Star Trek is not iconography.  There are plenty of iconic moments, inside jokes, winks, nods, and more, but it all stems from an original story starring fleshed-out characters who answered the call of duty and the call of adventure in equal and enthusiastic measure.  Director J.J. Abrams only sees iconography, but it was enough to get him through 2009′s reboot.  The story was barely patched together, still filled with holes, and wrapped in coincidences, but Abrams’ talent as a director managed to bring the story and characters to life in a way that felt fresh and exciting.  Much like his take on Captain Kirk, it was slapdash, occasionally clever, frantic, and charming.  Unfortunately, a flashy smile and big set pieces can’t save Abrams a second time as his follow-up, Star Trek Into Darkness, amplifies the shortcomings of his original effort, and removes the joy as the picture stumbles around looking for character arcs, themes, and a compelling, well-constructed plot.  But its greatest embarrassment is in trying to steal classic Star Trek moments without having a clue as to why those moments had meaning.

“Underwater” was an interesting but fragmented penultimate episode for Bates Motel‘s first season, especially after that shocker last week.  This may have been my least favorite episode of the season, because though it set up a final showdown really well, I don’t feel all that invested with the Abernathy situation yet.  We know he’s an uber villain who was Shelby and Keith Summers boss, but his vague threats to Norma seemed to reflect more of her own craziness than his.  Norman hardly had anything to do this week, and Bradley continues to successfully manipulate everyone in town.  Hit the jump for why crazy people keep gravitating towards Norma (hint: she’s crazy!)

Considering that the film was bumped around from September to January due to a national tragedy, it would be nice to feel a little sorry for Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad.  The period film, which casts Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling as cops going against Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) for control of Los Angeles, has a great cast and period setting.  On top of that, The Untouchables is a great film and it wouldn’t be the worst thing to see more films like it.  And yet, Gangster Squad is a total miss.  My review of the Blu-ray follows after the jump.

Oh, Don.  What the heck?  After a shaky start, Mad Men really received rave reviews last week for an episode that felt like old times, even though I just can’t really trust Matthew Weiner at this point to really give us what we want.  There must be a catch about this merger.  Before that shoe drops though, we got a thoroughly Don-centric episode that was, even outside of Don’s plot, all about power plays.  Don’s question of likability and watchability is still an issue for me, but the way things ended up tonight did leave me wondering what is coming next for him.  Hit the jump for why you are not to pick up the phone.

I know that I’ve been promising action every week on Game of Thrones for the last few (like Winter, it is coming!), and while “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” delivered some towards the end, the rest of the episode was fraught with rich character building and small payoffs that are certainly propelling us into some interesting situations for the final three episodes (I swear!).  “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” had a lot to do with hard truths, and studied the pairing off of characters for good or ill.  Hit the jump for why “if you waste your time getting people to love you, you’ll be the best liked dead man in town.”

HBO has put a lot of stock in British-based comedy over the years, particularly in their partnership with The Office‘s Ricky Gervais, his writing partner Stephen Merchant and their brilliantly bizarre friend Karl Pilkington.  There’s also the current series Veep, which although it is based entirely in American politics, is written wholly by Britons.  Their latest comedy offering, Family Tree, which is paired with Veep in a Sunday comedy block, has its roots in Britain, but does reach out across the pond as well, reflecting the dual-citizenship sensibilities of its creator, Christopher Guest.

Fans of Guest (who created seminal works This Is Spinal Tap and Best in Show, and served as a big influence on Ricky Gervais in creating The Office‘s style) have been waiting for something new since 2006′s For Your Consideration, which was fun, though not his best effort.  Family Tree, like his other work, takes on a mockumentary style (with varying success) and a minimalistic atmosphere, where most of the humor is found in subtle phrasing and background content, such as a poster at a theater in Hove for “Avatar: The Musical.”  Hit the jump for more on Family Tree and why it’s definitely worth tuning in for. 

[This is a re-post of my review from the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.  Sightseers opens today in limited release.]

With his third film, Sightseers, director Ben Wheatley has clearly defined his wheelhouse. He makes surreal, darkly comic, horrifically violent tales about ugly people doing terrible things. The humor slightly faded in his last film, the twisted thriller Kill List, but Sightseers returns him to the pitch-black comedy of his debut feature, Down Terrace. This time, instead of giving an emotional bubonic plague to the platonic family, Wheatley fiercely savages the banality of relationships growing out of the puppy-love stages and into something serious. For the two lead characters in Sightseers, the relationship grows into something seriously demented and ruthlessly perverse.

20 years after its release, it’s impossible to overestimate the impact of Jurassic Park.  It ushered in a new era of cinema technology that melded the greatest aspects of stop-motion and animatronics with CGI breakthroughs in their infant stages.  But more than that, it blew the pants off of audiences around the world.  It’s safe to bet that everyone who saw the film during its initial release remembers what it was like walking out of the theater.  It knocked us all on our asses while also spawning a 1,000 junior archaeologists.  Kids replaced their Bart Simpson posters with ones of T-rexes and raptors, everyday coming in filthy from digging in the backyard all day.

