stxyn922 Reviews

F Troop (1965–1967)

You had to be a kid to love this show!

[7/10 · 16 January 2011]

F Troop was one of the best of the stupid high-concept sitcoms of the time when I was growing up and seriously in need of Cathode-Ray parenting. Like Goldilocks, Gilligan's Island was too stupid, and The Munsters and Bewitched weren't stupid enough, but F Troop was just right (as was the Addams Family, Get Smart and oh yes, Green Acres.)

No way could it be made into a movie today! Forget about it! We were too stupid to realize how offensive the racism on the show was, and that was fine. The same stuff wouldn't be funny today.

Yes, I remember Larry Storch as his identical cousin Lucky Pierre: "They say I'm the Burglar of Banff-ff-ff!" Agarn:"The Burglar of Banff-ff-ff?" Pierre: "The Burglar of Banff-ff-ff!" Pure Vaudeville. I had forgotten about Paul Lynde's Singing Mountie until reading these reviews just now. This was the height of Lyndes's popularity, I think. (He was playing Samantha Steven's unforgettable warlock Uncle Arnold on Bewitched about the same time. He just didn't have the right star vehicle when the studios finally gave him his own sitcom.)

The reason one reviewer remembered "It Is Balloon!" so well was cause it was so damn funny! Throughout the episode, Agarn and O'Rourke kept describing to Wild Eagle and Crazy Cat hot air balloons, and they kept on refusing to believe any of it. Then in the last five minutes, it comes from out of the sky and... you had to be there.

For some reason, I'll never forget the episodes where Henry Gibson played the living jinx "Wrongo Starr." (Great stupid anachronisms abounded!) and Parmenter was always trying to give him affirmations, "You're not Wrongo Starr! You're Lucky Starr!" and Wrongo always managed to set off sequences of events that would have all the stunt actors in Hollywood busy for the week, always ending with the cannon misfiring and hitting the watchtower with somebody flying out of it.

You had to be a kid to love this show!

The Cove (2009)

I do not have faith this film will produce the change it wants to see

[9/10 · 24 June 2010]

I live in Japan, where its very hard to see this movie. I believe my friend who made a copy for me got it online, but perhaps she got it at a rental.

If so, that would surprise me, because according to the Japan Times, the shrill conservative minority in Japan has made it their mission to harass and intimidate anyone who tries to show the film publicly. Here in Japan, the right wing ride around in big vans and buses painted red and black with the Chinese character for the Emperor painted on the side, and an overwhelming sound system, and human speakers standing on the roof, screaming amplified patriotic doggerel. The purpose, it is said, is to target businesses they don't approve of and drive away customers until the shops acquiesces to their demands. I presume they are doing something like that to any movie theater that agrees to present The Cove.

As a Dominican representative to the International Whaling Commission says in the movie (and as I've concluded independently,) the primary motive for whaling and dolphin harvesting is neither economic nor nutritional; the Japanese government has equated the practice of slaughtering dolphins and whales with a nationalist determination not to let any other country determine what they can or can not do. So it appears to me that the more activist groups and individuals like the Ocean Preservation Society and Ric O'Barry fight to stop these practices, the more determined are the right-wing to resist them. I do not have faith that this film will produce the change it wants to see. Yet it is a very important film.

As I write this, I await the verdict of the IWC, which is convening just now (June 24th, 2010) because Japan has amassed a queue of international supporters (like the aforementioned Dominica who has withdrawn their support) to rescind the Whaling Ban that has been in place since the 1960s. This at a time when the huge blob of petroleum crude in the Gulf of Mexico is on the verge of being caught in the Gulf Stream and carried very quickly up to the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic. The destruction of the oceans is underway, and supporters of the whaling ban are just as responsible as the whaling nations. Angry finger-pointing, like this film encourages, is not what we need right now.

As a vegetarian, I find it very hard to live and eat in Japan. Every bit of prepared food has some quantity of meat in it, as if its a fetish, a belief that humans can not be healthy without red meat. It is true that dolphin meat is never displayed for sale here, but kujira niku (whale meat) certainly is, and the film makes it clear that the dolphin meat is deliberately mislabeled.

When I tell my English students this, they disbelieve me; no one would ever knowingly eat iruka niku, And with the memory of Minamata Byo (the breakout epidemic of mercury poisoning in Minamata City in the 1950s) behind them, the Japanese I know assume the government would never cover up mercury poisoning again. But when they come to realize this, they become docile and complacent.

The waters of the Taiji cove literally do turn red with blood, and it is viscerally shocking to behold. The scenes where narrators O'Barry and Louis Psihoyos weep upon seeing the live video from the cameras they implanted are very convincing. Yet the Japanese simply do not understand our pain. They want to participate in the global community, but don't grasp the global responsibility it entails.

I conclude that if we want to change Japan's relationship with the Cetii, we need to learn and understand their very different culture very well, and listen carefully to those who do.

Sticky Stickson

Star Trek (2009)

Since When Did Star Trek Ever Make Sense?

[9/10 · 17 December 2009]

I'm really surprised how many 1, 2 and 3 star reviews of ST09 are in this site. I enjoyed the movie immensely at the theater, bought the DVD, and have watched it half a dozen times since. I don't consider myself a Trekkie or Trekker because I can't speak Klingon, tell you the color of Zephram Cockran's shirt, or name the writers of every show in the first season. (But if I could, I would call myself a Trekkie, not a Trekker.) However, I did watch the very first airing of the very first episode. "The Man Trap," in 1965 when I had just turned ten, and watched every show of the original series as they came out. I once skipped a Boy Scout camping trip to watch the episode, "Assignment: Earth" (a great disappointment.)

