• Inside Entertainment,  Media Rants

    Shallow Foundations

     Note: Although this blog references The Rise of Skywalker, at this point I still haven’t seen it. When you sit down to write a story, you create characters who’ll serve that story. They each have a unique function. Once that function is complete, the character is done. They exit the story. James Bond movies illustrate how characters function in self-contained stories. Bond’s boss, M, briefs Bond about his mission. Q will provide Bond with weapons and gadgets. Once M and Q have fulfilled their roles, their jobs are complete. In a few Bonds, M and Q might reappear, but usually never with any great depth, necessity, or regularity. There’ll be…

  • Inside Entertainment,  Reviews

    Star Trekking: Part 2 of 3

    While promoting Star Trek into Darkness during a 2013 interview with Stewart joked that Abrams’s lost him following his initial admission (he didn’t like Star Trek). Abrams responded: ‘You … and your kind … were much smarter than I was. I couldn’t get it. So we tried to make it work for people like me … and people like you. The goal [with Star Trek into Darkness] was to make a movie for moviegoers, not just for Star Trek fans. So if you’ve never seen Star Trek before, you can still see it.’ Some of this response I will return to later, but for now I want to focus on…