Moving

The name of this place no longer makes sense for what I want to post, so go here instead.

Winona as Amanda?

The news from that film factory down south, the vast wasteland known as Hollywood, just keeps getting worse, and I'm not talking about the writers' strike. No, I mean the word that Winona Ryder has been cast as Amanda Grayson, mother of Spock, in the 2008 Star Trek film, the 11th in the series.

My stomach actually lurched. Most of the cast just looks dreadful, but their acting talents are -- to me -- generally unknown, so they might surprise me. That's not the case with Winona, and there's just no freakin' way she can do Amanda Grayson, originally played by the wonderful Jane Wyatt, any sense of justice. This is just frighteningly bad, almost worse than that Speed Racer trailer thingee.

The casting of Simon Pegg gave me hope. Now hope is crushed. What's terrible is knowing that it can get even worse, that they can come up with a real crappy re-design of the Enterprise.

Dear God, no, not Speed....

I take some time off just for the sake of sanity and The Woman Who Currently Wants to Monopolize Me (and may I just say, "Yeehah"), and what do I discover...?

Good Lord, no, stop this thing from happening.

"Move it, Speed, it's getting ugly out there." Well, yeah. Can you hear Don Davis echoes of The Matrix in the music? Can you see the garish color schemes, a la Dick Tracy? Can you sense the deep, probing, inquisitive acting, the sort that makes you long for the soaring talent of, say, Keanu Reeves (can you smell the sarcasm?)?

I hope they refine the CGI because even that looks lousy. Watching this actually make my skin crawl. A mere trailer hasn't done that since, well, the first teaser for Wall-E (and please be good, Wall-E, please, please please).

Nicki Finke has a list of titles for screenplays read and reviewed by varied and sundry Hollywood studios during 2007. The titles on that list sound better than this Speed Racer thingee (it's not really a movie, is it?).