the wrath of khan: subtlety is not an issue

To paraphrase some brilliant Brit writing in NME (he was speaking of Scott Walker at the time), there must be people in the world who don't love Ricardo Montalban in the Wrath of Khan, but what must their hearts be like?

It's not even a matter of liking; certain things surpass subjectivity. An old friend once told me he'd approached art criticism as if it was all subjective until the day his father overheard an Ornette Coleman record and said it was utter crap. In that moment, he suffered a revelation: sometimes the quality's there, and if you don't see it, it's due to a deficiency on your own part. A lack of effort, maybe, a cranky attitude towards that crazy post-modern music, or some misguided neural pathway etched into your brain.

Granted, a Ricardo Montalban performance inhabits a whole different stretch on the space-time continuum than an Ornette Coleman record, but let's call it like it is: a masterpiece is a masterpiece, and Khan is a masterpiece. Part of it is context: you don't want to cast some subtle, underplaying Trevor Howard opposite William Shatner, the Uberking of the Scene-Chewers. (You would, on the other hand, cast Christopher Plummer, that great eschewer of English subtlety who tosses himself full-force into the ham in Star Trek 6: the Undiscovered Country with his gleefully Shakespeare-barking Klingon, but that's another piece of brilliance for another day.) Montalban, I believe, is the only actor who ever balanced Shatner move for move. They are a perfect match -- but Montalban wins. The shameless magnificence of his outrageous choices and the impeccable smoothness of their execution combine to make it one of those rare and to-be-treasured performances that can be proudly ranked among the truly intrepid. Not only does he manage to speak lines like "From hell's heart I stab at thee," and "I'll chase him around the fires of perdition," with dignity, he speaks them like they're Shakespeare (yes, alright, Melville) and a goddamn privilege to pronounce. He is an inspiration to behold. Magnificence in action.

And, while there is unquestionably virtue and courage inherent in making oneself ridiculous, a thing from which Shatner never shies ("Kha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-n!"), Montalban transcends ridiculousness, grasps hold of his role with both muscled hands and elicits cheers, not laughter.

Every year when I go to the coast I take Star Trek 2: the Wrath of Khan and watch it right before I'm due to come home. I'm not certain why. It's one of those traditions that sprang up in that realm somewhere outside conscious choice. Although I love this movie, consider it one of the great B-films, I'm impatient with it, too. I tend to fast-forward through most of Chekov's scenes, for instance, unless he's sharing the screen with Khan (sorry, Chekov), and I also tend to look away from the screen when Kirstie Alley's on (yes, I understand that she's cute, but she's no Vulcan. Robin Curtis in the third and fourth films... Now THERE'S a Vulcan woman who would make T'Pau proud.) The sentimental hogwash subplot involving Ike Eisenmann makes me gnash my teeth, too, since he was a favorite child actor of mine in the old days (he did a series called the Fantastic Journey with Jared Martin and the original Witch Mountain movies; awesome) and I was glad to see him onscreen here and sorry to see him wasted.

Still, show me a love affair in which the Beloved has no flaws, and I'll show you a pale, wan reflection of true passion. I'm convinced that there's no Trekker in the world so devoted that he must own ALL the original six Star Trek movies. The first one and the fifth one can be skipped without compunction. The others, -- the Wrath of Khan, the Search for Spock, the Voyage Home, and the Undiscovered Country, -- should be dusted off and enjoyed in all their imperfect glories at least once a year. Make it so.

things i've been watching: august 2009

In the Loop: (2009. dir: Armando Iannucci) Seldom does one really laugh all the way through a comedy. With luck one gets two belly-laughs and a fistful of chuckles. Maybe people just aren't as funny as we used to be. Maybe we're just too bitter. Here's one for you: In the Loop, a -- not just scathingly. What's the word I want? -- a skin-flayingly funny, dark, endlessly smart, and completely depressing British comedy playing now at your local cinema. It has the opposite of the Obama Effect. If you are one of the millions who felt inspired to political involvement during his campaign, this film is the antidote. By the time you hit sunlight, you'll not only never want to have anything to do with politics, you'll never want to read a newspaper, vote in an election, or live in a country with any sort of government, or, indeed, other humans in it.

