You Can Call Me Bill

Captain’s Log,
Captain’s Tree

You Can Call Me Bill
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
USA Exhibit A Pictures 2023
London Film Festival screening, 7th October 2023

Documentary film maker extraordinaire Alexandre O. Philippe’s You Can Call Me Bill is, as the director himself put it in his introduction to this UK premiere screening at the London Film Festival, not the William Shatner documentary you were expecting. Indeed, if you are expecting a blow by blow account of William Shatner’s personal history and the various roles which have made him a modern icon (of a sometimes dubious nature but, hey, that image of him is exactly what I wanted to dispel by coming to see this thing) and serviced by various actors and studio producers who have worked for him than, I’m afraid, you are going to be out of luck...

I mean, put it this way... apart from various clips from some of his film and TV work (plus clips from stuff he’s not even in), where you will naturally see other actors in archival footage... William Shatner is the only human being you will see in this film. And, tedious as that proposition sounds, it’s certainly not a dull movie (far from it) and, you will come out of it with a sense of knowing something about Shatner as a human being... rather than the grandiose celebrity personality he’s become. No, this film is all about Shatner as he is now, looking back on a few moments in his life but ultimately, at 92 years of age (as at time of this screening), as a man who, despite being in the best of health for someone his age, knows he will certainly be shuffling off this mortal coil sometime very soon.

And that’s what this film is mostly about... death, the nature of the universe and a human being’s place in it. The film is split into chapters and, certainly, certain parts of his childhood and acting life are talked about by him but, it’s more about where he is in his life right now and how he chooses to reflect on that life and, more importantly to him, his place in the universe and what comes with death. And I say this coming out of this screening with very much the idea that Shatner is not especially religious or, certainly, a follower of one religion... more that he’s open to the great adventure of life and death and is, curious about what, if anything, comes next.

The other big vibe from the movie is that Shatner is very much into nature and, for example, his statement that he wants to be a tree... and he’s given instructions for his ashes to be placed in a forest with a redwood planted on top of him, so his cremated remains can nourish the growing tree. He loves horses and dogs and forests... and so on. So, one of his concerns is that the population of the planet is killing it off somewhat quicker now.  So he’s very eco friendly in his outlook these days. And also, another concern about his personal impending doom is... he won’t get a chance to see his grand children grow older to see what kind of people they become.

All this is done using Shatner in a chair with what looks like two or three cameras trained on him... one held static and at least one other moving around him, so the director and editor can cut between the shots through Shatner’s monologues and responses to the interviewer’s questions (almost all questions and prompts not included but... I think I heard the director’s voice once in this) and give the whole film a more dynamic feel. Bringing a sense of movement to the stillness of Shatner’s wonderful and somewhat optimistic outlook on life.

But, as I say, there are other visual things going on. For instance, apart from the various clips from things like Star Trek and T. J. Hooker etc, which all were picked to mirror some of the sentiments of what Shatner is talking about as the view of a 92 year old man, you also get things like a beautiful static shot of a tree in a forest, which both opens and closes the film and which, honestly, reminded me of something my second favourite director, Andrei Tarkovsky, might have shot for inclusion in something like Solaris or Mirror. There is also recent concert footage of Shatner and an orchestra performing a musical narrative of his thoughts since he went up into space a couple of years ago.

And of that experience, which is touched on briefly towards the end of the documentary, you can tell that he had a very profound response to his short time in space, for sure. And as he reflects on the irony of the privilege of having the opportunity to go into space, I learned another thing about him I never knew...

I remember as a youngster in the 1970s, the reruns of Star Trek on TV was one of my favourite shows... I had the blueprints, I had the Kirk and Spock action figures put out by Mego... but I also remember wondering what the heck had happened to Shatner because, he wasn’t in much before Star Trek started up again as a cinematic franchise... or at least that was the way it seemed to me. I remember him headlining shows like Barbary Coast but I often wondered what had become of him in between. Well, the irony of his recent space mission for Shatner was that, after Star Trek was cancelled and he got divorced, it turns out he was completely broke or, as Shatner corrects himself in this movie, not broke in terms of being a broken man but... he had absolutely no money. So he and his dog lived in a small truck which he’d camp up in a field or whatever and sleep in at night. He recalls a day in 1969 when he was in the truck looking up at the moon and on his smallish TV set he had in the truck, he watched the moon landing. I bet if you told that unemployed actor looking desperately for work that he’d one day get to go into space himself, there’s no way he would have believed it.

And that’s me done, I think, with this rather unexpected but certainly interesting and enlightening look at the modern acting legend that is William Shatner. There are some funny moments in the film, such as when he addresses how alien the impressions of him with his broken sentences sounds and then relating it to a story about him asking Edward G Robinson about the odd delivery he’d noticed from him in his movies... but mostly the film is a somewhat surprisingly optimistic look at impending death and how one chooses to live a life. You Can Call Me Bill is a really nice little tribute to the actor and, if it doesn’t give you all the specifics of his career or his marriages or whatever else you were expecting... it does give you a sense of the man himself as he feels about things now, which is a nice thing to have as a... hopefully somewhat premature but ultimately fitting, epitaph. If you are a fan of Shatner or are just curious about where he’s at as a person these days, then this movie is definitely worth a good look.

My 2000th Blog Post

Missed Opportunities

My 2000th Blog Post
 

So here I am on my 2000th Blog Post already. I wanted to do something different for this but, I didn’t have anything I could pull out of my hat that I hadn’t already done before so I had nothing really prepared for this moment. I even did an online search to see what other people do for ‘special occasion’ blogs and what the ‘on blog celebration’ ideas might be but, some of them I’ve already done, some of them were just ridiculous and the one which I’d already wanted to do... which is to give away a big prize or something... well, I’m sorry but I don’t have a budget for that kind of stuff right now.

So, I’m sticking to my usual ‘post numbers blog’ format and doing something which isn’t a review and this time it’s... okay, well I have a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with list articles but, yeah, this is kind of a list... I’d love it if some movie producer just stumbled on this one and got some ideas from it (like that would ever happen). What it is, is a list of ten cool characters who have appeared in movies either only once or, in the case of one of them here, a number of times in one-off attempts to get the character restarted... who really should have become running characters in a series of movies. I think the movie industry should maybe take a look at some of the characters on this list, many of whom could easily be played by the same acting talent in a number of sequels, because I really think these are missed opportunities in terms of creations who have a lot of legs and fictional people who I would love to see more movies made about.

There’s no ranking involved here... there’s no one character from this list of movie juggernauts (in my eyes) who need consideration over the others... I think all of these people deserve another shot at being turned into a franchise. So the order here is just alphabetical, as dictated by the first name of each character (in the case of all but one... you’ll know it when you see it). So, yeah, Happy 2000th to me, NUTS4R2 and, I hope you have an interesting time reading this. In the case of most of those listed here, if you’ve not seen the films in which they appear in some cases, maybe you should take a look at them because these characters are really cool. Most of these are reviewed here so, in most cases, if you click on the title of the movie in the subheading, it should take you into my review of the original film.

Clark Savage Jr
Doc Savage, 1975
Okay, so if you’re a longtime reader of this blog you’ll know of my love of the Doc Savage novels, kick started by seeing this movie in the cinema in 1975. This is a character who starred in over 180 original novels, published initially in the pulp magazines between 1933 and 1949, under the magazine pseudonym Kenneth Robeson (although almost all of these were written by Lester Dent) and then augmented over the years with new stories by the likes of Philip Jose Farmer and Will Murray. It’s a crime that only one movie has ever been made about him, starring Ron Ely and based on the first novel The Man Of Bronze. There should have at least been a 1930s serial based on this character and it’s terrible that I live in a universe where this didn’t happen. There was an attempt to get a movie made starring Chuck Connor’s as the character in the 1960s and you can read about what happened to that production here in my review of the Gold Key comic based on the unfilmed script. Doc has been picked up a few times over the last decade or so but still no movement on getting another film series of Clark’s 1930s adventures in sight. This needs to change.

