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HardWired on Film: Star Trek (2009)

Let me start by saying that I watched Star Trek a few weeks back at the IMAX cinema in London, the biggest screen in the UK. One of the major pulls of watching films here is that the screen is as tall as 5 double-decker buses stacked on top of each other. Add this to the 11,000w, 42 speaker surround system and you've got yourself the ultimate cinematic experience. I urge everyone reading this to go and see a film in this format at least once in your lifetime. However, the experience that I had watching Star Trek may differ from those who saw it on a normal size cinema screen.

That out of the way, Star Trek is a stunning work of cinema. Don't make the mistake of assuming that you are reading a review written by the average "action is the only and best genre" teenager. I'm a film student and therefore can appreciate any and every film genre, in any context. This being said, however, many of the technical film reviewers have complained that the lens flair has been overused in this movie, and I wholeheartedly agree. There is a line with this kind of effect, and Abrams molested it good and proper, but this is the only bad thing I have to say about the entire film.

Let's start with the casting. Trekkies around the world have been sweating ever since the reboot/prequel was announced, and the main worry was that the casting wouldn't accurately depict the original crew of Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc. Many have even suggested that finding new actors to play the established characters would be impossible. Luckily, they couldn't have been more wrong. Chris Pine was amazing throughout. Funny, angry, womanizing and intelligent, often all at the same time. The best part of his depiction for me was the way in which he managed to mirror the characteristics of Shatner's Kirk exactly, as well as adding his own legacy to the depiction. Zachary Quinto (Heroes) also does a great job with Spock, despite competition others playing the role throughout the film. As a character, Spock is one of the most difficult characters to play, as you need to portray emotion effectively without physically showing it, and Quinto does about as well as anyone else has in the past (or present). The rest of the cast are all excellent, Bones is the perfect casting and he sounds exactly like the original in every way. Simon Pegg as Scotty didn’t get as much screen time as I would have hoped (that’s probably just my bias towards the actor), but in the small amount of time he is given he delivers the famous Scotty one-liners as humorously as the first time they were said.

Concerning the storyline, J.J Abrams uses the famous Roddenberry effect (Google it for spoilers), which allows him a lot of room in which to tell the story of this film and that of subsequent sequels. Fast-paced and full of action and comedy, Star Trek is highly enjoyable for both action fans and those who are looking for more of a personality in their movies, with intricacies such as character development based on past events (as it turns out this aspect in particular is key to the narrative throughout). The enemy is as ruthless and fearsome as we have come to expect from most Hollywood antagonists, and he has the mother of all motives, which always helps improve the realism.

All in all, Star Trek is a giant of 2009 action cinema and cinema in general, and is easily the best Star Trek film to date (yes, it’s better than The Wrath of Khan). Perhaps most importantly, however, it will please both die-hard Trekkies and new audiences alike.

9.5/10

Your salvation is here !

Okay... maybe it isn't but myself and Pgreen saw humanity's salvation today on the big screen.
At first from all the mixed opinions I have heard of this film I must say I held reserved feeling towards the film but soon not long after the curtains opened and the screen lit up I ate humble pie and big fat slice too.
From an average Joe's point of view the film is 'quite good'. However from my point of view (being a film student) it really is a good piece of work, with a few interesting opening scenes (no spoilers here) I couldn't help but take in the techniques used and think to myself "I haven't seen any other film use this for awhile." We have some crafty uses of great camera angles, filters, CGI and a good use of a Christian Bale.
Despite what you may think of Batman fighting machines instead of the joker is.... *AHEM*. I mean Christian Bale pulls off this character of a war worn and battered John Connor quite well if sometimes, a little OTT in doing so with a few uses of the infamous Batman voice (doing it again).
I was most impressed with how the film was syncronised with the others and how well it fit, as I can safely say I did spend a good 80% of my concentration trying to pick apart it's fitting with the other three films but was happily pleased with it. More importantly though I personnaly love a film which features cameos or references to others, in one scene we hear "You could be mine - by Guns 'n' Roses" appear which was the soundtrack to Terminator 2 and as your well aware if you've seen the trailers, Connor's line of "I'll be back", enough said there really.... and a really good few others which I'll save for myself ;)
All over I would reccomend screwing the bad reviewers with a giant 70ft mech with a 70" cannon for a head (like in the movie), or if you can't manage that going to see the film will do just as well as this really is worth your money in your pocket to go see.

Weather report - Update

CHANGELOG

TODO:

Fix the need to be in the current directory for the file to be located

RSS capability nearly works. Just add an option for auto-detection. (i think i have done this now)

To save the repeated entering of options, load the config from a file

Use son, father, grandfather backup scheme to search for the weather in a file LESS THAN A WEEK OLD

Done:

Made bash script to automate everything.

0.3 - Lots added

Function to find the position of the nth colon

A parsing function that extracts the 3 relevant bits of information from the relevant line - success

0.2 - More features and bugfixes.

Allows the user to specify is the serial communication functions are on or off. This fixed the issue of the program trying to write to a serial device in /dev/ that isn't there.

Moved the weather file to the same directory.

Allows the users to overwrite which file the program gets its data from.

Changed "4" to "3" in data file name. Also fixed in automator script.

Added a function to extract the general summery from the relevant line.

0.1 - First Semi-Functional Build

Works out what day it is.

Allows the user to add a dayshift to skip to other days.

Outputs relevant line of file.

Sends a serial command to the arduino to display a red LED for failure and a green LED for success.

#!/usr/bin/python

# Filename : weather1.py

import datetime

from datetime import date

enableser = bool(input("Enable serial, (True or False) : "))

if enableser:

import serial

ser = serial.Serial('/dev/tty.usbserial-A8004Iyv', 9600)

import time

def getday():

dayshift = int(raw_input("Enter dayshift, (eg 0 for today,1 for tomorrow.) : "))

now = datetime.datetime.now()

year = now.year

month = now.month

day = now.day + dayshift

dayofweek = ['Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saterday', 'Sunday']

daytoday = dayofweek[date.weekday(date(year,month,day))]

return daytoday

def findcolon(no):

for x in range(1, len(strweather)):

if strweather[x] == ':' :

no =no -1

if no == 0:

return x

def parseline(str):

if 'xml' in file.name:

minus = 6

else:

minus = 1

strsky = str[ findcolon(1)+2 : str.index(',') ]

print strsky

strmax = str[ findcolon(2)+2 : str.index("C") -minus]

print strmax

strmin = str[ findcolon(3)+2 : str.rindex("C") -minus]

print strmin

today= getday()

fileoverride = bool(input("Override default file, (True or False) : "))

if fileoverride:

newfile = raw_input("Enter the path for the file : ")

file = open(newfile, "r")

else:

file = open("Next3DaysRSS.xml", "r")

for line in file:

if today in line:

strweather = line

occurs = True

break

else:

occurs = False

print "The day is", today

if occurs:

print strweather

if enableser:

ser.write("Y")

parseline(strweather)

else:

print today, "is not in the file"

if enableser:

ser.write("N")

Apple sucks

*watches while everyone cries*

... Yeah. £742. Fuck off