So, I’ve heard nothing at all good about the newest outing into the Stargate ‘verse (Stargate Universe / SGU) and feel little motivation to check it out myself (though I’ll probably sit though at least one episode just for Lou Diamond Phillips) but the continuing angst and hair rending about it in the fan-sphere makes me laugh. You know why?

Star Trek, baby. Specifically, Trek back in the 80’s. (yes, I’m something of a bitter old fan)

I don’t doubt that SGU is of the suck, but we’ve had (depending on how you look at it) 12-15 years of good programming (Atlantis lost me half way though). Star Trek gave us 3 seasons of TOS, one mediocre movie, one very good movie, two movies of debatable quality, a spinoff series that is not aging well at all, and then we had ST5. You know, the “what does god need with a spaceship one”. The “bad Vulcan who has a beard and laughs and also happens to be Spock’s half brother” one. The “really, it makes the one with the whales look good” one. Srsrly, you think one shit-tastic series in over a decade is pain? You don’t know pain.

This is also, BTW, why I was quite numb to every bit of trek-silliness from 1989 until the Reboot. Once you’ve hit the nadir, nothing looks that bad. Not even Enterprise.

Netflix has Broken Arrow on instaview, and I’m remembering how much I love it.

• You have Travolta after his career picked up, but before he tipped over and went bugfuck nuts. *Right* before, actually. His performance is stylized, but I (just) still buy that he’s playing a character, not just some louder version of himself.
• You have Christian Slater after he grew past his baby face, was still young enough to be sexy, but before he turned into a clone of Jack Nicholson.
• His chemistry with Samantha Mathis is almost as good as it was in Pump Up The Volume.
• “What does a suspicious truck look like?” Oh, the innocence of the time, when reporting suspicious activity was only something wackaloons did.
• They’re worried about leaks coming from the hobbyist press. No internet, no bloggers, no ability to arrest folks on the grounds of national security. Seems like such a simple time.
• Also, humvees were only something you saw in the military.
• And Hale’s from Trenton, which always makes me smile.
• The soundtrack really kicks ass. It was my default for long distance driving in college, and my first intro to Hans Zimmer. (King of the bombast though he may be sometimes.)
• The cell phones are so big!
• Endangered dirt!
• Shooting at nukes is bad. :)
• Out thinking the bad guy is good, but you should really wait until *after* you’ve pulled your save before telling him, y’know?
• It’s an action movie, yeah, but the real plot is a cat and mouse / move and countermove game between Deakins and Hale. The rest is just nifty set dressing.
• Though if you view the movie though slash goggles, it’s one very big, messy break up fight.
• No, really. The soundtrack is just that damn good.
• Hale really does like smashing bad guy’s faces into things.
• And the end credits. Yup, one hell of a fun, macho movie.

All three books are described as “A Modern Tale of Faerie”, and that’s what they are, putting faeries in prosaic locations like New Jersey and New York City — hardly the first or the last time it’s been done. They actually reminded me a lot of the Bedlam’s Bard series by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill, only not quite as complex. (link)

I giggled a bit at this, ’cause though I did love the BB books when I was in high school, I’d call them some of the most *straightforward* and un-complex of the early crop of “modern faerie” novels. “Folk of the Air” and “Jack the Giant Killer” might be better examples. Really, if you’re looking at something less complex than the BB books, I’m wondering how stripped down the genre’s gotten.

Fan!projects are just so neat sometimes:

So there may be a Hellraiser remake on the horizon. You’d think that I’d be upset about this, seeing as it was one of my very favorite horror movies growing up, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

If they keep Doug Bradley as Pinhead, I’ll be over the moon, but his own comments seem to make this unlikely. On the other hand, he’s been happy enough to appear in every sequel made, and while some were lovely some… were not.

My biggest beef with the movie has always (even before I read the original story) been the casting of Clare Higgins as Julia. The character’s appeal made more sense when I read the story and understood that she was supposed to be phenomenally beautiful… but Higgens didn’t bring that across. When I was young I thought that it was just some grown up thing I didn’t get but looking at it now…. I still don’t get it. (Higgens wasn’t unattractive, but she always struck me as more of a high strung wasp matron than anything else.) So re-casting that role is a plus for me.

The up side (if it happens) is that a whole new generation will discover the franchise. That’s cool. The down side… fans getting pissy. I figure, even if they do a remake and it sucks, I’ll still have the original.