Cynical Cinema

I noticed something odd about Star Trek when watching Season Three of the original series, out tomorrow (November 18th) from Paramount Home Entertainment.  William Shatner is the kind of character who might conceivably refer to himself in the third person.  He’s overblown and arrogant and overacts and so forth.  But he doesn’t refer to himself in the third person, he does something more bizarre.  His name, really, is James.  Certain characters call him James.  Kirk is his last name.  Most characters on Star Trek call him “Captain”.  Because he is the captain.  Captain Kirk.  So far so good?

OK.  Now, when he meets other people, as he does quite often in many episodes, he needs to introduce himself.  So he says his name is Captain Kirk.  But when he meets old friends, people he has known for many years, or even people with whom he has grown up, he refers to himself as “Kirk”.  Like, “hey, Steve, it’s Kirk”.   Would anyone in the world do this, for real?  Phone up a friend and announce themselves by their last name?  It makes very little sense to me.  Your last name could be the name by which your friends know you, (as is often the case with me).  But even if that is the case, you don’t refer to yourself by that name, because it is a nickname.  If you do, you come across like George Costanza when he tried to give himself the nickname T-Bone on Seinfeld.

Anyway, just something I noticed.  Star Trek:  The Original Series, Season Three comes out tomorrow, and features that awesome episode where the weirdo creepy kids take over the Enterprise.  That episode, in itself, makes the third season better than the second one.

I enjoyed Season Four of Mission: Impossible, certainly more than I did those three crappy Tom Cruise movies. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Season Five on DVD Tuesday, October 7th, and it’s even better. The main reason it’s better is because they have added a hot chick. Now, normally that wouldn’t change the quality of a show, except to make it worse. The addition of a hot chick normally (these days anyway) means that the writers and producers feel the show has jumped the shark, but they can hang on for a few more years simply by providing their weirdo viewers with some eye candy.

But when it came to Season Five of Mission: Impossible, this was actually a good move. The addition of Lesley Ann Warren as Dana Lambert was terrific. She provided the team with something it had been lacking - instead of simply using a bunch of gadgets to set up their targets, they began using actual people and deception a lot more. Dana was able to seduce the people who needed seducing, and get close to the men who were the targets of the team. In a bizarre way, this was actually more realistic spy stuff.

Also great in Season Five is Sam Elliott, one of the great gravelly-voiced, made-for-westerns actors in the world. He comes and goes, and isn’t in every episode, but his role just adds a little more oomph to a series that already has plenty. The fourth season was good, the fifth is great.

Star Trek is one of the great phenomena in pop culture. Somehow it has managed to maintain it’s relevance over the course of five incarnations, with similar stories and similar characters and similar sets throughout all five. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a box set tomorrow, September 16th, that highlights the similarities between all five series. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective contains episodes from The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyageur, and Enterprise. It’s a box set featuring 20 episodes of Star Trek that explore alternative realities. And by that they mean mirror universes, parallel dimensions, twisted realities, and alternate lives.

What this box set does, most of all, is highlight the similarities between the five series. For example, no matter which version of Star Trek you watch, trouble causes the flight deck to shake and shudder, and makes the lights flicker, no matter what that problem actually is. And at the end of every one of these “alternative realities” episodes, the bizarre occurrences are easily explained away as “a temporal discharge of abnormal anomalies”, or some such thing. Most of these episodes fall into one of two categories. Either they are like clip shows - there are crossovers with old episodes, sometimes even other series, and they are really easy to do with a minimum of effort. For example, the episode of Voyageur where one of the characters is able to pass from deck to deck in the spaceship, and each level exists in another time frame. So old episodes get recycled. Or, they function as a reason for the creators of the series to do something totally different for one episode. Like the episode of The Next Generation where Captain Picard is in a coma and lives another man’s life on another planet while in his coma.

Perhaps that makes this box set less than appealing for true Star Trek nerds, or maybe it’s even more appealing. I really don’t know. But as a non-Star Trek afficionado, I found it to be very interesting. There are some great episodes here. The episode of Voyageur where two of the crew members cause the destruction of the ship, and send a message from fifteen years in the future in order to avert the catastrophe. Or the episode where a hot woman appears to be constantly jumping backwards in time, from the moment she dies until the moment she is conceived.

But the best episode on this box set, the one that makes it all worthwhile, is the episode of the Original Series where there is an evil Captain Kirk and a good Captain Kirk, and William Shatner fights himself. There is, I believe, no moment in television history (outside of that Star Wars holiday special) that involved worse acting than does this one. You see, Captain Kirk’s personality has been split in two - one of them all of his evil characteristics, and one of them all his good ones. The Evil Kirk makes it known that he is evil by twitching his face like a hamster. It is absolutely hilarious! William Shatner was silly at the best of times, but here he sets some kind of record for over-the-top silliness. This episode alone is worth the price of the box set. However, for those of you who don’t want to spend the money buying this massive box set, but would still dearly love to watch William Shatner fight himself, check out the bargain-basement DVD White Comanche, in which he plays long-lost twins, one who has grown up cowboy and one who has grown up Indian. The final showdown is as bonkers and hilarious as is this episode. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective hits stores tomorrow.

The first thing I noticed about Star Trek The Original Series: Season Two when I picked it up today, August 5th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, was the packaging. The packaging is irritating. There is a big, clumsy plastic box, and inside that there is a cardboard package with a bunch of episode cards in a little pouch. Also in the cardboard package are the DVDs themselves, in a book-shaped plastic case. There is no artwork on the DVDs themselves, and the listing of episodes and special features is on the cards in the other pouch. I guess the idea is that it looks futuristic, yet is in practice rather clunky and unnecessary. Much like the series itself.

