The teaser trailer for Star Trek Into Darkness was
released today. I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal the film’s villain
is Khan - the same as the second in the original run of films The Wrath
of Khan.
Khan is now played by blonde, blue-eyed Benedict Cumberbatch,
replacing the Mexican Ricardo Montalbán, reinstating the original
concept of the character as a kind of Aryan super-man. First introduced
in the Star Trek episode “Space Seed”, the similarity between Khan and
Kirk was pointed out.
This got me thinking of how I have made a number of references to the
Dark Opposite in a number of recent posts, and I wondered if this was
part of a current fashion to find an interesting opponent in recent
ongoing series seeking to rejuvenate themselves.
As you may have seen from my Five Word Review, a few months ago I saw Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction. One of many things I liked about the film was the casting of Will Ferrell in the lead role. I've never been a particular fan of Ferrell, as I find a lot of his films rather infantile, but he brought a real pathos to this part.
Maybe with this in mind, I was intrigued when I passed Spud in HMV's Bluewater branch, with a big picture of John Cleese on the cover. I took a chance.
Some of you may have seen in the national newspapers the story that someone has seen a giant ape-like man with evil red eyes on Tunbridge Wells' Common. Given that the witness was not named, and no additional information about him or her was available, and the fact that the Daily Mail cited The Sun as its source, I am a little sceptical. The timing a week after a news story that my good ol' hometown was seeking a rebrand is hard to ignore.
It did however call to mind an earlier example of the printed media moronically printing anything they are told when a resident and two friends was able to hoodwink the international press into believing there was a super-hero at work in the town.
Anyway, following a chat on Twitter, I decided it would be a good idea if the two of them duke it out comicbook style.
Following my Page Count Update on Saturday, I thought I'd finish up today with an update:
Having averaged 20 pages a day for the last three days, I added the finishing touches to this script earlier today.
Although I have written and edited several scripts this year, it is my first full-length script since February. While it is numerically the fourth draft of this project, it is also the first draft of the screenplay in this iteration.
This is the project that spawned the Narrative Problems with Anthologies article, so I will be writing a follow-up with my solutions to some of the problems in the next few days. In the mean time, I'm going to take a couple of weeks away from the project to let the mental dust settle, work on other projects and spend some time with real people.
Towards the end of her fascinating book How Not To Make A Short Film, Roberta Marie Munroe includes a chapter called Top Short Filmmaker Clichés.
It is a list comprised of the top cliches included in short films that Munroe spotted during her time programming the Sundance Film Festival. As someone who has programmed four festivals, a lot of these rang true. Meanwhile, as someone who has written, produced and directed a number of shorts I am pleased to say I have not made any of these transgressions… yet.
A lot of the clichés are specific to North American shorts, but here are some of the ones I have seen the most a few of my favourites:
Characters pointing a gun at their own head while breathing heavily
The protagonist drives down a foggy road at night before seeing a child wearing a whit nightgown who mysteriously disappears in the reverse angle.
Someone vomits. The vomit looks like milk and Oreos [or vegetable soup].
Yesterday I saw Skyfall, the third in the rebooted 007 franchise. I think my Five Word Review reflects how I feel about it.
Coincidentally, I also saw The Amazing Spider-Man on half term release at my local indie theatre (my Five Word Review for that one also self-explanatory).
After the disappointment that was Quantum of Solace (I still don't know what that even means!) and doubt about rebooting a franchise barely a decade after it began I was not expecting to enjoy either of these movies.
As it is I enjoyed both of them. Both had something new to bring to their universes, with Skyfall really feeling like Bond's apotheosis after 50 years of films.
So are Hollywood execs really being greedy money-grabbers, or are writers and directors getting to build on their predecessors' work for the first time?
Having just written about how Forward Unto Dawn sets a technical benchmark for web television, I thought I'd take the opportunity to review the series that wrapped up this morning.
Unlike other reviews I've written, it is gratifying to be able to embed the series in question:
The five-part series revolves around Cadet Thomas Lasky and his associates at the Corbulo Academy for the sons and daughters of high-ranking officers in the United Nations Space Command. He and the others are being trained for key roles in the war against the "Insurrectionists" - human colonists who seem to was independence from the main government.
The series starts with the now-adult Lasky receiving a message from AI unit Cortana, who is trapped aboard a stricken ship with the Master Chief in hyper-sleep (where they were stranded at the end of Halo 3), but the bulk of the series action takes place in a time before the Covenant War. In that sense, this series could constitute a kind of origin story, and is the most recent in a long line of visually high-quality live action material from the Halo games franchise.
