Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

When a show has been running for a while it generally needs a bit of a refresh to keep the viewers interested but in a change to this approach Big Brother has largely kept the same format but seems to have gone for a different approach in selecting the house mates this time around.

The relative balance from previous shows seems now to have been thrown out and instead what we have are essentially a collection of weirdos which, so far, doesn’t seem to be working overly well if Wendy’s reactions are anything to go by.

Now, I’ll grant you that the potential contestants applying to appear have also had to up the ante each year with their weirdness. After all, after a few years it take something really off the wall to attract the interest of the selection panel. Thus everyone seems to have tried to outdo everyone else in weirdness from names to lifestyles.

Is it going to end up being an interesting show though? Well, just about every random collection of people thrown together do tend to mesh after a while so this group will be no different and perhaps the very different viewpoints this time around will make it that little bit more interesting as the show gets underway.

Despite various TV talent shows having been on the go for years they can still throw up some major surprises of one sort or another although this years crop from Britains Got Talent seems to have broken all records in terms of surprises this time around.

For one thing there’s the heavy bias towards the cute and vulnerable acts this year. Sure there’s probably a feeling that the youngest hopefuls should be encouraged that little bit more but as many have shown this year, they simply don’t need any legup on the older hopefuls. Well, except for Hollie Steele, of course, and for reasons which escape me the judges seemed to be puppets under the control of her mother. That wouldn’t have been so bad but her act just wasn’t up to the professional standards of the other young contenders and they didn’t get anything like the assistance that she did.

On the other side of the coin we saw Susan Boyle who came out of left field and surprised everyone. Although it’s usually taken as wrong to judge on appearance, for a high level talent show like this one, appearances do count. Not that it mattered because she simply overturned that initial judgement completely and will probably become someone we’ll hear quite a lot of in the years to come. Her other surprise was the collapse after the show. This was someone who seems to have been aiming for an opportunity like this for her whole life and yet she doesn’t seem to have thought through what might happen if she were to do really well.

Two very different surprises for sure.

Last night Britain’s got Talent rewrote the rules of auditions for itself by allowing Hollie and her mother to get another, undeserved, chance to perform her act. Well, her second act I suppose you could say.

That’s really no surprise as the judges this time around seem to be completely biased in favour of the “cute & vulnerable” where a child performer was involved. Hollie merely took this advantage much further than the other children on the show already have.

Whilst it wasn’t a surprise that they’d do this, it does show just how much the show can get taken in by that cute & vulnerable label. That would be fine if the child concerned was very good but Hollie just isn’t. Whether she’s got the potential to be, I don’t know, but at the moment it just looked like a pushy mother wanted her little girl to succeed regardless of anything else.

Although it’s notionally all down to a public vote in reality the judges by their comments can exert a lot of influence on which acts will go forward. They’ve made no allowances for lots of very professional acts in this and previous editions of the show but then they didn’t fall into that cute & vulnerable category.

Sadly this time around a poor performance from Hollie knocked a very good one from Greg Pritchard. That’s just not right.

As expected the new Star Trek movie did rather well in the opening weekend, pulling in over twice that of the previous box office record Star Trek movie way back in 1996. Of course, that’s broadly what the studio were hoping for and the reason behind the making of this movie by them in the first place.

One complication that always crops up with long running and popular series is that sooner or later the writers end up essentially writing themselves into a corner and the Star Trek franchise is now into its 40th year which leaves Dr Who as the only other science fiction that’s been around longer. In the case of trek, the original NCC 1701 was destroyed in one of the films which makes later series featuring it a non-runner and now we’ve sort-of seen its origins in the latest movie which basically uses it up and the NCC 1701D from the Next Generation series was also destroyed in another film so it’s out of the picture. At least the NX-01 from Enterprise managed to survive into retirement but that also means that a successor series based on it seems unlikely to be a runner even had that series been more successful.

The short gap from the Phoenix to the Enterprise era doesn’t seem to leave much scope for further prequels and in that the NG Enterprise timeline stretches into the origins of the Department for Temporal Investigations there’s an implication that there would be something of a discontinuity in technological development around that time and besides if the DTI are operational then that implies that explorations in time are becoming more important than explorations in space were by that time in the Star Trek universe. That leaves open the potential for a spin-off series, possibly along the lines of the proposed Gary Seven spin-off back in the days of the original series and that could be a relatively open series in that there hasn’t been an awful lot of information put out about the future time cops in any of their interactions within the various series.

So, given that there don’t seem to be any gaps to fit in a new series based on a USS Enterprise, the writers have collectively written themselves into a corner. Unless, of course, one moves to an alternate timeline and a whole new NCC 1701 as they’ve done in the new film. This potentially opens up in effect a remake of the original series and one wonders if that’s what the studio are hoping to do? Interestingly, it also moves knowledge of the potential for time travel and alternate realities into the foreground in this reality so perhaps the DTI or its alternate reality equivalent would be formed much earlier in this particular universe?

As a standalone movie it certainly has all the aspects that you would expect to see in a big budget Star Trek film ie the grand CGI effects, the fast paced action, unexpected plot twists and so on. On all those fronts it succeeded very well with spectacular CGI sequences right from the impressive start through to the space battles towards the end, a number of Spock-centred surprises along the way and a sustained fast pace that produced a sense of urgency that made it feel like a normal length of episode.

However, the bigger question is: is it actually a genuine Star Trek movie or merely one that had that label tagged on to improve the box office success? Yes, there are characters that have the same name as those from the original series and, yes, you’d expect their younger selves to be less developed than they were in the original series and, of course, they’d be different in some ways due to changes in the timeline but, taking all those into account, was this a Star Trek crew? I think so but I’m not convinced that it was the crew of the Enterprise: it just didn’t feel that if you ran time forward a few years that you’d have a group of people working together in the same kind of way as you should have done. To my mind this film was created because the studio felt they needed another Star Trek movie but didn’t want to pay the big bucks to make one using an entire set of existing actors from any of the Star Trek series so instead they tried to create essentially another Enterprise style prequel but one that little bit closer in time to the original series.

Being really picky, as some have been, you might wonder where the Temporal Integrity Commission were when a rather major league change to the timeline was being made. Arguably this could be explained by the temporal change having taken place before the formation of the TIC itself thus they are never created (much like in Asimov’s End of Eternity). However, in other contact with the TIC this seems not really to be possible in that it appears to take a while before changes ripple up the timeline and, of course, there’s the issue of various people coming back in time in Enterprise (which, of course, is set before the events in this movie) to correct the timeline…

You could also wonder how come the Enterprise here which has just been built seems more modern than the older Enterprise as depicted in the original series? However, that’s not really as big a deal as you might at first think. Even in real-life places can change their look substantially over a few years and who are we to say what which Enterprise style would really be more modern? We’ve seen ourselves that really modern meant that home electronic devices must be silver (10? years back), that they must be black (5? years ago) and that they must be silver again: which look is really more modern?

What this movie does allow is for the studio to kick off another series based in the Star Trek universe but because it’s an alternate reality version of it, they won’t have all the baggage that’s built up over the years from the Star Trek franchise which, let’s face it, has begun to complicate life no end for the writers. After all, who but the most dedicated fan could remember everything that’s gone before and write a new series of episodes that’s consistent with that? What they’ve effectively done is the equivalent of firing Voyager off to the delta quadrant only more so in that there can’t be any contact with the regular Star Fleet headquarters which would, of course, require consistency with 40 years of episodes.

Worth watching, but don’t get too hung up on the inconsistencies.