Eden Sinclair
Doomsday,  2008
Rhona Mitra played special trooper Eden Sinclair in this post-apocaylyptic blend of Mad Max 2 and Escape From New York, where a wall has been put up outside Scotland to keep a lethal virus out of the UK. Many years later, Sinclair leads a team into what’s left of Scotland, to try and bring out a cure which might possibly be there. She’s a great character who has a bionic eye which she can take out and roll around so she can see around corners etc. I’d love to see another movie using this character and Mitra shows just how good she is at playing these kinds of roles.

Florence Cathcart
The Awakening, 2011
Florence Cathcart is a professional sceptic and debunker of the supernatural, until she runs head on into it, of course, in the supernatural thriller The Awakening. When we meet her, she’s played by the great Rebecca Hall and she’s both a tough as nails but also a fairly vulnerable character to throw into the deep end of the spiritual realm. As the film continues, a certain gift for channeling the spirits is exhibited in the character... even though she doesn’t realise it for a long time (although I’m pretty sure most of the audience will figure out just what that special talent is from very early on in the movie). I’d love to see more films where the previously sceptical Cathcart is involved in adventures in the realm of the supernatural, while trying to find a more explicable cause for them. And I’d love to see Rebecca Hall back in the part now (wow, is it ten years ago already since this one came out?).

Gary Seven
Star Trek - Season Two: Assignment Earth, 1968
Gary Seven was a human(ish) secret agent from Earth’s far future who was sent back in time to 1968 to find out why two other ‘time agents’ have failed to report in to his superiors... which is where he encounters Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise, also somewhat misplaced in time. Robert Lansing played Gary Seven and this episode was originally intended as a pilot for a proper full on Gary Seven TV show but, presumably, wasn’t taken up by the studio. He had a sonic screwdriver-like device and a highly intelligent, shape changing cat of dubious origin. The episode also featured actress Terri Garr as someone who was obviously going to carry on as Seven’s new human assistant... you might remember her from such films as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Young Frankenstein. Although Lansing is long dead, I’d love to see the full TV series in development sometime with a bright, young star in the role.

It
It Follows, 2014
Well, I didn’t know what to call this demonic, sexual curse creature but, in some ways, I guess you can imply it’s an ‘It’ from the title, right? This was a big hit horror film when it came out seven years ago and I have no idea why we don’t have at least one sequel to it already... not to mention a franchise. It doesn’t even have to be populated by the same characters as in the first film, obviously, since the sexual chain that 'It' has to kill in descending order can be carried on for anyone, assuming the creature didn’t die at the end of the film... it’s kind of implied that there’s a possibility it’s still out there, still following the chain of sexual encounters back to their centre of origin.

Jerry Cornelius
The Final Programme, 1973
Michael Moorcock’s notorious and changeable Jerry Cornelius character has really only been in one film proper, Robert Feust’s poorly received (at the time) but absolutely incredible The Final Programme. There are a number of stories which could be easily adapted for cinema and, also, some which would not be that easy to adapt (although I believe a couple of them could be cross pollinated as a double adaptation if you wanted to go down that route). Moorcock himself hates this movie but I think it captures the character quite well in the snapshot of the first novel it’s trying to achieve (albeit with a whole load of stuff missed out but... that’s the nature of the medium). Jon Finch did a fine job of bringing Mr. C to life and I think the character, who is supposed to look somewhat like Mick Jagger, could easily be re-tapped for some more ‘truer-to-Moorcock’ on-screen adventures with someone like David Tennant in the role.

John Carter
Princess Of Mars, 2009
John Carter, 2012
I’ve still not seen the decidedly dodgy (by all reports), budget inadequate, 2009 straight to video, very loose adaptation of A Princess Of Mars (aka Under The Moons Of Mars) by Edgar Rice Burroughs but... I’ll get around to it (however much I’m dreading it). I love Burroughs’ series of Martian novels, many of which are headed up by either John Carter, former cavalry man and future Warlord Of Mars or his son Carthoris. The 2012 movie John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch as the character, was not without two glaring problems... the fact that they wrote in a more scientific way of travelling between worlds rather than the accidental ‘astral projection’ of the novel and, also, the fact that the Martians in the movie wear clothes... but overall it was a pretty great movie and it was just badly marketed. This film deserved at least a couple of sequels and the character is in desperate need of a reboot... which probably won’t happen now due to the poor box office of the 2012 version.

Lilith Silver
Razor Blade Smile, 1998
Jake West’s truly brilliant movie Razor Blade Smile highlights main character Lilith Silver, as played by Eileen Daly. She’s a vampire living in modern times who has been around since she was ‘turned’ sometime in the 19th Century and who is in the thick of it against an evil cult who intend her harm. The film has a marvellous twist to it and it makes it very easy to do any number of sequels. Lilith has a lot of personality (almost like a female version of Jerry Cornelius, see above) and it shines amidst a wonderful atmosphere of blood, nudity and gore. I’d love to see more movies made about this character but, for right now, I’d settle for a decent Blu Ray transfer of this thing by some smart UK label... more people should know about this movie and character. I’m surprised there have been no comic books.

Modesty Blaise
Modesty Blaise, 1966
Modesty Blaise, 1982
My Name Is Modesty, 2004
Peter O’ Donnel’s absolutely brilliant newspaper strip character ran for a long time and, more importantly, was in a string of novels written by him which are absolutely first class ‘ex-head of crime network turns espionage queen’ novels. There have been three attempts to capture the character on screen so far and, each one has had some real problems. The first of these was the Jospeph Losey movie Modesty Blaise, which starred Monica Vitti in the title role. It’s a fantastic film if you can divorce it from the source material but, although it’s based on the first novel, it completely fails to capture the tone of the stories and instead turns it into a comedy. Monica Vitti looks perfect as Modesty... in one scene where she has her trademark black, skin tight jump suit and her dark hair... but looks completely unlike the character for the majority of the film. I can see why O’Donnell hated this one and all subsequent attempts to put her on the screen. The second attempt, Modesty Blaise in 1982, was a failed TV pilot movie and, although I haven’t seen it, the clips I have seen tell you all you need to know as to why it failed. The producers have tried to turn her into something which completely fails, again, to capture the character of the stories. I have recently come into a ‘print’ of this to watch at some stage for the blog but... I’ve not been brave enough yet to unleash that disappointment on myself. In 2004, Quentin Tarantino (who had featured a later edition of the first novel in Pulp Fiction), produced another low budget venture with My Name Is Modesty but, once again, failed to deliver the goods. Although, he and the director really made a rod for their own backs on this by making it an origin story, of sorts, so the only character from the actual stories in this one was a very young version of Modesty herself. O’ Donnel is dead now so I presume the rights to the character may well be on the market again and, seriously, we need someone to do a proper Modesty Blaise franchise of movies... especially since the actress Gal Gadot is an absolutely perfect fit for the character. This needs to happen and someone should tell her she’s perfect for this.

Scarlett Marlowe
As Above, So Below, 2014
Scarlett Marlowe is the young, rogue archaeologist who is the central protagonist in the ‘gates of hell found under the catacombs of Paris’ movie As Above So Below, as played by Perdita Weeks. She’s gutsy, persistent and unflappable... even in the face of being pursued by supernatural demons. It’s an under seen belter of the ‘found footage’ horror cycle and the ending of the film leaves it wide open for us to join the character in another adventure... presumably along the lines of a ‘horror movie meets Lara Croft’ style series of films. I would love to see her further adventures but, like the Florence Cathcart character from The Awakening (as mentioned above) the movie was presumably planned as a one off adventure and, I wish the producers would see the potential of expanding the character out into other adventures.

And that’s me done on the under appreciated, under used characters of film and television over the years... at least as I see them. I think all of the above could be mined for box office gold if done right and the fact that they haven’t been is a real head scratcher to me. Anyway, that’s 2000 posts published and... more reviews to follow. Thanks for reading.

