!trekkies

Bottle Shows

Star Trek: (real Trek, pre-JJ Abrams) was never a high budget show. It was expected to make ~26 episodes/year. Coming up with that many scripts is hard enough, but coming up with that many that you can fit into the budget is even harder.

The first thing you cut is going out on location. Only a fraction of Star Trek episodes were actually filmed outdoors. It's a major pain in the butt bringing your whole crew out to some place like Vasquez Rocks and feeding and sheltering them. If it rains, you get no footage and you still have to pay everyone. Even excessive winds or clouds in the wrong place can ruin your day. And shooting on location too much is counterproductive as eventually the audience realizes every planet looks like Southern California.

Tillman Water Reclamation Works in Van Nuys. It was used numerous times on multiple shows because from the right angles it looks a little futuristic.

The logical solution is to go to the soundstage. Get some paper mache boulders, plastic plants, and sand and you've got yourself an alien planet. The atmosphere is whatever color of gel you put on the lights pointed up in the back. The weather is whatever you want it to be. And everything is right there on the Paramount set within easy walking distance. Heck, you can just step over to Cheers and grab a stool next to Fraiser if you feel like it. The sound stage gives you most of the feel of the starship going to an exotic location but without the risk of dealing with nature.

A shot from "Power Play" on Paramount Stage 16, known lovingly as Planet Heck by the crew. Wind and lightning effects were used to vivid effect but it was still quite an ordeal even on stage.

Even staying indoors can be expensive though. Every new set needs an enormous amount of labor. Beyond the carpenters and painters you need electricians to wire it. Lighting technicians go through the laborious process of getting all their lights in the right place, pointed the right way, with the right color and intensity. That has to be done custom for the stand ins who literally stand there on stage wearing the same costume and hair as the actors. Artificial weather effects can be almost as much of a pain in the butt as real weather. And you've got to get through this whole cycle and tear it down and be ready to start over in a week.

The bridge of the USS Enterprise-C in "Yesterday's Enterprise". This is originally the main bridge from the movies. It was redecorated as USS Reliant, the Enterprise-D battle bridge, and most Federation starships in TNG.

So an even cheaper, simpler, more reliable kind of episode is needed: The bottle show. It takes place within the "bottle" of the USS Enterprise itself. Instead of exploring strange new worlds, everything happens onboard the ship. You already have the Enterprise sets permanently set up. The crew has experience in every angle to shoot from. The extras in the background already have Starfleet uniform costumes made for them. If you want to really get cheap then skip bringing on an expensive guest star and have our cast deal with each other.

In "Disaster" it was enough to turn off a few lights and have our own characters talk to each other. DS9 could turn the entire station into Empok Nor just by turning down a dimmer switch.

You may think that a bottle show would hopelessly stifle the creativity of the writers, but they can turn out to be among the best. For example TNG's "The Defector", "Conundrum", and "Cause and Effect". Good writers can tell a fantastic story without even leaving the ship.

Star Trek TOS: "The Mark of Gideon"

TOS was in a precarious position by the third season. The actors could demand a bit more money as the audience grew to expect their characters but the network kept cutting the budget. The network had only agreed to a third season because of a massive letter writing campaign. This wasn't simply naive trekkies begging for more, they had a logical pitch: If there's just two seasons of Trek that's not enough to sell into syndication and it will be lost forever. If you make a third season you'll have 75 episodes, enough to show as reruns. So just make us one more season, even if it's not that good.

Roddenberry had burned out early on and mostly turned the show over to Gene Coon. But Coon's amphetamine-powered genius could only last so long and he had to step back too. Roddenberry had also managed to alienate half of the writers in Hollywood with his meddling rewrites. So the show was now run by people who were competent and well-meaning but didn't have.uch of a creative vision for the show and couldn't afford to. After an enormous amount was blown shooting on location for the forgettable "Paradise Syndrome" (Kirk bumps his heD and thinks he's Native American) there was a desperate need for bottle show scripts.

Sorry bros but our obelisk went overbudget.

"The Mark of Gideon" brings the bottle show concept to an audacious extreme. The bad guys trick Kirk into beaming down to... an empty exact replica of the USS Enterprise! In story there's a very shaky justification for why they would do this. Apparently they hope the comfortable surroundings will make him content in captivity. But the business reasons make perfect sense. They can reuse the Enterprise sets except without even paying for extras to walk the corridors. The only new set needed was a tiny alien conference room, which was probably just done by rolling a wall out in the existing Enterprise conference room and swapping out the chairs.

The story was pretty clumsy and most of the events just happen for no real reason. Like there's no reason for Kirk and the girl to meet unless the disease can only be sexually transmitted. And there's not really any indication that Kirk just jumped right in the sack with his uncooperative captor within a matter of a couple hours so that makes no sense either. So there's really no purpose for 80% of the scenes or the one relationship in the episode.

Kirk and the inevitable love interest sitting awkwardly on the steps on the bridge. They didn't even bother trying to get to his bedroom.

