A Personal History of the American Theater. Skip Blumberg. 1985. ⚃

This was an extra on the Criterion bluray of Gray’s Anatomy.

So it’s a VHS from a performance from 1982?

[half an hour passes]

It’s… Gray telling anecdotes about theatre performances he’d performed in, and the sequence is supposed to be random — he’s got a shuffled box of title cards that says what the order is.

But he’s also got a script he’s consulting so it’s not random? Theatre, man!

For some of the plays he just says what the title was (and where it was performed) and then he goes on to the next one. On others, like Commune, he talks for fifteen minutes about the thing (and what was going on while it was being done).

The audience is very… receptive. That is, they laugh a lot, even when what he’s saying isn’t very funny. I mean, after basically every line, somebody laughs, which is just weird.

Or perhaps they were all really stoned? I guess that’s not unlikely.

Because this isn’t really that funny, and it’s not really that interesting, either.

[more time passes]

Somehow… it all sort of came together in the last twenty minutes. It’s weird. I’m not sure what he did, exactly.

Gray’s Anatomy. Steven Soderbergh. 1996. ⚄

Well…

I was somewhat sceptical. I mean, everybody loves Sex, Lies and Soderbergh, but has he done any movies after that (his first) that’s any good?

On the other hand, this is Spalding Gray, who’s fun.

So I was hoping this would just be Gray on a stage with a static camera, and… this isn’t that. It’s the most spruced-up stage thing ever.

I’m also having a lot of difficulty connecting to his story, because he’s talking about all these weird cures for his eye thing. I have the same thing, and my eye doctor told me what it was, and that it might fix itself. And then the next time I visited him, he told me that it’d fixed itself.

That’s less drama.

I didn’t even visit a single Christian Science person, or any sweat lodges, or any nutritionists, or any psychic surgeons.

I’m not trying to say that my complacent passivity is any good or anything, but… It’s like…

Americans are weird?

But his eye anecdotes are funny, and mine aren’t. So he wins.

Star Trek Beyond. Justin Lin. 2016. ⚄

I’ve seen this before, but on DVD (I think). Now it’s 4K, so it’s… more…

More.

Oh, this isn’t by JJ Abrams? WILL THERE BE NO HORIZONTAL LENS FLARES?!?!

[half an hour passes]

This started off fun, but then there was fifteen minutes of character development and stuff (zzz), and then…

SO MUCH ACTION

I wonder about the economics of Kraal having a million space ships (I mean, they all presumably have to have a shower and a toilet and a kitchen and stuff) instead of a lesser number of bigger ships, but those swarms sure look cool.

[more time passes]

I’m really enjoying this. It’s a good old-fashioned action slash adventure thing with scrappy girls and guys fighting against the odds. It’s not exactly a Trek movie? But it’s a lot of fun.

I see that the director has done a bunch of Fast & Furious movies, so now I want to see whether those are good, too. I had assumed that they were eh not?

[and now it’s over]

I wondered why there hadn’t been any further Trek movies — this one was so much fun. But it was a very, very expensive movie to make (and it shows), and… well, I don’t know how much money this netted the studio, but I’m guessing it was a wash? The previous Trek movie grossed $470M (which sounds profitable at this budget), but $350M sounds dodgy.

But at least we have TV… with the disappointing Discovery series, and the execrable Picard series. Perhaps the new Pike series will be good.