Toy-Ventures

The Joy Of Toy

Toy Ventures Issue 1

I’ve been following @Plaidstallions, the creator of the new Toy-Ventures magazine on Twitter, for a short while now... having discovered them by way of retweets by @MegoMuseum and others. Very recently, the gentleman responsible for the account has produced Issue One of what we all hope will be a long running magazine and, since I’m a man wholely in touch with the memories of my childhood possessions (name me one guy who has actually, ever ‘grown up’) and I remember a lot of the stuff coming out over here in the UK too, I thought I’d go ahead and order the thing.

Now, I don’t review magazines that often on here. In fact, outside of magazine format comic books I think I’ve only ever reviewed a magazine one other time on this blog in just over ten years and... that was quite some time ago. However I wanted to flag this one up because it’s a really nice product and, well... how often do print based magazines come out these days?

I’ll get to my slight criticism right away because a) it’s minimal and b) probably unimportant to most people anyway. The thing is, I’m a graphic designer and... just don’t ask a graphic designer about another designer’s work is always a good policy for the most part so... yeah, I’d say the font size is a little too large for comfort in some areas and some of the background washes on the text are just a little too heavy in places for quick legibility. Although, having said that, you never know what ‘dot gain’ is really going to do to a design until you get it back from a printer so that’s always a risky business anyway and it’s certainly worth doing because... well... it’s legible enough. Those kinds of issues are always trial and error anyway.

Okay, that’s my only slight negative on the whole venture.

Everything else about this is quality and, large print or not, there are certainly some nuggets of information to be gleaned from the issue, which works as both an informative guide for collectors of various highlighted toy lines while also being damn fine entertainment. I had a huge wave of nostalgia just hitting me as soon as I got this out of the envelope... not just from the cover but also from the free little ‘trading cards’ of various action figures over the years which accompanied it. Some of the design detailing in the magazine itself is really cool and I especially liked the inclusion of the little price tag in the top right corner on some of the ‘toy branded’ pages in the interior spreads.

This issue of the magazine is an Azrak-Hamway tribute edition and most of the toys featured are made by them so, if you’re wondering why some of your favourites from certain toy lines are not here, I’m sure they’ll be coming in future editions. This one is split into seven main articles which comprise the following:

Set Phasers To Fun is a look at various Star Trek toys such as phaser and U.S.S Enterprise water pistols and character parachute figures. I loved the little ‘pin ball’ sets in this section which, to be honest, took me back while reminding me just how disappointing those little pinball sets really were compared to the real thing.

The Guide To ‘Official World Famous Super Monsters’ does exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak and looks at the history of the various and sometimes copyright bending Universal Horror action figures comprising Dracula, Frankenstein (well, the monster at any rate), The Wolfman, The Mummy and The Creature From The Black Lagoon. And most of their many variants, both in body colours, widths, accessories and boxes/card displays are shown here. There were a lot of these for reasons explained in the mag but I found it interesting that the slight variant of the astonishingly beautiful Frankenstein monster I had from one of these moulds was not pictured or included in the many versions listed here. The green hands I had were of a slightly different orientation to the ones displayed in this article. However, if you’re interested in information about how, say, the moulds were inspired by the famous Aurora model kits or which box artworks had bleeds or borders/punch holes etc then this is something you might want to spend some time with.

Now, Skydive Like Apes! This is a look at some of the outrageous and brightly coloured rack toys inspired by the Planet Of The Apes license. These include parachute apes, friction wagons and even a nice Dr. Zaius stunt cycle. It also includes a reproduction of a ‘Notice To Trade’ retraction of a Mego & 20th Century Fox VS Azrak-Hamway legal dispute, accompanied by a photo of some wonderful ‘knock off’ action figures from their range of ‘Action Apeman’ toys. Nice.

I Wanted The Best... KISS mike is a tale of obsession of trying to find a specific piece of KISS merchandise over the years which is both tragic and moving. Not going to say much about this one but it’s a story with a very unexpected ending.

Rack Toys: 1999 is an absolutely wonderful three page item about various rack toys produced to tie in with the Space 1999 TV show (which I reviewed here). This included the little light up ray gun I used to have as a kid and, honestly, loads of stuff I never knew even existed. I mean, a lot of kids had one of the two versions of Dinky’s Eagle Transporters but, did you know that there were ‘friction’ versions of the Eagles produced for sale?

Realistic Floating Action takes a look at the various Super-Hero themed parachute sculpts that were all over the shops in the 1970s and early 80s. There’s a lovely quote from a former Senior Vice President of AHI/Remco alluding to the fact that the sales dropped when kids started questioning the credibility of flying characters like Superman ever needing a parachute. I can vouch for that... it’s exactly why I didn’t get interested in things like a Superman parachute or Superman car when I was a kid. Who fell for this? As some of the other sections, there are also photos of some versions of these toys which never made it onto the shelves and were only built as prototypes or, in some cases, just didn’t get much distribution. So this is valuable visual info.

Adorable Horror looks at the Universal Monsters inspired Bend-Em toys. I used to like Bend-Ems as a kid... until the wire in the arm or leg broke and you could no longer... you know... bend ‘em. I don’t remember owning any of these horror ones though, so this was a nice surprise.

The magazine finishes off with a couple of double spreads of more photos of the Universal Monsters figures and, although it’s something of a quick read... it’s one I’ll probably keep delving into for weeks and years to come because, as much as some of this stuff can be found online, having actual printed photographs of these things and the ability to quickly flick through them is definitely a more quality experience.

Toy-Ventures Issue One is, for me, an essential purchase and, if you think you had the same kind of childhood as I did, you’ll probably find one or two special things lurking within its pages too. I’m definitely looking forward to Issue Two now, which will hopefully release sometime in December.

Toy Ventures Issue One can be bought from Mego Museum and you can check out the Plaid Stallions website here.

The Hollywood Meme

Meme Me Up, Scotty

The Hollywood Meme -
Transnational Adaptations 
In World Cinema
by Iain Robert Smith
Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 9781474441339

This is, once again, another book that caught my eye drifting past in my Twitter timeline and I was lucky enough to be given a copy for my birthday earlier in the year. Now, it would be true to say I had a few problems with The Hollywood Meme - Transnational Adaptations In World Cinema, the first being when I finally cracked it open to read in the Jury Lounge while on Jury Service and finding that, although the cover was correct, an entirely different book had been printed and bound inside - namely Creative Involution  - Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze by S. E. Gontarski. Luckily, Amazon were more than happy to change it for me which they did, fairly promptly. So well done to their customer service team for that one.

Now the book focuses on the phenomenon of the meme as a snippet of an idea bringing together a common visual image, for example, which is then spread around such cavernous places as the internet and changed in ways which take the core meaning or notion but re-contextualises it to fit something else... if my understanding of that creative process is correct. So what Smith does here is use the notion of meme as a metaphor for the specific elements of Hollywood product and how different cultures utilise certain things from these to fit in with a specific market place and to bring more recognition and box office gain to the equation. And he does this using a few of the usual suspects by focusing on three large chapters, one each, about the Turkish, Philippines and Indian cinema at specific periods in their respective history (again, different periods) which best demonstrate what he refers to as The Hollywood Meme in evidence at the times selected to best highlight these points.

And he starts off by making a very good point about American product cannibalistically turning in on itself to reconstitute its own successful ideas and therefore reap greater profits from it. In this case, in his introduction, he starts off talking about the universal reaction that Star Wars Episode VII - The Force Awakens was a rip off of the original, first Star Wars movie. Of course, this didn’t stop the film’s key target audience (myself included) from going to back to it for multiple repeat viewings and it’s certainly true, of course, that the very first Star Wars film itself was a potpourri of famous creative influences which owed a debt to various forms of cinema (not to mention Joseph Campbell’s writings) which A New Hope (as it was later retitled) was less than subtle with when it presented various texts combined and regurgitated back in 1977.

