When I'm a Movie Critic...

There may be many movie/theatre critics out there who think they have a good method for determining what makes a "good" show. Well, here are two more.

Jennie and I decide how good something is by how much liquor you need to have ingested to enjoy yourself. For something like the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie you can have fun watching that movie stone cold sober. When I watched Fight Club I wished that I'd had a couple of beers to sip for the first half and a couple pints of everclear for the second half. Woah.

My mom and I know that we like something when we get in the car and say, "Didn't you love the part where..." The more of those moments we find and the longer we're talking about them, then the more we liked the movie.

After we saw the new Star Trek, we were oohing and aahing over it for days. I'm stilling oohing, but it's more internal now.

Note: this works just as well for theatre as it does for films.

Didn't you love that part where Spock turned down his admission into the Vulcan Science Academy and told the Vulcan elders to "Live long and prosper"? Yeah, me too!

To Boldly Go... Where?

Recently, I ordered some Star Trek DVD's on Amazon. (Voyager, if you must know. After all, the captain's name is Kathryn.) I bought them used, since they're so freaking expensive (Thanks, Paramount!). When they arrived, the packing slip was in Chinese. Fine by me, as long as I can read the menus on the DVD's. Here comes the hitch, you can read the menus, but you can't turn the Closed Captions off. They're either in English or Chinese.

If I watch something with Closed Captions, I read the captions and forget about watching the movie or whatever. I've left them in Chinese, because that way I can at least ignore them. Slightly irritating, but not insurmountable.

The most amusing part however is the packaging. I'm not talking about the hugely cheesy plastic envelopes INSIDE the normal looking case. I'm talking about the writing on the back of the box. The titles of the episode are randomly capitalized and randomly incorrect. My personal favorite is the episode "Demon" being spelled "Semon" instead. Spell check, anyone?

But now, I come to the best part of all. The blurb on the back. I'm going to attempt to recreate it exactly as it is. Here goes...

Navigator's number of warship of star headed by first women captain precious Wei, fall into an enormous cavity , is thrown and united 70,000 mere distant place from the star , for solve energy problem, precious Wei captain lead team member go rascal celestial body survey energy, unexpectedly, Nilles is attacked, the lung is siphoned away fast; Find the celestial body person's corpse of grade a lot of 5 on the globular asteroid; Pursue gram commandant injured attack that energy flow with card tower , navigator number face unidentified energy shed attack, a large amount of energy run off, unidentified other star seize the opportunity , slip into airship, team member supervise unprecedented challenge ....

If I were a die-hard Trekkie, I'd probably be pissed off. As it is, I just think it's fUnmy.