So I’ve moved my blog to Blogger/Blogspot.

site: http://mistercomfypants.blogspot.com/
RSS: http://mistercomfypants.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

And that’s that. I’m there now, not here. Old posts were imported, so the new place is riddled with links back to here (there’s not really anything I can do about that, short of paying WordPress an annual fee), which is annoying, but better than ads.

Subscribers will have to re-subscribe at the new blog in order to keep getting updates. Sorry, WordPress doesn’t offer any way to redirect the RSS feed automatically.

Data
Title: Star Trek [The Animated Series]: “One of Our Planets Is Missing”
Year: 1973
Network: NBC
Episode: the third (of sixteen) from season one; 24 minutes
Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Hal Sutherland
Writer: Marc Daniels
Starring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley
With: George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Majel Barrett, James Doohan
Music: Alexander Courage (theme); Ray Ellis, Norm Prescott
I saw it: on video a couple times, most recently a few days ago (have on DVD)
Synopsis: a space cloud eats planets

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog: It’s ironic, the dialog in the cartoon is so much more natural and believable and all-around grownup than it became toward the end of the original series. There’s this nice bit where Kirk gets Bones’ advice on whether or not to let a doomed planet know it’s doomed; it feels like they’re actually the characters they’re meant to be, instead of some sort of childish cowboy/Flash Gordon hybrids.
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 8/10 (Great, ). The title is “One of Our Planets Is Missing.” That’s all I have to say about that.
Objective Rating (Average):

eta: The writer, Marc Daniels, directed a lot of the better episodes of the original series, including “The Doomsday Machine” (written by Norman Spinrad), which this episode rips off. Shameless. But I’ve always complained that if they’re going to rip off earlier episodes, why don’t they rip off the good ones? Giant Space Monster, Devourer of Worlds – none of that Little Timmy Gets Magic bullshit.

Data
Title: Star Trek [The Animated Series]: “Yesteryear”
Year: 1973
Network: NBC
Episode: the second (of sixteen) from season one; 24 minutes
Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Hal Sutherland
Writer: D.C. Fontana
Starring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley
With: Majel Barrett, James Doohan, Mark Lenard, Billy Simpson, Keith Sutherland
Music: Alexander Courage (theme); Ray Ellis, Norm Prescott
I saw it: on video a couple times, most recently a few days ago (have on DVD)
Synopsis: Time Travelin’ Spock helps his younger self

My reaction
Concept: It answers that burning question, “If they’ve discovered half a dozen means of time travel throughout the original series, why aren’t they time traveling more often?” The answer: “What? They time travel all the time. It ain’t no thing.”
Story: So timey-wimey.
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 7/10 (Good, ). Baby Spock is annoying, but if you can get past the ridiculousness of the setup, it’s a novel story.
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: Star Trek [The Animated Series]: “Beyond the Farthest Star”
Year: 1973
Network: NBC
Episode: the first (of sixteen) from season one; 24 minutes
Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Hal Sutherland
Writer: Samuel A. Peeples
Starring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley
With: George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan
Music: Alexander Courage (theme); Ray Ellis, Norm Prescott
I saw it: on video a couple times, most recently a few days ago (have on DVD)
Synopsis: an ancient spaceship is orbiting a dead star

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters: No time for characters – too much awesome science fiction.
Dialog: Most of this episode consists of discussion of astrophysics. Kids love that shit.
Pacing: Way too fast. On the other hand, the half hour time slot leaves no room for Kirk to even think about getting his romantic subplot on; dude’s forced to captain a starship for a change.
Cinematography:
Special effects/design: Yeah, the animation of people – or anything else that moves, really – is awful. But other than that, it is a beautiful, beautiful show.
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 9/10 (One of my favorites, ). I guess four years of not making Star Trek gave them a chance to figure out what people liked about the show. This takes everything good about it, throws out the garbage, and adds in the wonderful bonus of not having to worry about a special effects budget.
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: Vertigo
Year: 1958
Length: 129 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Alec Coppel & Samuel A. Taylor, based on a novel by Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac
Starring: James Stewart, Kim Novak
With: Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones, Raymond Bailey, Ellen Corby, Konstantin Shayne, Lee Patrick
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Editing: George Tomasini
Oscars: nominated for Best Art Direction/Set Decoration and Best Sound
I saw it: on video a couple times, most recently a few days ago (rented from Netflix)
Synopsis: a retired cop is hired to follow a woman whose husband claims she’s possessed

