Puttering in the Study

Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me - David Lynch

Watched this last night, completing my Twin Peaks fiesta.  To my surprise, I really liked it.  Although I still think the uber-bizarre stuff is a distraction, the movie itself I really liked and the major portion dealing with the last days of Laura Palmer's life was very good.  Once again, I can't say enough about what an extraordinary job Sheryl Lee did in this movie.  It's impossible to overstate how bizarre her character's travails were at this stage, and she gets across the despair Laura felt.  She then tuns around and backs Laura out of it in the closing scene when she discovers that things are, well, good.  It's hard to say much more than that about something this weird. 

The Queen - Stephen Frears

Watched this last night and really enjoyed it.  Extraordinary performance by Helen Mirren (one of my favorites) and a very interesting story.

Twin Peaks - Season 2 DVDs

Just finished the Season 2 Twin Peaks DVDs last night, and watched the short interviews with various cast members.  Although I'm still immensely pleased with the quality of the DVDs - they blow up to a six foot wide 4:3 image in the purple room (our home theater) the series did trail off a bit as the second season wore on.  It was something that a third season could have picked up and run with (the chacaters remained great), but the ending - with all that bizarre stuff in the Black Lodge really let the series end on a bad note (I'll be watching the prequel movie Fire Walk With Me soon and will see if it changes my impression).
I now have the season 1 and season 2 episodes on DVD, but not the original pilot, which isn't available on DVD (yet).  It's available on VHS but in the format of the European version, which had a different ending tagged on.  Fortunately, I taped all the original episodes (including the pilot) when they re-ran on ABC in 1990, so I have the pilot on VHS.  This morning I copied the pilot over onto a DVD so I could watch it without having to switch back and forth between the movie VHS and the original episode.  I thought the original has commercials as well (all of this was taped uring the first Gulf War) but the pilot at least doesn't - and I now suspect that I copied it from one VCR to another so I'd have all of them organized in order.  The video quality is awful - it's amazing what we tolerated twenty (here seventeen) years ago - but at least I have the original.  Now I can watch it on a DVD player, and save it to the server so when the original tapes degrade I won't have lost it.

The Book of Fate - Brad Meltzer

I picked this up in a San Antonio bookstore - then put it down.  Then picked it back up and thought about it some more, and finally decided it looked like something I should like.  It's another Baldacci/Brown type book, here about a president's body man that gets shot in an apparent attack on the president and then - disfigured - keeps working for the former president.  I sort of vaguely know what the job is since Jamie and I spent a morning with President Clinton's body man (aide, whatever they call him) in the Oval Office a few years back (no, I am not making that up - attached see pic of me in the Oval with him trying to look casual) but it was very interesting reading the sorts of details that the book provides.  Anyway, it's a pretty good mystery, although the title and the general Masonic theme the title promises doesn't really pan out.  I never quite followed the gunman's motivation (a stock religious nut from the Dan Brown books, although still a solidly written character) or the overall plot.  I did like the characters, though, and thought they were universally well-done.

Overall a pretty good book.  If I see any more by this author (he has several, which seem to be set in DC) I'll pick them up.

Star Trek TOS: The Man Trap; Errand of Mercy

The first ST episode broadcast (I think it was the third shot) The Man Trap this is a very good action-packed episode (guaranteed to give four year olds nightmares thinking about the salt vampire).  But it is not mature Star Trek - much of the dialogue is just plain inconsistent with the characters - even Nimoy doesn't have Spock down right yet - he's treated as a bit of a humorous oddity.  It's also startling to see how young McCoy in particular appears, and the very earliest forms of the uniforms (the collars are still a bit big, and the sleeve braid is different).  But lots of color, lots of 1950's sci-fi action and images (talking plants).  Good episode, but it still looks a lot like a different cast playing the familiar roles, and not quite getting it right.
Oddly, I got to watch a second episode last night, Errand of Mercy, which was one of the remastered episodes.  The color is abysmal for some reason - bridge set railing that should be red are decidedly orange and skin tones are way off, but the episode itself is quite good, which a really outstanding performance by John Colicos as the Klingon commander.  Again, Shatner is really pretty good, and Nimoy is just solid, always understated and dignified.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

