Star Trek Beyond

One of the characteristics of a myth is its tenacity. The Greek myths have obviously endured for millennia and still infuse our culture. Stars Wars is a franchise which has also attained mythic status and the same can be said for Star Trek which has had iterations both as a classic television series and series of films. But how do characters age in myth? Harrison Ford returned as Han Solo in Star Wars:The Force Awakens, but by the end of the movie he’d been consigned to cosmic as well a cinematic oblivion. In the recently released Star Trek Beyond, Kirk (Chris Pine), Scotty of “beam me up Scotty fame” (Simon Pegg), Chekov (Anton Yelchin, who in reality was killed in a freak accident before the film was released) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) are all back as well as the iconic starship Enterprise. But with Leonard Nimoy gone Spock, for all intents and purposes, inhabits another universe and at the end of the film he flips a page from the family album where the original Kirk (William Shattner) appears. Without igniting a spoiler alert an interesting element of the plot in this new edition of Star Trek lies in the fact that the villains are not really aliens. And though the vision of their leader Krall (Idris Elba) aka Balthazar Edison is one of eternal strife and struggle (Kelly Clarkson's “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”), he  possesses a hive mind—which turns out to be his undoing. Like Rey (Daisy Ridley) in the Star Wars sequel, Star Trek also contains a heroine Jaylah (Sofia Boutella) who is a refugee from tyranny. But what's most interesting are the new phenotypes which cross the screen. As with Zeus, Atlas, Hera  or any of the classic heroes of yore, our current race of superheroes, in this case Krall/Edison and Spock (who contemplates retirement in this latest version) have undergone their own evolution, interacting and finally reflecting the worlds of out of which they’ve been created, in order to reinterpret the original myths which gave birth to them in the first place.

Good at Being Bad

Sisyphys by Titian

Giles Harvey's “Cry Me a River" (The New Yorker, 3/25/13) takes a look Benjamin Anastos’s Too Good to be True, Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and The Sound of No Hands Clapping, David Goodwillie’s Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Josh Gidding’s Failure: An Autobiography,Tom Grimes’s Mentor: A Memoir, Greg Baxter’s A Preparation for Death and David Shields’ How Literature Saved My Life. With the exception of the Shields title which is less concerned with personal failure than the failure of fiction itself, Harvey set himself a Sisyphean task in trying to come up with something positive say about such a large number of books about failure. You can almost picture Harvey with his legs up on his desk and the review copies of the books on failure in an auspicious pile—with say Memoirs of Literary Failure being the straw that breaks the camel’s back in terms of blocking the view out of his window at The New Yorker. But where does someone like Josh Gidding go? Failure: An Autobiography is not like Star Wars. Despite the fact that Toby Young did write The Sound of No Hands Clapping after How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, there is not likely to be a sequel to the Gidding volume. And what about the failed writers whose whole existence has become a cliché? What about those autobiographies of failure that fail to merit mention in even a piece like Harvey’s? What about the angry diatribes, in which the writer blames everyone from the publisher to his wife, that fail to get published at all? What about those books that aren’t good at being bad?

Richard III

What is the origin of the evil in Sam Mendes production of Richard III?  Kevin Spacey plays a Richard that will take its place with the great historical renditions of the role and the citations of Mussolini (strung up by his heels), of Qaddafi in his epaulets are quite clear as is the reference to technology (in this case image creation by way of a large screen TV) as the whipping boy of fascism. Elias Canetti wrote a book called Crowds and Power and the crowds in the Bridge Project's rendition of the play abet the evil. This Richard III is not a modernized Shakespearean production influenced by Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Instead Mendes leaves the final chapter of The War of the Roses as a history play that freely partakes of the future.  So that besides our latter day tyrants this Richard is firmly anchored in fantasy and science fiction and could easily be subtitled The Empire Strikes Back. The Star Wars analogy is made clear from the beginning in the futuristic typeface used to project the names of characters who dominate individual scenes. The current production parenthetically also makes one ponder the Shakespearean origins of Star Wars (and other similar fare) with its ornate universe of evil and in the end as Spacey finally holds court and the perspective of the stage is deepened, the set does momentarily take on a sci-fi quality. But Mendes, the director of American Beauty in which Spacey also starred, is known for his visual effects and the stage at BAM is transformed into a buffet of visual references to die for including one scene in which Mendes presents the London Underground as Magritte might have imagined it, with bowler hats and yes clouds. Spacey played Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, a character who only acts the part of the cripple as a cover up. Spacey’s gnarled Richard isn’t covering up anything and while the malignity is as superhuman as the performance (whose portrayal of gratuitious evil surpasses even the actor’s John Doe character in David Fincher’s Seven), the shock value comes in the recognition of something almost true to life.