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Star Trek, the new prequel written by two guys who wrote the Transformers movie and directed by J.J. Abrams, goes to the very beginning of one of pop culture’s most enduring relationships: James T. Kirk and Spock. Kirk the juvenile delinquent turned Starfleet Academy bad boy genius is played by someone who could be a cast member of High School Musical (Chris Pine), but he makes up for it by getting beaten the crap out of on a regular basis. And for not doing a William Shatner impression, which must’ve been a constant temptation. Spock (Zachary Quinto) has issues because Vulcans look down on him for being half-human and therefore emotional so he overcompensates on the rationality department.

Harold (John Cho) from Harold and Kumar plays Sulu with combat skills, pretty Beyonce lite (Zoe Saldana) is Uhura with an unexpected romantic life, and a little boy with an exaggerated Russian accent is Chekov. For comic relief they turn to Simon Pegg as Scotty and Karl Urban as ‘Bones’ McCoy. How lovely to see Karl as a character with a personality—irritable and paranoid, yes, but a bit more demanding than his usual looking-great-while-killing-people roles.

Eric Bana’s villain is supposed to be a tragic figure but the filmmakers give him nothing to work with. He’s not even particularly scary, and when he tortures someone you really miss Ricardo Montalban in The Wrath of Khan.

The special effects area thousand light years ahead of the pathetic attempts on the old TV series—remember the one where Kirk fights a monster on a rocky alien landscape? The rocks were obviously cardboard and the monster some guy in a costume. Here the effects are impressive, but what does that mean in this day and age?

The 1960s TV series looked clunky, but it made up for the cheap sets by having clever storylines. In this retooling the writers feed us a space-time paradox parallel universe twist whose science is wonky at best (as is my understanding of Special Relativity, which may not qualify as ‘understanding’) but which will allow them to completely rewrite Star Trek history and create an infinity of Star Treks. (Bernard-Henri’s simple interpretation: After the success of Lost, J.J. Abrams feels no great need to be coherent.)

But Star Trek is zippy and enjoyable; see it on the biggest screen you can find.

Photo: Horrible woman selling puppies on a street in Seoul. Yelled at everyone who dared look at the puppies. Knocked the phone out of my hand (no damage).

We’re always interested in the sufferings of the rich, basically because they seem rare. The Economist has a special report on how they may be in for an “extended period of austerity”. Depends on how you define austerity. Flying first class instead of chartering the whole jet?

Hard times for the rich, in the Economist.

My reading backlog has been shrinking but my viewing backlog has been expanding so last night I put my book down and watched two movies. Well, one and a quarter.

First I put on Nothing But The Truth, a thinly-veiled retelling of the Valerie Plame affair, written and directed by Rod Lurie, whose previous work includes The Contender. In The Contender Joan Allen plays the vice-presidential nominee (the elected veep has died) of president Jeff Bridges who gets raked over the coals by conservative senator Gary Oldman. Allen, Bridges, Oldman—the director just had to yell “Action!”

The main problem with Nothing But The Truth (apart from the constant reminder of the old Inday Badiday showbiz talk show with women who gave birth to fish and lost children looking for their parents) is the casting. Playing the Judith Miller character—the dedicated reporter who goes to jail because she will not reveal the name of her source—is Kate Beckinsale. Lovely, smart, effective at waging war with werewolves, but totally unbelievable as a tough national correspondent who chases down a story that could bring down the government. With her cute upswept ponytail, she looks like she would burst into tears if someone said “Boo”. It’s not her looks, it’s the lack of street smarts, steel, and the cynical world-weary quality of women who have faced down powerful, scary men. The quality of “Yeah, and fuck you too.” Maybe my idea of female journalists draws too much from movies, but I’ve worked in newspapers and I know some girls who could flay Beckinsale’s character alive before appetizers are served. Also, Lurie would have us believe that a national reporter can get a scoop no one else has a whiff of, and still be a full-time soccer mom. Where does she work, the homeowners association newsletter?

Enter Matt Dillon as the special prosecutor tasked to find out the source of the leak in national security. There are many roles Matt Dillon can essay brilliantly (see Drugstore Cowboy), and he may be responsible for triggering puberty in the females of my generation, but there’s no way he can play that special prosecutor. Vera Farmiga as the exposed CIA operative and Angela Bassett as the editor are better, but they’re not the leads.

