Beyond Expectations

When I heard Simon Pegg would be writing the third of the reboot Star Trek films, I was cautiously optimistic. Optimistic because, well, Simon Pegg. Cautiously because ... um ... Paramount. I got a really strong impression that Into Darkness was initially written with the villain not being Khan, and that the studio had him shoe-horned in for completely cynical reasons. So even considering Simon Pegg to be a genius, I wasn't sure he'd be allowed by the suits to work real magic.

When I heard Justin Lin would be directing ST: Beyond, I remained cautiously optimistic despite the caterwauling of many Trek fans that the movie would be turned into The Fast and the Federation. I've never seen any of the F&F movies, but I'm of the impression they're good popcorn flicks, and the trailers for that franchise alone make it clear Lin can bring the spectacle. After the dreary cynicism of ST: ID, I would have been happy with a good popcorn flick version of Trek.

By the time I saw the final ST: B trailer, though, I'd become tepid in my hopes. Each of the trailers seemed determined to make the movie look more action-packed, and none gave an impression of strong story or dialogue.

My son kept asking me when we were going to go see it, though, so last weekend we packed the family in the van and went to the theater. Everyone enjoyed themselves, but as it happened, Joey, the one kid most interested in seeing it, was working that day and didn't get to go.

So last night, I took him and saw it a second time.

What a terrific film.

The first time round, my nitpick circuitry hadn't been turned off, and I found aspects of the movie silly, parts of the plot predictable, and some of the pacing haphazard. Somewhere around the 45-minute mark, I thought to myself, "This is a perfectly enjoyable Star Trek film, but I'm not going to want to see it over and over again."

The thing is, though, the movie kept getting better and better as it went on. The energy ramped progressively upward, but at no point did the characterization slack -- in fact, almost every aspect of the spectacle served as an opportunity to let the beloved Trek ensemble shine. And despite these characters now being 50 years old, the culmination of the story delivers real meaning for them -- and does so with a grace and elegance largely absent from the previous two films.

On a second viewing, all my nits had been picked, and the movie captivated me.

Do you want to see Captain Kirk outwit and outfight bad guys while delivering both gravitas and wry humor? Do you want to see classic McCoy/Spock duels of sarcasm done with genuine invention and an undercurrent of heart? Do you want to see Uhura do more than sit at her console or get choked by a Klingon? Scotty, Chekov and Sulu each getting their moments to shine? Then this ought to be the movie for you.

Star Trek: Beyond overflows with the sensibilities of the original series. Yes, the action gets hyperkinetic at times -- but even that is really in keeping with TOS, if you think back to those space battle scenes where a jerky rotation of the camera would fling the whole bridge crew about with choreographed inertia.

There's more great Trek dialogue in this film than in the previous two put together, more of a sense that these characters fit together as a unit, more pure adventure and entertainment, and a greater celebration of what the Federation is and what it represents.

So much for even-numbered Star Trek films being the good ones!

Us versus ...

It is far past time for people of conscience to stand up. Not against another people, not against a group or organization, not against any other human being -- but against an idea.

The idea of "us versus them."

It's an attractive idea with insidious allure and horrific staying power. But it's the wrong idea.

If we're going to fix these problems we face, if we're going to put an end to the violence and the hatred, we need to come to grips with the central issue, which is the deeply mistaken notion that there is a "them."

There is no "them." There is only an us.

And we need to convince ourselves and our fellows that every one of us is one of us. Even the deluded. Even the demented. Even the unsalvageable.

Because until we remove from our thinking this conviction that "they" are a "them," we will continue to treat "them" with a lesser standard of decency than we demand for ourselves. And so long as we treat some of us less decently, the response will be a return in kind.

Tribalism begets tribalism. It can never be defeated by more tribalism.

We live in a world of us versus us. It's time we wake up to that reality and bring an end to its misbegotten evil.

Free and Cheap Books!

The Ingressionist, book two of The Aveliad, is free now through March 3! And all the other books in the Delvonian Tales series are just 99 cents each!

More Than You Could Imagine

I was driving home from Plano, mulling over these complaints that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is just a retread of the original 1977 movie. So I decided to make a mental list of all the things in the movie that we've never seen before in any Star Wars film. Because I'm nerdy like that.

Anyway, here it is. Please correct me if you can think of a single example of any of these things in the first six films.

1) a rolling ball droid
2) a hot-shot pilot who's a major character and also with the resistance when we first meet him
3) stormtroopers making a landing for a ground assault
4) a Force user who can freeze blaster bolts and paralyze people
5) female stormtroopers
6) a stormtrooper taking off his helmet
7) a stormtrooper breaking conditioning
8) a full explanation of where stormtroopers come from
9) a woman as the central protagonist
10) a fully formulated economic ecosystem based on scavenging the wreckage of a galactic-scale war
11) humans who have learned to understand the language of astromechs
12) the inside of a wrecked Star Destroyer
13) people on a desert planet being thirsty (!)
14) self-rising sponge food
15) good guys flying a TIE fighter
16) TIE fighters strafing civilians
17) someone having to get the hang of piloting a spaceship
18) atmospheric spaceship combat
19) Han Solo actually smuggling something (!)
20) Han Solo listening to Chewbacca and treating him like a partner instead of a pet or underling
21) the interior of a large civilian spacecraft
22) fighting alien monsters aboard a spaceship
23) someone who is sexually attracted to wookiees
24) a female general
25) a planetary-scale weapon being fired with a view from the surface that shows its beam taking up the entire horizon
26) a Force user who can read minds
27) a Force duel that's entirely mental
28) a sun being sucked away into darkness as the visual and thematic backdrop to a high-stakes dogfight and an even higher-stakes personal confrontation
29) a human female wielding a lightsaber
30) a female with a speaking role who is a Force user


Did I miss any?

