Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Well, saw the last episode of Enterprise yesterday evening. Considering the dreck that made up a lot of Voyager, you have to wonder how bad Enterprise was doing to get cancelled. It's a little bit of a shame, the arc in season three with the threat of the Xindi about to destroy Earth was fairly satisfying and even exciting in some places, and some of the stories this season weren't too bad either, the advanced humans, the Vulcan story, the Klingons and Romulan arcs. But it was always difficult to care about what happened to any of the characters because they didn't really have any. And the last episode said it all, rope in some Next Generation cast in the hopes that'll improve things (and try to ignore the fact that Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis have noticeably aged in the fifteen or so years since the episode this refers to occured, why not set their story after the last Next Gen film?), keep it normal length and cut out most of the emotionally charged scenes in favour of the crew talking about what they'll do when they leave Enterprise. And considering they've been together for ten years they seem both blissfully untroubled when one of them dies and happy to move on, which sounds like being crew on Enterprise was as boring for them as it was for us watching.
More to my tastes was Hinterland by David Barnett (UK, US). It's a very English story of a small-town newspaper writer who finds his world suddenly twisting away from under him. He's visiting strange bars on streets that don't exist, finding identical pictures at houses that have burned to the ground, remembering and then forgetting encounters with feral women as a child. While the town is gripped up in the frenzy of an archetypal 'big cat on the loose' story he's finding his world contracting under the pressure of paranoid conspiracy theorists and strange black cars that seem to be ever-present around town.
It's a snappy little thing and well deserves to be turned into a film that somehow manages to miss the point.
Talking of which, I can only assume that Warner Brothers are, porbably rightly, completely convinced that everyone will be going to see Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire already so they can put out a really bad promo for it. From the five or so seconds you actually see from the movie it does look as though it'll be good, I'll be interested to see how they've cut the novel down to fit it in.
More to my tastes was Hinterland by David Barnett (UK, US). It's a very English story of a small-town newspaper writer who finds his world suddenly twisting away from under him. He's visiting strange bars on streets that don't exist, finding identical pictures at houses that have burned to the ground, remembering and then forgetting encounters with feral women as a child. While the town is gripped up in the frenzy of an archetypal 'big cat on the loose' story he's finding his world contracting under the pressure of paranoid conspiracy theorists and strange black cars that seem to be ever-present around town.
It's a snappy little thing and well deserves to be turned into a film that somehow manages to miss the point.
Talking of which, I can only assume that Warner Brothers are, porbably rightly, completely convinced that everyone will be going to see Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire already so they can put out a really bad promo for it. From the five or so seconds you actually see from the movie it does look as though it'll be good, I'll be interested to see how they've cut the novel down to fit it in.