Peter Capaldi has a big honkin' hootenanny with his once-in-a-lifetime role as a foul-mouthed Scots bulldog of a Minister whose thankless task it is to see that Great Britain comes in line with the PM's decision to follow America into a bogus war in the Middle East. You start out laughing, and there are jokes hidden under jokes, with the improvised feel of a great ensemble cast. It's filmed handheld under true light; it looks and feels a lot like the original the Office. It's not that it ever gets unfunny, just its meanness thickens your blood until you at last resemble Bernard Hill in his first appearance as Theoden King in the Two Towers by the time you try to leave your seat. When the credits roll down, literally every character has either sold his soul, been morally degraded, humiliated, or resigned. Most don't get to choose from the list, but get two or three, even all four. My favorite of the many shining performances is from Zach Woods as Chad, a pathetic but wonderfully funny power-worshipping aide who switches his lovestruck allegiance from one power-player to another as they fall and rise, and never manages to catch anyone's attention, really.

See this movie, by all means, and then go out and get weasel-faced drunk and pray to all your various gods for Obama and the fate of this country.


the Fall: (2006. dir: Tarsem Singh) >SPOILER ALERT< Gorgeous and phantasmagoric period-piece set in the early days of Hollywood. A crippled and suicidal stuntman lies helpless in hospital and tells an epic tale to a little girl with a broken arm to try and coax her into stealing morphine for him. Most of the film is the story as we see it played out in her head and hear it narrated by him. When he speaks of an Indian, we know he means a Native American because he talks of wigwams, but she sees an eastern Indian whose wigwam looks like a Taj Mahal. The disjointedness is dreamlike and enchanting. Lee Pace as the stuntman is wonderfully, opiately sensuous in his hospital bed, and although it has a happy ending, there is a climactic scene that is so heartrending I felt my sorrow aching in the palms of my hands as I wept.




Duel in the Sun: (1946. dir: King Vidor) >SPOILER ALERT< I never much liked Jennifer Jones when I was a kid, but then I saw her in things like the Song of Bernadette and Portrait of Jennie. Had I seen her in this, I think she'd have been my hero. My mom remembers her aunt taking her to see this when it came out and it was so sexy and passionate it left an indelible mark on her. And it still is: one of those movies that pulled no punches, left no holds barred. It's filmed in deep, passionate colors all the way through, deep reds and striking greens and yellows. Jones plays Pearl Chavez, an embodiment of sensuality, destined to inspire the animal in those around her, a girl whose rational capacities have been so utterly neglected that she is led through life by emotion and her netherparts. She is sent to live with rich strangers, and among them, two opposite brothers: Joseph Cotten as the left-brain, moral voice, and Gregory Peck as the dark embodiment of animal passion, Pearl's great love and nemesis.

In these days of quirky underplaying, Jones' performance looks like a typhoon. With utter shamelessness she throws herself headlong into each emotion, pausing only long enough to fully embody each as it passes. Her face expresses lust and hatred with hypnotic totality, and I could listen all day to that voice, sultry to the point of indecency. When Joseph Cotten reaches out to offer her a good-girl future living with his nice wife and him, away from her bad-girl present with Gregory Peck, it sounds stultifyingly awful, and although Pearl wants to be a good girl, we know she never can tamp herself down to that drab level, and she responds to him with, "I wish I could die for you," because she can only live passionately or die, there is no third choice.

In addition to that last, magnificent scene in which the hater/lovers kill one another while simultaneously crawling desperately across the desert for one last kiss, other reasons to see it include a powerhouse turn by Walter Huston as the self-styled Sin-Killer, a Texas preacher who puts in a word with Pearl towards salvation but admits it's a long-shot, and Lillian Gish as the matriarch of the house. Now THERE'S a woman who knows how to play a death-scene.

the time traveler's wife and (500) days of summer: it's about love, baby

This is HG Wells on love: "I think that in every human mind, possibly from an extremely early age, there exists a continually growing and continually more subtle complex of expectation and hope; an aggregation of lovely and exciting thoughts; conceptions of encounter and reaction picked up from observation, descriptions, drama; reveries of sensuous delights and ecstasies; reveries of understanding and reciprocity; which I will call the Lover-Shadow... I think it is almost as essential in our lives as our self consciousness.
...When we make love, we are trying to make another human being concentrate for us as an impersonation or at least a symbol of the Lover-Shadow in our minds; and when we are in love it means that we have found in someone the presentation of the promise of some, at least, of the main qualities of our Lover-Shadow. The beloved person is for a time identified with the dream -- attains a vividness that captures the role, and seems to leave anything outside it unilluminated."

