corollary

Listening to:

The compact Coward, a compilation CD of songs by Noel Coward, most recorded in the 1930s. Currently up to I travel alone, recorded 29 October 1934. This one is melancholy, minimalist, but appealing. Others are quite comic. The Ivor Novello character in the film Gosford Park sings similar songs.

A recent movie:

Star Trek: Nemesis. This was an entertaining film, though totally undemanding. As an attempt to scratch an S/F itch, it wasn’t much of a success, but it was enjoyable enough. From the science-fiction point of view, the most disappointing thing about the Star Trek universe is the dreadful lack of variety in the aliens. They are all too obviously people with plastic prostheses on their heads. For all that they don’t get big roles, at least Star Wars has more interesting looking creatures.

The Star Trek universe is also less imaginative in its conception of the future than, for example, Banks’s Culture novels. There clearly hasn’t been much thought put into what technology advances might achieve. If a space-ship is “intelligent” enough to automatically put a force-field over a hole in the ship’s structure, surely it should be smart enough to maintain motion detectors and person identifiers throughout the ship. In particular, a tedious on-ship battle between the ship’s deputy boss, and the enemy’s deputy in the bowels of the ship should never have happened.

Anyway, with engaging hero and anti-hero (Jean-Luc Picard vs. Shinzon), you can ignore all of these sillinesses and enjoy the bad guys, and their eventual downfall.