Site Columns

By Michelle
October 3, 2004 - 2:53 PM

Hello World!

Last week a couple of friends of mine and I decided to have a Hot Men of Harry Potter film festival. This meant that at lunchtime we got California Tortilla and sat down in front of the television for two hours to review objectively some of the films of Alan Rickman, David Thewlis and Jason Isaacs. ("Review objectively" in this case means not going "EEE he looks so hot in that shirt" and things like that. Much.)

We started with Divorcing Jack, which features both Thewlis and Isaacs and was therefore an obvious choice, plus it has Robert Lindsay, my beloved Captain Pellew from the Horatio Hornblower films, and Laura Fraser from A Knight's Tale. I had expected it to be more of a lighthearted black comedy like the US variety but the emphasis here is very much on the "black", as this is a story of IRA violence in northern Ireland and a hapless journalist who sleeps with the wrong woman in the midst of it. Despite being much bloodier than I expected, it was amazingly funny, and Thewlis and Isaacs were superb. Isaacs in particular gave the best line reading of a curse word in the history of cinema.

Since we were already in a Thewlis mood after that, we put on Gangster No. 1, which also stars the lovely Paul Bettany and (Trek relevance!) Malcolm McDowell. This is an even more violent movie of the sort that you normally could not pay me to watch, but in between the violence it's a very perverse and twisted love story of the sort that appeals to me. And, you know, it has Bettany and Thewlis in really nice suits, so I just didn't watch the bloodletting scenes.

After that it was obviously time for a nice change of pace so we watched Isaacs in Passionada, a love story set in New Bedford, Massachusetts where I visited barely a month ago. He plays a gambler who is wooing CSI: Miami's Sofia Milos, who enchants him with her singing. Isaacs is mostly known for playing bad guys and worse guys in Harry Potter, The Patriot, Soldier, Peter Pan, etc. so I adored seeing him as a romantic lead.

And then, being in a romantic lead mood, we watched Rickman in Mesmer. I knew nothing about Franz Anton Mesmer before this film and I tend to be sympathetic to mystics fighting either the tyranny of the church or what can become the tyranny of science -- the insistence that the incomplete research of any era represents an absolute rational approach to any given problem. But as this film portrays him, Mesmer was all too happy to bilk rich women of their money even if he genuinely believed in his principles. Rickman was superb -- smart and bitter and incredibly sexy and sinister and terribly passionate -- and who can resist him in period clothing, anyway?

Trek BBS Today

Below are some of the topics currently being discussed at the Trek BBS:

-Obvious Trek ripoffs!

-Archer: Has the man who never loses finally lost?

-Is Enterprise Star Trek material?

More topics can be found at the Trek BBS!

Trek Two Years Ago

These were some of the major news items from September 2002:

Final 'Carbon Creek' Ratings Stable
Enterprise's audience remained stable between its first and second episodes of the second season, with only a very slight drop for 'Carbon Creek' following 'Shockwave, Part Two'.
Berman On Upcoming 'Enterprise' Shows
Executive producer Rick Berman discussed episodes upcoming in the second season, including 'The Seventh', in which T'Pol took Archer and Mayweather on a secret mission to capture a dangerous Vulcan; 'The Communicator', where Archer and Reed nearly disrupted a pre-warp culture; and the then-unnamed 'Singularity', when a typical day is disrupted by some bizarre behavior.
Bakula Has An Alien Actor Encounter
"I bump into this guy - he's about 7''5 and he speaks to me in alien - 'OoG La MoO! Only he says to me the first time we do it 'I want to mate with you!'" protested scott Bakula (Archer), who described some of the pitfalls of playing a starship captain, like having a six-year-old child who gets scared when he works with "the blue faces."

More news can be found in the archives.

Poll Results

Below are the results of the most recent TrekToday poll:

How do you think 'Storm Front' will perform?
A few more people will tune in than last year	30.5% - (463 Votes)
'Enterprise' will be the new Friday night hit	30.5% - (463 Votes)
The ratings will stay about the same	21.2% - (322 Votes)
A few less people will tune in than last year	8.9% - (136 Votes)
'Enterprise' is going to flop	8.8% - (134 Votes)
Total Votes: 1518