He is also keen to point out that the street goes two ways, as it were, in the way that various countries and cultures borrow and exchange ideas, allowing us to distill down from bits of each other’s successes within the context of our own cultural backdrop, so to speak. He makes the point that Hollywood comprises only 6% of global film production so, perhaps its reach and dominance of so much of international culture is a bit of a puzzle. Actually, in the early pages of the book I was just waiting for him to get around to pointing out Wim Wenders famous quote from his 1976 film Kings Of The Road and, sure enough, within a couple more pages he’d gotten around to that  “The Yanks have colonised our subconscious” dialogue so, yeah, it’s still a useful quotation to use as a metaphor, I guess.

He also goes onto talk about The Berne Convention For The Protection Of Literary And Artistic Works set up in France in 1886, at the behest of writers such as Victor Hugo and how this was pretty much ignored by the various people making movies at these key times of Turkish, Philippine and India.

Here’s my big problem with the book though... it’s way too academic. And when I say that I mean that the levels and denseness of the academic speak and technique in which the book is written is far more alienating and able to render vasts swards of text almost incomprehensible in the worst way. To myself, at least. I still can’t for instance, work out just what the objective of Mr. Smith’s new model for the study of transnational cinema is... even when he tries to sum everything up in the end. As I’ve said elsewhere (in a review of a book which I’ve so far been too cowardly to publish here for fear of hurting an author’s feelings), I really hate the academic approach of ‘method, text, conclusion’ as I find it a complete waste of everybody’s time but this is exactly the mode of discourse that the writer has chosen to utilise his ideas with here. The first two great chunks of text discuss exactly what he is trying to write about and prove and then, before we get to a similarly redundant conclusion chapter, the book is split up into three main chapters which actually are very interesting when you can cut to the chase, namely Popular Turkish Cinema from 1970 to 1982, Popular Philippines Cinema from 1979 to 1994 and Popular Indian Cinema from 1998 to 2010 (specifically their Bollywood strand of national cinema).

Then, at the start of each chapter he does exactly the same thing... starting off each section with a lengthy summary of what he is going to write about and then following up, at the end of each chapter, with another summary of what he’s just written about. And I suspect, with the overwhelming academic speak that some parts of this text uses, I didn’t always understand all of the points he was trying to make. Especially when the specific samples he picks... of which he chooses three to four films for each chapter to briefly write about... are all examples which are somewhat different in intent to each other and which all use slightly different modus operandi in their respective approaches to the ‘Hollywood Meme’ part of their make-up.

But, like I said, there is some ‘gold in them thar hills’ if you can penetrate the slightly alienating writing style found in many passages and he helpfully includes, near the start of each chapter, a kind of precis of each of these national industries at the period he is writing about and how they came to be at that place within a historical context. He also talks about the lack of enthusiasm or recognition of copyright laws in each respective country as an indication of the relative ease in which films like the famous yesilcam 3 Dev Adam aka Santo And Captain America VS Spider-Man are made.

So, in addition to introducing me to the background behind the ‘yesilcam’ film and the term ‘Turkification’, he explains why Turkish cinema was more Westernised and populist in its execution as opposed to the often more artistically different film produce of other countries. He also demonstrates how many of the films from Turkey and the Philippines are actually not utilising the specific characters from the source material... Batman, Robin, Superman, Captain America, Spider-man etc... but merely using the visual iconography of those famous characters to get people into the cinemas. So the only traits that the villanous Spider-man of 3 Dev Adam shares with his comic book counterpart is, for example, just the costume and the name. And often the text of the movie will point out that the characters are only borrowing these trappings due to a plot point, rather than actually being the same characters (which is kinda interesting, actually). Again, he points out that in Turkish Star Wars, while footage and music from various Hollywood products are spliced in (visually, from Star Wars) the plot and characters are different to the original Lucasfilm classic.

He goes on to look at Turkish Star Trek (this is one of the many films highlighted in this book where I’ve had a ‘DVD’ waiting in the piles to watch for years without getting around to looking at the thing) and how it’s a continuation (indeed conclusion) of a long series of films about a Turkish comedy character and how he is injected into a feature length remake of the early Star Trek episode The Man Trap (the salt vampire one... I believe it was actually the first in the series to air when the show was first transmitted, with the second pilot film following a week later) plus famous scenes from other Star Trek episodes and how this character is used to highlight, metaphorically on screen, the exchange between Turkish and US culture.

He points out, in another film I’ve still yet to get around to watching, Seytan, which is a Turkish remake of The Exorcist, how the Catholic tropes which make the film quite terrifying for audiences of a certain religious persuasion, have been replaced by Islamic ones. So, for example, the infamous, forced crucifix masturbation scene in The Exorcist is replaced with a Jinn-headed knife masturbation scene in Seytan.

His chapter on Philippines is more of the same but he points out that their cinema is a more postmodern one in terms of its borrowings from American culture, with several sources and genres spliced in so the movies can appeal to a wide range of countries in export. So, for example, Dynamite Johnson is a sequel to both The Bionic Boy and Cleopatra Wong (the Philippines answer to Cleopatra Jones). He also looks at the way their own popular characters such as the comic strip heroine Darna, who is already a little like Wonder Woman, is further enhanced to resemble the US heroine in the long series of films about her, even down to giving Darna a similar costume, tiara and bracelets that ward off the bullets of her enemies.

In the Bollywood chapter, however, Smith is quick to point out that the visual iconography of Hollywood so prevalent in the popular cinema of the Turkish and Philippine cinema of these respective time periods, is absent completely in the popular cinema of India. Instead, it is the characters and plots, scenes and shots which are transplanted wholesale... after being ‘Indianised’ with national traits like the addition of musical sequences... and this gives various Hollywood ‘classics’ the chance to flourish in a national market where penetration of Hollywood product is very low, especially in comparison with most other countries. So a Bollywood remake of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, for example, has the narrative unfolding in the correct order but also has a parallel flashback story added and it’s in that romantic back story that the traditional Bollywood musical sequences are inserted.

In his concluding chapter, where the author also tells us what it is he’s just written about, he says some interesting things about the memes taken by these countries being 'memed' themselves and altered to produce a new phoenix form the ashes of what’s gone before... especially in regards to the web. So, for example, a serialised version of 3 Dev Adam has been re-subtitled with a totally different story and dialogue, with much the same attitude that Woody Allen ended up pulling together What’s Up Tiger Lily? from the ashes of the Japanese film Key Of Keys and turning it into something funny with the addition of new dubbing.

It was in this final chapter that the writer did really go down in my estimation, it has to be said, by using the phrase ‘an history’ instead of the totally correct ‘a history’... it’s a hard ‘H’ people! Other than that though... and the somewhat tiring use of academic syntax to render what should be easily understood ideas into fairly less penetrable ones... I’d have to say that The Hollywood Meme - Transnational Adaptations In World Cinema is actually a kind of interesting book and if you’re one of those few people in this ‘bootleg DVD, internet ironic’ world who has somehow not heard about a lot of these manifestations of national cinema, then you might want to give this book a try. If nothing else, it will open your eyes to what’s around for the more jaded of cineastes to whet their appetites on. This probably won’t end up being my favourite book on the subject but, until something better comes along, it’s definitely worth a look.

Star Trek - Insurrection

Insurrection Shuffle

Star Trek - Insurrection
USA 1998 Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Paramount Blu Ray

It’s a shame that this film wasn’t better received when it came out. Frankly, Star Trek - Insurrection seems, to me, to be a much maligned film and, though it’s not up to the calibre of the previous Star Trek movie, also directed by Frakes, it deserves a better reputation than it’s got. It’s actually the second best of the four movies in the series utilising the crew members from the TV show Star Trek - The Next Generation and, to be honest, Star Trek - First Contact (reviewed by me here), was always going to be a hard film to follow.

I think one of the problems is that the emphasis of the film is less on action and more about moral dilemmas, with the film revolving around the Federation, who are traditionally seen as the good guys, taking a morally wrong stance, as they try to covertly relocate the population of a planet, the Ba’ku, to be able to harvest the particles in the planets atmosphere and use them to prolong the life of various people. So, yeah, it the old, ‘fountain of youth’ plot but with the added frustration of the establishment which ‘the good guys’ are supposed to be representing being, in themselves, a part of the problem and not a solution to it.

