Interestingly, my favorite song of the band is not a single (yet). It’s called “Of Moons, Birds & Monsters”, listen to it below. Psychedelic to the max!

And if you happen to like the MGMT, you might just like the 3OH!3 too, another duet, who play “electronic rapcore” music. That’s rap that has rock & electronic elements. The music video of their most known song is here, although this specific song is more pop than rapcore (compared to the rest of their songs).

But her new song, “Keeps Gettin’ Better“, is actually, better. It has an electronic style music, but with a mix of alternative rock style singing melody, and a bit of Rihanna in it. I like it, a lot.

Kring said no final ending for Heroes has been conceived, noting, “We didn’t have an island to get off of.” On top of that, Kring noted that “My original idea was more of an anthological vibe to it, where you regenerate the characters.“

The way I read the above, and the rest of the things he said in that interview, is like this: “I have no master plan. I just put together a convoluted, written-on-the-go story, and I cross fingers that people will buy into it. You see, the Marvel movies were all over the Box Office, so I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could strap together some super hero stories to make a quick buck? So I did. I made a quick buck, and it was fun while it lasted”.

And then, he also says that serialization on modern TV is a bad idea. Maybe it is, but then again, where would serialization be possible then? The movies, where it’s impossible by definition? What he fails to understand is not that serialization is not wanted by viewers, but that viewership naturally decreases on series after 3 years, because older viewers get bored, and new viewers don’t understand the whole back-story to get hooked. Which is why having a clock, a master plan, a premeditated story that makes sense, and a series that doesn’t last more than 3-4 years, is important. But nooooo… Tim preferred the quick buck rather than creating an artistic masterpiece (like “Lost”), or enjoy the kind of money that does come with it in the longer run (e.g. “Firefly” made more money after its demise).

Before I saw some pictures a few weeks ago, and the trailer today, I had a problem with the Spock portrayal. I just didn’t believe that there was any actor out there that could have Nimoy’s eerie look and mannerisms. And if the actor would have decided to go his way and redo Spock’s character from scratch, that would have been a huge disappointment for me — given that Spock was the first love of my life, at age 5, a character that has inspired me, and steered a lot of my personality’s evolution.

But Zachary Quinto just looks amazing as Spock. I dare to say that this is the only actor from the bunch that actually tried to recreate Spock’s character as closely as possible, while the rest all look like a bunch of new kids on the block. Interestingly, I never particularly liked Quinto’s character on “Heroes”, the villain Sylar, but there are a couple of scenes in the ST trailer that show what a great actor he is. I had trouble thinking that this was not Nimoy. He seems to have put a lot of effort in recreating Nimoy’s body movements when in action, which is what makes him believable.

So overall, I am excited about the new Star Trek movie, and my only real concern is about the new franchise to not lose the “soul” of Star Trek. And that soul is just that: social commentary. Hopefully, JJ Abrams — who I don’t particularly trust — won’t turn Star Trek into a shallow action packed flick as this would be a lose-lose situation eventually.

Even more interestingly, this movie will be the first space-based science fiction movie in theaters, in two years. The longest, I believe, we ever had to wait for a space movie in cinemas. Makes you wonder.

Now, you are probably thinking: “but her music sucks, it’s just boring easy-listening pop”. And I must say: not so. When you think of Madonna you probably are thinking of “Like a virgin”, “Material Girl”, “Vogue”, and “Hung up”. None of these songs are among my favorites though. The kind of Madonna music I like is the kind of music that was never released as singles, and so most people are not aware of it.

Here’s my top 10:

10. Gone
9. Fighting Spirit (unreleased)
8. Sky Fits Heaven
7. Mother and Father (ignore the actual video, acoustic version equally good)
6. Future Lovers / I Feel Love (Live version only)
5. How High
4. Lament
3. Paradise Not for Me
2. You Thrill Me (original, unreleased version of “Erotica”)
1. To Have and Not to Hold

All but one of these songs (”Lament” is older) are from the “third era” of Madonna, her electronic era (I musically categorize Madonna’s career in 3 major eras: the pop ‘80-’89 era, the ‘90-’97 weird sex shit era, and the electronic/disco of ‘98-today). Interestingly, no song from her brand new album “Hard Candy” (review) makes my top 10.

