Dave, is this another one of your interesting experiments gone wrong and trying to hide the evidence?

Experiment

January 30th shall be International Delete Your MySpace Account!  Huzzah!  A holiday I can support!

More of the big E. The new Star Trek teaser trailer is out there, and if you haven’t seen it, you can from various sources. TrekMovie.com has many links, though it’s down right now, so I can’t provide you with the exact page. You can download the trailer in various sizes of quicktime at Dave’s Trailer Page. (My prefered method.  You will need to rename the downloded file to something ending with “.mov” before you can watch it, though.) There’s always the low-quality YouTube offerings (cam-cordered from the cinema) or, if you feel like it, there’s the official site.

So there you go!

I expect some of you may already have seen this, being in the UK and all, but it’s worth mentioning anyway.  Video of the Doctor shipping for a TARDIS.

What the hell does this mean?

Here it is: Your first look at the new Enterprise from the upcoming Star Trek movie:

The movie’s a couple years old, but it was brought up again, and it seems I have a couple things to say about it.

It was amazing to see how the filmmakers completely missed the mark with “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” movie.  They’d take a funny or witty quote from the book and then have the actor say the same quote, but leave out the funny or witty part.  Over and over again.  Amazing.

If, by pure chance, a funny line did make it through unadulterated, they’d then add in a line which attempted to explain the joke (which never needed explaining in the first place) and utterly kill the humor.  I should record a podcast commentary for this movie pointing out everything that’s wrong with it.

There was one good new joke in it, however.  “Achoo.”  That was it.

One good joke can’t make up for the bewildering “creative” choices that composed the rest of the movie.  For every spot-on choice, such as casting Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, we get something which completely undercuts it, such as having a Zaphod with only one head.  Okay, so the movie suggested something about Zaphod’s second, hidden head being the place where he stored some deep dark governmental secret.  This is a plot point which has its genesis in the original radio drama and that secret would seem to be the reason behind everything that happens, from Zaphod’s theft of the infinite improbability drive starship to the destruction of the Earth.  But what happens with this strand of the story in the movie?  Oh, yes.  The movie decides not to address or resolve it in any fashion and simply ends.

This ending is the final insult.  As they fly off to take in a bite to eat at the restaurant at the end of the universe, Marvin informs everyone that the restaurant is at the other end of the universe, so the ship makes a dramatic U-turn.  Roll credits.  Sorry, what?  Even the most casual fan of the books (or TV series or radio program) knows that the “end of the universe” at which this restaurant is found is not an end in space, but in time.  In what conceivable way does this joke work?  Does it matter if you’re facing left or right when traveling in time?

I won’t stoop to hyperbole and say that this is the worst movie ever made, but I will quote Roger Ebert: “I hated, hated, hated this movie.”