How you react to that passage will perhaps say something about your age, your gender, your self-image; most pertinently, it'll reveal where you land on the scale of Pragmatist to Romantic, and how you feel about your rating. Some folks are proud romantics, more are slightly sheepish and coy about it, and in most mixed-gender crowds it's hipper to scoff (at all things, but especially at love). That is not to say I think the romantics are right or the pragmatists are mere killjoys. (Any true romantic will tell you there's more anguish in it than joy. They will also tell you there's a razor-thin line between pleasure and pain, and that they've spent at least one summer listening to nothing but Joy Divison. Aptly enough, Joy Division is a theme shared by these two films: spot the references!) I do think that our modern-day notions of romance are forced, untrue, even cruel, and this is a perfect double-feature to use in the examination of the issue.

To begin with, the Time Traveler's Wife. It's got a splendid cast and a big-money look, and what better new slant to lay over the top of the old boy-meets-girl chestnut than a fellow who's shaken loose in time, who might turn up grey-haired for your wedding or post-pubescent when you're forty? There may be a metaphor in it for those damaged but well-meaning lovers among us who show up when they can but often forget to bring their inner selves with them. If so, that's more interesting than what most viewers will bring away, which is a fairly straightforward primer for the female of the species on everything we're supposed to obsess over from the youngest age to the oldest: romantic love and its relationship with destiny (because without destiny at its foundation, romantic love stands on very shaky little colt-hooves indeed), the Very Expensive Wedding and the conventional and mutually-fixated marriage lived in the always immaculate home and accompanied by the traditional, compulsive emotionality over breeding and child-rearing. The Wife works as some unspecified sort of artist, but that doesn't have much to do with her Life (that is to say, with The Husband); it's merely what she does. She keeps no servants, but somehow the house is always dauntingly immaculate, interestingly so, like those ideal living rooms you see in the most expensive but ecologically-correct catalogues for those rich people who were raised by hippies and don't want their houses to look like rich people's houses. How does she do it? or does he? We never see anyone wasting time cleaning, although a main bonding experience seems to be the mutual preparation of food in their very immaculate and interesting-looking kitchen. It's all shorthand, I expect, for Traditional Family Values and subliminal advertising for those expensive catalogues. Otherwise we'd see someone doing the occasional dish or getting annoyed that the garbage hadn't made it to the curb on time.

On the one hand, I dare you to look me in the eyes and say you do not love Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in this movie, do not look forward with curiosity roused to the next leap in time (where will he find clothes? who will be waiting for him after his leap? and how does death, as it must, fit in?). On the other hand, the movie feels dangerous in the way that Sleepless in Seattle did all those years ago: impressionable girls are going to come away with a handful of irresistibly attractive notions that are not Romantic in the most soulful sense, but "romantic" in a cynical, wedding-industry way. And although its story is unequivocally engaging, its script is an obstacle on the road to any quality the film achieves: in its best moments it is pedestrian and obvious, buoyed up only by the talents involved and the strangeness built into the story itself. (My favorite moment is after Claire and Henry have had a life-changing fight. She gets a secret call in the night and sneaks out to pick up a younger version of Henry who has just time-traveled into the moment. He asks where his older self is, she tells him, "I wanted a little time away from him," and he says, "How's that working out for you?" in that low-key, Eric Bana way.) At the lowest point in their marriage, Claire rails that because she met him when she was eight and they had already been married several years from his perspective, she'd never been given a real choice, a fighting chance.