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design: The design is great. The special effects are pretty sad.
Acting: I love Jimmy Stewart, but he is horribly cast in this movie. Besides being too old, his persona is at odds with the character’s development.
Music:
Subjective Rating: 8/10 (Great, ). Suspenseful, fairly unique, and unmistakably 1958. It’s kind of two different movies, one after the other. About two thirds of the way through the film, the first story comes to a climax, things twist around, and a new story starts in a different direction. The first time I saw it, that bothered me a lot, and I wasn’t really able to get into the second story. Watching it a second time, it’s like a completely different movie. The first section now seems like prolonged set-up to the second section – which, now that I’m not distracted by having the rug pulled out or by Stewart’s miscasting, I can appreciate as having some of Hitchcock’s strongest moments.
Objective Rating:

[update of a previous post - original is here]

My reaction
Concept: Basically a Western – at least, in characters and story.
Story:
Characters:
Dialog: Much of the movie involves people standing around not saying anything, which would have been a disaster if the cast and score wasn’t so damn great. There’s an enormous amount of communication that goes on without, or sometimes in spite of the dialog. (Judging from the reactions of the middle-aged people sitting behind us in the theater, it might benefit from subtitles for the subtlety impaired.)
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 8/10 (Great, ). I wasn’t as blown away as I expected to be based on the internet’s reaction/obsession with it, but it’s a great movie. It oozes hipness. I predict there will be a number of movies in the next few years that emulate its style. Also: What is this cast? How is this a thing?
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: How to Steal a Million
Year: 1966
Length: 123 minutes
Director: William Wyler
Writer: Harry Kurnitz, story by George Bradshaw
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole
With: Eli Wallach, Hugh Griffith, Charles Boyer, Fernand Gravey, Marcel Dalio, Jacques Marin, Moustache, Roger Tréville, Edward Malin, Bert Bertram
Music: John Williams
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Editing: Robert Swink
I saw it: on video a couple days ago, rented from Netflix
Synopsis: an art forger’s daughter needs to steal a faked statue from a museum

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 7/10 (Good, ). Fun and witty. My wife got bored, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: My Fair Lady
Year: 1964
Length: 170 minutes
Director: George Cukor
Writer: Alan Jay Lerner, based on his musical based on a play by George Bernard Shaw
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison
With: Stanley Holloway, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Gladys Cooper, Jeremy Brett, Theodore Bikel, Mona Washbourne, Isobel Elsom, John Holland
Music: André Previn (score); Frederick Loewe & Alan Jay Lerner (songs)
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Editing: William H. Ziegler
Oscars: won for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Harrison), Best Cinematography (color), Best Score (musical), Best Art Direction/Set Decoration (color), Best Costume Design (color) and Best Sound; nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Holloway), Best Supporting Actress (Cooper) and Best Editing
I saw it: on video a couple days ago, rented from Netflix
Synopsis: a cockney girl is trained to pass as an aristocrat at parties

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 5/10 (Indifferent, ). There are a number of very good parts, but they’re scattered and sparse. The songs are almost all boring, and the action usually comes to a complete stop while we wait for them to finish singing. Even if the songs were good, they would be an unwelcome interruption – and they go on like this for three hours.
Objective Rating (Average):

