ALT.SF4M

  Amusements 10/19/97

   • j********o@***.com
     19/10/1997 00:00:000 UTC

     I'm really looking forward to Gattica - it looks intelligent and

     Continental but not effeminate, nonsensical, or pretentious. It looks
     like

     it's got style and heft, like the good qualities of the Dune movie, in
     its

     richness of milieu.

     I saw the guy who plays Garak on DS9 in another role: he has a rather

     squirrelly in-bred look to him quite in contrast with Garak's
     aristocratic

     yet sly demeaner. Cudos to the make-up boys - in fact, the Jem'hadar are

     well made up too and interesting to look at.

     Pretty good episodes of Earth: Final Conflict and "The Frank Black
     Comedy

     Hour." You know, Timecop ain't half bad - I'm getting interested in the

     "Ian Pascoe" plot-line. I was watching an Old Trek episode ("That Which

     Survives"), wherein Scotty climbs up a Jeffries tube and has to stop the

     antimatter flow, and I was again struck by the genius of the people who

     made Old Trek: they knew how to do a TV show. Not just a science fiction

     show, but a good TV show. When Scotty is working, we never see what he

     sees - we are merely shown the lights reflecting on his face and hear
     his

     description of "static discharges dancing on the instruments." Nowadays,

     they'd show flashy and unconvincing special effects, with a much less

     satisfactory result. That brings up the old saw that (Old) Trek works as
     a

     radio show, a criteria New Trek, etc., should emulate. In the same vein,

     those great planet sets and planetary disks - they couldn't do the
     latter

     realistically, so they did it coolly, combining to create a distinct

     esthetic mood. (Although the long shot of the quarry with the lake in
     the

     second-to-last episode of DS9 was scenic.) Which brings me back to
     Timecop

     - they don't have the budget to match the production values of the movie

     (which I liked), but they try and fail. Take the silly "time-sled:"

     instead of showing an obviously sped-up sequence of the dinky thing
     running

     off down its track, they should show only a sped-up view into the canopy

     from the outside, with the reflections of the lights accelerating past
     in

     front of the passengers' faces. In practice, just have a spinning
     vertical

     column of flourescent lights on either side of the camera and the
     canopy,

     and spin them faster and faster while shaking the cabin a little. Then

     speed it up to create the appearance of vibration and suggest speed and
     danger.

     Gorno