Not What I Expected

I got this CD in the early '90s for the song "Soul to Soul," which was getting airplay on several of the stations I listened to in Dallas at the time. Based on that one song, I was expecting edgy, unpredictable indie rock with a lot of creative modulations -- depending on how generous you are, "Soul to Soul" has six or eight distinct motifs, as compared to the typical pop song's three to five.

So when I put it on for my first listen, I was gravely disappointed that the rest of the CD sounded to me like nothing more than a proficient '80s hair metal band. None of the other tracks had nearly the complexity of "Soul to Soul," and as my disappointment mounted, track 6 came along and served up the ultimate hair band crime: an obligatory ballad with the acoustic guitar-strum lead-in joined by humming and/or whistling on the part of the lead singer.

I tried to give the album several more shots, then wrote it off as the work of a thoroughly indistinctive band that happened to exceed their capabilities for a single, lucky song. Because I'm a pack rat, the CD stayed on the shelf or in a box through four or five moves. I think I tried to sell it to CD Exchange once and they didn't want it.

But I reached the B stretch of my collection for this feature, and I didn't want to go straight into the Beatles, and I was also curious as to why I'd bought "Dancin' on Coals" in the first place, since I couldn't even remember the title of the one song I'd liked. So into the car CD player it went.

And darned if it's not a pretty good album!

This time around, instead of expecting edgy, unpredictable indie rock, I was expecting boring late '80s hair-band music. And the CD turned out to be just as far from that prediction as from my original expectation in 1990. Bang Tango, at least in this incarnation, blends funk-metal, glam-metal, and some alt rock stylings into a highly listenable concoction full of blistering guitars and amazingly inventive bass parts, making it hard to believe that I mistook this for hair metal, which almost always relies on alternating two-tone eighth-note thudding for its bass lines. There are saxaphones and harmonica solos, and even some gospel-ish backing singers on "Midnight Struck" -- the song I mistook for a cliche hair-band ballad -- and none of it's thrown in; every song is carefully and solidly arranged with thoughtful layers and variations from verse to verse. The production values are great without the CD being overproduced or glitzed-up. It's just all-out solid rock and roll, very well put together.

And "Soul to Soul," far from being just a kind of cool song, is downright incredible.

So thanks, CD Exchange, for turning this one down, if I'm remembering that part of the story right!

This One's Beyond Obscure

So, maybe you know the crazy guitar-organ-flute-yodeling-accordion-Popeye-the-Sailor-vocalization masterpiece "Hocus Pocus" by the Dutch group Focus. Or slightly less likely, you might know their song "Sylvia." But I'm pretty sure you didn't know that their guitarist, Jan Akkerman, recorded an album of classical lute songs interspersed with far-edge eclectic art rock as one of his solo endeavors.



That's Tabernakel. I can't for sure remember what inspired me to buy this CD, but I think it was the unintentionally hilarious set of liner notes in my copy of the digitally remastered Focus 3, wherein the producer of most of Focus's albums waxed Spinal Tap-esque about the genius of the band. Somewhere along the way, he mentioned Akkerman's obsession with lute music and that he thought the guitarist had actually recorded a whole album of lute songs. Like I suspect is the case with most of the stuff in those liner notes, that wasn't quite true; about a third of the album is art rock. But there are a lot of lute songs.

I'm guessing if you like lute music, this is pretty kick-ass stuff. Akkerman is a hell of a musician, and the songs have enough complexity that there are times when I think, surely he overdubbed that with a second lute track -- it can't all be him just playing one lute. But I'm pretty sure it is.

Anyway, if you've got a hankering for lute tunes, check it out.

Random ABBA Thoughts

So I've been terrible about this CD feature so far, but I'm going to try to crank several out over the next few days and get myself in the habit.

Up next is ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits.

I'm not ashamed to say that I love ABBA. I think they're officially the second-highest selling pop group of all time, so I've got company, even if they also personify some of the silly excess of the 1970s. And in my defense, I only love them enough to have their greatest hits. It's not like I've got all their albums, right?

Anyway, I have no unifying thesis for this ABBA fest. Just a potpourri of observations and memories.

First, there are some genuinely poignant and uplifting moments in the music of ABBA. "Chiquitita, you and I cry / but the sun is still in the sky and shining above you." "I believe in angels / something good in everything I see." Maybe the words are a little saccharine on their own, but those voices and the music really make me buy it.

Next, I can't think of ABBA without remembering that there was an ABBA movie, and that I watched it on cable, probably several times, but can only remember one scene from the very end of the film. (Spoiler: I guess the characters in the film spend the whole time trying to see ABBA in concert or meet them or something, and they totally fail, and then in the last few minutes after they've given up, they get on an elevator and ABBA are there. Is this ringing a bell with anybody?)

Finally, there's a snippet in "One of Us" that's pretty much exactly the vocal hook from Ace of Bass's "I Saw the Sign." It was very weird putting this CD in my car player, getting to a track that I'm really quite unfamiliar with, and then hearing this 100% familiar moment that was only familiar because of a different, later song. I'm not accusing Ace of Bass of stealing it, but they totally stole it.