(500) Days has its focus pulled in on the destiny question as well but the debate is laid straight out on the table: Summer (Zooey Deschanel) doesn't believe in love, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a big old gooey and glum romantic who thinks he's found his soulmate. If Time Traveler dipped a little too liberally into that old paintpot marked "SENTIMENT. WARNING: TOXIC IF OVERUSED" and felt its wings dragged down near-fatally into muck, (500) Days flirts, but ultimately non-fatally, with over-cleverness. Part of what saves it is the quality of its pop culture satire, like the soda-pop-advertisement-ish music video that is our young hero's morning walk to work after his first night spent in Summer's arms, or the Bergman film he gets caught in once the relationship goes south. Again the cast is near-perfect and Levitt's charms and sex appeal win us over in a character that might have seemed irredeemable.

Those cynics among you who are NOT secret romantics will be annoyed to learn that the True Love vs Sheer Fantasy debate tips ultimately into the corner of the romantics, but only after a rather good and very funny examination of both sides. Tom works as a writer of greeting cards and ultimately recognizes that the business he is in is part of the problem, along with pop music and Hollywood (we are told early on that his ideas about love were gleaned from repeated early viewings of the Graduate on television. When he takes Summer to see it she leaves the cinema weeping uncontrollably). There's more than a little Annie Hall here, with its meta-fictional tactics, its quirky-girl heroine (poor Zooey. She didn't ask to be the archetype of eccentric muse girl, did she?), its fast-and-loose playing with time. On first viewing, it bears up surprisingly well beneath that weighty mantle.

Here's the final tally: all told, I cried only once, and then only a few tears (four or five, tops) during the Time Traveler's Wife despite repeated coaxings for a more prodigious outflow, and I frown upon its lack of introspection, but I laughed many times, sometimes loudly and long, during (500) Days, and I like its negative capability: it knows destiny isn't true, but it believes in it anyway. So that one wins.

public enemies: set the camera down and back away slowly

Sometimes I get excited about a movie and walk in the doors without noticing who directed it. This is a dangerous practice and I recommend it only for the strong-hearted. Who knows what dreck might be lurking behind an attractive poster? From the first shots, I ought to have known; the words MICHAEL MANN ought to have whispered themselves into my ear. In retrospect, it feels as if the director were standing in front of me, waving his arms around, shouting, "Don't look at the actors! Look at me instead!"

It's not dreck. It's a good story, and much of it is well-told; by some 50 minutes in, I was fully immersed. Here's the rub: it should not have taken that long. The story was good enough, the actors were good enough, I ought to have been immersed long before, if someone had, for God's sake, hogtied the camerman. Mr. Mann has joined my list of directors to whom I will send a tripod at Christmas with clear, easy-to-read instructions about how to use it. What's with all these ultra-ULTRA-close-up motion shots? Apparently Mann or his DP or his editor or SOME misguided sumbitch thought that was a clever way to introduce us to the characters, by showing us how massive his pores are as a piece of his face glides past the camera. Luckily, that stops after awhile. Maybe Mr. Mann (or his DP or his editor or whatever sumbitch sits at the desk where this particular buck stops) finally got engrossed in the story and in spite of himself just started letting himself tell it. Well done, Mr. Sumbitch. A belated realization, but better late than never.

This is not a film made by a director with vision, but a director with a longing to be visionary. He wants us to walk out of the theatre and say his technique is bold. OK, it's bold, and sometimes it works, but most times it detracts from all the things he did right, which are myriad. The period details, for one; I swear to God he Tardis-ed his cast back to the thirties to film this. The clothes, the cars, the apartments, the planes and motorcycles... details of both wealthy and poor seem right on. There's one scene where J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup! hurray) is giving medals to "young crimefighters". Granted, it's just a snippet of a scene, but kids are the hardest folks to displace in time because they haven't yet got the seasoned actor's self-awareness about the personal marks and influences cultural imprinting has left upon them, and these little boys I swear to God seem like they came from my father's generation and never touched an ipod or cruised online porn.

In fact, I wish I had the casting directors (let me check IMDB... Avy Kaufman and Bonnie Timmermann, it says) here right now: hearty handshakes and big sloppy kisses all around. The faces these guys found! Look around the room at the mugs on the Feds, on the Texas ranger guys, on the gangsters... great, classic mugs. On top of that, the pretty boys from my generation (Crudup and Depp specifically, but also Stephen Dorff and others) have reached that halfway-to-ninety point at which life has carved some hardship into the prettiness, or stretched it some with years of dissolute luxuriousness, and they're starting to look interesting instead of perfect. Crudup is spot-on as the fast-talking, obsessed Hoover, and Christian Bale, with the toughest job as the low-key, practical and hard-working Melvin Purvis, pulls it off with his usual adeptness, making the nonsensational crimefighter as interesting to watch as any mobster. My favorite bit might be a phone conversation between Hoover and Purvis, in which Purvis is saying he needs Texas rangers to finish the job right and Hoover keeps snapping, "I can't hear you," and Purvis keeps repeating it, patiently and stubbornly, until Hoover hangs up and the next thing we see are Texas rangers disembarking from a train (led by Stephen Lang in a really wonderful small role. As we left the cinema my boyfriend said, "Do you think he had enough lines that we could give him Best Supporting Actor?" He didn't, and that's too bad).

Mann's an odd fellow; his choices are odd. Some of this is filmed on video, or the film is overtaxed into graininess, and those places seem random. There's a shootout at a resort deep in the woods at night which is hypnotically lit by bursts of machine-gun fire, and that's all gorgeous, but then they run out into the woods and the moon becomes a very bright and very shifting light-source. Things like that don't matter if they work, if you're engrossed in the story and don't notice them. I guess I wouldn't care so much except for this unsettling suspicion that they were deliberate: that instead of making a film about John Dillinger, he's made a film about Michael Mann making a film about John Dillinger, and that kind of feedback loop just makes my head hurt.

what i've been watching: june, part 2

In the Electric Mist: (2009. dir: Bertrand Tavernier) In the Philip Marlowe novels, Raymond Chandler managed to create a world in which the mass of humanity was darkly twisted and corrupt, where the apparently innocent were not innocent, where Marlowe retained a semblance of self-respect only by holding himself aloof and living strictly by a self-imposed code of honor. Although Marlowe himself often comes away from his adventures feeling unclean and depressed, we the readers do not; we are shielded from it by his stoicism and underplayed ironic humor, and most of all by the gorgeous poetry at the soul of him. This is all in tribute to Chandler, who was an undisputed master of his craft. His books never get old, and he, with Dashiell Hammett and a few others, spawned an industry that has erupted into monstrous proportions today.

Take, for example, James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels. I read a clutchful of these when I was early in the throes of my vigorous love affair with New Orleans. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead was easily my favorite because in it the stoical and sober-alcoholic veteran Robicheaux gets dosed with acid by Hollywood types and for the rest of the book has periodic, wonderful conversations with the ghost of a Confederate general who may or may not be a projection of his own best self. The Louisiana of the Robicheaux books is as dark and morally polluted as anything Marlowe or the Continental Op or even the easily detestable Mike Hammer ever faced, all tough men surviving in ethically slimy times.

French director Bertrand Tavernier has teleported the story into post-Katrina days and cast Tommy Lee Jones in the lead (I always saw Fred Ward, but the craggy face is the important thing, and Jones is no poor man's second). In fact, it sports an enviable cast, including Peter Sarsgaard, an actor I usually love but who is missing something in this role, some intangible but necessary thing. An almost unrecognisable Levon Helm (again, a man I love) is the Confederate general and the wonderful Kelly Macdonald gamely forces herself into the cramped little thankless role of a good-hearted but nonetheless tainted-by-Hollywood actress. In the end, in spite of the talent involved, there's something crucial lacking here. The awful seaminess of this world seems contrived and untrue, as it sometimes does, truth be told, in Burke's books. The characters are too often no thicker than two dimensions and all the acting skill in the world can't fix a story that's broken at its very foundation.



the Other Boleyn Girl: >SPOILER ALERT< This is a nasty tale of a heartless girl who seduces her sister's lover (while the sister is sequestered in confinement bearing his child, and at the behest of her very ambitious and possibly sociopathic family) using a dastardly yet effective tactic of ongoing titillation and withholding until he divorces his wife (meanwhile inventing Anglicanism) to marry her. Then, when the going gets rough, she sleeps with her own brother in a desperate bid to bear the needed heir to the throne, thereby condemning him to death alongside her, and nearly destroying her sister's life out of sheer petty selfishness.