All these years later and Universal did the obvious: they released Jurassic Park 3D.  Shortly after it hit theaters, it was dropped on Blu-ray.  How does it fare in comparison to the mighty 2011 Blu-ray release?  Hit the jump for all of our details on the Jurassic Park 3D combo pack. 

Filmmakers who adapt a novel are not beholden to the major themes of that novel.  They’re free to take away what they want to see and leave the richer aspects of the material behind.  Such is the case with Baz Luhrmann‘s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby.  Where Fitzgerald saw the relationship between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan as a laughable excuse to escape into the past, Luhrmann sees a doomed romance because Baz Luhrmann likes stories about doomed romances*.  And like his previous movies—Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, and Australia—Luhrmann is too afraid of actual intimacy, and covers it up in glitter and other shiny objects while laboring under the delusion that it makes the story operatic.  With The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann isn’t adapting Fitzgerald as much as he’s remaking Baz Luhrmann.

At first glance, the stand-alone release of Star Trek: TNG - The Best of Both Worlds on Blu-ray looks like typical double dipping. The Season Three Blu-ray includes the first half of the two-part episode, but not the second, forcing Trekkies the world over to either pick this set up or wait until later this summer for Season Four to arrive. Why not get a few extra bucks out of the folks who can’t wait? The set certainly doesn’t justify any extra expense… but it does make an easy option for more casual fans who don’t want to invest in two expensive season collections. Hit the jump for the full review.

First of all: AHHHHH!  Second of all, for anyone who thought Bates Motel would just be a pale imitator to Psycho, as we finish up this first season its been very apparent that there are plenty of places and ways for it to develop that both establish a background to the canon naturally (Norman’s “episodes,” Norma’s control, the taxidermy, the hotel itself), while flourishing in its own new plots.  As I mentioned last week, the wrapping up of the Shelby storyline felt final, but one of the main tenents of the series is that nothing is ever really dead.  How they bring back these stories and incorporate them with new ones (like the Man in Number 9), has been spellbinding to watch unfold.  Hit the jump for more on why you should never handle anything, Norma.

David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, may be respected for giving the world one of the greatest television shows of all time, but when he jumped into feature films with Not Fade Away, he seems to have been allowed to do whatever he wanted, but the finished product was abandoned by its studio (Paramount), who must not have thought it was Oscar material.  That’s too bad as Not Fade Away is a film that feels alive with the possibilities of cinema, but also is aware of the past.  The story of a band that never made it, Chase’s semi-autobiographical tale paints a great portrait of teenagers going through the 1960’s and are swept up in the cultural changes reflected in the music of the era.  My review of the Blu-ray of Not Fade Away follows after the jump. 

This season of Mad Men has been a little divided, much like last season (which people keep forgetting — “Zou Bisou Bisou” almost shut down Twitter).  Though many of you have mentioned how harsh I’ve been on Don this year, I felt vindicated when the cast visited Katie Couric this past week.  Jon Hamm said of Don, “I wouldn’t say he’s likable … he’s watchable.”  He also said “if you don’t like Pete, you should really not like Don.”  Vincent Kartheiser piped up later that the reason we all give Don a pass is because he’s suave and handsome and charming, and Pete is not.  But at their core, they are the same.  But “For Immediate Release” showed that, while both are complete cads, Don does have moments of redemption that don’t absolve his sins, but do make them more palatable overall.  Hit the jump for more on why you should consider putting “brain in a jar” on your tombstone.

More setup and machinations this week on Game of Thrones, with a few really great little scenes slipped in between the big reveals that should start paying dividends immediately.  Of course, I said that last week, and this week we again got a lot of walking and talking, with people being built up just to be torn down.  We left Dany and Stannis out of things, and shoehorned Theon painfully in (literally), but other than that there were updates from all across the realm, which Littlefinger tells us is little more than a figment of our imaginations.  Varys asks what we are left with if not this shared delusion: chaos?  It’s a pit.  “It’s not a pit,” Littlefinger counters, “it’s a ladder.”  Hit the jump to find out why you should have learned from your position to not overplay your… position.

While on our recent set visit to Pixar Animation Studios, we were treated to a special screening of director Saschka Unseld’s animated short film, The Blue Umbrella.  This short will run in front of Pixar’s Monsters University on June 21st.  Like previous Pixar shorts, The Blue Umbrella is absent of dialogue and long on the use of visual and musical cues to elicit an emotional response.  This particular meet cute centers on two boldy-colored umbrellas in the middle of a rainstorm in the city.  If you’re interested in the behind-the-scenes work on The Blue Umbrella, be sure to read up on our interviews with Unseld. Hit the jump for my review and to find out why The Blue Umbrella is unlike any Pixar short you’ve seen before.