I had no desire to see Star Trek TOS done again, and haven't liked a Star Trek movie since "The Return Home." ("Well, "First Contact" was pretty good- but it was the only STTNG movie that was!) So I received ST09 with an open mind. I didn't expect it to be the same; it couldn't be. It had to appeal to a very different audience. I was interested in seeing what they came up with.

Star Trek 2009 had an intrinsic problem to solve; what does Star Trek need to be for its audience in the 21st century, and how do we get there from here -- one century closer to the date of the series itself! But actually getting there was put into the background, so we could zero in on the new actors playing the old characters-- the fun part. Plot logic and continuity didn't have a high priority in this film. How could Spock Prime watch the destruction of Vulcan from another moon or planet-- if it was in his solar system, the other planets would be pulled into it; if it were from even the closest solar system Vulcan would be an invisible dot circling a pinpoint of light. How did Kirk, Sulu and Olsen dive from space into the atmosphere at a perfect right angle to the threshold without burning up like the space shuttle Columbia? How the hell did Spock manage to illegally banish Kirk from the Enterprise only to send him only eleven miles from Spock Prime who he didn't even know existed, amidst all the vastness of space? If you're looking for a story that makes sense, ST09 is not for you.

But since when did Star Trek ever make sense? Since when do explosions in space make sound? When did the concept of the Universal Translator ever make sense? How can a computer suddenly extrapolate the language of a culture it hasn't even made First Contact with? And would you actually eat any food that was made in a replicator? Are warp drive, time distortions and tele-porter beams really science or a hi-tech kind of magic? Everyone just puts the line where we suspend disbelief in our own place, that's all.

ST09 always struck me as the post-911 remix. "We were once innocent and optimistic, but that is all gone and now we live in an alternate reality in which our father and mother were killed by alien terrorists." Its like a snapshot of what's become of us by way of the Great Speckled Bird. Its compelling enough that lots of us-- not all of us-- don't need to pay attention too carefully to the background. And according to the box office, the Abrams team got the depiction right. That understanding informs my enjoyment of the picture.

Chris Pine creates his own Kirk but at times shockingly invokes Shatner effortlessly, whether he's slouching in the captain's seat or intoning the name "Bones!" Zachary Quinto, though never reminding me of Nimoy, always inhabited Spock's identity, practically never invoking Sylar. His voice is actually softer and gentler than Nimoy's, playing the same character in the original.

One of the biggest changes in the Trek Canon was the character of Uhuru. You can't make a big-budget wide-appeal movies nowadays without having far stronger female characters than Gene Roddenberry had. Modern women would never accept a Communications Officer Uhuru who had nothing to do but turn on the Universal Translator and automatic ship-wide radio at the beginning of her shift. Zoe Saldana fends off Kirk's boorish advances, intercepts and translates elusive Klingon radio transmissions, runs long-leggedly through the Enterprise's halls in her famous mini-skirt, and badgers Spock to assign her to the Enterprise even if it looks like favoritism. So what if she's in a love triangle with Spock and Kirk? Here's a woman fit for a starring role in the film. About Vulcan time!

I loved Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin, Ben Cross and Bruce Greenwood recreating the series' characters-- even though this Captain Pike could have been the father of the original Jeffrey Hunter Captain Pike. (J.J. Abrams said they wanted an actor to capture the Kennedyesque quality of Hunter in the original series, so they got the guy who played Kennedy (very well) in Thirteen Days.)

Eric Bana brings a lot of working-class gravitas to a role that is just patched together to give the actors something to do. He's always fun to watch. By the way, Nero has more motivation in this film than many of the other reviewers give him credit for; he slaughtered the Kelvin mad with grief over the death of his family and his planet, only minutes before he destroyed the USS Kelvin. Then he and his ship were captured and imprisoned and tortured by the Klingons for 25 years before escaping, explaining why his face was so twitchy in one extended closeup. He became an obsessed crackpot in prison. Buy this entire sequence was cut out of the theatrical version.

Well, that's my take on the movie. Not so bad if you have a sense of humor.

Star Trek: A Piece of the Action (1968) Season 2, Episode 17

More Realistic than you'd Think!

[9/10 · 9 May 2009]

A few months after I moved to Japan to teach English in the late 90's, I was starting to get a bizarre Star Trek Deja Vu. Rather than wearing Kimono and wooden clogs and all the traditional stuff they show in the guidebooks, everyone, EVERYONE, wore Western clothing that was all slightly offkilter. Western boots with high spiked heels, 10-inch platform shoes, died blonde or orange hair, T-shirts with English messages that made no sense, a predilection for uniforms, black business suits that belonged to morticians, ubiquitous high skirts and stockingless legs for women between 6 and 40, to name just a few examples. I was especially taken aback by the commonplace adoption of English words into Japanese that were used, pronounced and spelled wrong dozens of different ways. A friend of mine held out his hand in a light drizzle and said to me, "Look, Penny Rain, like in the Beatle song."

Finally I said to myself, "Now, this is a highly imitative Alien culture." Then I thought, "just like the Iotians in 'A Piece of the Action.'" For the next ten years, I kept my sanity only by imagining myself in the Reality TV version of "A Piece of the Action II." I've often wondered if the author of this script-- was it D.C. Fontana?-- had visited Japan. But really, when Old Commodore Perry first landed in Japan in 1853, crew members reported finding blueprints of devices and weapons pilfered from the ships for sale in the local markets. It could easily have been blueprints of Federation-issued phasers. Talk about your highly imitative Alien cultures.

I think the creators of this episode were right to make it a comedy-- it IS a comedy!-- and if the clowning around in pinstripe suits and tommy guns --I remember Fizzbin well!-- eclipses the core anthropological idea, so be it. Its still one of Star Trek's Classics, and it still makes me chuckle whenever I think of it.

And remember, all Japan wants is a piece of OUR action.