An American film was also made from the same wildly popular piece of chick-lit which spawned this one, and I watched this British take first because the actors are top-notch: Jodhi May gives a manically spirited and eerily convincing performance as Anne Boleyn, and I always love Nastascha McElhone, even here in her non-role as watcher and Silent Wronged Woman. There's a lot of handheld camera and reality-TV private interviews in which the characters explain their motivations and feelings directly to us, and I suppose that's designed to make us feel right at home with these old Tudors, but instead it feels cheap. At the end we see the Tower today, tourists visiting the spot where Anne got her head chopped off, and that feels even cheaper.




My Dinner With Jimi: (2003. dir: Bill Fishman) Think of it as a morality tale for the fame-hungry: these are Howard Kaylen's remembrances of the most exciting days of his life, when the Turtles were touring England on "Happy Together" and hanging at the Speakeasy with the hippest of the hip, and yet the conversations are all as asanine and dull as you'll find in any high school cafeteria any day of the week. Moral lesson the second: all the hippest of the hip we come across (Mama Cass, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Graham Nash, Donovan, Brian Jones, the Beatles and Hendrix) are just as bored as everyone else, pursuing drugs and sex to fill the time until they can get back onstage again. Is this news to anyone? There are exactly two moments when this fatuous piece of flaccidity comes to life: the worst is when John Lennon (Brian Groh) unleashes a devastating barrage of unfunny wit against the Turtles' rhythm guitarist, inspiring him to put down his guitar and never play again for the rest of his life. The scene crackles with an electricity of mortifying cruelty and bears with it an awful pong of validity. The other is when we finally get into the booth with the spinach omelettes and the man we've been waiting for... And even then, it's not that he ever says anything profound, it just always feels like he's about to. And, frankly, Hendrix had so much damn charisma that it stretches across the years and out of the grave, and a guy playing him with enough truth (as Royale Watkins does here) is a thing you can't look away from, even when the dialogue is this grindingly tedious.

what i've been watching: june edition

Death Proof: (2007. dir: Quentin Tarantino) Kurt Russell deserves an Oscar just for the moxie it took to tackle this role. In fact, Stuntman Mike might, in another film, one that's interested in character, be very intriguing indeed. Death Proof is not that film. In fact, as a piece of cinema, I doubt that it rates highly on anyone's scale. As an homage to a cinematic era gone by, however, it's a little slice of genius. From that opening screen they used to show before all the drive-in movies to the editing glitches he inserts to mimic the hiccup between scenes that happened when they changed the reels and complete with old-film scratches, it's like stepping back in time. If only I had tinny old speakers to hang from my window-frame. He even caught the sound quality just right, although I don't know enough about the mechanics of audio to know why it seemed that way.

It's got the "id"-heavy plot that's short on sense but wallows in sordidness, which is very satisfyingly as it should be. Structurally, it's too loose and involves characters too adolescent to be truly engaging, but it's nonetheless got moments of utter, jaw-dropping fascination. My own favorite is the record-geek bit in the car as the doom-bound girls ride to their date with destiny, pleasantly drunk, all grooving to a perfect song and talking about Pete Townsend, oblivious to the autobeast hunkered and waiting, headlights off, just around the bend. Those early, creepy shots of Stuntman Mike's deathmobile at rest, too, are very effective, particularly when the girl goes out for a smoke and you can almost feel the car leering at her from its shadow in the rain.

It's too long, with a doubled plot, and the Tarantino-speak conversations between the girls don't have the zest and buoyancy of his best work, but it'll leave you feeling a little soiled (in a good way), just like those old bottom-of-the-barrel Russ Meyer double features did in the old days.