When Beckinsale gets sent to jail, I quit watching the movie. I couldn’t believe a second of it. I put on William Friedkin’s 1985 movie To Live And Die in L.A., of which I knew nothing but the soundtrack by Wang Chung.

Whoa! Freeze frame! Is that William Petersen as the rampant testoterone lead? William Petersen, our beloved eccentric Uncle Grissom from the original C.S.I.? He was…he was Hot. And wearing jeans so tight you could tell what religion he is. The jeans are so distracting they take over the movie; they also explain the character’s unfortunate decisions since they cut off circulation to his brain. Petersen, who was excellent in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, the first adaptation of Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (a much much much better movie than Red Dragon with Edward Norton), plays a Secret Service agent on the trail of a painter/counterfeiter Willem Dafoe (also hot, though we prefer him older and twisted). I think Friedkin was attempting to return to French Connection territory with the antihero-hero and the long car chases; he doesn’t make it, but To Live And Die in L.A. has its moments. Oh and the score is distracting.

Photo: Saffy is not amused.

Wonderful news: Your genius government has figured out a way to increase revenue collection! From now on, imported books (every title that is not published locally; nearly all the merchandise in bookstores outside of the Filipiniana section) will be taxed. This means books will become more expensive, and there will probably be a longer wait for new titles.

Until the new Department of Finance guidelines were issued and implemented (or existing laws were reinterpreted) there were no duties on book importation. This is—was—how books got to be cheaper here than in most other countries (If you ordered books from Amazon and DHL or the post office hit you with taxes, you were screwed). But those days of unfairness are over! From now on book-readers, those elitists who make us feel stupid by choosing to pay attention to a bunch of long words between covers instead of listening to our scintillating thoughts or watching our brilliant telenovelas and game shows, those people who think they’re intellectually superior just because they, like, read and have big vocabularies—they have to pay! Hurray!

Congratulations to the Finance Department, you’ve really hit on a great way to promote order and development! Cause you know, too many people are reading books as it is, and that’s not good: it makes their brains work, they start questioning the way things are, and before you know it, they’re criticizing the way the government does stuff. It leads to chaos! Tax imported books, make them more expensive so the people who read will read less, and the people who don’t read will be even less inclined to pick up a book. Bravo! Way to keep the people docile and stupid.

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Reacting to the imposition of taxes on book imports, the Book Development Association of the Philippines has requested the opinion of Justice Secretary Raul M. Gonzalez. Yay! We’re saved!

(I’m guessing the BDAP was a little distraught when the letter was drafted.)

April 30, 2009

LIRIO P. SANDOVAL
President

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That Kindle is looking good. You think they’ll figure out a way to tax e-books?

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Posting the BDAP position paper in Comments below.

For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.

Good-bye, civilization.

The 2012 Apocalypse—And How to Stop It, by Brandon Keim in Wired.

The Bund, Shanghai, a location in Steven Spielberg’s movie of Empire of The Sun.

JG Ballard died two weeks ago. I don’t remember what I was doing that was so important that the news slipped by me but I don’t remember it at all, and I vividly remember Empire of the Sun. So vividly that I was convinced Ballard was separated from his parents when the Japanese invaded Shanghai in World War II, and spent the next few years in an internment camp. In fact he was never separated from his parents and sister, but the time in the camp made a huge mark on the writer. “I have – I won’t say happy – not unpleasant memories of the camp,” he said. “I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!”

Martin Amis remembers JG Ballard.

Here is an uncollected Ballard short story from 1996, The Dying Fall.

Three years have passed since the collapse of the Tower of Pisa, but only now can I accept the crucial role that I played in the destruction of this unique landmark. Over twenty tourists died as the thousands of tons of marble lost their grasp on the air and collapsed to the ground. Among them was my wife Elaine, who had climbed to the topmost tier and was looking down at me when the first visible crack appeared in the tower’s base. Never were tragedy and triumph so intimately joined, as if Elaine’s pride in braving the worn and slippery stairs had been punished by the unseen forces that had sustained this unbalanced mass of masonry for so many centuries. . .

Continue reading in the Guardian.