I picked this up a couple of weeks ago in San Antonio since I knew Collin and Parker would like another Star Trek movie, especially one with the Excelsior.  Sure enough they did (Parker is watching it a second time with me as I write this).  While the movie is pretty good, and has some outstanding dialogue and scenes (the scene where Kirk orders the Enterprise out of spacedock on impulse and the Valeris tries to tell him it is against regulations and he just smiles while Spock is ha-hm-ing the lieutenant to shut the hell up is priceless) it also has some really weak spots where things just don't fit together right (Sulu beaming down right in front of Admiral Cartwright and tracking him with his phaser as he materializes is a bit much).  The glasnost-inspired plot also has some unnecessary references to late-1980's U.S.-Soviet relations.  I like the plot idea fine, but there are lines like "this president isn't above the law" and "the end of history" that just don't fit anything but commentary on current affairs.  I didn't realize till I watched the extras that Gene Roddenberry strongly objected to the overt prejudice against the Klingons shown by the Starfleet officers, and I tend to agree that it was overplayed.  Again, the idea was okay, but the script went too far.  Shatner objected to saying "let them [the Klingons] die" and watered the line down with his performance as best he could (the watering was cut, leaving an inexplicably over the top performance - if you didn't realize that it's not what he intended - but the false note remains in the final cut.  I think the point could have been made better by pointing up the loss of prestige and funding Starfleet would face.  Race prejudice would be part of it, but it didn't have to translate quite so easily to prejudice.  Roddenberry posited that prejudice would eventually fade in an advanced society (maybe, maybe not) but greed and ego certainly would not, nor would the all too human trait of seeing situations in terms of one's position.  All politics is local, and Starfleet officers could be excused for being unwilling to see peace as realistic, when the down side to Starfleet as an institution would be catastophic (or so they would assume).  The temptation to translate race prejudice to a space drama (and have the black actors mouth it - gee, what a great idea!) would be overwhelming and in the tradition of Star Trek, but it was too heavy-handed.  On the bright side, it could have been worse - they wanted Nichelle Nichols to say (of the Klingons) "yes, but would you want your daughter to marry one?" and she point-blank refused.  It was this sort of salting of the script with contemporary lines that I had a problem with - you have to be more subtle than that.
Valeris is perhaps the worst Vulcan performance in the series.  No one (but Nimoy) seems to be able to handle playing a Vulcan, but this is the worst - she's more emotional than a human, and prisses around instead of giving a cold, reasoned performance (notably, the Romulan ambassador is instantly believable doing this - makes me wish he'd been cast as the turncoat officer).  Again, Nimoy is the giant among the original crew, getting points across with gravitas and delivery, using what could be seen as human affectations learned in decades of interaction with humans, but not emotion.  His best performance is something I liked from when I first saw the picture, where a furious Spock knocks the phaser from Valeris' hand, and simply stares at her, enormously disappointed with his pupil, and shaking with rage.  But when I saw it this time I realized he wasn't shaking at all - he was absolutely still, but the suppressed rage was still evident. 
Overall, the movie has some of the best moments in the entire series, but also some of the weaker ones as well (the final scene where the Enterprise crew assembles on the stage around Kirk to accept the accolades of the assembled peace negotiators - it's just far too staged).  But the ending, where the Enterprise literally rides off into the sunset, followed by the original cast's signatures, is just magnificent - a fitting sendoff to the original cast.

Ready For Anything - David Allen

I recently finished reading this book, with is 52 essays by Getting Things Done creator David Allen.  Since I'm a big devotee of Allen's GTD method of, well, getting things done, I bought this after reading GTD.  I was disappointed in this book the first time around - a collection of Allen's essays on the principles of GTD is seemed like essentially worthless navel-gazing, but after rereading GTD recently I thought I'd try it again as well.  The second time, it made a lot more sense, and gave me a lot of ideas of how to work more efficiently.  Itried to read one chapter (each is only 2-4 pages) every few days, and while they still have a lot of fluff, most do have a useful thought or idea that I was able to use.

Spiderman 3

Jamie and I took Grayson to see the new Spiderman movie last Sunday.  Although I'd read several bad reviews of it, we thoroughly enjoyed it.  While it did seem like there were too many plot htreads for most of the movie, they eventually tied themselves together just fine.  One thing I particularly liked was Thomas Haden Church's Sandman.  I admit to being a little biased because Church's brother Tex Quesada is a lawyer friend from Dallas, but as surprisingly good as he was in Sideways, he's just as good here, and with a very different character (both in the character and in the way he looks).  (I was hurt when Grayson really didn't care much about him because this was the one Hollywood actor I think I could have snagged an autographed picture from!)  I just thought it was a solidly good movie, and Grayson seemed to as well.  Of course he was quick to point out that it wasn't as good as Batman, but then nothing is.

No negatives from me - I look forward to getting the DVD and seeing what it looks like when you're not on the second row.

Night At The Museum

Jamie got this the other day and we watched it with the boys, and they absolutely loved it - have insisted on watching the "dinosaur bones" movie ever since then.

Bandai U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 kit

A couple of weeks ago I finally built the 1/850 scale prepainted and pre-lit starship Enterprise by Bandai that I bought about four years ago, and I can't say enough good things about it.  Although it is snap-together, it is an amazingly accurate model of the movie Enterprise, and the lighting is spectacular.  I couldn't find any of the various photos of the model from the box art (which are of the model itself), but the box art on the left should give you an idea of what it looks like.  Since the first movie came out in December of 1979 I have wanted a shelf-sized lit Enterprise (and I still plan of finishing the monster-size 1/350 kit at some point) and this is exactly the thing.  The fit was excellent with the exception of the secondary hull, where something (probably a wire) kept the hull sides and bottom from fitting together tightly, so the seams are evident from a couple of feet away - and are open enough to allow some light leakage.  If properly fitted there would be no light leaks and the seams themselves wouldn't be visible until you got closer than a foot in normal light.  In low lighting, so as to see the lights you dson't see a properly fitted seam at all, and when the lights are on it's the last thing you're looking at.  This really is an extraordinary piece of model engineering.  It has a base that contains the batteries and light switch, and which provides a solid mount for the model.

Here are some pictures of the model on the shelf above the Star Trek books in the study (where's it's away from little hands and isn't part of the door into the workshop).  I have an even smaller TOS die-cast Enterprise by Corgi on the shelf below, so this completes my (current) Enterprise collection.