Now, I’m not going to defend this movie to the hilt here... there are some things wrong with it, to be sure, and I think some of the earlier script and story ideas, such as Picard being courtmartialed for his actions throughout the movie, may have been a lot more satisfying, dramatically, than the final version of the movie we are left with. However, I don’t think it’s fair to compare Insurrection to the dazzling brilliance of First Contact, which admittedly raised everyones expectations for this one, and there are some really nice scenes in here.

One of the things it does really well is play up the romantic aspect of the characters. Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis reprise their on screen roles as Commander Riker and Deanna Troi but, this time, they are allowed to rekindle the long lost romance which was already in their past before the timeline of the first ever episode of Star Trek - The Next Generation. This back story was briefly touched upon in the series but in this movie we see the two characters reunited romantically, and this includes seeing Troi in a bathtub as she shaves off Riker’s beard... making this the first time the character has been beardless since the first season of the show. Frankly, I think there should be more movies where Marina Sirtis is seen in a bathtub but, hey, that’s another story. Both Frakes and Sirtis play the scenes with a certain amount of charm and teasing enthusiasm that really makes their screen time whiz along nicely.

Similarly, Picard also starts up a romance, of sorts, with one of the planet dwellers, Anij, played so wonderfully well by actress Donna Murphy... always a pleasure to watch her on screen. Picard also has some good, comic moments in this and the movie itself starts off very strongly with a rebelling Commander Data taking on all his superiors in the quadrant, in an effort to protect the inhabitants of the planet. The disappointing part of that is the punchline that he has been damaged when shot at and so everything is wiped out in his android brain other than the difference to tell right from wrong. I would have much preferred him to have made this decision to fight the Federation on his own terms but I guess the end result amounts to the same thing... more or less.

This film also sees the restoration, due to the planet’s atmosphere, of Geordi La Forge’s eyesight, without any kind of electronic aid and, as he watches a sunset with his Captain for the first time, it’s another scene in a movie full of such scenes where the emphasis seems to be about how great it would be if everyone just learned to slow down and look at what’s going on around them. Which is great and something I can really get into... although bringing this aspect into the structural make-up of the movie does seem to kill the pacing, somewhat, I would say. But isn’t that kind of the point?

It’s actually quite a nice looking film and that goes for some of the special effects, too. There’s a sequence near the end of the movie where Riker in the Enterprise is playing a deadly game of hide and seek with the new ‘allies’ of the Federation (who want the planet for themselves, for reasons I won’t spoil here), in a sector of space known as ‘the briar patch’. It’s actually an echo of a similar set of scenes, to my mind, between Kirk and Khan in Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan (reviewed here) but these are some of the most beautiful and colourful shots of the Enterprise in this section of the film than any we’ve seen before or since. Some really great stuff.

There’s a downside to this too in that, unlike the original Star Trek series from the 1960s and the subsequent film versions, the Star Trek - The Next Generation episodes were always much more about being ensemble pieces which would explore aspect of all the characters, with everyone getting great chunks of screen time, sometimes a whole episode, to shine and explore their roles. In the movie versions, although the majority of the characters do have some nice scenes, the movies are much more focussed on Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard and Brent Spiner as Data... which is fine and, in some ways, tends to make the movies more focused, but ultimately does mean that everyone else gets considerably less time in the spotlight. Which is a bit of a shame, to be honest.

Once again, Jerry Goldsmith returns to provide another, very beautiful score although, like the movie itself, I think it’s also been underrated, somewhat, by people who listen to such things. After the standard Alexander Courage intro, rather than go into another version of his sweeping main title theme from Star Trek - The Motion Picture (reviewed here), which by this time was completely synonymous with the crew of The Next Generation, he does something completely different but appropriate to the opening title sequence of the peaceful Ba’ku and the observation of their culture. It’s a lovely them which I suspect is overlooked by some fans of Goldsmith’s work because it’s not particularly action oriented. However, there is also some good and very typical Goldsmith action moments during the film and, as a nice crowd pleaser, he also requotes the Klingon theme he used for the first film... and again in Star Trek V - The Final Frontier (reviewed here) and Star Trek - First Contact, this being the second time it’s been used as a heroic theme to underline Worf’s character at a certain moment.

All said and done, however, it’s certainly not among the greatest of the Star Trek movies, to be sure, but equally, it is one of the two greatest Star Trek - The Next Generation movies. I think regular fans of the show may find themselves having a much better time of it with this movie, now that some years have passed, than they did when it was first released into cinemas. Certainly, I suspect, it will be much better remembered than the last of the Next Generation movies, which was soon to follow... but I’ll get around to watching Star Trek - Nemesis sometime soon and hopefully get a little more out of it than the terrible experience I had at the cinema with that one. We shall see.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek - First Contact

The World According To Warp

Star Trek - First Contact
USA 1996 Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Paramount Blu Ray

And so on to what is undoubtedly the greatest of the Star Trek - The Next Generation movies and almost, but not quite, the best movie in the entire run of movies of either generation... I would still say that Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home (reviewed here) is still better than this one... but only just.

This was the second time an actor who plays a member of the crew of the Starship Enterprise went behind the camera and directed the film while still playing his character on screen. On this one it’s the turn of Jonathan Frakes, who plays Will Riker in the show and movies, to take the helm and... well he does an absolutely fantastic job here. Like his predecessor in Star Trek actor turned director, Leonard Nimoy, Frakes also directed two movies for the franchise - this one and the next one, Star Trek: Insurrection. My recollection of Insurrection is that it’s much maligned but really not too bad a film. First Contact, on the other hand, is absolutely wonderful.

The film starts off with Patrick Stewart’s character Captain Jean-Luc Picard having a nightmare about his previous experiences with the Borg Collective (or The Borg, for short) and these were at the time, and probably still are, the most iconic and downright threatening of all the Star Trek villains created in the show’s history. They debuted a few years earlier in the Star Trek - The Next Generation TV show and their reputation as being an almost unstoppable, collective consciousness who see the human race and countless other lifeforms as mere insects to be assimilated and then brushed away, made them a fan favourite and ensured their longevity and future appearances on pretty much all of the other Star Trek TV shows after their debut. Star Trek: Voyager even had an ex-Borg turned good, Seven Of Nine, as part of the crew. Captain Picard is perceived as a survivor of this experience in much the same way that one might perceive a survivor of the holocaust in the Second World War.

At the opening of the film, the Borg engage the Federation but Picard and the crew of the new Enterprise (that’s NCC 1701-E by now, if anyone’s counting) are ordered away from the rest of the fleet... presumably because Picard was once assimilated into the Borg collective and his superiors don’t trust him (and don’t realise his experiences give him a unique perspective on how to fight the Borg). As they monitor the raging battle, however, it’s clear that humanity is having serious problems defending itself from the Borg and so Picard rushes tot he rescue. Stopping only to emergency beam up Worf (who had gone on to be a crew member and regular character in the TV show Star Trek: DeepSpace Nine by this point), the Enterprise leads an assault which destroys the Borg ship. However, a pod escapes and starts warping backwards in time. The Enterprise follows in its wake, going back in time, and are protected by this ‘warp bubble’ when it turns out the Borg went back and wiped out humanity in the past, turning the Earth into one big machine planet. With the crew of the Enterprise the only ones left of humanity, they have to try and stop the Borg in the past and bring the timeline back into what it was before the Borg got there. Meanwhile, some wiley Borg have started to slowly take over and assimilate parts of the Enterprise... so we have simultaneous story threads taking place as some of the crew members have to fulfil a very specific mission on Earth, while the others are fighting to save the Enterprise and stop the Borg from calling other Borg from far away galaxies in the past. It’s all go, that’s for sure.

And that's the basic plot set up. But there are lots of interesting things to note about this movie.