The problem is that viewers (including critics, from what it seems) don’t think hard. They thought that the message of the movie was “nature taking revenge on humanity — be kind to the environment”. And so by having plants releasing toxins to kill people, viewers found that plot ridiculous. While the nature stuff is the visible “message” of the movie (and it’s not even proven in the movie that nature was the culprit, it’s just the No1 suspect), it also had a second message that could only be seen if you look at the signs the director gives you. And that message is “don’t be lonely, don’t fear to love, trust others”.

The director masterfully starts the movie in Central Park, and we later see that “the happening” is happening in the metropolitan area, which is where millions of people live. As the movie progressive, the heroes find themselves to smaller and smaller groups of people. In fact, through their panic, they start to think that the smaller the group they belong to (and lonelier they can be), the safer it is. But as we will see later with Mrs Jones’ death, this is not necessarily true.

Tell-tell signs about the “loneliness” message in the film is when Julian says “don’t hold my daughter’s hand unless you mean it”, the ring that changes colors depending on the emotion of the person that wears it (do we need a device to tell us what we feel?), and it’s very clear when it shows how lonely modern people are when the two heroes are communicating via the sound tube (which is a separatative kind of communication). Only when they overcome their loneliness and fears, start to trust each other, get together and show true love to each other, they become unaffected from the toxin. Mrs Jones died because, even if she was alone in the field and therefore shouldn’t have been affected, she had such a poisonous mind that she didn’t feel love for anyone. She was the epitome of loneliness. She didn’t trust anybody. In fact, Mrs Jones’ character is like the “bad boss” at the end of a computer game level. She was everything that’s wrong with modern society, even if she was living all alone far away from the society (a very artistic way to show that if you hate society for what it is and so you don’t contribute to it, you contribute to all that’s wrong in it, so nothing gets fixed in the end).

Basically, what the director wants to say is that our society sucks. But it’s not going to get fixed if we remove ourselves from it or from our loved ones. Fixing starts with the person closer to you.

Finally, it’s very possible that the “crazy” plant-owner guy and his wife lived too, although we don’t see that in the movie. If we have seen that, maybe it would have been more obvious to viewers what the movie is really all about. I believe that the director could have made a few things more clear for more bozos to understand, so I will take a point out of my final movie rating for his shortsightedness: 9/10.

I expect this movie to hit cult status in 20 years or so.

Shatner replied with the following video on his youtube channel, that shows that he can’t deal with all that:

I take Takei’s side on this because I can tell how Shatner operates. Even his friend, Leonard Nimoy, doesn’t seem to take him that seriously. When we saw both at the Star Trek 40th anniversary a few years back, Nimoy was making fun of Shatner on stage, and I could tell that it was not all for good fun — although Nimoy does cares for Shatner. It seems that Nimoy knows that Shatner is just a big kid, and so he just goes along with it. Others are not as tolerable, and don’t understand his psyche, and so they shun him away. That’s my take anyway.

A few weeks ago, Shatner said to the press that he was not invited to act on the new Star Trek movie, but JJ Abrams replied that he did invite him to have a cameo, but Shatner wanted to have a large part of the story be about him. When Abrams refused, Shatner didn’t want anything to do with it. But Shatner kept insisting that he was not invited. When I read their public dispute about this, George Takei’s talk about Shatner’s need to be the focus of each movie came to mind (George said that months ago). I don’t particularly like JJ Abrams, but I take his word on this. Shatner is in the red here for one more time. Too much ego.

I don’t know if I should laugh at its comedy, or start crying about the overall state of sci-fi these days.

What I need is this instead:

I need the TV series to be big. Grand. Epic. Be about big, important, things. Not casual things like 2 detectives with different murder stories each week, or other episodic-style TV that might even have a fade background longer story. I need the series to affect many lives, I need a complex story and mystery, I need action, and I need intelligence. Here’s an example that I just thought about:

The humanity in the 24th century is about to make a big discovery. They come in contact for the first time with an alien race. But instead of having 5 or 10 main characters with episodic style action, I want each episode to use completely different characters, spanned in completely different locations. In one episode you are dealing with the military and how they see this new race. In the other episode, you get to know a large cast of doctors who find something mysterious about the capabilities of the race. Another episode deals with the politicians or the security agencies about the issue. Another episode deals with scientists who are told to work in a specific thing. Another episode is dealing with exploration expeditions to another planet and what they find there that ties back to our main story. Another episode deals with normal travelers who happen to travel through the alien space and what happens to them. Another episode deals with some people back on Earth and their take on the whole thing and how that affects their lives etc.

This allows the show being military, scientific, romantic, political, or all in once.

The point is that the story and the mystery should be unveiled slowly, but at many-many different levels. For example, something mysterious seen in one episode, might get explained in another episode with different characters, far away from the previous location. Of course, most of these characters will be recurring. For example, the doctor you saw on episode 2, you will see him again on episode 8, or the General you saw on episode 1 you will see him again on episode 5 and then 12 etc etc. There should always be some connection between some of the characters, like a complex web that becomes more complex as time goes by and the mystery unveils little by little. And you will get your surprises between some of the characters or their history too. It’s just that the majority of the story should get progressed mostly by new characters each time (more than 100 recurring characters, even more non-recurring ones), rather than a very specific “main hero” character. I don’t want a main hero because it’s not realistic to have just one smart ass guy who can magically fix the problem on each episode. People don’t shine that often!

Instead, I need to see a UNIVERSE. Like Star Trek had a whole “universe” background story, with many many recurring characters and stories. When you talk about Star Trek you identify with the whole story of humanity up to that point, not about 7 people on the Starship Enterprise. ST is bigger than that. Star Wars too. Which is why George Lucas has expanded the universe of SW to many new details and information that you can read online or on his novels, about characters and situations that don’t show up in his movies. In other words, I need the creation of this virtual universe that shows me how big it is and how grand it is by showing me many different situations of many different people in it, with only tie-in being the main plot and their occasional path-crossing.

If I was to give an analogy for what I want, is the online massively multi-player version of a computer game rather than a single-player PC game played by just one person. I am not sure I can make it clearer than that. It just has to feel “bigger than life” by taking place in a believable new universe. Heck, why else would I watch TV? If I wanted to watch reality TV, or traditional TV series, I would just record my own life during the day and watch it at night. I would probably be less bored.

Yes, my TV show idea above is indeed something like what “Lost” does right now. “Lost” is the first series to have so many main and recurring characters and have the viewer in the gaming seat, but I need the series I imagine to go even further. Even on “Lost” we don’t know the names of all of the 47 survivors, let alone their stories. “Heroes” is one of the shows that also tried to be “grand” (many characters, big thematic concept), but it fails in its implementation rather than the idea.

The only problem with this show idea is that it’s very expensive: not only you need completely different sets for each episode (or 2-part episode specials), but you need to make sure your many-many recurring actors are available for the job whenever you need them. Having an actor on call costs extra. Lastly, I need to know that there’s an end date, like on “Lost”. I don’t want the story to go on forever until it fails with the ratings and the series gets canceled. I need to know that the story is structured so carefully that there’s story for 3 or 4 or 5 seasons — and then it’s done.

But damn me to hell if I will ever enjoy a new TV series that’s not as “big” and “complex” somehow. I need to feel emerged with the story and their world, otherwise they are dead pixels to me.