I see a lot of movies every year. A
ton. But this year I’ve decided I don’t see enough movies, so one of my
New Year Resolutions was to simply see more. And to write about them.
See, that’s the other half of the equation: I see a ton of movies, but
I write about comparatively few of them. There are a lot of reasons,
but they mainly boil down to the fact that I feel the need to do long
form reviews, and sometimes – like in the midst of Sundance – I just
don’t have the time.
And
so was born this new blog! I aim to make an entry for every single
movie I see in 2010. Some entries may be very short, some may be
lengthy. Entries may take a couple of days to be posted. Let’s see how
long this lasts.
One
last thing: one of my main objectives this year is to rewatch more
movies. I know this sounds like a strange goal, but there are films I
haven’t seen since high school, which means it’s been almost a lifetime
since I saw them. Recently I rewatched Black Christmas for
the first time since the 1980s, and I might as well have been seeing
the movie for the first time. I’m interested in getting a look at some
movies I loved or hated twenty or even ten years ago and seeing how I
feel about them now.
Let’s begin…
#8 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
1979
d. Robert Wise
I saw this movie in theaters when it came out, having begged my father to take me. About an hour in the film melted, and it was like sweet release for my dad. I’m not sure if we ever went back to see the rest of it.
Years later I got it on Blu-Ray and made my girlfriend sit through it. She’d done the other five original crew movies (or four and a half – we gave up on Final Frontier), but after this one I’m not sure if she’s still talking to me. It’s pretty bad – especially because I woke her up after she dozed off and made her stay up with me for the rest of the film’s interminable running time.
This is the Trek I’ve revisited the least, and over the last couple of years I’ve begun to think that the film’s fabled turgidness was hyperbole, and that my own distaste for it was based on being a kid who just wanted whizzbang.
Nope, it’s a truly boring piece of shit. It’s stultifying, and the fact that anyone at Paramount thought audiences wanted thirty minutes of screen time given over to people looking out of windows and viewscreens boggles the mind. It’s like director Robert Wise thought 2001: A Space Odyssey was way too rushed.
As if the boring story and the lack of character interaction isn’t bad enough, the entire Enterprise has been redesigned to look like a radiologist’s office, and the new uniforms make everybody look like orthodontists. The whole film plays out like you’re getting your teeth cleaned under the influence of a shitload of Valium.
I have been slowly picking away at the Star Trekkin’ column – I’m only 7 episodes out from the end of season one! – and was considering extending it to the animated series and the movies. After suffering through The Motion Picture tonight I’m not sure I could do it again for the series.