It’s not an unusual thing for a time travel movie such as this one, for instance, to have the crew of the Enterprise travelling to fix things in their past but, to have that past era still be way in the future of the audience watching it is something a little different to what we’ve seen before. That era being the mid 21st Century, when Zephram Cochrane invents and tests the Warp Drive... an act which quickly leads to the Earth’s first contact with alien worlds, changing the course of our planet forever and leading the way to the Star Trek universe as we know it. This is, of course, the mission that the ground crew have to ensure still happens but once Zephram Cochrane gets wind of his ‘revered’ status in the future... well he’s not necessarily jumping at the chance to change the course of history.

Zephram Cochrane, of course, is a bit of a Star Trek fan pleasing addition to the storyline. Played here by James Cromwell, he was originally played by Glenn Corbett in the original 1960s TV show episode Metamorphosis. Ironically, he was played as a much younger person although the events of that episode were set many hundreds of years after the events of this movie. Which is okay, because he was being kept young and alive by the strange alien being in love with him on the planet he ended up on. So it actually makes sense to have Cochrane appearing as an older looking guy here, even though he’s younger looking in the earlier show. Of course, there’s a little slip in that Zephram Cochrane was said to be from Alpha Centuri in the original episode but, I’m sure this can be easily explainable as a slight lapse in the full info and the crew of the original Enterprise’s remembrance of it. Of course, it would have been great to have Corbett reprise the role in that it doesn’t matter he should have looked older but, alas, he was already three years deceased by the time this film was produced. Cromwell plays the role really well, though, and turns Cochrane into a real flesh and blood character with the short time he has in the role.

There are some other pleasing cameos in the film for Star Trek fans too... both human and non-human. We have the return of the Dixon Hill 1940s noir holodeck novel that Pickard invents in the TV show and, appearing in this, as a completely different character, is Ethan Phillips who played Neelix in the TV show Star Trek: Voyager. Also cameoing from Star Trek: Voyager is Robert Pickardo as another iteration of the holographic Doctor he plays in that show. And, of course, Dwight Shultz returns as the stumbling Lieutenant Barclay, the character he played as a semi-regular guest appearance in later seasons of Star Trek - The Next Generation.

And then we have the Borg themselves, of course. Here we have a new character in the form of Alice Krige as ‘The Borg Queen’... which a lot of people were quite annoyed about, given what we know of the species as a collective consciousness, but I think they can kind of get away with it here to some extent. She is primarily there to go toe to toe with Brent Spiner’s popular character Data, in a section of the film which I personally refer to as ‘The Last Temptation Of Data’. She does a magnificent job here, inhabiting an almost visually iconic character and clearly holding her own against, and complimenting, Spiner’s much loved performance. Which apparently wasn’t easy as both the costume she is wearing, the make up and the black contact lenses... were apparently more than challenging.

Speaking of contacts... LeVar Burton’s Geordi La Forge character has finally ditched the visor he’d been wearing in the role for the previous nine years and has robotic eyes instead, finally letting fans of his character be able to see what he looks like properly. It’s actually not as much of a jolt to the system seeing him like this as you might think and I found myself accepting his new look pretty much straight away.

For the musical score we have the late great Jerry Goldsmith returning to the franchise, where he would stay until the recent reboot movies. Assisting him with additional scoring on this one is his son, Joel Goldsmith, who is also not with us anymore. He can sure write music that sounds like his dad might have composed it, though. Together, they provide a score to the movie which is one of the best of the series and which brings some beautiful new themes along with the return of Goldsmith’s famous Star Trek - The Motion Picture main theme (which had been associated with Star Trek - The Next Generation since that show had started anyway) and the Klingon sub theme which he used in that one and which returned in his score for Star Trek V - The Final Frontier (reviewed by me here) and which is now used as a ‘hero theme’ for Michael Dorn’s Klingon character Worf... which is a nice touch.

And that’s about it on this one. Star Trek - First Contact is full of action and it really doesn’t pull its punches on the horror of the Borg situation either... even Picard is shown ‘mercy killing’ one of his own crew just before they are fully assimilated into the Borg collective and he has no problem mowing down ex-crew members turned Borg with a machine gun in a scene either. Additionally, my favourite Next Generation character Deanna Troi, played as always by the lovely Marina Sirtis, gets to play an outstanding drunk scene opposite her on-screen lover Will Riker, as played by director Jonathan Frakes, and she does it really well. Would liked to have seen these movies making more of her, to be honest. But this is just great and the film loses none of its charm and power for me now, watching it 20 years since seeing it on its original cinema release. Frakes manages to give us one of the ‘almost perfect’ Star Trek movies and, although he does a fairly good job on the next one, if memory serves me correctly, this really was the last hurrah in terms of truly great Star Trek films until the reboot from a few years ago (the third installment of which is out in cinemas this summer, I believe). If you need a jumping on point for the Star Trek - The Next Generation universe... well this movie is one of the most entertaining ways to do that, it has to be said. So if you feel a hankering to go and watch one of these things, as Pickard would say... “Make it so.”

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek The Ultimate Voyage Concert Tour

Hailing Frequencies Closed

Star Trek The Ultimate Voyage Concert Tour
The Royal Albert Hall
1st November 2015

You know, I’ve been to loads of great movie music concerts over the years. Starting off when I saw John Williams at the Barbican in 1981 or 1982... where he conducted Holst’s The Planet Suite followed by music from Superman The Movie, Close Encounters, his first two Star Wars scores, Raiders Of The Lost Ark and, in an astonishing encore, the premiere UK performance of a piece of music from his up and coming film E.T. I was 13 or 14 years old and it was a great experience. I saw a few more concerts by him over the years too.

Over the remaining decades since that first time, I also saw some great concerts by the likes of Jerry Goldsmith (more times than I can remember), Michael Nyman (even more than Goldsmith), Philip Glass (again, too many times to recall), Elmer Bernstein (three times), Ennio Morricone (three or four times), John Barry (a couple of times) and Howard Shore... to name drop a few. I’ve also seen some of the new style concerts over recent years, where clips are simultaneously projected as silent montages, such as a brilliant concert by Danny Elfman for his music for the Tim Burton movies and even some full-on films where the score is played live to the projected movie, giving the audience an insight into the way the orchestra works against the images and sound on screen... such as the two recent Star Trek films at the Royal Albert Hall and Goldsmith’s Planet Of The Apes at the Royal Festival Hall. There have been a  lot of these kinds of ‘movie with music’ screenings going on in London over the last couple of years, presumably because the organisers of these things have discovered that these are really popular... and not surprising either. In this way you can see film music put into practice against the images they were composed for (a key point which will come up again in a minute) and really see the art and craft of the scoring of these movies coming alive before your eyes and ears. They can be great fun...

And, yeah... they’ve mostly been pretty good, overall, to tell the truth. You always get the odd bad one and there’s no such thing as ‘the perfect concert’ but, the number of live performances I’ve seen that I loved far exceed the number of concerts I’ve had a bad time at. I rarely review concerts because... well, they are what they are and the review is rarely going to be more than an account of the one off performance in question... which can be entertaining but less useful in terms of judging whether you should go take a look at it. That moment is usually long gone.

I am, however, making an exception in this case because the Star Trek concert I saw a few weeks ago at the Royal Albert Hall was quite badly presented and I had some real problems with it on a couple of counts. It’s also touring in 2016 and I think people should know what they’re getting into here.

Part of my problem stems from having such a brilliant orchestra, the London Philharmonic, a conductor, Justin Freer, who knew how to get the best out of them, two legendary guest conductors - composers Ron Jones and Jay Chattaway - and a play list of 29 mostly great pieces of music from 50 years of Star Trek that made the mouth water when I saw the programme... and then having a simultaneous presentation which completely, and in almost every way possible, detracted from the music for most of the time.

It started off okay with the first half of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture arrangement of Jerry Goldsmith’s famous theme, despite what it said in the printed programme, unfortunately cutting off before they got to the Klingon battle music half way through the piece. Which was a shame but I wasn’t going to complain too much... until, after a couple of pieces of music were played from other things when the second half of the track was performed as a separate suite. What the f***? That wasn’t the worst thing, however. As soon as the second piece in the concert started, an audio/visual presentation began which would last through the whole two hours of the show... and it wasn’t kind to the performance.

