Tag: SImon Pegg

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Film Features Film/TV

Star Trek Beyond

It ain’t easy being a Trekkie.

From the beginning, we’ve been an aggrieved bunch. The fandom coalesced in 1968, when NBC threatened to cancel the original Star Trek after two seasons, prompting a “Save Trek” letter-writing campaign organized by sci-fi zines and word of mouth. It worked, but the third season had fewer classic episodes, which led to Trekkies discovering their other favorite pastime: Complaining about Star Trek.

In the 1970s, as Trekkies were successfully lobbying to have the first space shuttle named Enterprise, they backed series creator Gene Roddenberry’s quest to create a new series. After the tremendous success of Star Wars, those ideas were transported onto the big screen for 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Trekkies were gleeful, because not only did they have new Trek to watch, but, since many found the film to be ponderous and self-important, they also had new stuff to complain about. For director Nicholas Meyer’s 1982 sequel, The Wrath of Khan, the haters were drowned out by the cries of Trekkies grieving for the death of Spock. When the franchise (and Leonard Nimoy, who had his own love/hate relationship with Trek) gave them what they wanted and brought Spock back to life in the third installment, Trekkies declared that “odd-numbered Trek movies are always bad.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987, and for the first two seasons, Trekkies, who were tuning in religiously every week, hated Captain Picard. Then he was assimilated by the Borg, and everyone decided they had always loved him and please don’t take him away. And so it went for 25 seasons of four consecutive spin-off series until Enterprise went off the air in 2005 just as it was getting good.

Sofia Boutella (left) as Jayla and Simon Pegg as Scotty in Star Trek Beyond

At this point, it probably will not surprise you to learn that I was less than impressed with the two J.J. Abrams-directed reboot films, Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). Sure, they looked good, and the new crew, led by Zachary Quinto as Spock, was well cast, but the writing—done by the same team who wrote Transformers—was just downright stupid. Abrams ditched Roddenberry’s techno-utopian humanism in favor of post-9/11 paranoid cynicism. The tenor of the times was not a good fit for Trek.

So it was with considerable trepidation I approached Star Trek Beyond. Abrams jumped ship for Star Wars, but his replacement is Justin Lin, best known for three Fast & Furious movies. The screenplay is by Simon Pegg, the comedy writer behind Shaun of the Dead, who is also returning for his third go-round as Scotty. Pegg’s script elevates Star Trek Beyond to the best Trek movie since 1996’s First Contact. Chris Pine’s rendition of Captain James T. Kirk has been the weakest link in the rebooted cast, but in the film’s opening scene, when Kirk’s diplomatic mission spirals into farce, Pine finally finds the handle on the character. Later, when a a rescue mission to an unknown planet turns into an ambush, the Enterprise crash lands, scattering the crew. Pegg’s script pairs off Spock and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban), giving the two frenemies some great scenes together as they fight for survival in the alien wilderness. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Sulu (John Cho) both get meatier roles, and Idris Elba provides a credible villain with the fascist space vampire Krall.

Chris Pine as Captain Kirk


While the character moments are the best parts, Trek has never looked better. The frontier of the Federation doesn’t simply resemble rural California, and the gravity-bending design of Starbase Yorktown is an instant classic. The second-act space battle between the Enterprise and a swarm of Krall’s drones is visually inventive and harrowing. But, as the film progresses, Lin’s tics resurface. He puts Kirk on a motorcycle, his nervously roaming camera becomes tiresome, and he fumbles the climax, which seems to be on loan from Guardians of the Galaxy.

What Pegg and Lin get right is the sense of camaraderie among the diverse crew. Star Trek Beyond carries Roddenberry’s conviction that we can solve our problems by sticking together and applying equal parts compassion and logic, and its optimism is catchy.

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Film Features Film/TV

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

It’s been 19 years since Tom Cruise first portrayed Ethan Hunt in an adaptation of the hit spy show Mission: Impossible. That’s longer than the show had been off the air when the Brian De Palma-helmed reboot hit theaters with the now-iconic image of Cruise hanging over a computer terminal, suspended by impossibly thin wires. Since someone born on the first film’s premiere date would be college-aged by now, it’s likely that there are many people in the audience who don’t know the self-destructing message sending spies off on an elaborate and dangerous mission is a callback to the show’s weekly cold opening. But it’s the formula Desilu Productions developed for TV that has allowed the Mission: Impossible franchise to outlive the Cold War. A highly trained team of agents working for a shadowy, quasi-governmental agency undertaking missions so sensitive and difficult that their government will “disavow” all knowledge of their existence if they fail works just as well in the age of terrorism as it did in the days of KGB vs. CIA spy-jinks.

The latest installment, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, is nothing if not formulaic, but the movie is self-aware enough to preemptively ask if it’s still relevant. We first meet returning player William Brandt (Avengers‘ Jeremy Renner) defending the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) before a congressional committee as CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) successfully argues that they are redundant and dangerously out of control. Hunley puts the IMFers, including computer wizard Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), on desk duty, but their first assignment is tracking Hunt, who has once again gone rogue. Hunt thinks he’s on the trail of yet another shadowy, elite force of spies called the Syndicate, but almost no one else believes they exist. Hunley accuses him of making up threats to justify the IMF’s funding with one of the film’s best lines: “Hunt is both arsonist and fireman.”

But since Tom Cruise is both star and producer, we know that the Syndicate is real, and it includes stock characters like the strangely cold, vaguely European mastermind Soloman Lane (Sean Harris), a Russian sadist named the Bone Doctor (Jens Hultén), and British double (or possibly triple) agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). Hunt gets the old team out from behind their desks — and in the case of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), out of retirement — to stop the Syndicate from — well, doing something that’s probably real bad. Details like the bad guy’s motivations and the exact nature of the MacGuffin (It’s a list of agents! No wait, it’s a list of bank accounts! No wait, we’ve got to rescue Benji!) are not Mission: Impossible‘s strong suit.

What Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are all about is crafting high-quality action, and judged by that metric, they succeed. The “gain access to an impossibly secure computer system” sequence is set underwater this time, to spectacular results. But the best part of the film is the second-act set piece in a Vienna opera house that references Hitchcock’s climax to The Man Who Knew Too Much.

While the Daniel Craig/Sam Mendes team has taken James Bond into more serious character territory, Cruise and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company have taken the opposite approach. Rogue Nation plays like a fond memory of Roger Moore-era Bond films such as Live and Let Die, only without the misogyny — or sexiness, for that matter. Even though Ferguson, a British actress making her first foray into the action genre, is captivating onscreen, she and Cruise share only a single extended hug.

Like Adam Sandler, Cruise’s wealth and status remove the usual motivations for doing a movie: He doesn’t need the money, so why bother? In Sandler’s case, the leaked Sony Pictures emails allege his films are little more than ways to get his friends and family free vacations. Cruise, on the other hand, appears to be motivated by the desire to perform increasingly over-the-top stunts. Rogue Nation‘s big moment comes right off the bat, when Hunt, trying to recover a biological weapons cache, clings to the side of an Airbus military transport as it takes off and flies away. At least that’s more fun for the viewer than watching Sandler yuk it up on a waterslide.

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Summer Movie Journal #5

Full Metal Jacket (1987; dir. Stanley Kubrick)—Kubrick is a cable television hypnotist; stop to watch a scene or two, and the next time you check your watch, two hours of your life have vanished. Part of this comes from Kubrick’s distinctive mixture of precision imagery and ambiguous human agents; his shifty films, which often concern the breakdown of orderly systems, always feel like you can eventually figure them out if you could just see them one…more…time. Like The Shining, Full Metal Jacket is a horror film, but it’s more matter-of-fact about the world’s terrible things than its predecessor. Its main subject is the way people like Matthew Modine’s Private Joker and Vincent D’onofrio’s Private Pyle are ground up in the human being lawnmower that is the U.S. military-industrial complex, embodied in the film by R. Lee Ermey’s mad-god drill instructor. Ermey’s florid, obscene litanies of abuse, which he delivers nonstop at maximum volume, coexists uneasily with Kubrick’s tightly composed images of military harmony, including a shot of Marines climbing ropes in the twilight as beautiful as anything in a Miyazaki film. For most viewers, Jacket’s merciless first forty-five minutes overshadow the film’s second half, which takes place in Vietnam and includes a little thing called the Tet Offensive. But it shouldn’t: one look at Animal Mother’s 1000-yard stare ought to keep you locked in. And in the age of CGI, Kubrick’s meticulous craftsmanship stands tall. Just think; they had to set those building on fire during the battle scenes every single day. Grade: A+


Hot Fuzz (2007: dir. Edgar Wright)— Edgar Wright is another filmmaker who stops me in my tracks whenever I’m idly channel-surfing. Hot Fuzz, about a London supercop (Simon Pegg) who thinks something fishy is going on in the small English village where he’s been reassigned, is the only action-comedy anyone needs to see, a triumph of verbal and visual wit more immediately accessible than anything Wright, Pegg and co-star Nick Frost have done so far. But for genre connoisseurs interested in a bit of fun, this pastiche offers endless treasures. Its network of cross-references and allusions are bewildering, edifying, inspirational: the Lethal Weapon theme music, the Silent Rage lookalike who can only say “Yarp”, the Straw Dogs shotgun violence played off as a joke, the casting of The Wicker Man’s Edward Woodward as the town’s security head, all the songs from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, the A-Team like way in which the bad guys aren’t killed. To say nothing of Timothy Dalton as the guiltiest-looking, most shamelessly wicked murder suspect in film history. Grade: A+

A Summer’s Tale (1996; dir. Eric Rohmer)—Although Eric Rohmer’s funny, lovely romance about the romantic adventures of a young man and three women had its long-overdue U.S. theatrical premiere earlier this year, it isn’t coming to Memphis; looks like Kansas City (where it’s currently playing) is as close as it’s going to get. This is a shame, because this is perfect mid-August fare, a chatty couple of hours that records, with grace and equanimity, all the dumb games people play when they’re too young and uncertain to deal with love, sex and commitment. I don’t tend to look to Robert Louis Stevenson for advice about today’s youth, but he’s spot-on about the central dilemma of the clueless dude at the film’s center: “He does not yet know enough of the world and men. His experience is incomplete… He is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near trying it as his means permit.” Out of such hesitations and feints are authentic feelings and many painful memories born. Grade: A


Post Tenebras Lux (2012; dir. Carlos Reygadas)—There’s too little to hold onto in Reygadas’ emotional autobiography, for which he won the Best Director award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Its internal logic remains opaque, and its few potent-looking individual vignettes fail to compensate for its many dead spots. I liked the two visits by the devil (I think) and the scene where the guy rips his own head off, but the rest of the imagery and emotions were either hidden or buried. I feel sorta dopey disliking this movie, though. It’s easy to tee off on typical Hollywood product because village-idiot brainlessness is often what it’s selling. It’s tougher to take down something “challenging” or difficult or unconventional. Because these works may require more time and effort for viewers to unpack it mysteries and challenges, you feel like a chump and a simpleton when you finally give up and say, “I don’t get it.” But I don’t get it. Grade: B-


“Friend Like Me,” from Aladdin (1992; dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker)—I didn’t discover Robin Williams’ soul while watching The Fisher King or Good Will Hunting; I discovered it in a Disney cartoon. The connection between creativity and solitude—and the way in which Williams’ manic flights of free-associative fancy frequently exhausted other people whenever he escaped from the prison of his own head—is the subtext of Williams’ Genie’s mantra: “Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space.” Nevertheless, Williams’ magical wish-granter is his greatest role, in part because it best embodies the radical notion of the comedian as world-builder. Wonder, joy and generosity in the movies are all too rare, but these things are all present in this gloriously surreal, genially self-indulgent two and a half minute musical number, which still delights me after dozens of viewings. (Favorite moment: the way the Genie leers, “Well, lookie here!” after conjuring up a tiny harem for his new master.) Before bursting into song, the Genie declares “I don’t think you quite realize what you’ve got here”; that purely expository line will assume new shades of meaning and gravity as we continue to grapple with Williams’ huge (and often frustrating) artistic legacy. Grade (musical number only): A+