Posts tagged ‘film’

In loving memory of the hopes I had cultivated of actually doing NaNoWriMo this year, I’ll be attempting to post at least something to atypicalreview every day of November. Two things today though, to make up for yesterday.

As those of you who will have read Jackson’s Star Trek review will one day know,¹ this year J.J. Abrams brought us a pretty impressive film. I was even able to rise above my childhood Doctor Who versus Star Trek rivalry to enjoy it. Perfectly paced, funny, exciting, moving.

It’s just out on DVD, Blu-Ray, and iTunes as well. May I caution you as an aside; do not just buy it on iTunes. It’ll cost you $25 there, but for an extra $5 you could get the blu-ray edition which comes with its own digital iTunes copy. Even if you don’t have a blu-ray player, one day you might. Think about it.

Anyhow, that’s not the point, as you may have guessed from the picture up in the top left hand corner.² What people often rightly applaud Star Trek for is its agenda of social progress and togetherness and the triumph of humanity against its base urges. The first inter-racial kiss on television. The first romance between a cyborg and an artificial intelligence.³ So it surprised me somewhat to be watching the scenes deleted from Star Trek and to find a pretty ropey scene between our hero Kirk and an Orion woman. Allow me to paraphrase:

KIRK: I’m really sorry. I realise it looks like I used you shamefully but I won’t actually come out and say that I did. I’m very awkward right now. I’m even a bit reluctant to make eye contact with you but I clearly have on several occasions in this sentence.
…pause…
You’re not Gaila, are you?

For those playing at home, that’s a joke about how all girls with green skin look the same and how Kirk can’t tell them apart. And we’re not talking about girls he’s barely met. We’re talking about girls he’s slept with. Take a moment to think about just how that’d play if, say, Kirk had the same issue but with Uhura and another girl of similar skin colour.

Luckily, it didn’t make it to the film. But not because it was in bad taste — in fact, J.J. and his crew still seem to think it’s really funny. It’s all a bit weird. How tragic that on the same day that I note that anti-robot stereotypes are on the decline, we see once again the ugly face of intergalactic racism. Truly, equal rights in genre movies is an ongoing battle.

1. Patience my children. Remember the parable of the Not Fade Away review. ↩
2. I reserve the right to one day change the layout of this website and not update this sentence. ↩
3. Well, almost-romance. Curse you, Voyager! ↩

A review will surely appear, but until it does, I feel like somewhere on this site we should add our voices to the choir and mention how awesome Star Trek is. Or, as Hoyts cinema insist on calling it, Star Trek 11 — a name that completely works against the way they’ve been trying to market it. There’s a reason why we didn’t see Batman V or James Bond 22.

OK. Let’s say you’re the sort of person who sees ropey romantic comedies with Vince Vaughn. Which of these do you go to?

These are, of course, the same film. But oddly, the one which has been stripped of all things Yuletide is the one being released in Australia and New Zealand. Here’s the trailer — watch as the voiceover guy completely fails to actually mention the name of the movie. I’m not saying either of them look good, per say, but one of them at least manages to get across some kind of concept to the audience. I don’t recall what the tagline for the Down Under version is, but it didn’t do much to dispel the obvious and erroneous conclusion that our two vertically different actors would be travelling to four different relaxing destinations and getting away from it all, rather than having four awful family experiences in one day.

At least, Four Christmases sounds shorter.

I’m not the first person to notice this, by the way. Clearly sensible people everywhere are bemused. Unlike Mr Dunks, I’ve never read a letter to the editor whinging about overly Christmasey overtones — rather, I only ever seem to read the ones which whinge about said hypothetical whingers. But either way, I find it hard to imagine anyone taking issue with a film for involving Christmas as a tangential and not particularly Christian plot point.

And if these people do exist, is the plan to hoodwink them into seeing such a film? There must be more of them than I can possibly imagine to make the effort of rebranding the film worthwhile.

I don’t get it. What upsets me more, though, is the realisation that at some point in my life, “Four Christmases” turned from sounding awesome to sounding terrifying, and I didn’t even notice.