For starters, they had a narrator, I don’t know who (could have been Michael Dorn, I guess), starting a continual, pretentious monologue about man’s endeavours, how the characters are all noble and tough, how we all collectively strive to be better people etc, playing right over the music. This was accompanied by constantly shifting montages from all the various Star Trek films and TV series, mixed together, including full sound effects and intrusive dialogue... all played over the top of the orchestra’s hard work. The music was rarely even from the same era or show from which the clips being used were chosen from... it was ludicrous. It was like a mix and match scene and I really didn’t want to watch...say... excerpts from the exciting ‘drop’ action sequence of the 2009 Star Trek movie while I was trying to listen to James Horner’s End Titles from Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan? I also knew I didn’t want to be watching excerpts of Khan - the Montalban and Cumberbatch incarnations - whilst trying to listen past the dialogue and sound effects to the End Credits Suite from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country! 

I mean, asides from the overblown ‘connecting’ dialogue voice over, the clip montages were mostly quite good... but how could you possibly concentrate on the music? I was realising half of the pieces I was waiting for had already passed me by because I was too busy trying to shift my concentration away from the visual density and noise of the presentation. This was appalling. I remember Goldsmith saying in or before at least a couple of concerts, sometimes in a pre-concert talk, that he absolutely hated it when a piece of music he’d composed to be shown with a specific sequence of images was used to accompany a different set of images. He then went on to illustrate how Ridley Scott (Goldsmith’s scores for Alien and Legend were both treated quite badly in their final presentations too) or somebody like that had temp tracked a cut of a movie using parts of his old scores and he’d been very unhappy about it. He knew what the music was supposed to be conveying with the images and putting the music he’d composed with other images was just wrong. Imagine how he would have felt, were he alive, if he’d have seen this so-called concert, where almost all of the pieces of music on offer were put in the background to serve totally different emotional hits than what they had been composed for. I reckon, after hearing stories about the great man, that he would have been less than calm with this decision and I wonder if his departed spirit would come back and haunt the people responsible for this event at some point... Star Trek Experience - The Wrath Of Goldsmith.

Now, the concert wasn’t all bad... there were a few instances where they let the actual visuals, dialogue and effects playing on a clip with the actual score composed for that sequence play out as it did in the original, with live accompaniment... such as the stand out moment of the concert where the fight scene from the Star Trek episode Amok Time was screened, supported by Gerald Fried’s iconic action music written for that scene. Sad to say, though, that these moments were exceptionally few and far between and, for me, this one piece was the only bit of the concert that really worked. At least the music fit what was gong on and I could hear the way the score was working properly, without any distraction other than visuals which already worked in harmony with it.

As far as the rest of the concert was concerned... well... the lady I was seeing the show with was clock watching and, although she’d been really looking forward to the music, suggested we could leave during the interval if I wanted... I said we should see it through and at least wait and see what the encore was (there wasn’t one) but, she was obviously not having a great time with the concert either and, when we talked afterwards, it seemed she was having the exact same problems of a distracting and needless presentation that I was having. The organisers should have seriously ditched the screen content and noise on this one, I think.

Now, when I think back on it, it becomes clear to me that this was maybe more of a propaganda/promotional piece for Star Trek rather than a celebration of it. It kinda pains me to say this and there were certainly no “buy our DVDs and Blu Rays - in shops now” moments in the well put together presentations... it was mostly done quite tastefully. However, the lack of respect for the way the busy sound and footage detracted from actually being able to concentrate or, in actual fact, consciously register the music above all the hullabaloo, seems to me to say a lot about what the target audience was for this... certainly Star Trek fans above music fans, it seemed to me (and to the person who came with me). It seemed specifically fired up to the aim of getting everyone rushing home and watching, consuming and buying more Star Trek and I’m sure that’s the thing that most people, whether consciously or unconsciously, would have taken away from this event. I can’t imagine anybody saying... ooh, Rosenman’s opening titles from Star Trek IV was really well done because... well, could they even hear them?

The concert finished with a big disappointment for me too. The Alexander Courage theme, which I’d seen played amazingly by the same orchestra earlier in the year, was the expanded arrangement which is on the Johnny Williams and the Boston Pops album Out Of This World. It’s a version of it I’ve always hated for its deviation in spirit from the original and I can only assume they wanted to round off the concert with this extended version because they wanted to make their final montage of clips last just that little bit longer. Oh well... at least I couldn’t concentrate on that piece so much, over the visual and audio noise... which is not the kind of consolation I want to be taking away from any film music concert.

I find it increasingly strange in a growing market of soundtrack listeners worldwide, that the people who organise events like this do not seem to be listening to what the people who listen to this particular niche music like and dislike. I know people every year, on various message boards which anyone can access, complain in no uncertain terms when a record producer decides to put dialogue from a film over a musical cue. I could understand it to a certain extent, back in the days before people had access to some kind of home video system, where an argument could be made that the record release was pretty much the only souvenir of the film’s audio track available on the market... but we moved on from that back in the 1980s. People who buy scores, in the majority, don’t want their music sullied with any dialogue or sound effects... and people (including myself, I guess) can get quite vocal about it. Why then, would the organisers risk alienating their music loving concert goers by screwing up the most important part of it and tracking in dialogue, sound effects and busy visuals to pull away from that experience so intrusively?

Now, to be fair, it might be that this concert tour wasn’t aimed at a soundtrack listening audience at all. I’m sure lots of ‘trekkies’ or ‘trekkers’, or whatever the latest fashionable term for fans of this high quality science fiction franchise is, were probably there and they probably had a really good time with it. However, I was there for the music and the insult of having such a wonderful play list performed by truly brilliant people and then not being allowed to listen to it properly was purely a lesson in frustration, as far as I’m concerned. And I know the person I was with thought so too. It’s actually put us both off going to this kind of event before approaching the ticket buying process with extreme caution in future.

The programme for the event, costing an exorbitant £10 on top of the ticket, was also quite telling. Midst some writing about the orchestra and guest conductors, there was also an article on The Science of Star Trek. Really? What’s that got to do with the music? There’s a Western concert happening in March and my friend said to me that she’d quite have liked to go to that one but it looks like they’ll be playing clip montages again over the music... so count her out. Sentiments I really can’t blame her for after this fiasco and I think I may not be going either, I suspect.

The reason I’ve written this review is not specifically to have a whine, although that helps take out frustration somewhat... it’s because of this - the show is apparently touring in 2016 and, frankly, I’m hoping the organisers may have a long think about how they’re selling this to the concert going public. Maybe pitching the advertising a little to make it clearer that the music will be obscured or maybe even tweaking the presentation a little to dial it back from being such an overwhelming experience might raise this ‘experience’ to a much greater level musically. I’m sure the various orchestras involved would prefer the public to be able to hear them properly, right? Anyway... I’ve said my piece and done my bit. I’m honestly not sure if this is the worst concert I’ve been to in my time but it’s down there among the worst and, at no time, were any of the wonderful conductors or orchestra members to blame... so it’s a bit of a shame. Moving on now... and hopefully purchasing my tickets to live events with a bit more caution in future. Listen long and prosper.

Star Trek - Series One

Where No Man 
Has Gorn Before

Star Trek Series One
1966 USA
Produced by Gene Roddenberry
Paramount BluRay Region A/B

Space.

The Final Frontier.

It was back in 1973, I think, when I first started watching the voyages of the Starship Enterprise on BBC1 via my parents old TV set. I was five years old. The year is pretty easy to place for me, actually, because I must have liked the show so much that, at the end of that year, my folks got me the Star Trek Annual 1973, one of many hardcover annual editions put out in the UK with full colour reprints culled from the US Star Trek comic put out by Gold Key. I remember, I used to read that and subsequent annuals a lot until well into my teens.