The high concept is a planet devastated by overpopulation that needs to infect itself with a plague taken from Kirk. From today's perspective as we face demographic collapse over most of the world, this may seem a bit silly, but midwits at the time were terrified of overpopulation. Earth had just experienced the most dramatic population explosion in its history and it seemed logical to assume that resources would run out at some point. By the late 1960s it was clear to experts that the birth rate in the third world had been dropping for years and agricultural productivity was exploding in the Green Revolution, but this hadn't filtered down to pop media yet. Paul Ehrlich published the popular doom prophecy The Population Bomb in 1968 claiming that hundreds of millions would die of starvation around the world in the 1970s. Of course there were no famines except for the man-made ones, so eventually the overpopulation lunacy morphed into veganism, "sustainability", /r/childfree, and general hippie shit.

Actual footage of Indians who have been waiting 50 years for genocidal maniac Ehrlich's predictions to occur.

It's Bob the Builder if you didn't click the link.

Is it woke to make the construction worker character into a Latinx?

I'm going to limit myself to what I feel are the stupidest decisions made in this movie, although virtually everything in it goes wrong.

I wonder how much they needed to pay an actor like William Fichtner to be in this shit?

It really is that stupid. The world will be destroyed if the bomb doesn't explode at exactly the right place inside the asteroid. This is the primary motivation of every character.

Most of the comic relief is based on characters doing something against this purpose. It doesn't work because it means all the comic relief characters have gone full r-slur, yet they are relied on to be heroes in the serious parts of the movie. To paraphrase Kirk Lazarus, have you ever heard of a hero who was an r-slur?

Much more seriously, almost all of the drama is based on characters doing something against the purpose of saving the world. Sometimes they have a reason that makes no sense. Sometimes they have no discernable reason at all. Virtually the entire movie is a conflict between the few plucky heroes following the plan and the other 6 billion humans who are desperately trying to thwart them. Why would I even want humanity to be saved if everyone is treacherous and suicidally r-slurred?

Clearly the basic concept for the script is taken from the classic Crimson Tide released a couple years earlier. But while Crimson Tide is about two sides struggling over the bomb because both have very good reasons, Armageddon is about various tards trying to sabotage the mission for no reason. Also there's a lot of attempts to rip off Independence Day that fall painfully flat because Michael Bay is that much worse than Roland Emmerich. Supposedly it was made to steal Deep Impact's thunder too which I believe because everything is so cynical.

Remember how these guys were yelling at each other for a reason?

The CGI shit is pretty appalling. Random blobs of things go flying in all directions and it's supposed to be scary. It's not. If you don't know what caused the random blobs to somehow fly in all directions it's not just chaos. Some will live and others die depending on who the writers want to have a lame tearjerker scene over. This concept that having rapidly moving CGI particles flashing across the screen is why most Hollywood action scenes have sucked for the last 30 years.

And how in the frick do they have the solid boosters separate out in space not in the atmosphere? The only way this could possibly happen is if some tard had never seen a real shuttle launch.

Moonraker did better before the shuttle even launched irl.

I usually don't like to say this about an artist. They may have some brilliant accomplishment that never became famous. They may be a wonderful person in real life. But I'm pretty sure if I was Michael Bay I would kill myself. He's also responsible for The Rock, the only other action movie so stupid it actually makes me angry that it was made. (And I've seen some of Steven Seagal's bad stuff.) He's an absolute cancer on humanity and I hope God chooses to spare us of him soon.

https://old.reddit.com/r/marvelmemes/comments/1904329/truly_a_renaissance

Reddit sneed, and now I'm basically unable to post or comment anywhere on reddit because my karma is so low. fricking give me some updooterinos you hecking redditors

Veteran US actor Gary Graham has died aged 73 on Monday, his family has confirmed.

Best known for his role in Star Trek: Enterprise, the actor's family chose not to publicly share the cause of death, only explaining that it was “sudden”.

His ex-wife Susan Lavelle revealed the news in a Facebook post paying tribute to her former partner.

Unironically sad. He was a great actor and played a great character. !trekkies

A classic film noir starring the great Edmond O'Brien (DOA). A bitter, burned-out cop decides he's had enough of seeing the bad guys go free decides he's it's time for him to take a little slice of the pie himself. Of course that's not a terribly unique premise, but it's approached in the realistic adult way that Hollywood was only able to in the late '40s-early '50s.

Back when even slutty white blonde women in bars looked good.

If you've ever known real people who live on Earth you'll fit in here. There's not a lot of lowlifes driven by deeply complex philosophical motives that only an English major could comprehend. There isn't constant hints of a racial or misogynistic anti-queer context. They're ordinary people who want to get what they've earned from life, to upgrade their situation, to help each other out, to keep society from falling apart.

