II? Yes it is.

The plot continues after Evil Dead II. Ash defeats the Demon at the cabin then is sucked in to a worm hole and ends up in the past. He then has to help the people of that time ward off The Evil Dead.

It is amazing how this franchise changed from movie to movie. The first movie is a straight up horror movie, all be it a low budget one. Then second one blends in humor with the horror, and Army of Darkness is a straight up dark zany comedy. I hope that the new franchise follows this path because it is one of the better trilogies ever made.

Sam Raimi must love old school special effects because he uses them all in this movie: stop motion, puppets, overlaying two sets of film, and almost any other technique you can think of, and it gives this movie a very old school swash buckling feel, and it is wonderful.

Bruce Campbell is his usual jerky hero, and he had perfected it by this movie, and plays it so well it was a shame they never made another sequel, as of yet that is. The rest of the cast does their job well, but they are pretty much just reacting to the amazing Bruce Campbell.

Of the three movies Evil Dead 2 is still my favorite, but Army of Darkness is a close, close second. It is also the reason I forced myself to sit through the new Evil Dead movie, so I could have a chance to see Bruce be Ash one more time.