Tag: Action

TV Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation (1993-1994)

~ Liam ~ 1 Comment

In what should be a long-term project, I plan to watch and review every Star Trek television show and movie in the order that they were released.

Title: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Release Date: September 20, 1993 – May 23, 1994
Production Company: Paramount Domestic Television
Episodes:  26
Summary/Review:

After a month away with the crews of Deep Space Nine and Discovery, it’s nice to rejoin the Enterprise in their final season.  Nevertheless, I had some trepidation heading into season 7.  For one thing, I remember it not being all that good, at least before the finale “All Good Things…” The bigger thing is the nostalgia for 30 years ago when the end of Star Trek: The Next Generation was a bittersweet moment for me.  It will be sad to have no more TNG episodes left for me to watch for the first time.

Watching the season, it was indeed wildly uneven, with some of the biggest stinkers since the early years of the series.  But there were also some excellent episodes with a lasting legacy of what we think of The Next Generation crew 30 years later.

Top 5 Episodes:

 

And the biggest stinker:

Related Posts:

NOTE: The capsule reviews below the cut presume familiarity with the episodes and contain SPOILERS!

Continue reading “TV Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation (1993-1994)” →

Movie Review: Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

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Title: Hundreds of Beavers
Release Date: January 26, 2024
Director: Mike Cheslik
Production Company: SRH
Summary/Review:

Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) is an applejack salesman in the north woods of Wisconsin in the 19th century.  After his farm is destroyed, he has to find a way to support himself.  He begins furtrapping beavers and trading them to the Merchant (Doug Mancheski), hoping to win the love of his daughter The Furrier (Olivia Graves).  That’s the plot in a nutshell for this movie that’s made in the style of silent movies, and while it’s not actually silent it is dialogue free.

Live action footage, animation, and puppetry bring to life this imaginative tale.  It’s like if Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton movies were mixed with the slapstick animation of Looney Tunes and Aardman Animations with a touch of Guy Maddin style absurdism.  Oh, and all the animals are played by people in furry suits.  It’s a hilarious gag-a-second movie with a lot of great running gags. I think at 108 minutes it could be trimmed down, especially some of the repetitive bits in the middle section, but nonetheless it is terrific fun!

Note: No animals were the making of the film but people in animal suits are gruesomely killed in cartoonish ways, so be warned if that might trouble you.

Rating:

Movie Reviews: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

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Title: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Release Date: October 2, 1974
Director: Joseph Sargent
Production Company: Palomar Pictures  | Palladium Productions
Summary/Review:

How the hell can you run a goddamn railroad without swearing?

Four men with machine guns hijack and New York City subway train and hold 18 passengers hostage.  They are lead by Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), a ruthless former mercenary soldier.  Mr. Green (Martin Balsam) is a former subway motorman with a bad cold.  The trigger-happy Mr. Grey (Héctor Elizondo) and the conscientious Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman) round out the gang. Transit police Lieutenant Zachary “Z” Garber (Walter Matthau) is forced to deal with Mr. Blue’s unreasonably short deadline for delivering the $1 million ransom, and try to figure out how the gang plans to escape the subway tunnel. For added New York-ness, the cast also includes Jerry Stiller as another police lieutenant and Tony Roberts as the deputy mayor.

The crew working with Garber to resolve the crisis are layered with every “Noo Yawk” stereotype imaginable with their conversations peppered with racist and sexist statements and plentiful profanity.  I’m not sure if the filmmakers deliberately decided to make the acting over-the-top or if they really thought everyone in New York City is like Archie Bunker, but the end result is a movie that’s very funny as well as thrilling.  It’s a cynical story with the mayor (Lee Wallace) depicted as worse than useless, while the passengers and other civilians generally seem clueless.  Granted, before the internet and personal devices people did not have ready access to breaking news, but I still don’t think everyone would be so blase.

There are also some evident flaws in Mr. Blue’s plan, but ultimately the story, the action, and the dialogue are just to entertaining for that to matter.  This is a movie in a heightened reality of New York at its grittiest, but in no manner is it realistic.

Rating: ***1/2

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery (2021-2022)

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In what should be a long-term project, I plan to watch and review every Star Trek television show and movie in the order that they were released. And new series (close to) when they come out.

Title: Star Trek: Discovery
Release Date: November 18, 2021 – March 17, 2022
Production Company: Secret Hideout | Roddenberry Entertainment | Living Dead Guy Productions | CBS Studios
Episodes:  13
Summary/Review:

The fifth and final season of Discovery is debuted this month and I realized that I never watched season four, so this should address that! Somehow, it’s been almost three years since I last watched Discovery so it was a bit of a catch-up for me to remember character and story arcs on this the most serialized of Star Trek shows.  This also would be the first time I’d be reviewing the Discovery series since I adopted the practice of writing capsule reviews for each episode as I go along which feels a bit weird when each episode is part of a longer story.

Each season of Discovery has a galaxy-level threat as the season story arc in this season is no exception. In previous years, the crew of the Discovery dealt with the rogue AI Control and The Burn.  This season the threat is a Dark Matter Anomaly (DMA) destroying parts of the galaxy.  Without getting too deep into spoilers, the threat is made by aliens from outside our galaxy, and the Discovery crew go where no one has gone before in their efforts to make first contact with these strange beings!

When Discovery started, the feel of the show was very “grimdark,”  a style of storytelling I don’t like in general, and especially felt unsuited to the optimism of Star Trek.  This season though there are a lot of moments where the characters are getting in touch with their feelings, modeling conflict resolution, and offering one another positive support.  It’s such a shift from how the series began, and I admit that I like that they’ve made a place for this positivity in the show, although it can get heavy-handed. Overall, I think this is the most enjoyable season of the show thus far.

 

Related Posts:

NOTE: The capsule reviews below the cut presume familiarity with the episodes and contain SPOILERS!

Continue reading “TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery (2021-2022)” →

TV Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993)

~ Liam ~ 1 Comment

In what should be a long-term project, I plan to watch and review every Star Trek television show and movie in the order that they were released.

Title: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Release Date:  January 3, 1993 -June 20, 1993
Production Company: Paramount Domestic Television
Episodes:  20
Summary/Review:

I’m excited to enter the part of this project where I will “boldly go” where I’ve never been before.  I watched some episodes in the early run of Deep Space Nine, but never really got into the show.  It felt to much like a “soap opera” to me which in retrospect just means that it was a show pivotal in the transition from episodic to serial television as the standard.  A bigger reason that I didn’t watch much of Deep Space Nine (nor Voyager and Enterprise) is that starting in 1995, I lived for 22 years without a TV in my residence, and before streaming became widespread it was near impossible to keep up on current shows.  I’ve heard a lot of good things about Deep Space Nine over the years and I’m excited about catching up on what I missed.

After watching the season, I have to say I loved it.  It’s a show that remains true to it’s Star Trek setting while exploring the possibility of conflict when people of different backgrounds come together in the same space for a common goal.  I was even surprised to learn that episodes considered to be notoriously bad (ex. “Move Along Home”) felt like perfectly enjoyable stories to me.  The cast is strong and from what I’ve heard from fans, the show only gets better so I have a lot to look forward to.

Top 5 Episodes:

  1. Duet
  2. Progress
  3. In the Hands of the Prophets
  4. The Emissary
  5. The Forsaken

And the biggest stinker: The Passenger

Related Posts:

NOTE: The capsule reviews below the cut presume familiarity with the episodes and contain SPOILERS!

Continue reading “TV Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993)” →

90 Movies in 90 Days: Bad Black (2016)

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Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: Bad Black
Release Date: September 25, 2016
Director: Nabwana I.G.G.
Production Company: Ramon Film Productions
Summary/Review:

From the makers of Who Killed Captain Alex? comes another extremely low-budget action thriller from Uganda.  In Kampala, a girl grows up on the streets with other children and becomes the leader of a powerful gang known as Bad Black (Nalwanga Gloria).  She seeks revenge on the millionaire Hirigi (Bisaso Dauda) who attacked her as a child and has plans to buy and evict everyone from the ghetto.  Meanwhile, American doctor Alan Ssali (Alan Ssali Hofmanis) is running a medical mission until Bad Black robs him of his money, passport, and dogtags.  In one of the funniest sequences of the film, he is trained to become a kung fu commando by a small child (Kasule Rolean).  In case you’re tempted to take any of this seriously the video joker VJ Emmie narrates a constant riff track on the movie.  Despite the low-budget silliness, this does feel like a better acted/better produced movie than Who Killed Captain Alex? and a more serious glimpse at poverty and violence in Kampala.

Rating: ***

Movie Review: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

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In what should be a long-term project, I plan to watch and review every Star Trek television show and movie in the order that they were released.

Title: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Release Date: December 6, 1991
Director: Nicholas Meyer
Production Company: Paramount Pictures
Summary/Review:

In 1989, things were looking bad for Star Trek after the fifth film, The Final Frontier, was near-universally panned.  Meanwhile, the spin-off series The Next Generation struggled through its first two seasons.  By 1991, though, The Next Generation had become one of the most successful shows on television and anticipation was high for the 25th anniversary of Star Trek and a film that would properly send off the original cast. Nicholas Meyer, who had directed and performed uncredited rewrites on the script for Star Trek II, and also co-wrote Star Trek IV, was brought in to work his magic again as director and co-writer of Star Trek VI.

Since the Klingons had long represented the Soviet Union to the Federation’s United States, the plot of the film parallels events leading up to the fall of the USSR.  A disaster threatens the future of the Klingon homeworld leading the chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) to pursue peace with the Federation.  Many on both sides are uncertain about peace, including Captain Kirk (William Shatner), but Captain Spock (Leonard Nimoy) commits the Enterprise to escorting Gorkon to the negotiations. Conspirators make it appear that the Enterprise fires upon the Klingon ship and Starfleet personnel board the ship to assassinate Gorkon. Kirk and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) are arrested for the crime, convicted, and sent to a Klingon gulag.

What follows is a tense political thriller as the Enterprise crew must uncover the conspiracy before the peace conference can be sabotaged.  All the members of the original cast get to play an important part including Hikaru Sulu (George Takei) finally getting to be captain of his own ship.  The guest cast is large and includes great performances by Kim Cattrall as Spock’s Vulcan protege Valeris, Christopher Plummer as the Shakespeare-quoting Klingon general Chang, Iman as the shapeshifting alien Martia, and Michael Dorn playing the grandfather of his character Worf from The Next Generation.

The design of the film is interesting as the starships seem to be deliberately more primitive as to heighten the difference with the futuristic Next Generation sets (ironically, most of the sets were redressed from the TV show for budgetary reasons).  The makeup crew also get a workout with more “alien” beings than we’d ever seen before in a Star Trek production.  It all comes together as a worth celebration of Star Trek history and a reflection on real world events.

Rating: ****

 

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TV Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991-1992)

~ Liam ~ 1 Comment

In what should be a long-term project, I plan to watch and review every Star Trek television show and movie in the order that they were released.

Title: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Release Date: September 23, 1991 – June 15, 1992
Production Company: Paramount Domestic Television
Episodes:  26
Summary/Review:

Season 5 is an odd duck.  Star Trek: The Next Generation has definitely hit its stride and they have the confidence to tell all kinds of stories with their versatile cast and crew.  Indeed, the season includes some of the greatest Star Trek episodes of all time and some noble failures.  But there are also times, especially mid-season where they just seemed to be retreading ground that this series and the original series have already trod. This is also a season with a large number of guest child actors.  I’ve learned that a lot of Star Trek fans do not like kid actors, but as a sentimental dad I actually like the kinds of stories that involve children.  Overall this is another really good season with a few road blocks here and there! Any season with Darmok, The Inner Light, and the return of Spock will go down as legendary!

Top 5 Episodes:

  1. Darmok
  2. Cause and Effect
  3. The Inner Light
  4. Disaster
  5. Unification, part 1 & 2

And the biggest stinker: Violations

Related Posts:

NOTE: The capsule reviews below the cut presume familiarity with the episodes and contain SPOILERS!

Continue reading “TV Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991-1992)” →

TV Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation (1990-1991)

~ Liam ~ Leave a comment

In what should be a long-term project, I plan to watch and review every Star Trek television show and movie in the order that they were released.

Title: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Release Date: September 24, 1990 – June 17, 1991
Production Company: Paramount Domestic Television
Episodes:  26
Summary/Review:

After a nearly perfect third season, the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is generally good with a few noticeable flops.  This season is the first of any Star Trek show with a season-long story arc, focusing on the leading to the Klingon Civil War which begins in the season finale cliffhanger.  Some of the best episodes of the season deal with Klingon politics and Worf’s continued dishonor in Klingon society, as well as the Romulans who are secretly supporting a sect of Klingon’s opposed to the alliance with the Federation.  The season introduces some important new characters including the Cardassians, the Trill, Dr. Noonien Soong, the Duras Sisters, Worf’s son Alexander, Keiko O’Brien, Spot the Cat, and the real Dr. Leah Brahm, and Commander Sela.  Lore, The Traveler, K’Ehleyr, Reg Barclay, Vash, and Q, Lwaxana all make important returns to the show.  And Wesley Crusher leaves for Starfleet Academy as Wesley Crusher departs the show’s main cast.

There are a lot of good episodes, many of them quieter and character driven. Some of the best episodes offer experimental points of view, such as the people of a planet encountering the Federation for the first time (First Contact) and an android narrating his typical day (Data’s Day). There are also a few stinkers.  I feel that the Star Trek writers/production team went back to the well too many times, particularly with a crew member having their mind and/or body taken over by some other entity.  This happens to Picard (Locutus of Borg), Data (Dr. Soong’s program), Riker (Barash), Troi (Paxans), Geordi (the Tarchannes), Barclay (the Cytherians), Riker again (Odan), and Geordi (Romulan brainwashing).  Still, I enjoy a bad Star Trek episode more than some of the best shows of most other series.

Top 5 Episodes:

  • The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2
  • Family
  • Data’s Day
  • First Contact
  • Half a Life

And the biggest stinker: Galaxy’s Child

Related Posts:

Continue reading “TV Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation (1990-1991)” →

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

~ Liam ~ 4 Comments

Title: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Release Date: June 30, 2023
Director: James Mangold
Production Company:  Walt Disney Pictures | Paramount Pictures | Lucasfilm Ltd.
Summary/Review:

The first question I have for this movie is “why?”  The Last Crusade was a perfect ending to the stories of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was so poorly received, so why return to him again all these years later when its star is 80 years old?  Even if the likely answer is “cash grab,” the fact that this movie was a box office bomb means that even that isn’t a satisfactory answer.  I’m sad to say that this movie doesn’t justify it’s existence.

Through a flashback sequence to the last days of World War II, we learn that Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, de-aged by CGI for this sequence) and his archaeological colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) recovered Archimedes’ Dial from the Nazi.  The movie resumes in 1969, where Indy has been teaching at Hunter College in New York and is now retiring.  Shaw’s daughter and Indy’s goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) arrives looking for Archimedes Dial, coincidentally at the same time the former Nazi Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) arrives with his henchmen looking for the same thing. This leads to a global chase from NYC to Morocco to the Aegean Sea to Sicily, and ultimately to ancient times!

I feel like there is a really good movie trapped within just an okay movie.  For one thing, it is WAY TOO LONG.  Trimming or removing the several interminable chase scenes would make a good start.  I was looking forward to seeing Waller-Bridge in this movie but her performance feels constrained.  Logically, as the younger actor she should take the role of the headstrong action hero while Indy relies on the wisdom of his experience and his resources.  This is true to a certain extent, but then Indy is also the headstrong action hero making Helena feel extraneous.  I also felt they could’ve done more to establish Indy’s desire to remain in Ancient Syracuse and his reconciliation with Marion (Karen Allen) throughout the film.

There’s a good story here about an aging man in a time of rapid scientific discovery and social change that’s touched upon early in the film with the scenes set against the parade for the Apollo astronauts, but then is dropped for much of the movie. It makes me more disappointed that there’s almost a good movie here than if they had just made some frivolous dreck.

Rating: **1/2