The full movie on Youtube:

everyone should watch this !kino

Pros:

• Strong black female

• Insecure womanlet pupper (reminded me of @Shreddedmanlet)

• Shits colourful

• Reasonable super powers (looking at you thanos KANG*)

• Cute puppers

• Kids like it

Cons:

• Straight white male lead

• Strong black woman is the villain

• Have to sit with other people's kids

• Other people's kids

• Other people.

Movie is 10/10 must watch.

Has #metoo been anything but a complete disaster for society?

Super disappointed that it got cancelled

Unironically terrifying.

Since Hitler had partial Jewish ancestry he has to be cast by the swarthiest Jewiest Jewess we can find.

In the shadow-draped corners of indie cinema, a film often whispered about but seldom confronted has re-emerged from the depths of 2003, a year otherwise lost to the sands of cinematic history. "Death of a Man" is an enigmatic exploration, a labyrinthine dance through the duality of the male psyche, torn asunder by its own voracious appetite for both isolation and societal adulation.

The film, directed by a visionary whose name evades the grasp of conventional fame, delves deep into the murky waters of existential dread. Our protagonist, a man shrouded more in mystery than in character development, embarks on a Sisyphean journey through the fog of his own mind. He is Everyman and yet no man, a specter haunting the peripheries of his own life, ensnared by the tendrils of an unseen tormentor. Is this tormentor his own burgeoning desire for isolation, or the relentless, gnawing hunger for the recognition of his peers? The film leaves the question tantalizingly unanswered, floating in the ether like the last note of a symphony lost in a storm.

As I sat, ensconced in the flickering shadows cast by the film's stark, unyielding cinematography, I found myself ensnared by the protagonist's plight. His journey became my journey, his solitude my solitude, his insatiable yearning for validation a mirror to my own. The film, with its labyrinthine narrative structure, seemed to whisper secrets in a language both ancient and arcane, a dialect of the soul known only to those who have tasted the bitter nectar of existential despair.

And yet, beneath the film's brooding exterior lies a vein of undeniable, though perhaps unintended, chauvinism. The female characters, mere phantoms flitting at the edges of our protagonist's vision, serve more as signposts along his journey than as fully realized entities in their own right. They are sirens calling him to the rocks of his own self-destruction, embodiments of the societal accolades he both craves and reviles. In this, the film inadvertently lays bare the all-too-common sin of its indie brethren: the relegation of the feminine to the role of mere catalyst in the masculine narrative.

In the final reckoning, "Death of a Man" is a film that defies easy categorization. It is a tempest, a whirlwind of thought and emotion that sweeps up all who dare to confront it. It is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, cloaked in the vestments of cinematic experimentation. To some, it may appear a masterwork of pseudointellectual self-indulgence, a film that revels in its own obscurity. To others, it may reveal itself as a profound meditation on the human condition, a stark portrayal of the eternal battle waged within the soul of man.

As I emerged from the cinema, the world around me seemed both brighter and more obscure, as if I had gazed too long into the sun and been rendered blind to all but its afterimage. "Death of a Man" is not merely a film; it is an experience, a journey into the heart of darkness that resides within us all. And like all journeys, its true meaning lies not in the destination, but in the path we take to reach it.

Totally organic thread on the frontpage of /r/movies.

!chuds !kino

The first two episodes are out. It's not on the same level as BoB (8.5/10) or TP (8/10), but it's a solid 7.5 so far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_the_Air

Masters of the Air is a 2024 American war drama streaming television miniseries created by John Shiban and John Orloff and developed by Orloff for Apple TV+. It is based on the 2007 book Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany by Donald L. Miller and follows the actions of the 100th Bomb Group, a B-17 Flying Fortress unit in the Eighth Air Force during World War II; the unit was nicknamed the “Bloody Hundredth” due to the heavy losses it incurred in combat missions. The series serves as a companion to Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010). It is also the first series to be produced by Apple Studios, in cooperation with Playtone, and Amblin Television.

!kino !burgers

Arguably the greatest cinematic achievement of all time, Godzilla: Final Wars has absolutely everything one can hope for in a piece of cinema.

There are swordfights against aliens

Motorcycle chases with guns

A j-pop race of alien invaders

Confusing anime battles

MINILLA who DANCES

And so many things I can't even find screenshots for like the guy going super saiyan or the scene from the matrix where neo stops the bullets in mid air but this time they're lasers or the 36 on 1 karate fight or the constant continuity errors and things that happen for no reason at all besides that they look cool.

A timeless masterpiece and the high point of the 00s.

Rate it:

Oh and one time the weird mutant Japanese soldiers kill a giant lobster monster guy and one climbs on top of him and says TOO BAD I'M A VEGETARIAN and blows him up

The popcorn bucket for ‘DUNE 2’.

(via: @3CFilmss) pic.twitter.com/FzNZjGJiTC

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) January 26, 2024

!kino !fellas

The guy also makes video games n' shit:

https://thatcherproductions.itch.io

It was pretty good but I have trouble seeing Vince Vaughn as a depressing southern gothic drug dealer

instead of Wes Mantooth