We went out to see Star Trek tonight, which pretty much made a liar of me when I told JeffP that we never do that. In this case, Diana wanted to keep her weekend afternoons free for gardening, and it wasn't a school night.
And I remember why we don't usually go at night. Nine bucks? Really? We typically do the first matinee for five. Ouch. Plus the theater was crowded, including a bunch of obnoxious pre-teens who stood up and yelled surprise when some girl walked in... during the first scene. WTF? I was pissed.
But anyway, yeah, Star Trek. It was awesome. The casting was great (Simon Pegg as Scotty was an excellent choice), it was visually stunning, and the story brilliantly made it so that the "reboot" of Star Trek can boldly go where no Star Trek story has gone before. I won't post a spoiler, but I will say that the decades of history created by the previous movies and TV shows means absolutely nothing going forward. I'm not really a Trek fan, or not to the extent that Diana is at least, but I was into it. And best of all, they worked out all of the classic Star Trek cliche lines, without them sounding like cliches.
The only thing that was really missing was some kind of political or social theme to it, as the previous movie and shows typically had. Sure, there was some inter-racial-inter-species love, but that's more or less accepted these days. And if you really wanted to stretch it, you might infer that there was some lesson about letting go of a culture's past aggressions, but that's really thinking creatively.
Regardless, I loved it.
Looking over the cast on IMDB, holy shit did I know a lot of those actors, even though I couldn't place them. The green chick with red hair was in Alias, in the role that presumably would've replaced Jennifer Garner's character had it not been cancelled (she'll be in GI Joe with red hair as well). The bad guy was the dick in The Other Boleyn Girl. Sulu is of course Harold/MILF kid. House hottie Jennifer Morrison is Kirk's mom. One of the bridge crew members was Marshal's wife on Alias.
Last weekend we saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine. All I can really say about it is that it was OK. I generally love the stuff out of the Marvel universe, and it was entertaining, but it wasn't particularly memorable either. I don't know how much it stuck to the existing mythology or whatever, but I just felt so indifferent about it. Lots of action and explosions, mutants, and of course Xavier shows up. If they plan to do similar movies for other characters, I hope they're better.