When, after thirty-one minutes of twisting, prying, and shaking, I managed to get the DVDs out of the package, my girlfriend immediately wanted to put on Disc 5, the “Tribbles” episode. From what I understand, after listening to her Trek-nerd ramblings, this is one of the most famous episodes of Star Trek. After watching it, I still didn’t really understand what the big deal was. The tribbles are these tiny little fuzz balls that make a comforting noise. They don’t move, they don’t have eyes or feet or features. They’re just stuffed…nothing. And so they can’t really be cute, because they aren’t really anything. But the idea is that these “tribbles” just eat and reproduce, to such a massive extent that very quickly they cause a real danger to the Enterprise.

On the fifth disc, the “Tribbles” disc, there are two other Star Trek episodes - one of them is a tribbles episode from a cartoon Star Trek series that ran in 1973 and 1974. And another is an episode of Deep Space Nine that actually takes footage from that original, Shatner-led “tribbles” episode. The cast members of the new series are superimposed on the old one, in a sort of homage to the original Star Trek. This is an episode that really calls attention to the difference in production values between the modern and the classic. I had forgotten how low-budget the classic Star Trek really was compared to today’s versions. But all the same, I think I still prefer the original.

Now, although I find William Shatner’s overacting to be totally hilarious, I realized in watching Season Two of this original series that he wasn’t the only one! In fact, just about everyone in the original Star Trek was an overactor! Even Leonard Nimoy, as the emotionless, uber-logical Spock, still manages to have a scene or two where he manages to over-act. Now, I’m not sure it’s the fault of the rest of the cast - I think it’s likely that when acting next to William Shatner it’s natural that it would just come out. It seems like over-acting would be the only way you would even know you were in the scene with him.

Campy over-acting, some interesting ideas, and of course the Tribbles make Star Trek Original Series: Season Two worth checking out for nerds and non-nerds alike.

When I was a kid, after a long game of tennis, I saw an episode of Mission: Impossible at my friend Oliver’s house. I loved this show! It was one of the best things I had ever seen on TV! It had everything - espionage, international bad guys, gadgets, and missions! And that theme music! So distinctive, so cool! However, Oliver had some channels that I did not, and I never saw the show again until today. When I grabbed Season Four of Mission: Impossible from Paramount Home Entertainment on May 13th, I wondered if it would be as good as I remembered. After all, my favourite programs growing up were MacGyver and The A-Team, and I can’t watch those now without laughing at what an idiot I must have been to have enjoyed such crap.

As it turns out, however, Mission: Impossible really does hold up over the years. Of course, over those years it has been the source of some of the worst pop culture has to offer. Those three horrible movies with Tom Cruise. The music has been used as background for the irritating Scientology video, also starring Tom Cruise. The phrase “your mission, should you choose to accept it” has been overused ad nauseum, and the self-destructing message has been a concept taken to asinine proportions. By the way, I DID watch Inspector Gadget as a child, and I could never understand the self-destructing message. The chief would always pop up in a garbage can, a dryer, a potted plant, and hand Inspector Gadget the message. Then, he would be told that the message would self-destruct. And Gadget would throw the message right into where the chief was hiding, and it would blow up the chief. Every time. Every time, it happened! And I would always wonder, as a child - if the chief was so adept at finding these hiding places for himself, in order to give Gadget his mission, why wouldn’t he just pop out of the dishwasher and tell Gadget the message, rather than having to hand him paper and wait while he read it? That always bothered me.

Season 4 of Mission Impossible is yet another example of when network TV used to be good. It’s like the A-Team, only without the terrible writing, the ridiculous gunfights and the lame acting. It’s like Counterstrike, only less slick and less Canadian. And it is far, far better than those absolutely idiotic Tom Cruise-John Woo movies.

Matlock was a series that began in 1986. At that time, it’s audience was, as is my understanding, comprised entirely of people over the age of 70. I know this because I watch the Simpsons - Maaatloooock! The first season of the show replaced another cautionary tale of 80s television, The A-Team, on ABC on Friday nights. That first season saw it’s release on DVD today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Now, I don’t want to question Paramount’s judgement - they have been good to me. But exactly who do they think might be buying this? The people who watched the show in Season One are now, at least, 92 years old. Which means that half of them are dead, and the other half are old-timers who are resistant to new technologies, and who don’t own a DVD player.

I have a lawyer. He is fairly competent, I think. He knows his way around the law, and he is doing some fine work for me right now. And if I ever get arrested for that murder I never committed, I would likely hire him to save me. However, while I’m certain he would be able to defend me on legal grounds, I doubt he would have the ability to investigate and solve the crime all by himself. For that, I would rely on the police. Matlock, on the other hand, can do it all. Amazingly, in every episode of Matlock over the course of the show’s nine years and 195 episodes, Matlock was never asked to defend someone who had actually committed a crime. This is the kind of luck that befell Jessica Fletcher only in reverse, on that other much-loved-by-octogenarians show, Murder She Wrote. Matlock was anchored by Andy Griffith, who plays Ben Matlock as some kind of cross between Columbo and Perry Mason. Both of which were superior shows to Matlock.

Which brings me to another DVD set released today. The 50th Anniversary edition of Perry Mason, a show anchored by Raymond Burr. I like Andy Griffith, and I like Raymond Burr, but what made Perry Mason better than Matlock was, for the most part, the fact that Perry Mason showed up late in the episodes. The beginning of the episode would deal with the crime itself, and the various people who could possibly have committed that crime, and then halfway through, Perry Mason would somehow become involved and solve the case. The 50th Anniversary edition is four discs, full of some great episodes and even better guest stars. A very young James Coburn, a very young Robert Redford, an aging Bette Davis, and many others. Can you imagine Matlock with Julia Roberts and Robert DeNiro as guest stars? No? That’s why Perry Mason was better.