Dollhouse, the season wrap-up: (2009. creator: Joss Whedon) As promised in the wake of the initial disaster area of the first eps, I stuck with it through the end of the season. For those of you who didn't, it got good from the sixth through the ninth episodes ("Man in the Street", "Echoes", "Needs" and "Spy in the House of Love"), then put it on autocruise for the tenth ("Haunted"). The season enders ("Briar Rose" and "Omega") which apparently earned the show at least another season's reprieve from the chopping block from those mad headsmen at Fox, were wildly ambitious and very disappointing, largely due to one very important casting choice (I won't spoil it, but it's somebody we Joss-heads love playing a hithertofore unseen character we've been building up to all damn season long, and playing it underwhelmingly). In its favor, even the bad episodes have interesting things in them, and the best make good use of the unexpected in that wonderful old-time Joss way (like the revelation about Ben and Glory in the fifth season of Buffy, or Spike getting his soul back).


the New World (Massive Extendo-Version): (2005. dir: Terrence Malick) Even a devoted Luddite finds things about this new techno-age to cherish, and one of the best for me is that a movie can keep morphing long after its initial release. A few years ago I had a beautiful dream that Coppola would keep re-releasing Apocalypse, Now! every third year with a different shape and focus. It's possible that wasn't the best idea I've ever had, but here, in consolation, is another of my all-time favorites in a whopping new package. This ran 149 minutes at the theatre, the initial DVD was a petite 135, but all lovely things come to those who wait, and now we have the Big Monster Godzilla version, clocking in at a gorgeously self-indulgent two hours and 52 minutes. I accept, although I can't really wrap my mind around it, that even at its shortest it was too long for some folks' taste. However, for those to whom sensuality and the numinous are huffed up from the same feedbag, this new version is a three-hour retreat chock-full of spiritual rejuvenation.

It holds some surprises. Malick is notorious for shooting hours and days of an actor only to leave his entire performance on the cutting-room floor* (rumor has it that Viggo Mortenson, Martin Sheen, Bill Pullman, Gary Oldman, Lukas Haas and Mickey Rourke were all originally in the Thin Red Line). In this long version, Michael Greyeyes sees a great chunk of his role restored, and who knew Roger Rees was in it at all? Ben Chaplin, poor fellow, is still just a guy pulling an oar in a longboat, and we can only guess what his role originally entailed. The most important alteration is in Pocahontas' recovery from her grief over Captain Smith's supposed death at sea. In the old cut, we see her crazed with sorrow and then, apparently with the passing of time, she finds solace in good work and then John Rolfe casts his eyes on her and her salvation is complete. In this one, she is grief-stricken for a very long time and given up for hopeless by society. She decides to commit suicide but experiences a very beautiful and supremely Malickian moment of grace and her salvation rises up, crucially, not from the favors of John Rolfe, but from her own relationship with the divine. It seems so vital to the lifeblood of the story that I'm surprised Malick allowed it to be cut in the first place. No matter. It's back now, amid all manner of beauty else.

* Kills me that the cutting-room floor is only metaphorical now. I love to think of that little closet-like, windowless room with a pale, tireless person hunched over a Moviola and the floor crunchy with filmstrips.

star trek: it's all fun and games until somebody loses a planet

>SPOILER ALERT<

The first nightmare I ever had, or the first one I can remember, had Kirk and Spock in it. It involved the mixing of magic potions that looked like buckets of paint: the brown one was a healing salve and that was for Captain Kirk, the blue one was a toxin and that was for Mr. Spock. I, however, managed somehow to sit in the blue bucket and when I stood up and looked at my hands, three of my fingers were gone: two from the left hand, one from the right.

One of the many thousands of things my mother did right in raising us was that we watched the original Star Trek faithfully from the first episode to the last. I was two when it first aired, and I guess I slept through most of it, but by the third season I can remember a serious discussion between my older brother, my mother and me, about whether or not we'd be allowed to stay up for the new nine o'clock airtime on Friday nights to watch. (We were. She was and is a total champ.) I can very distinctly remember that first surreal time I saw Abe Lincoln sitting in the middle of space talking to Captain Kirk. I found the use of his word "negress" when addressing Lt Uhura slightly embarrassing although I couldn't place why. Apollo was the first Greek God I knew about because he's the only one who ever appeared in an episode. To this day I mistrust the Earps and suspect they were the worst of the bad guys at the OK Corral. You could say with some truth that everything I knew about life before the age of seventeen I learned from Star Trek, Shakespeare, or Hollywood.

Mr. Spock was my first great love, and remains one of the few fictional figures from my childhood who still resonates strongly in my underconscious as an adult. That's all prologue to the admission that I went into this new Star Trek with some trepidation, and emerged with wildly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't remember the last time I had so much fun sitting in a theatre. It had me from the first moments: that lovely, stoical Captain Robau (Faran Tahir) going to his death at Romulan hands, the woman in labor in the midst of deadly chaos while her husband sacrifices his life to save hundreds... I'm weeping just thinking about it. And after that, it gets downright delightful.

Here are some things I love: Simon Pegg is a brilliant Montgomery Scott, for one, and the Endorian Mud Flea vaccination scene between Bones (Karl Urban) and Kirk (Chris Pine) is hilarious. My sincerest gratitude and joy go out to Anton Yelchin and whoever wrote this script for turning Chekov into what he ought to have been all along. (Apparently this is the young man who plays Kyle Reese in the new Terminator movie, or "Kyle FRICKIN' Reese" as an outraged blogger put it in a recent rant. He seems an unlikely choice to carry the Michael Biehn sultriness, but after the perfection of his Chekov, I'll give the boy plenty of room to take his shot.) It's also exactly right, very satisfying, that Kirk gets the crap beat out of him again and again, like a repeating motif. It's the only possible counterweight to that young Kirk arrogance, and we wouldn't put up with him without it. The Lens-Flare-As-Futuristic-Aesthetic tactic is bold but works for me, and the Romulans are fantastic, with their ferociously antisocial look. I could gaze upon Eric Bana's mutated face for some hours and feel that my time was well-spent. There are fierce ice-bears! And crazy giant snow-lobsters! And how about Scottie's little sidekick, eh?

As with most fun, however, there's a downside. All credit to these guys for doing the research, learning the mythology, then creating a credible time disruption to explain the many changes they make. That said, I'm just not ready to live in a universe in which Vulcan has been destroyed and Spock and Uhura spend their time kissing. (Yes, you could argue that I've lived my whole life in a universe that didn't have Vulcan in it... but you'd be wrong.) It kills me that a whole generation of kids, maybe multiple generations, will grow up thinking that this alternate history is the true one, the important one, relegating the original, the Star Trek that thrives, a living universe inside my head, to the status of the passe, the mendacious, or, at best, the secondary. On the one hand, you have to admire any approach that brings this kind of vitality into what had become an inert franchise, but at what cost?

Consider Mr. Spock. The beautiful thing about Spock, one of the crucial factors which lift him above the meager ranks of Character and into the realm of the Archetype, is that he is, ultimately, the Man Alone. Because his Vulcan and human halves vie in neverending and always fascinating conflict, he walks alone, by choice and necessity. And as a direct result of it, he belongs to all of us. Any fantasy can be projected onto him; he can fit into almost any story; it's why so much slash fiction has been lovingly devoted to him over the years. He is a brilliant embodiment of the war between the left and right halves of the brain, that age-old moral dispute between making one's life-choices from the heart or from the mind. As such, he is a vital and never-aging animus projection whose ongoing drama offers lessons for anyone who uses the current homosapiens version of the bicameral brain.

This new Spock, I fear (very well played by Zachary Quinto, he of the impossibly kissable mouth... see above), will be reduced to the status of mere romantic hero. If he continues (in the inevitable sequels) on his current path favoring his human side over his Vulcan, Spock takes a step backward out of his previous greatness into a life of possible happiness, but little more. No doubt he will serve the Federation and Captain Kirk with loyalty and glittering hyperintelligence as before, but we as a people will have lost a hero of larger-than-life nobility, wisdom and self-sacrifice. At the risk of blaspheming, I'd like to submit into evidence the following example: remember the Last Temptation of Christ? The devil lets Willem Dafoe step down off the cross and live a happily married life with Barbara Hersey's Magdalene, and at the natural end of it he realizes with some horror that he has betrayed the very heart of what he was set on this earth to do, thrown aside his own greatness of purpose for some scant years of human contentment.

Call me alarmist, but I fear that our Spock is about to make a similar mistake.