Without going into all the bloody details (figuratively or
literally) this new film with Brad Pitt as the Beaver was a
huge waste of time.

This is how boring it was: during the film I was going out
online looking for cheesecake photos of Helen and Andromache.

OTOH, there's this small film made in the European market or
for tv and distributed to vid stores that I thought was a better product.

• Helen of Troy

When I remembered it, I requested my library to add it to it's
collection of plays. It's in a current Kino Video version
on dvd.

Also that Helen O' Troy I mentioned _is_ stocked by the
local library. I was going to re-rent and was surprised
to see it turn up.

All these big war adventures got triggered by the upsurge
of nationalism after 911. I'll bet my shirt on it. But to
give some historical distance, they picked antiquity and
made Troy and Alexander the Great.

I'm getting weary of these CGI "cast of hundreds of thousands"
epics. There's that haze you can always see in the CGI images
that says "fake".

No good s-f films being made, so now that I have a dvd player,
I'm catching up on Star Trek Voyager episodes.

"Damnit Scotty, if we don't have warp drive in five minutes we're all dead!"

I remember reading the Making Of Star Trek book and back
on TOS (The Original Series) the costume designer wrote about
how he worked in as much cheesecake as he could for the
alien babes. Even the terra babes on the crew had short skirts.

In the revival series' they took an absolutely
Puritan approach in the 80's. Then came Jeri Ryan as
Seven Of Nine in ST-V (Star Trek Voyager.) Still, there
seems to be consistent pattern of keeping sex out of the
program-- unlike the rest of tv and unlike ST-TOS.

The future isn't what it used to be.

Original Star Trek CastEnsign Janice Rand

The next generation Star Trek might have been more conservative, but there was always the tension between Deanna Troi and Commander Riker. That and her cleavage spiced things up a bit. And sometimes they would throw in a little chemistry between Dr. Crusher and Captain Picard too.

Next Generation CastDeanna Troi

I actually think a lot more care is taken with the newer
series. It's less broad and not as much scenery chewing.

The features films, with notable exceptions, have been
getting better in that there is less 'fan service' (a term
used in anime quite a bit) and more story.

If the plot lines were written then as they are now, the
Borg collective would be a reference to Communism I suppose.

I stopped watching tv after the first episode of ST-V, not because I didn't like Voyager, I had just had it with commercial televison.
I never went back.

But now I can watch the content without the advertising.

But I wonder how that one episode with 2 primative peoples
at perpetual war with each other would be viewed today. I'm
thinking of the one that concludes with Kirk reciting the
Declaration of Independence. Even as a kid, that choked me
up a little bit when hearing it. Today 30% of high school
kids polled are in favor of a reduction of freedom for
a spurious security.

The fact is that productions these days are made by business
administrators rather than even studio heads. So the
production landscape has become severely limited.

And there's not enough of us old trekkies to keep it going.

Think of what they did with that show in symbolic and
artistic terms: showing the race conflict of the time as
a fight between two men, each having a half/half skin color
on opposite sides-- and when they spoke they reflected each other's
image.

That one was written by Harlan Ellison. Ellison is now one of the
senior figures in s-f and fantasy, mostly as a consultant and
editor.

As a final aside, I wish I knew all the authors of those episodes
who worked under pseudonyms. Major figures of that era wrote some of them under pen names.