Friday, August 24, 2007 Rant Archive
Beam up for a brand new Star Trek episode!
Fans of Captain Kirk, Spock and the gang are in for a special treat today with the world premiere of "World Enough and Time” premieres on the web (no not the Tholian web). In case you think you’ve dropped into a wormhole back to 1966, you haven’t. It’s still 2007 and this time Captain Kirk is played by the world’s biggest Trek fan and Elvis impersonator, James Cawley.
Cawley is the force behind the force behind Star Trek: New Voyages, a completely volunteer group of Trek fans that banded together to create the best viral Star Trek fan films on the web.
“World Enough and Time” features the redo cast from TOS (The Original Series for you non Trek people). Cawley reprises his role as Kirk, his friend Jeffery Quinn is Spock, and real physician John Kelly is Dr. McCoy. The 1-hour episode features the one and only Sulu, George Takei, as, well ... Sulu.
I’ve got to hand it to Cawley. Not only did he save enough of his Elvis impersonation money to build a full scale USS Enterprise Bridge, he has also recruited an army of talent to work for free, just to have a chance to live out their childhood fantasies.
I read an article this week that HBO passed on MAD MEN, and is now sort of regretting it. Tonight’s episode is probably one of the reason’s why. It manages to explore actual issues, while flowing along dramatically, like some slow moving river with gorgeous scenery.
Jon Hamm as Don Draper, our “hero,” is pitch perfect navigating his very full love life, while trying to put his ad campaign for the state of Israel together. He romances his wife for Mother’s Day. In a very good scene, he makes puppy dog eyes at Rachel, a retail heiress he wants to bed. Don ostensibly wants to pick her brain about Israel, and what it’s like to be Jewish, for his campaign. She takes him seriously, and gives the subject its due weight, but sighs wearily as he tries to hold her hand. The latent, guilty, anti-semitism of America in the fifties and sixties is not a topic that’s very trendy these days, but it is handled very elegantly in this show.
It must be exhausting to be Don Draper, and after a long day of seducing, get back on the train to the suburbs, and his perfect family. But in tonight’s episode he manages to fit in one last escapade. Clearing his schedule for a romp with his downtown mistress, he begrudgingly ends up at the Gaslight, a prototypical Greenwich Village club. At the club, Don out-ironics Roy, a hipster, and you can see in Don’s eyes that he is thrilled to win the duel. Don flourishes in the seedy places. Suburbia is who he wants to be, docile and married, but underneath is a very angry person looking for a fight.
Friends, loners, crackpots… I come to bury Dick, not praise him.
Things looked grim for my Jen. I picked her early on as my personal favorite in this game. She struck me as charmingly vapid and gleefully shallow. Her defenses were pedestrian and transparent. It was clear she need the warm embrace and gentle understanding of an angry writer on the other side of the country. Yes friends, I felt this all even before I found out she was in the LINGERIE BOWL ’06. I even mentioned this to my wife who rolled her eyes and told me to put the kids to bed.
Jen was too bright a star to remain within the meager confines of the BIG BROTHER household and now she can burn as bright as she needs to whether it be as a nanny or a swimsuit model. Now she can soar the skies of possibility, for tonight Jen was evicted. The vote was 0-6 and only five votes were cast. That’s how profoundly she was evicted tonight.
I made the point that this was a bad strategic move for Dick and Daniele- a team I had found myself squarely behind until tonight. They turned on my Jen for a number of spoken and unspoken reasons. Like most things in life the unspoken reasons held more weight than the spoken ones. Both made the case that Jen was disrespectful of the game because she so happily gave up half the prize money in a veto competition. Of course she was fighting for her life in the game and giving up half of something is better than getting all of nothing but that sort of logic isn’t part of this equation. Jen’s paper-thin claims of the money not being important were given more prominence in this silly round-about deduction than they deserved.
Fox sure doesn't like to give its fledgling shows much of a chance to make it out of the nest ... remember what happened to their summer series DRIVE? It vanished off the horizon faster than someone trying to set the new land speed record. ANCHORWOMAN was the latest victim to the chopping block, being canceled after only one show. Ouch. I guess the idea of putting a former WWE wrestling diva into a newsroom in East Texas on a reality show and watching what happens just wasn't too appealing to viewers. Gee, it sounded so great on paper. The remaining episodes of the show will be streamed online through MySpace ... also owned by Fox.
Back to the drawing board, or the wrestling mat ... or maybe Hooters is hiring again.