My reaction
Concept:
Story: The ending kind of blows. Not blows as in Lost - it’s just kind of disproportionately uncreative.
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography: Damnit, enough with the damn lens flares already! Watching a J.J. Abrams movie, it’s kind of like having him in the room, jumping up and down next to the screen pointing at it, yelling, “Hey! Look what I did there! Check it out!”
Special effects/design:
Acting: Fanning is great. Courtney is fine, considering that his part is too demanding to expect a kid to pull off.
Music:
Subjective Rating: 6/10 (Okay, ). Fun and entertaining. Unfortunately, it’s a J.J. Abrams movie, and never lets you forget it. Um, J.J? Maybe next time you taunt us with your “magic box,” you could put something inside it first. As far as channeling Spielberg goes, the focus there is on his corny tropes, not on his storytelling skill.
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: Star Trek: “The Cage”
Year: 1988 (produced 1965)
Network: NBC
Episode: pilot; 64 minutes
Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Robert Butler
Writer: Gene Roddenberry
Starring: Jeffrey Hunter
With: Susan Oliver, Leonard Nimoy, Majel Barrett, John Hoyt, Peter Duryea, Laurel Goodwin
Music: Alexander Courage
Cinematography: William E. Snyder
Editing: Leo H. Shreve
I saw it: on video a couple times, most recently yesterday (have on DVD)
Synopsis: telepathic aliens capture a space captain

My reaction
Concept:
Story: Nothing any of the characters do has any effect on the outcome of the story.
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 7/10 (Good, ). It’s a good thing this pilot didn’t get picked up as is; the show badly needed the retooling it got, particularly the recasting. All the actors and characters are all perfectly good, but they’re just… kind of boring.
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: Meek’s Cutoff
Year: 2011
Length: 104 minutes
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Writer: Jonathan Raymond
Starring: Michelle Williams
With: Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Tommy Nelson, Rod Rondeaux
Music: Jeff Grace
Cinematography: Chris Blauvelt
Editing: Kelly Reichardt
I saw it: on video (rented from Netflix), yesterday
Synopsis: a wagon train is lost in the Oregon desert

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing: Very slow, but in a good way.
Cinematography:
Special effects/design: Very good visually. The sound recording is terrible.
Acting: The performances are great, but the way the movie is directed, everything is kept at a distance. It’s a great approach as far as telling the story goes, but doesn’t really let the acting into the foreground enough to be memorable.
Music: I like that they completely avoided any of the typical types of Western scores. The music is sparse and alien, well suited to the movie.
Subjective Rating: 7/10 (Good, ). An excellent movie, but its small budget shows through enough to take you out of it from time to time.
Objective Rating (Average):

My reaction
Concept: Once again, the concept of the show as a whole is great, although the episode-by-episode concepts average out to much less – about 2.2/4.
Story: Rounded up from an average of about 1.8/4.
Characters: Average: about 1.7/4.
Dialog: Average: about 1.9/4.
Pacing: Average: about 2.2/4.
Cinematography: Average: 2.0/4.
Special effects/design: Average: 4.0/4. I suppose I was a lot more lenient on this category than I should have been. Whatever.
Acting: Average: about 2.1/4.
Music: Average: about 3.9/4.
Subjective Rating: 7/10 (Good, ). It hurts me. It hurts me to only give classic Star Trek a 7/10. But I’ve got to be honest. Well, no, if I was honest, it would get a 6/10, rounded up from an average of about 5.8. Thing is, there are no great episodes in season three.  Some that I like quite a bit, but not a single great episode. And a surprising number of bad episodes. This whole looking at, and keeping record of my reaction to, every episode individually is quite revealing.
Objective Rating (Average):

The episdoes
sorted by subjective rating (objective rating in parentheses)
7/10
- “The Enterprise Incident” (3.1/4)
- “Whom Gods Destroy” (3.0/4)
- “The Savage Curtain” (3.0/4)
- “Day of the Dove” (3.0/4)
- “Spectre of the Gun” (2.3/4)
- “All Our Yesterdays” (2.9/4)
- “The Cloud Minders” (2.8/4)
- “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” (2.8/4)
- “Spock’s Brain” (2.0/4)
6/10
- “The Empath” (2.4/4)
- “Elaan of Troyius” (2.6/4)
- “The Mark of Gideon” (2.5/4)
- “Turnabout Intruder” (2.6/4)
- “The Way to Eden” (2.0/4)
- “The Paradise Syndrome” (2.3/4)
- “The Lights of Zetar” (2.1/4)
- “Wink of an Eye” (2.2/4)
- “The Tholian Web” (2.2/4)
5/10
- “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” (2.3/4)
4/10
- “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (2.1/4)
- “Plato’s Stepchildren” (1.7/4)
- “And the Children Shall Lead” (1.7/4)
3/10
- “Requiem for Methuselah” (2.0/4)
- “That Which Survives” (1.7/4)

Data
Title: Star Trek: “Turnabout Intruder”
Year: 1969
Network: NBC
Episode: the last (of twenty-four) from season three; 50 minutes
Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Herb Wallerstein
Writer: Arthur H. Singer; story by Gene Roddenberry
Starring: William Shatner
With: Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Sandra Smith, Harry Landers, James Doohan
Music: Alexander Courage (theme); Fred Steiner
Cinematography: Al Francis
Editing: Donald R. Rode
I saw it: on video and TV several times, most recently yesterday (have on DVD)
Synopsis: body swap

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters: ”Intense hatred of her own womanhood.” What?
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting: Shatner’s ridiculous, but Smith usually makes a reasonably convincing Kirk.
Music:
Subjective Rating: 6/10 (Okay, ). And the series ends with a bang, of sorts: all new heights of sexism. It could have been fixed, too, with just a tweak of two or three lines of dialog – making it so that the villain’s problem is that she’s criminally insane, rather than that she’s a woman. Sigh.
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: Star Trek: “All Our Yesterdays”
Year: 1969
Network: NBC
Episode: the twenty-third (of twenty-four) from season three; 50 minutes
Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Marvin J. Chomsky
Writer: Jean Lisette Aroeste
Starring: William Shatner
With: Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Mariette Hartley, Ian Wolfe, Kermit Murdock
Music: Alexander Courage (theme); George Duning
Cinematography: Al Francis
Editing: Grant Hoag, Fabien D. Tordjmann
I saw it: on video and TV several times, most recently yesterday (have on DVD)
Synopsis: trapped in time

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 7/10 (Good, ). Wait, an alien world that’s not evil? And isn’t run by a computer? How can that be?
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: Star Trek: “The Savage Curtain”
Year: 1969
Network: NBC
Episode: the twenty-second (of twenty-four) from season three; 50 minutes
Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Herschel Daugherty
Writers: Gene Roddenberry & Arthur Heinemann; story by Roddenberry
Starring: William Shatner
With: Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Lee Bergere, Barry Atwater, Phillip Pine
Music: Alexander Courage (theme); Fred Steiner
Cinematography: Al Francis
Editing: Bill Brame
I saw it: on video and TV several times, most recently yesterday (have on DVD)
Synopsis: first, Abraham Lincoln In Space; then, yet another arena battle

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting: Great casting. The ancient Vulcan looks like he walked in out of a medieval painting, and the guy from 21st-century Earth is a classic 1950′s spaceman.
Music:
Subjective Rating: 7/10 (Good, ). When Abraham Lincoln shows up, even though you know by this point in the series that it’s just going to be some god-like-powers bullshit, you can’t help being intrigued. There’s just something inherently fascinating to me about showing the future to a figure from the past. And you really want to know where this could possibly be leading. It doesn’t end up leading anywhere novel – just another Space Monster Wants to Make You Fight Each Other scenario. But it’s one of the better episodes of that formula, with a relatively interesting character dynamic.
Objective Rating (Average):

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting: Another would-be intelligent female character, played as if she’s an idiot child.
Music:
Subjective Rating: 7/10 (Good, ). Kirk faces a realistic, complex diplomatic issue, and naturally has no good solution available. That is, of course, until midway through the episode when McCoy makes an announcement that you’d never see coming. If you think about it on a symbolic level, the story’s solution is offensive. But on a literal level, it works and is fairly interesting and novel.
Objective Rating (Average):

My reaction
Concept: However, the simple absense of supernatural powers is so welcome by this point that I almost don’t notice the lack of any good ideas to take their place.
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting: Homeier and Napier are both pretty good in their key scenes. Rapelye and Koenig are awful.
Music: Fucking hippies.
Subjective Rating: 6/10 (Okay, ). There’s not really much to it, but in the (relatively few) places where it’s moving forward, it’s perfectly good. On the other hand: jam sessions. On the other other hand: pretty girls without much clothing.
Objective Rating (Average):

Data
Title: Ikiru
Year: 1952 (Japan); 1956 (US)
Length: 143 minutes
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto & Hideo Oguni
Starring: Takashi Shimura
With: Shin’ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka, Minoru Chiaki, Miki Odagiri, Bokuzen Hidari, Minosuke Yamada, Kamatari Fujiwara, Makoto Kobori, Nobuo Kaneko, Nobuo Nakamura, Atsushi Watanabe, Isao Kimura, Masao Shimizu, Yûnosuke Itô
Music: Fumio Hayasaka (and non-original music)
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Editing: Kôichi Iwashita
I saw it: on video a couple times, most recently a few days ago (rented from Netflix)
Synopsis: a man wants to learn to live when he finds out he’s dying

My reaction
Concept: It’s a cliche, but every cliche needs at least one great movie for the others to copy.
Story:
Characters:
Dialog: There’s probably something lost in translation.
Pacing: Not exactly boring, but it’s very long and feels longer.
Cinematography:
Special effects/design: I’m taking some points off for poor video and sound quality. I would never guess from watching it that it was shot as late as the 50s.
Acting: Over-the-top, but very effective.
Music:
Subjective Rating: 6/10 (Okay, ). Well made and depressing.
Objective Rating (Average):

And, what’s Ebert got to say?
- “…one of the greatest closing shots in the cinema.” Um, no.
- “[Kurosawa] makes us not witnesses to Watanabe’s decision, but evengelists for it. I think this is one of the few movies that might actually be able to inspire someone to lead his or her life a little differently.” Sure, maybe if you’re a useless bureaucrat who can’t be arsed to clean up a neighborhood sewage dump. On the other hand, if you’re someone who’s bothering to watch a Japanese art film, you’ve probably got enough of a brain to realize that being habitually miserable is a bad decision.
- “I saw Ikiru first in 1960 or 1961… I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for two and a half hours… Over the years I have seen Ikiru every five years or so, and each time it has moved me and made me think.” And here we see why Ikiru, of all movies, is the second entry to Ebert’s Great Movies. Ebert’s making a statement of purpose by choosing it second – that he’s not pretending to be objective. His essay includes a laundry list of classics made by Kurosawa; this is not one of them. It’s great, yes, but it is clearly not meant to be seen as one of a handful of Best Movies Ever; if that were the point, one of those other, much better movies would have been chosen first. Instead we get… a movie he likes, that’s important to him, personally, and that he feels like writing an essay about.

[update of a previous post - original is here]

My reaction
Concept:
Story:
Characters:
Dialog:
Pacing:
Cinematography:
Special effects/design:
Acting:
Music:
Subjective Rating: 3/10 (Bad, ). Very probably The Worst character writing in all of Star Trek. Which is very frustrating, since the basic ideas of the characters have a lot of potential. It’s also slightly frustrating that the episode isn’t ultimately about the immortal guy – which would have been a novel concept – but instead focuses on his robotics science project, which we’ve seen in multiple previous episodes. But that’s not really important, because oh my god why is Kirk hopelessly in love with someone he just met?
Objective Rating (Average):