"This Means War" - stupid film redesigned by Neophytos!!!

So I was stuck in line at Walmart the other day (and my three readers already know my feelings about Walmart...) and to the side were some awful DVDs, particularly one featuring my least favorite actress ever, Reese Wither Spoon, called "This Means War". I stood there studying the image on the cover, with a photoshopped Reese flanked by two guys, the one on the left who played the second-rate Captain Kirk in the Star Trek re-launch (aka another nail in the coffin of the franchise) and the other guy was, I dunno, some other guy...

But here's the thing: the Captain Kirk guy - something about his head is wrong.  It seems to be freakishly misshapen, whereas the guy on the right, his head above the eyebrows seems to be freakishly smaller, almost as if there was a terrible transporter beam malfunction and cranial substance was swapped from one to the other.  See what I mean?

 

 

So, I decided to do something about this, and broke out trust ol' Photoshop, and made some changes.  I think what happened was, in a terrible transporter accident, the Kirk-guy had his upper-head swapped with the guy on the right.  So, like a good Scotty, I made things right and fixed the transporter accident.  Check it out...

 

 

The Kirk guy now looks like someone you'd see in a catalog while waiting to get a haircut, but at least his head seems more properly proportioned, I think.  And the guy on the right looks like a guy from my college Algebra class.  But something is still wrong... let me think....

 

Ah yeah, Reese has got to go.  To make this movie a lot better, she needs to be erased from this film, and instead, these dueling guys need to be competing for the affection of a woman with a lot more style, character, and acting prowess.  I've got it!!!

 

 

 

 

Worf Denied

I never really thought about it before when I used to watch ST:TNG, but yeah, Worf was always demanding action and combat, and Picard was always denying the request so that therre could be council meetings with the crew. I think TNG might have been a lot more exciting had the series been about Worf instead...

Snippet of James Horner

James Horner wrote some remarkable film music back in the 1980's, which was the prime of most all cinematic music. Film music today just stinks. It's computer-rendered garbage written by music majors with no understanding of how to utilize the components of a full orchestra (let alone the fundamentals of music theory.) Horner scores a couple of the Star Trek films in the 80's (thankfully not the "whale" one) and strangely, I've not enjoyed much by Horner over the last several decades. I thought his Avatar music was boring, and his Titanic stuff was just too overshadowed by that awful "near-far...wherever-you-are" stuff. Beyond that, I'm not sure what else he's even written since the 1980's. I think of him as one of those composers trying, and coming a little close, to following the John Williams mold and then, falling short, branched into doing more of those maudlin, simple-piano tripe. Still, it beats most of the generic, amelodic garbage padding most films these days.

Here's a theory: the more cinema branches into the digital, the greater the decline in musical quality in the soundtracks. Or maybe I'm just not keeping up with films and I'm missing the good stuff, but with what I've seen/heard lately in cinema, it just isn't happening anymore.

Skip the first :25 seconds of this short track and enjoy Horner's succinct cover of the principle Alexander Courage theme:



Another very energetic piece of work, with a touch or two of Prokofiev: