That’s bold, baby: ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’ delivers

Epic. Engaging. Familiar characters and masterful acting. “Star Trek: Into Darkness” has something for everyone.

Even if you’re not a “Star Trek” fan and even if (ahem, what is wrong with you?) you’re not entirely clear who Gene Roddenberry is or why Capt. Kirk looks so much younger in this movie than pop culture implies, you’ll appreciate this sci fi thriller.

I toured the blogosphere this weekend and found a number of reviewers decades younger than me — many of whom admitted never seeing a television episode of the iconic ’60 series — who enjoyed “Star Trek: Into Darkness” very much, so I feel confident saying director J.J. Abrams did a good job luring a new audience to the “Star Trek” franchise.

And as an ardent fan of “Star Trek” (aka “Trekker” not to be confused with “Trekkie”) who even dressed as a Klingon once, I loved the latest cinematic outing. I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me. Not kidding.

**SPOILER ALERT**

This is as much a review of “Star Trek: Into Darkness” as it is an analysis. DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER if you haven’t seen the movie and you want to experience it in all its glory. Find another reviewer who piques your interest without giving away plot points. This one is for insiders only.

I saw the movie in 3D on an IMAX screen, and I was enthralled. It was worth the extra admission. There is so much action, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Amazingly, most of the action is not gratuitous but actually important to the story. I loved the scenes as the Enterprise is plunging into Earth’s atmosphere and wreaking havoc on the gravitational systems. That’s how it is on spaceships — sometimes the ceiling is the floor. You never would have seen that in 1967.

Portraying one of the greatest “Star Trek” villains ever couldn’t have been easy, but Benedict Cumberbatch pulls off Khan Noonien Singh for a new generation. Between his portrayal and the writing which shows Khan to be multi-dimensional — Kirk pressing him into duty as the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” was brilliant — I appreciated his nuanced and diabolical performance.

I was a little irked, however, that the real bad guy turned out to be the Adm. Marcus, but maybe I’m mad because it’s a little like finding out Obama’s IRS is harassing the Tea Party — that’s such a Nixon move. Do all our leaders have to sink to underhanded shenanigans and reveal their human frailty? Is this what is meant by “Into Darkness”? We have seen the enemy, and it is us? It reminded me of the first “Mission: Impossible” movie when trusted Jim betrays Ethan. Such a predictable plot twist. Ugh.

Still, no one will remember who plays the admiral. Everyone is talking about the new Khan. But more than Cumberbatch’s performance, I admired Zachary Quinto’s Spock. Sometimes, I could hear Leonard Nimoy’s voice as he spoke, but he wasn’t just copying someone else’s performance. He made Spock his own, even more than he did in the 2009 “Star Trek” movie that introduced all the young versions of our favorite characters.

And the scene with Spock watching Kirk die after he saved the ship — a tribute to the same pivotal scene in “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan”? Masterful. The old dialogue, flipped on its head, then updated as Spock helplessly watches Kirk die instead of the other way around.

Some die-hards hold up 1982′s “Wrath of Khan” as a better movie, and I agree. Here’s why. Spock died. There wasn’t a happy ending. It was like life. Life doesn’t always tell neat stories. The way “Into Darkness” brings Kirk back from the dead — “super blood”? really?! — was dumb. Abrams had to do that so audiences wouldn’t exit the theater on a sad note, but, I’m sorry, it wasn’t as theatrical as having to spend all of “The Search for Spock” returning his katra to his reanimated body. But I guess that’s how we are nowadays (oy, there’s that phrase). Back in my day, we didn’t have stem cells. We had to do things the old-fashioned way. We had to bring people back from the dead with dangerous and mystical Vulcan ceremonies with strange names like fal tor pan.

Anyway, back to “Into Darkness.” Besides the sometimes outrageous turns requiring us to suspend judgment (come on, if you can buy “warp drive,” you can buy “super blood”), I thought the movie pulls the audience through some amazing emotional territory — humor included, we even had Klingons! — and I enjoyed it. Because of the respect for what’s gone before, I’ll look forward to whatever bold things Abrams & Co. does with this “Star Trek” reboot.

My science fiction reach exceeds my grasp (of great literature)

“He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I’ll chase him ’round the moons of Nibia and ’round the Antares Maelstrom and ’round Perdition’s flames before I give him up!”

~ Khan in “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan”

It is sad that I fancy myself a bibliophile and yet I had to look up this quote from “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan” to figure out its origin. It’s a direct quote — other than the substitution of astronomical terms — for a passage from Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” which I will confess, I haven’t read. But I should.

 As long as I’m confessing, I’ll confess this: Based only on Trekkie rumor and speculation in the blogosphere, I watched “Space Seed,” the episode from the original “Star Trek” TV series introducing Ricardo Montalban as Khan Noonien Singh, and “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan,” the second feature-length “Star Trek” movie, in preparation for this past weekend’s viewing of “Star Trek” Into Darkness.”

Yes, I’m that much of a Trekker nerd.

SPOILER ALERT (if you haven’t seen the new movie yet and you want to be surprised, avert your eyes RIGHT NOW): Rumor and speculation were right: The likely villain to be reincarnated in the “Star Trek” reboot was indeed brought back to life by actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

And he was awesome! Well, he was no Ricardo Montalban, but still, bold. I’ll share my review of the new movie here tomorrow.

“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

~ Carl Sagan

Inheritance from my mother: The written word

If Minnesota Transplant readers ever wonder where I got the desire to write about all things interesting and inane, you don’t have to look much farther than my mother.

I helped an author publish her book to Amazon recently (read more about that exercise here), and it reminded me how grateful I am for my mother. The book I helped publish to Amazon is titled, “Letters From Mom: A Daughter’s Journal of Healing” and it’s about how the author, Joyce Kocinski, dealt with her grief after her mother’s death. The narrative includes several letters written by her mother.

The exercise prompted me to sift through my own manila file of “Letters From Mom.”

Most of them were written pre-Facebook in her neat, entirely readable left-handed cursive. Mom still hand-writes letters to me, but now she sends missives via Facebook email quite often, including today’s message: “We received about an inch of much needed rain last night. A wildfire burned roughly 70 acres up by Menahga this week. How’s the second novel coming?”

Mom writes about all kinds of minutia in a lovely way that polishes daily activities like gardening, decorating and visiting into precious artifacts. I aspire to that art of converting the mundane into the extraordinary in this daily blog.

I appreciate Mom’s deadpan delivery, too. She makes me laugh. Here are a few comedic gems from the handwritten letters in my file.:

“Curt is in Long Prairie running this afternoon. He said he ran fast in practice yesterday. We bought something for his diarrhea. I hope it clears it up, so we don’t have to go the doctor, but we will if it doesn’t (Kay!).

For your reference, Curt was my brother, and Kay, to whom this letter was also addressed because we were living together at the time and who apparently delayed seeing a doctor, is my sister.

Here’s a note Mom wrote after I told her I was going for a hot air balloon ride:

“I trust you didn’t fall out of the balloon. Here’s a sample of the wallpaper in the bathroom, too. I’m about 3/4 of the way done.”

Sometimes she even includes pictures:

Phyllis and I lay out Sunday, and I lay out Saturday alone. I have a pretty good tan and also a pretty bad sunburn in a couple of places [drawing]. That area wasn’t exposed to the sun before this summer, I suppose.

Here’s Mom telling me about her weekend. “Bob” is my dad, and “Mills” is New York Mills, a tiny town in Central Minnesota near where my parents live:

“Sunday, Bob, Gene, Kenny, Jerome, Howard, Mark and Jay went golfing at a golf course set up in Howard’s pasture by Mills. It has greens and everything, but also sheep turds. It doesn’t cost anything and isn’t a bit crowded except for the sheep.”

Mom, I treasure you!

Riding high

“I could really use a lift.”

Overheard in most circumstances, this would mean, “Can I get a ride somewhere?”

At my house, however, “lift” means a lot more than a commitment of a few minutes and a couple of dollars of gas.

It means enough steel that a forklift is required to lift it, two men spending all day on an installation and the sacrifice of the third stall of the garage:

Why, yes, they do install four-post auto lifts in residential neighborhoods. And yes, this equipment is so very, very necessary when Dad is angling to spend more time with his 18-year-old son and Son is planning complicated repairs/modifications/improvements to his vehicles and ones yet to be invested in.

Fascinating, isn’t it, the soft underbelly of a Passat?

Such a contraption allows one to see secret things normally only mechanics witness. Like the underside of a car.

When he was shopping for said lift, my Beloved asked the salesperson if he could trust it to be safe when his pride and joy was under it.

“You mean an expensive sports car?” the salesman asked.

“No, I mean my only son.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, totally safe. We certify it.”

Me? While my men are spending time getting greasy in the garage, I get lots of free time to indulge in ridiculous endeavors like blogging and trolling for “Star Trek” related trailers and videos on You Tube (have you seen the Audi commercial starring Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto, aka Original Spock and Young Spock? Brilliant!).

 

Author tells how Bible stories about harlots, seductresses and rape victims are worth reading and understanding

These are Bible stories you’ll rarely hear on Sunday mornings in church — stories of incest, rape, mutilation and seduction.

The Sunday liturgy in Catholic and Lutheran churches I’ve attended abides by a three-year reading cycle that covers most, but not all, of the Bible. A regular church goer will hear some passages in what seems like an over-and-over pattern (Jesus is feeding 5,000 again?), while some sections and books are never read and rarely used as the basis for sermons.

Author Jonathan Kirsch tackles some of those rarely studied stories in “The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible.”

Says Kirsch in his opening: “The stories that are retold here will come as a surprise to many readers precisely because, over the centuries, they have been suppressed by rabbis, priests and ministers uncomfortable with the candor of the biblical storytellers about human conduct, sexual or otherwise.”

If you believe the Bible was written by God’s fingers, you might not appreciate Kirsch’s thoughtful discussions of the origins of the Bible and his occasional treatment of the book as literature rather than the inspired word of God, but I found Kirsch to be respectful even when he was being academic.

Kirsch retells the Bible stories in common English in sort of a “historical fiction” approach alongside an English translation of the Bible, and then he explores possible meanings in historical and contemporary texts. In his analysis are seven stories from the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible:

• The story of Lot and his daughters (Genesis 19:1-38).
• The rape of Dinah (Genesis 34:1-31).
• Tamar and Judah (Genesis 38:1-26). This is the story on which the title of Kirsch’s book is based.
• Zipporah and Moses (Exodus 4:24-26).
• Jephthah and his daughter (Judges 11:1-40).
• The Levite traveler and his concubine (Judges 19:1-28).
• The rape of another woman named Tamar by her brother who was also King David’s son Amnon (2 Samuel 13:1-22).

Did you know Lot (the man whose wife was turned to salt when she turned around the witness the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah) had sex with his daughters who bore children by him? Did you know Moses had a wife and son? Have you ever even heard of Jephthah?

After reading Kirsch’s book, I have a new appreciation for all these characters, especially the female ones. If you think the Bible skims over the stories of women, Kirsch’s approach will open your eyes to the possible feminist themes woven throughout the Old Testament.

Don’t miss the appendix in back about “Who Really Wrote the Bible.” It explains a lot about how the Bible came together and some reasons for some of the confusing and sometimes redundant passages.

When I finished “Harlot,” I went back to my bookshelf to find another similar book I found useful in understanding the story of King David, the little shepherd who slayed Goliath, wrote Psalms, committed adultery with Bathsheba and ruled Israel hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus Christ. Turns out Jonathan Kirsch also wrote “King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel,” too.

A quick Google search reveals Kirsch is quite prolific having written books about Moses, Revelations and more. I’ll have to check them out.

 

Trivial pursuits

If you’ve been reading Minnesota Transplant long enough, you know that some days I really don’t have anything to say.

But I write a post anyway.

Today is one of those days.

I write for practice. I’ve come up with something interesting or inane to say about 26 times a month on average over the past five years. (I don’t obsess with my stats much, no, though astute readers might have noticed I recently surpassed 1,000 followers. If you’re reading me on your iPad, that is. On my PC, I supposedly have 643 followers. Who can account for the vagaries of WordPress stat crunchers? Who pays attention to such minutia anyway?)

In any case, today was one of those rare days in May. I ran 3.53 miles this morning (again, who’s counting?) as the glorious sun was rising. Not too hot, not too cold, it was Goldilocks “just right.” When I walked the dog briefly this evening, it was “just right” again.

Today’s meals? Not worth mentioning, except to say pesto mayo is awesome on a bacon-and-egg sandwiches.

Didn’t do anything worth writing home about either, except one thing: I wrote 877 words on my work-in-progress. Click here for today’s taste of the memories of the year I turned 15.

That’s about it. Oh, I slept well last night, too. Hoping for the same tonight. Here’s wishing you sweet dreams.

My pretty little dog has a grizzly side

I think my miniature schnauzer was a grizzly bear in a past life.

Besides the fact she snores (it’s the cutest little wheezy snore ever!), she really goes for any of Blue Buffalo’s dog food containing salmon.

I am morally against feeding my 8-pound canine beef since my dog could never take down a cow in the natural world, so I tend toward the chicken and turkey varieties when I’m hunting in the dog food aisle at Petco. But I decided to give salmon a try with my picky little dog, and it turns out she’s quite a pescetarian. In fact, she doesn’t just like salmon, she loves it!

They way she digs into her food bowl reminds me of a hungry grizzly chowing down on a river full of floppy fish during a salmon run.

We’ll need her grizzly aggression about now. My Beloved set our bikes free today from their winter storage, hanging from the ceiling of the garage. Chloe’s bark might come in handy should we encounter any witches on our bike rides.

“I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!”

~ Miss Gulch, aka
the Wicked Witch of the West

 

Color scheme for a man cave

My Beloved saved some beat-up kitchen cabinets from certain death a couple years ago when he bought a whole kitchen’s worth for $75 off Craig’s List.

They were great for containing paint cans, miscellaneous screws, winter gear and various other garage doodads.

He resuscitated them again this weekend when he dug out his painting supplies and gave the cupboards a facelift:

Even the steps are painted orange and blue.

Think an ardent Chicago Bears fan lives here?

Why being a stepmother is like ‘Survivor’

My Adored Stepson sent me a text and called me today to wish me happy Mothers Day.

I survived 40 years without giving Mother’s Day a second thought (other than to thank my own mother), so I’m still a little surprised — and pleased — when I’m thought of on Mother’s Day.

Best gift of all: My 18-year-old stepson, after living the past three years with his mother in Minnesota, is graduating this week and spending the summer with his father and me before he goes off to college.

Some mothers of teenagers, let alone nonbiological mothers, might be appalled by this turn of events, but I’m delighted. My Adored Stepson inherited many of the characteristics I like in my Beloved, so I enjoy his company and am considering time with him this summer to be a gift.

But stepping into the role of stepmother hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes, it has been … well … how do I say this … bang-my-head-against-a-wall, heartbreakingly difficult. Days like today, when I get to engage my stepson in a Mother’s Day conversation about his last day of work, tomorrow’s business class exam and ethics of $3 T-shirts made in Bangladesh make all those other, less satisfying moments worth it.

In honor of Mother’s Day and the season finale of the 26th season of “Survivor Caramoan: Fans vs. Favorites,” here’s a list of ways being a successful stepmother is like winning “Survivor”:

1. Outwit, outplay, outlast. If you can’t outwit and outplay a 13-year-old, you’ll never outlast one.

2. Do not be the leader. Leaders get voted out of “Survivor,” and bossy stepmothers are unlikable all the way around. I learned early on that I had no role as disciplinarian, and thank goodness, my Beloved was up to the task.

3. Don’t be a follower either. Children — biological or step — learn how to push their parents’ buttons. If you let them get to you, they win.

4. Be nice but don’t be too young, too pretty or too stupid. Having to compete for your spouse’s attention helps no one. Be yourself. Be sincere. Help with homework. Care.

5. Keep your emotions in check. Dawn’s crying jags on this season’s “Survivor” are a little too much. Yes, the actions of my stepchildren have made me cry. Crying is good sometimes. But not on camera or under the hot lights.

6. Being a good cook helps. If you can’t be a good cook, tend the fire. My tastes and my stepson’s tastes do not jive. Thankfully, my Beloved is a good cook. And I clean up after him well.

7. Lighten up. On “Survivor,” lunatics get voted out but people like to keep funnymen around. In the end, the comedians are often the “fan favorites.” In my step-dynamic, Caswell tells the jokes and I laugh at them. In the words of Martha Stewart, this is a very good thing.

8. Avoid lying. Blindsides make for good tribal councils, but blindsided contestants tend to hold grudges when it comes time for the final vote. That goes double for stepchildren.

9. Win immunity challenges at any cost! There have been a lot of challenges in this season’s survivor requiring contestants to stand, balance, hold on or hold their breath the longest (I found that challenge involving the metal grate and the rising tide really uncomfortable to watch, but Brenda didn’t panic and ultimately won). Similarly, sometimes the best tactic for a stepmother is hold on longer than she ever thought she could.

10. Don’t monopolize the challenges either. If you’re seen as huge threat, you’ll be voted off. Stepchildren don’t like threats to their security either.

Enjoy the “Survivor” finale tonight! And happy (step)Mother’s Day!

We can all use a pattern of Zen in our lives, if only for a moment each day

Pattern

There’s a window over the tub in our master bath. When I get up in the morning, I stand in the tub and survey the back yard while I brush my teeth. This is how I greet the day and figure out what kind of weather to expect.

It’s my Zen moment.

In summertime, I admire my handiwork on the lawn. When I mow, I mow diagonally, switching to the opposite diagonal every other time.

The resulting pattern is like a diamond-shaped checkerboard.

It makes me happy.

(Until I have to wash the window of my toothpaste spatter.)

For more photos of “pattern” in this week’s WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge, click here and follow the comments.