I loved the show but I was never, at the time, able to appreciate it in colour and it was not until the mid 1980s that I was finally able to see the full spectrum of the show in some much later re-runs. By then, I was a fully fledged Star Trek fan. Merchandise and toy manufacture was not quite as gung ho in those days when it came to tie-ins with film and TV as it became post Star Wars (around about 1978) but there were a few Star Trek items I had in the early to mid 1970s, in addition to the annuals, that I was proud to be the owner of.

My first item was the old Mego action figure of Captain Kirk which I took home with me after my parents spotted it at an early 1970s Ideal Home Exhibition. Mr. Spock was added to my horde within a year. I also grabbed a very handy, paperback reference book from either Dark They Were And Golden Eyed or Forbidden Planet (my two favourite shops at the time) called The Star Trek Catalogue, which probably would seem quite primitive in style to fans today but, back in the 70s, it was the essential guide to the show and included a handy episode guide to the series. I also had another episode guide to the show in a book called Fantastic Television, another essential 1970s book purchase for the discerning sci-fi fan. As were The Star Trek Blueprints and the Dinky die-cast Starship Enterprise (mine broke in a way far more devastating than any found in the original series... but I'm not going to disclose on how that happened).

Then came the 12 famous Star Trek fotonovels which were released by Bantam (and a couple by Corgi too), which were a great way to catch up with the show in an age when re-runs were still fairly scarce and the concept of easy to purchase and watch video tapes were something the majority of the nation couldn’t even begin to comprehend back then. They just hadn’t quite been invented yet. I guess people from later generations must find it difficult to imagine that the planet was stuck in a time when you couldn’t just decide to sit down and watch something you wanted to watch. If there was a film you wanted to revisit, you’d scour the TV listings for years, since there was usually a good two to four year gap between the same film being shown again. It really was a different world we were living in back then and home entertainment systems were pretty much a needle dropped onto a vinyl surface or a bunch of printed pages bound together. That was it, unless you got something like the Scalextric or a train set out. Or played with your Action Man.

I’ve been meaning to revisit this show for some time now but I had been steadily avoiding the recent DVD issues because of either re-tracked in music in the odd episode where license fees were not paid or, in the current re-issues, a lack of being able to see the episodes in their original state at all. A few years ago, Paramount got all “George Lucas” on the show and reshot all the special effects sequences of these things and inserted them into the episodes, along with creating a new title sequence and, even worse, rerecording the opening theme on those titles. However, when I read that on the new Blu-Ray issues, unlike the DVDs, you had the choice to watch them with their original and, sometimes dodgy looking, effects sequences etc. back in place, I knew that these would be the versions to watch.

So here I am.

And I have to say, it was absolutely great watching this first season again.

When you think of classic and groundbreaking television of the era, shows which really dared to go where no man had gone before, Star Trek was very much ahead of its time. While I was watching these it very much put me in mind of an earlier show from the late 1950s and early 1960s which explored similar territory... that is, the territory of ideas... The Twilight Zone (which I am also currently rewatching on Blu Ray, my first series review is here). Science fiction has always been a style of prose where, because of the fantastic realms you can get away with in that genre, you could explore the ideas related to the human condition in such a way that you could push further and take it to extremes you couldn’t get away with in other formats like, say, a hospital soap opera. You can’t examine the idea of the good part of the psyche and the bad part of your psyche and how they would react independent of each other in regular fiction, for example. However, if you have the concept of a transporter beam malfunction which then splits a person into the two separate beings, as it does with Kirk in the season one episode The Enemy Within, you can explore not just the possibility that your id is stronger and more confident than the other part, but also the fact that on their own, those two parts couldn’t exist without certain aspects of the other. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had to use a science fiction base for his own celebrated study of a not dissimilar concept.

This is where shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek really win out, of course, and it’s a stroke of genius that Roddenberry conceived of a format for his show, basically a clipper exploring the stars, that would allow you to be able to bring a whole load of different ideas to the table, just like you could in The Twilight Zone, but with a single, regular cast and a setting that gave enough of an anchor for viewers to see a familiar face each week but be flexible enough to allow for the diverse nature of the stories on offer. And, just like The Twilight Zone, many of those stories were written by gifted science fiction writers who would be very well remembered in years to come.

It was also quite gutsy. When I was watching it again, I was struck how different this series would be if it was made now. There are rarely any punches pulled in the way these stories are told, ideas conveyed. Even when the sequel series, Star Trek The Next Generation, was airing decades later, it was a softer, somewhat watered down and more politically correct version, in some ways, than the good ol’ knock ‘em down, “to the death” days of Kirk and his crew back in the sixties. Blood is spilled, people’s minds are played with and moral stances challenged in the least wishy washy ways you could imagine.

There are many key episodes in this first season which deal with interesting themes. Mudd’s Women, for example, deals with drug addiction fuelled by women who are concerned with their fading beauty as age hits them. Not an idea that would be tackled too easily in our sensitive times today, perhaps, but it even manages to do it with a sense of humour which doesn’t once undercut the pathos of the three ladies in question. Or The Galileo Seven, which is all about the prejudice against Spock and the will to survive and protect the people around you in extreme circumstances when they are almost against you as much as your collective odds of survival. Racial intolerance is also highlighted in this season quite overtly.

Another good one is Miri, which treats adolescence in a similar fashion to William F. Nolan’s novel Logan’s Run, and which guest stars Kim Darby and Michael J. Pollard. And there’s the original story of Khan, as played by Ricardo Montalban in the episode Space Seed, a role he would reprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and which Benedict Cumberbatch would help reboot in the recent feature film Star Trek: Into Darkness. Then there’s Arena, where instead of waging a long and bloody war, Kirk has to fight the alien Gorn on a planet, re-invents gunpowder projectiles and shows mercy, thus saving the day.

And, of course, no one can forget the brilliant, award winning time travel story City On The Edge Of Forever by Harlan Ellison, where Leonard Nimoy’s Spock has to convince William Shatner’s Kirk that his new sweetheart from the 1930s, played by young Joan Collins, has to die in order for history to be restored.

This season also includes my two absolute favourite Star Trek episodes ever...

Shore Leave, in which the crew are endangered (and some of them seemingly killed) by events and situations pulled directly from their imagination. The look on De Forrest Kelley’s face as his character, Dr. McCoy, is confronted with the man-size white rabbit from Alice In Wonderland, asking him the time, is absolutely priceless and the whole episode in general shows off the comic capabilities of the ensemble of actors very well. Devil In The Dark, a chase and shoot creature feature, is another one which becomes high concept when it transforms into being about something completely different by the end of the episode... a mother guarding her eggs. The concept was so good, in fact, that the story was pretty much rewritten and reused for the final episode of the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show in the early 1970s.

This show has brilliant colour and camerawork throughout, throwing bright greens against a wall, for example, even when there is no way that kind of lighting could be naturally occurring in that particular environment. In this way, actually, the show is very Bavaesque in its mise-en-scene.

Another big plus is the level of detail. For a mid-1960s TV show, everything is well thought out and concepts like beacons, sub-space recorders, disc storage and a whole host of things which wouldn’t necessarily be thought of today, are included in the chemical make up of the show. Admittedly, things like uniform colours to show rank or department are a little inconsistent at first, but it all gets worked out by the end of season one. Lieutenant Uhura, for example, looks even more gorgeous wearing the gold variation of her uniform, but eventually the red variant became her regular garb.

The music in the show is phenomenal. There’s lots of original stuff, as the limited edition 15 disc CD boxed set from La La Land showed a couple of years ago, and this is often used in a needle drop capacity throughout many episodes and gives a lot of familiar tunes and textures you can identify with on an episode to episode basis. This is all good stuff (and that CD set is well recommended, by the way).

All in all, Star Trek - Series One is a great start to a show which was cancelled way too early but which came back with a vengeance in the wake of the first feature film. It’s a show which is all about ideas and not necessarily action... although with Kirk and crew in the mix, you can be sure there’s plenty of fist fights and explosions thrown in for good measure. After seeing this series again, I can’t recommend it enough. It has everything a science fiction fan could want... and I can’t wait to start on the next box with series two in it.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond