Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 1 the Man Trap
This episode is special to me because it not only was a great story it it’s the one I think I literally wet myself the first time I saw it. The Buffalo was the creepiest Star Trek humanoid alien ever (the Horta was the all time creepiest alien ever) and scared the heck out of me. I still get the creeps when I see it and even seeing the stuffed one in Trelane’s mansion in the Squire of Gothos give me the heebie jeebies. Kudos to whomever designed and built that costume.
That being said if you ever wanted to lose your ability to trust or like women this is the episode for you (well, this one and Where No Man Has Gone Before, Mudds Women, What are Little Girls Made Of, the Conscious of the King, Space Seed, This Side of Paradise, Amok Time, Who Mourns for Adonis, Catspaw, the Gamesters of Triskelion, a Private Little War, By Any Other Name, Spocks Brain, Wink of an Eye, the Empath, Elaan of Troyius, That Which Survives, the Lights of Zetar, the Cloud Minders, and Turnabout Intruder. To say that betrayal by, betrayal of, and distrust of women is a recurring theme in TOS Star Trek is a bit of an understatement). 
A beautiful woman who turns into a hideous monster and sucks the life out of men sounds like every guys nightmare of a relationship from the most stereotypical point of view. However as I have noted before the question “Do you think this episode might be a little too misogynistic?” is one that I don’t think came up often at the writing table. Let’s celebrate Star Trek for it’s racial equality agenda, not for the fact that every female in it wore high skirts.
(Game Over image from the funny t shirt collection)
the Infamous Dave Inman
Star Trek Retrospective: Charlie X
This is one of my favorite episodes. My childhood was rife with alienation and isolation from other human beings and I therefore truly identified with poor Charlie Evans. I know a lot of other reviewers of Star Trek didn’t really like this episode due to the whole “god child” cliche (which would later be revisited in the Squire of Gothos) as well as the fact that this is another episode that treats women like walking talking sex dolls but the fate of Charlie (and his dark sense of humor) always struck a chord with me. To this day I feel terrible and kind of tear up whenever I see the final scene of Charlie begging for help. The terror he shows is apparent and the massive abandonment pretty much feels like my 2nd grade all the way through high school graduation.
Anyway this episode made number 8 on my personal top 10 best TOS Episode list. I suppose it’s true that I am more drawn towards the darker stories. Shore Leave and the Trouble with Tribbles I can take or leave but given the opportunity to see City on the Edge of Forever or the Conscious of the King and I will always take it. Take what you will of that if you care to try to understand my own dark personality. (Dark Side (that’s the literal translation) image comes from my collection of Star Wars t-shirts)
the Infamous Dave Inman
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 3 Where No Man Has Gone Before
This is an interesting episode in that it is the second pilot for the series. The first one, the Cage, was rejected of hand by NBC. Thankfully Lucille Ball convinced them to run a second pilot and this one came out great. I guess all Trek fans owe a great debt to the late Lucille Ball. I think I will add some I Love Lucy shirts to our site next in thanks.
You can tell this is a pilot as the women were still wearing slacks. I guess the mandatory short skirts and 70s black disco boots came down as notes from the studio executives. You don’t hear me complaining. I just Googled some Uhura pics and she makes that uniform look amazing. I admit I have a weakness for women in Star Trek uniforms from any series. When we set up our booth a Star Trek convention it is always extremely distracting.
Anyway, this episode is also the only time in TOS that we see the Phaser Rifle. Of course from TNG onward the rifle was so prevalent you’d think they were insulating the ship bulkhead with them but Roddenberry really didn’t want to make this show into a shoot em up. 
That being said I’ve always felt one great weakness of Star Trek is all the guns look like TV remote controls. Not like this Aliens beauty I pulled from the horror movie t shirt category.
the Infamous Dave Inman
Into the Woods Review Part 1
Don’t go in there.
I think I have a love/hate relationship with studio marketing departments. I love them in that they always seem to be way smarter than the actual movie director, writers, or producers. They can sniff out a stinker and pick out the few gems like a smuggler who moves diamonds inside his digestive tract in order to compose a trailer that puts asses in theater seats. They are really, really good at that.
But I hate them because they suck me in every time. I have seen a lot of really craptacular movies in my time but I honestly can’t think of a single really bad trailer. Sure you can pick out subtle clues that the film is the movie equivalent of getting your manhood slammed in a car door several times (most of those clues usually rhyme with Bichael May, Cicholas Nage, or Orberto Rorci) but most times trailers are the Judas goat leading you up the ramp.
The point is I have seen the trailer for this film dozens of times and never once got the impression that it was a freaking awful musical. A lot of you might think that I have a thing against musicals but the truth is there are several I like a great deal. 
Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast are all excellent examples of what a musical should be: a fun story with good dialog greatly enhanced by clever inspired original music destined to become iconic (I dare you to tell me you don’t know the words to the Time Warp. Image from the movie t shirt category).
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Into the Woods Review Part 2
What I object to is bad musicals like this one: tertiary stories with immemorable music in place of dialog sung by people who were hired for their star appeal rather than their singing ability. The music is non stop and takes up the space normally held by dialog (thus making every dialog another glass chewing grind fest). It is punctuated by a few moments of speaking and I was grasping on those like a man trapped under the ice trying to breath little air pockets. The songs are really just two songs as sung by either a man or woman. The female songs are all rising inflection ear bleeders and the male songs angsty suicide dirges. Also I thought it was established in Sweeney Todd that Johnny Depp can’t sing (Sorry dude. I do like you a lot but this film in not your rocket car).
Then there is the story. Honestly I have always thought a new take on a classic fairy tale cold be really cool and every time I see a new one coming down the Hollywood outflow pipe I get my hopes up. 
I keep hoping to see Snow White rewritten by Chuck Palahniuk and directed by James Cameran as an Alien sequel (image courtesy of the horror movie t-shirts). Instead I keep getting brain softening rehash of better Disney movies like this one. As I have said on other cruddy multi story films (cough cough New Years Eve cough cough) when you have more than one story thread you lose connection with the audience and the problem compounds itself as you add more. This film had Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and maybe Thumbelina and honestly by switching back and forth between the stories you never connect with any of the characters enough to care. If I were someone who had never seen or read a fairy tale I would have been both completely lost and apathetic.
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Into the Woods Review Part 3
I won’t say this film was unwatchable. I enjoyed Emily Blunt as the Bakers Wife and I appreciate a story that doesn’t feel the need to whitewash everything into happy happy joy joy in fear of exposing younglings to something that might traumatize their little brains (or perhaps help them grow a little backbone for when they grow up and deal with actual life. Your mollycoddling is doing them a disservice (said the man with no children) and only serves to protect you from having to explain things to them. Kudos on helping to raise the Wimpiest Generation. 
Plus if you really think you are protecting your children you should know that by age 10 I guarantee they have a friend who lets them play Assassins Creed. Let them have a few nightmares. My parents did nothing to insulate me from violence, bullies, and massive self esteem issues and look how great I turned out. Image courtesy of the video game t shirt category).
It’s just that the good is so grievously outweighed by the bad. The songs. The story. The dialog. The mediocre sets, CGI, and special effects. The fact that every male character in this film looks, sounds, and acts like a sexual predator. It’s like the casting director logged onto a talent agency site but was redirected onto the Megan’s Law page. There was nothing in this film to draw me in. A couple of characters die and I felt all the bereavement of flushing a toilet.
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Into the Woods Review Part 4
The story. A flimsy pretext is found to connect a bunch of old fairy tales together. A witch curses a baker with infertility unless he can find a white cow, red hood, golden slipper, and blond hair (I hope you have your story decoding glasses on to unravel this plot). We then get mini versions of the stories. I’m going to assume you aren’t idiots and can figure out how the stories all connect at this point. 
There is a twist that might have added some drama had they not solved the dilemma 30 seconds later and a lady giant attacks who is slain when hit between the eyes with a rock the relative size of an ant from a sling by a young boy (oh yeah. In an attempt to remain as unoriginal as possible they ripped off David and Goliath too. Come to think of it the trap they used on the giant was the exact same trap the Prince used on Cinderella. Lame. Image courtesy of movie t shirt category).
1 of 5 Blech
So worth seeing? No, not really unless you are a huge fan of one of the many stars of this film or perhaps the repetitive nature of Stephen Sondheim songs helps sooth you to sleep. It is a rare occasion when I truly regret the time spent watching a film good or bad (I generally find things to enjoy in bad films) but I honestly wish I had my $11 and 125 minutes back. I was so uninspired that it took me almost a week to get around to writing this review. I know that this film has garnered praise by other critics (71% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes but only 59% from audience. America, I love you) but I think this is another Emperors Clothes situation where critics fear looking like an uncultured oaf for not paying tribute to a highly overrated Broadway play. I am an uncultured oaf and don’t care what Broadway thinks of me. 1 of 5 phasers.
I have a couple more 2014 movies to see before I do my annual best and worst lists. Check back soon.
the Infamous Dave Inman
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The Gambler Review Part 1
Monologs a go go!
dialogue – [dahy–uh-lawg, -log] noun 1. conversation between two or more persons.
This is one of those special reviews for me where I, the cinema equivalent of a six year old prescribing sugar pills to her teddy bear while playing doctor, get to tell so called professional filmmakers who have dedicated their lives to perfecting their art how to make films. The funny thing is the director, Rupert Wyatt, actually directed Rise of the Planet of the Apes (a personal favorite).
You don’t have to be a genius to ken that I found issues with the Gambler. First off the entire movie serves as a vehicle for every single character to deliver long, pithy, analogy ridden, repetitive, boring monologs when telling their life story, discussing philosophy, or answering the question would you like fries with that? Each character in turn is either rambling on or playing the sounding board for the ramblings of someone else. The 111 run time could have been about 45 minutes if the writers had ever studied their Shakespeare (“Brevity is the Soul of Wit”).
The other Moviemaking 101 lesson that these guys seem to forgotten is the idea that at least one of the characters in a film needs to be remotely likeable by the audience. The main character played by Marky Mark I wanted to see die a horrible lingering death and he and his love interest had a lot of chemistry in that I wished they had both been dropped into a vat of acid. 
The closest thing to a likable character was Jonathon Goodman but since he was only on screen for about 20 minutes (and mostly naked for 18 of those 20 minutes. Weird. I just found out he played Mr. Prenderghast in ParaNorman. This poster I pulled from the zombie t-shirts) there is no way he could have saved this film.
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The Gambler Review Part 2
Let me expound upon this esoteric concept known as a protagonist. You see in order for an audience to enjoy a movie they need to connect to a character. This is usually the main one but sometimes can be a supporting character. Generally this identifiable character is a good guy who people like, although some great films can be about a bad guy who people sympathize with or who goes through some kind of a change (known to we film professionals as a “character arc”). Once in a while it is a really bad guy but he is that special kind of bad that is actually very cool, or that we hate but like to see bad stuff happen to. Typically when we identify with this character we imagine ourselves in his or her shoes and kind of wish we could be that cool.
Without this connection we honestly don’t care about the characters and therefore don’t give a crap about the drama they are experiencing. The main character of this film, Jim Bennett, is a turd of the highest order. A spoiled little rich kid who has a talent for writing he refuses to use for some idealistic reason. He is a professor who ends up sleeping with one of his students while owing gangsters hundreds of thousands of dollars. He has three major problems: diarrhea of the mouth, a crippling gambling addiction, and is fricking stupid.
That is really why I couldn’t identify with him in the end. Like all rich 1st world people he has the solution to his problems handed to him over and over again and yet keeps on doing the stupidest thing possible (image courtesy of our many novelty t shirts). His mother gives him $260,000 to pay off his gambling debts and he blows it all in Vegas. Someone else lends him the dough and he gambles it again. You can’t put yourself in the shoes of a character you don’t respect and I don’t respect characters who keep sticking their fingers in light sockets while being rich little bastards.
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The Gambler Part 3
That actually could have been a decent plot point if they had played up the gambling addiction and his struggle against it (i.e. Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas) but they barely touched upon it and the main character more or less tells us (in yet another monolog) that gambling addiction doesn’t really exist (or that he doesn’t have it). Instead of describing that character arc where he hits his rock bottom and recovers from his problem he keeps on trucking and in the end solves his massive gambling problems by…gambling some more. He gains nothing, learns nothing, and ends the film in almost exactly the same position leaving the audience with nothing.
None of the rest of the characters were anything to write home about except for Mr. Goodman. 
The black and Asian gangsters were paper dolls cut from the Big Book of Stereotypes (image from the funny t shirt category), the blond girlfriend was a two dimensional nobody who seemed to lack the motivation to keep on breathing much less be interested in her professor, and the mother was another Real Housewife stereotype with angst. The funny thing is each one had the bare bones of a back story that could have been honed into a decent sub plot but were only touched upon in one or two scene and then left to rot after distracting you away from the main boring story.
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