What better way to end a nearly month-long Fey hiatus than by
resurrecting one of our least popular features...Bobo's movie reviews!
Even I don't read these things, and I'm the one who writes them! And
seriously, Star Trek? Half the audience I saw it with at the Arclight was totes homo, but an LA movie theater makes for a misleading sample set, as LA is where all gay sci-fi/horror/fantasy nerds go to die (alone)...I'm still pretty sure I'm getting something wrong about our audience by bothering to write a review of this movie. But um, at least one of the actors in the movie is a well-known geigh! And, um, some of the guys--especially Karl Urban as McCoy--are really cute! And, um, Star Trek slash!
Anyways, having just seen and really enjoyed Star Trek I have one of those movie critic thesis statements to unload on you: Star Trek is the first truly post-Obama Summer movie.* I know rebooting the franchise at this moment was 100% a commercial decision and could just as easily--and accurately--be used as exhibit "Z" in some amateur insider cocktail party convo about Hollywood being "out of ideas," but through some happy accident of the zeitgeist it just feels really right to watch a big budget epic where all the heroes are smart, skinny and unapologetically technocratic. The movie's first act, when we follow the--well trained and educated and coed and multiethnic!--Starfleet crew being assembled for the first time, is just like the first few weeks of the Obama Administration when he put his team together. It's both refreshingly throwbacky--to a time before pop and political culture had turned deriding expertise into our national pastime; which is to say, to the time of the original Star Trek--and pleasantly of the moment to have these kinds of heroes onscreen.
These guys care about the rule of law! They discuss the importance of preserving (alien) cultures and languages! Their stated mission is "humanitarian" and "peacekeeping," not warmaking! They pay unflinching obeisance to (Starfleet) regulations! They refer to the big bad Nero as a "war criminal," not a terrorist! And they give their enemies a meaningful shot at surrender before blasting their ships into space dust!
And above all else...they're so fucking skinny! The only people in the film who look like they weigh more than 150 pounds are the villainous Romulans. All of our heroes--even Chris Pine's Kirk, who by contemporary event movie logic should be five inches taller and carry an additional 50 pds of muscle mass packed on specifically for this part, so that Men's Fitness could do a profile on his pre-shooting training regimen to coincide with the release of the film--are brainy bantamweights...
Just like Obama himself!
(I'm right about this.)
*This is the kind of dumb-but-impossible-to-argue-with blast of rhetorical bombast Armond White pulls out of his butt(s) every week, except his statements are at least charmingly perverse and nonsensical. Like if he were writing this review, he would say something like "Quinto and Pine's human-Vulcan buddy movie dynamic attain new heights of racist risibility not seen since 'The Jazz Singer.'"
Yay!
New post about an amazing movie!
You have got to love Chris Pine.
On the one hand, any self-respecting homosexual would refuse to see any Star Trek film that doesn't star Kirstie Alley.
On the other hand, I have a friend who is a leatherbear Star Trek novelist.
PS: Salon had this stupid article about how Obama is the new Spock. He did look sexy with the pointy ears they gave him, but isn't Obama's whole appealing-to-uplifting-emotions political style rather non-Vulcan?
PPS: I vote for Wesley Crusher to be the new Souter!
Great review! My personal cute-reactor buttons were pushed by the new Kirk, yes, and also the new Chekov and Sulu. (Yes, I know Chekov is 17, but the actor is older than that, so there).
Who, please, is the "well-known geigh"?