Boys Blowing Things Up

As someone who missed Star Trek the first time around, I recall the fun of skipping my Marriage and the Family class in college to get high and watch old reruns in the later 1960s. I was a big Spock fan, so wild myself that the idea that logic might be able to calm me seemed, well, calming.

I never got into the sequels, mostly because I never remember what night or which station shows play on, and still to this day do not know how to program a VCR, TiVo, or whatever comes with our cable service now.

I'm a Luddite when it comes to audio visual equipment.

This week I attempted to watch two boys blowing things up movies: Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond adventure, and last night, Star Trek.

Neither made any sense to me. And I'm not the kind of person who requires a straight narrative. I read a lot of out of sequence literature, see many plays that play with time and space, and have a high tolerance for fantasy.

Although visually beautiful, even my husband who can watch just about anything that blows up, Quantum of Solace was edited without regard to coherence. Actually, the only thing that made sense was the burn marks on Camille, the "Bond girl's" back. (She is gorgeous and was played by Ukrainian born Olga Kurylenko.) (Spoiler alert!) While the hotel was blowing up, I called out for Denis Leary from Rescue Me to get there! (Now that is a television show worth watching: funny, cynical, brilliant like The Sopranos in mixing humor with drama. )

Going to the movies now requires a half hour of commercials, not just previews, which I love, if you want to get a good seat. We watched a lot of boys blowing up things so when Star Trek actually began I was already exhausted. Maybe I was getting my explosions mixed up, but frankly, I only got the main part of the story: how Jim Kirk meets up with the eventual Enterprise crew--Uhura, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov. And the bad guy was a Romulan. And there was some romance, too, and of course, rivalry. Sulu is played by the actor John Cho who is the "Harold" in the "Harold and Kumar" series of high times films. And Eric Bana, the heart throb from Munich, plays Nero, the insane, heartbroken Romulan.

And the real Spock comes in and out of the plot whenever he wants to.

Which brings me to two other boys blowing things up: Dick Cheney, who thankfully no longer has his finger near any red buttons, and Barack Obama who does. As John Meacham said last night on Bill Maher, it seems like Dick Cheney is really having a continued argument with those members of the Bush administration--Stephen Hadley and Condi Rice--who insisted that the torture and paranoia of the first Bush term be stopped in the second Bush term. Cheney is arguing against what happened when some sense of lawfulness returned to the conduct of war. He isn't really fighting with Obama, but it seems that no one is getting that. Cheney is a desperate man, one who understands that unless he politicizes the "war on terror" he will be indicted. As it is, he may never leave the US again.