Mokka mit Schlag » Pop Culture

Children of Earth just finished on BBC America last night, and despite having to get up at 5:15 A.M. this morning for a marsh census, I couldn’t avoid staying up to watch it. Wow. Russell T. Davies surpassed himself and reached new levels of creepiness with this one.

Sadly it was marred by an ending that would have embarrassed a Star Trek TNG writer. Torchwood might as well have saved the day by reversing the polarity on the deflector shields. It was that bad. I can think of at least five preferable and more plausible endings: (Light spoilers follow)
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OK. I can’t hold my mouth any longer. Star Trek is dead and J.J. Abrams killed it. The latest movie has finally put Star Trek in the ground far more effectively than Star Trek V ever did. Although technically a good movie (unlike Star Trek V)–well plotted, well shot, and adequately acted–it has destroyed the franchise. More seriously, it has destroyed the entire Star Trek universe.

Lots of folks and critics seem to have liked this movie, and indeed liked it more than almost any other Star Trek movie/episode; and that’s the key point. The people who never liked or cared about Star Trek before, didn’t really notice or care what Abrams just did to the characters and universe they grew up with. They just admired the modern special effects, the well-plotted action, and the better-than-the-original-series acting. But those of us who did love Star Trek since 1966 because we had been able to see beyond the bad makeup and the occasionally corny dialog to the real heart of the show? We walked out of the movie with a very bad taste in our mouths that for once didn’t come from the popcorn. Spoilers follow.
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Attempting to install Lord of the Rings Online for the first time on a fairly stock Vista system, and the installer fails while updating some Visual C++ runtime library. When are we going to learn that we should not depend on the latest versions of every single library? Software should simply not require users to upgrade their libraries. (I say this having just shipped a product that fails on Java 5 on the Mac but succeeds on Java 6, so I’m hardly blameless here. The bug is really Apple’s fault, but we should have worked around it. Update: looks like a colleague fixed that a few hours ago. Cool.)

However, the real WTF is this error message I got while the installer was updating the files:

Naturally, I can’t copy and paste that URL. I’m supposed to type it into my web browser. More likely I just won’t play the game and try Warhammer instead.
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I caught Hancock at the $2 movie in Woodbridge last week. ($1.50 matinee actually.) That was about the right price. There were seeds of a couple of really interesting movies here. One you saw in previews: polishing the obnoxious superhero for modern media. The other story–well, I won’t spoil it for you.

Unfortunately there really wasn’t time to do both stories in 90 minutes or so. This story might have been better done as a TV series (Heroes?). But what really killed it in the end was a cliché that has lost all force.
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I caught the premiere of Fringe last night. More plausible than Alias but not quite as plausible as Lost. I’ll probably set the DVR to record future episodes, but as long as they’re enough King of the Hill repeats to keep me occupied, I probably won’t get around to watching them until they’re automatically erased.

I finally caught Tomb of the Dragon Emperor yesterday. Moving the story to China insead of Egypt, and finding a new mummy was a nice change of pace. Maria Bello was a definite improvement on Rachel Wesiz (if not quite as easy on the eyes) and Brendan Fraser was, well, Brendan Fraser.

However the basic rule for these sorts of movies is that they need to move so fast that you don’t have time to notice all the holes in the plot. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor didn’t quite achieve sufficient speed to lift off. Just when you thought it would; there’d be a long boring sequence that gave you time to catch your breath and start laughing at how silly the whole thing was. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t bother. It’s not worth the $10.