Were you aware that they have these things called question marks now.

The soundless violence over which is played swelling music only made me think of Ran, and, uh, ST rather suffers in the comparison.

I object to the use of initials. Or do I.

Also and incidentally, this:
SMS technology allows members of a party to make bitchy comments about other members of the same party without waiting until the latter are out of earshot
Can go pretty far wrong, linearly scaled to the amount of alcohol consumed.

You know what would be entertainingly anti-social. To twitter the flaws and foibles of your various companions, as you are hanging out with them, in the full knowledge that they'll read your twitter soon enough and realize that you were just staring into your phone, complaining about them to the world. Good stuff.

There have been a number of instances of DC Tweeple* mistakenly twittering when they meant to text someone. Nothing too salacious or embarrassing so far, though.

*I"m sorry.

*I"m sorry.

You certainly should be.

I don't type fast enough on a phone keypad to be able to Fisk a conversation with friends while it's actually happening.

Later sarcastic remarks have usually been made in the course of conversation and tweeted later.

New Original Star Trek sucked. It's NOST.

Did someone hurt your feelings, Ben?

For most of the time I was watching NOST, I was thinking of how much better Mission to Mars was, and how I had wrongly underrated that movie.

Then thought "the word 'underrated' implies 'wrongly', doesn't it? Saying 'wrongly underrated' is redundant. Or does 'wrongly' add the note of being unfair rather than simply the redundant note of being factually wrong?"

ST rather suffers in the comparison.

Sadly, zombie Kurosawa was unavailable.

I was excited about the Star Trek trailer I saw, because it starts out with a decent shot of a canal crossing (with some sort of instrumented gates!). But the rest of the trailer wasn't about irrigation at all.

I quite liked the new Star Trek. Anything that provokes "They killed the planet of mild Asperger's sufferers and cast pretty girls!" rage in the forces of Blognerdia exceeds in virtue whatever its vices may be.

12 But the rest of the trailer wasn't about irrigation at all.

It's no Milagro Beanfield War, that's for sure.

Pretty mediocre? You mean in comparison to the brilliance of the other Star Trek movies? I was a bit put off that they decided to fall back on the black hole-time travel crutch. How original. But I enjoyed McCoy, and the superfluous scaly Ewok.

I liked NOST, mainly because the performances caught much of what was good about OOST. The rubber science & giant chain of coincidences in the plot didn't bother me; I was a bit bothered that Spock, in possession of a space ship that could demonstrably travel backward in time, and having just seen his entire home planet blown up, didn't even think to use it that way.

9 confuses me.

17: Was someone being bitchy to you? And you didn't find out until later? Or did someone text you with a bitchy comment about someone else? Or were you the little bitch?

re: 13

Shit, the comments in that thread are pretty eye-watering!

AWB wondered if you had become aware of this practice in the context of having found yourself the subject of SMS-based mockery, I believe.

19: "I'm hugely emotionally tied up in this, because I've always identified with Spock. [...] It was only in reading a few post-RaceFail things that I really did see where my anger is coming from, and how much of it is tied to the destruction of the Vulcan race."

Jee. Zus. Christ.

19, 21: It gets worse better.

You guys have a lot more tolerance for reading that sort of thing than I do, evidently.

I enjoyed Star Trek, but I will happily admit that my expectations were low and my standards far from exacting.

Every so often I try to read Making Light, after hearing about its famed comment threads and sense of community, but... I don't get it.

The soundless violence over which is played swelling music only made me think of Ran, and, uh, ST rather suffers in the comparison.

Everything suffers in comparison to Ran. The question is, is how was it in comparison to a good bad movie, like Godzilla 2000?

11: Sadly, zombie Kurosawa was unavailable.

He's probably directing zombie ogged in a reality TV show.

12: But the rest of the trailer wasn't about irrigation at all.

You should totally rent Seven Samurai. Lots of rice-growing and water and stuff.

max
['Or Godzilla 2000 even with all that ocean plus infrastructure destruction!']

max

Sadly, zombie Kurosawa was unavailable.

Even more sadly, zombie Kurosawa is available, if you take seriously the crack about son Hisao having inherited all the temper and pride but none of the talent.

The camera attached to an epileptic break dancer seems to be standard action movie fare these days, unfortunately.

That comment is enough to get me to wait for the DVD and my fast-forward button. I H*A*T*E that sort of cinematography. I do not see where it adds anything except to Dramamine's sales figures.

#13 gets it exactly right.

I spent a pleasant afternoon at the Star Trek movie, haven't thought much about it since, and don't really have an opinion about the Vulcan genocide one way or the other. But I would still happily throttle pie George Lucas over those last three Star Wars movies, so I guess I do understand the feeling to a degree.

pie George Lucas over those last three Star Wars movies,

You made it through to the third one? That's dedication to a lost cause.

I was the bitch.

It seemed like a pretty basic action movie, but I wasn't really expecting an action movie. Shouldn't there have been more sitting in a chair, talking? And as an action movie: meh.

Favorite bit from the ML thread: "Having one's planet destroyed would probably make for a bit of internal turmoil".

28: Ditto. I spent 90% of Blair Witch staring at the floor. On reflection I should have simply watched and let nature take its course. If more moviegoers puke on the floor perhaps they'll ditch SiezureCam.

A family member dragged me to see it, and it did mostly suck. Good performances, shitty everything-else. Apparently Abrams didn't realize that "rebooting" is different from "swapping out the cast and the effects department." And what a waste of Eric Bana.

I've noticed a certain... I think I'll call it "admission-creep" in various praises and defenses of the movie. (This phenomenon last sighted in The Great 300 Mass-Denial.) STAGE 1: It's a masterpiece! What an absolutely perfect rebooting of a classic franchise! I plan on seeing it five times and pinning back my eyelids so I don't miss a single clever reference! --> STAGE 2: There are some slight flaws in the plot, but who cares, what fun it was! This is why people go to an action movie! --> STAGE 3: Okay, well, so what if the plot sort of sucked? It's just Trek, for God's sake. You saying it wasn't better than The Final Frontier, haters?! --> STAGE 4: Yeah, okay, it's bad, okay? Fine! But it's good bad, like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians with explosions! How can you argue with that? Have you no soul?

I threw up at Blair Witch Project and couldn't watch a movie in the theater without feeling nauseous for years afterward. I wound up throwing up at Eternal Sunshine as well. The problem has since gone away.

34: STAGE 2: There are some slight flaws in the plot, but who cares, what fun it was! This is why people go to an action movie!

They said the same thing about the TNG pilot, which I watched and which seemed a lot like a remake made for patients suffering from psychotic symptoms. So I didn't watch the series and people kept telling me how great it was, and how much better than the original it was, and I didn't watch it. Then I saw the last 50 minutes of the last movie and I was all like, well, it's not ... bad. Oh, well.

Fine! But it's good bad, like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians with explosions! How can you argue with that? Have you no soul?

Now, I would pay money to see Santa Claus Conquers the Martians with explosions.

max
['How could it be worse than The Hulk?']

You made it through to the third one?

I barely made it through the first. George gets a pie because I didn't even want to see the next two.

Interesting. Apparently in earlier Star Trek material, the planet Vulcan wasn't destroyed. I wouldn't have guessed from the movie.

['How could it be worse than The Hulk?']

Which one?

The first one, which actually was a excellent rendering of the typical issue of the comic. Hulk smash for 24 pages.

max
['Next month, Hulk smash some more.']

I barely made it through the first. George gets a pie because I didn't even want to see the next two.

Fool me once, shame on you.

The camera attached to an epileptic break dancer seems to be standard action movie fare these days, unfortunately.

The first time they did that was the elevator scene in Die Hard with a vengeance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hard_with_a_Vengeance

I was mighty impressed at the time.

There is a site that will show you every gun featured in Die Hard with a vengeance:

http://www.imfdb.org/index.php/Die_Hard_with_a_Vengence

and american beauty:

http://www.imfdb.org/index.php/American_Beauty

42: That elevator scene was pretty cool: the abrupt, frenetic camera movement fit the moment and wasn't sustained for the length of the movie.

I barely made it through the first. George gets a pie because I didn't even want to see the next two.

Ah, ok, that makes more sense. For a moment I thought you were some sort of masochist.

42: Holy shit. I had no idea imfdb existed. Wow.

45: Apparently, there are a lot more kinds of guns in the world than I had ever heard of.

46: I feel the same way whenever people start talking about different kinds of pot. There are so many kinds of pot!

25: This isn't a threat. Anyone who insists that it is, is just putting on airs to be interesting.

On wikipedia, I'm qualified to correct technical details about guns. On imfdb, I'm qualified to correct spelling errors.

46: This is a good addition to the iibrary:

http://www.amazon.com/Small-Arms-World-Basic-Manual/dp/0811716872

IMX, good for pressing cucumber slices and other stuff and also for leaving visible on the coffee table when my daughter's boyfriends came around back then and now when the landlord is around and being annoying.

Thread's long dead but, for the record, I totally disagree with the "mediocre" judgement. I saw it last night and, IMHO, I think it was about as good as it realistically could have been. Not a great movie, and not a classic, but it had a big agenda that it managed to complete while being enjoyable.

I do agree that the pre-credit action sequence was annoying for various reasons.