The Dinner
Melissa had been wanting to go to La Parigo in downtown Knoxville since they opened six months or so ago. It’s a small setting inside with a covered patio outside where we ate and watched the rain. Apparently they used to be in Bearden in Mango’s old building and Southern Living them named them one of the top three French restaurants in the South, which for all I know is like being one of the three best BBQ restaurants in France.
Everything we ate except the dessert was from the du jour selections. Salad was an ahi tuna tartar with blueberries. I liked it; Melissa was crazy for it. Soup was a creamy potato and leek. Melissa liked it; I thought it was delicious and would order it again. The entree was a white fish whose name I didn’t recognize with a caper sauce, tomatoes, and sauteed Brusell sprouts, which were better than they sound, I swear.
Our waiter was especially professional, unobtrusive, and likable. I wish I had asked his name so I could thank him here for his hospitality.
Dessert was a pistachio creme brulee. It was good, but not as Pistachio-ey as I expected (and it wasn’t green, either). I prefer the Northshore Brasserie’s creme brulee with its incredibly delicate caramelized top, and in general I couldn’t help comparing La Parigo to two other Knoxville restaurants we like, the Brasserie and Bistro By The Tracks. The former is explicitly French, while the latter has French as one of its influences and is my favorite restaurant in Knoxville for the sheer enjoyment of food I can’t get anywhere else.
Right now La Parigo is in third place. We liked it quite a bit, but it stopped short of being mind-blowing. Still, I’m looking forward to our next visit to have my mind blown.
The Movie
Star Trek on the other hand was completely mind-blowing. On the big screen its vision is enormous and overwhelming. The young actors inhabiting the rebooted Trek universe are brilliant and charismatic – you can’t help worrying about them when they’re in danger, which they are constantly. I’m not a big Star Trek fan and I’m ready to pay to see it at the theater again.
From reading Jason Kottke I knew going in that the movie made extensive use of lens flare. It’s as if they’re so close to the stars with no atmosphere to protect them that there is blinding light everywhere that the camera can’t escape it. Normally lens flare is something the director and cameraman try to avoid. But just as with distortion in musical instruments you can use that mistake, that input overload, to create new textures and background and that’s what they did here to good effect.
This morning I mentioned jwz’s take on time travel: “If your story is not about time travel, but it has time travel in it, then your story sucks.” The new Trek movie falls into the sucks camp by that standard. I don’t think the time travel here really makes sense since it’s of the going-back-in-time-to-change-history variety. (If that’s the case, someone should go back in time to undo the bad guy’s actions. Either events mean something or they don’t.) It also wasn’t strictly necessary. They could have changed the story ever so slightly to change the bad guy’s motivation and done away with time travel altogether.
Slight spoilerage – highlight the text to read. It’s almost as if they used the time travel conceit to shoehorn Leonard Nimoy into the movie. And if that’s the case that would be bad, except that I really, really enjoyed him here. It’s as if my favorite uncle came back from the dead and I just can’t get enough of listening to his gravelly but wise voice. So all in all I’ll take the time travel nonsense to see the original Spock better than ever.
Ratings
La Parigo – Magnificque
Star Trek – Mother Vulcan Awesome
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Star Trek: Would it be ok to bring a 7 year old to see it?? Mine is dying to go. But my wife is reluctant to let me take him.
Well, in this particular interpretation of time travel, actions do not mean anything.
The writers (and characters) seem to ascribe to the “parallel reality” theory, wherein if you go back in time and change something, that particular “present” shunts off from the “normal” time stream and starts making its own reality. If you were to go back in time and change that again, you would just be shunting another time stream to another reality, and creating a wholly new universe all over again (but still the “original” and “first shunt” universes would keep going, doing their things, on their own timelines).
I think the point with the time travel was to accentuate that this is the Star Trek universe, but it ain’t your daddy’s Trek – the same people, the same technology, but turns of events have changed the time stream from what we all knew and loved to something new and different. After all, you cannot just go back and rewrite canon – people like me get pissed off about that (See “Enterprise”). But creating a whole new timeline? Yeah, I can live with that, with a firm enough application of the “I Believe” button.
Countertop: There was a copious amount of violence and mayhem, but not a whole lot of blood, and almost no expletives. Nudity was limited to topless males and females in their skivvies. It depends on what your family’s tolerances of those things is
.
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Top: It’s PG-13 for violence. Like Linoge says there’s nothing adult in it except an underwear scene, but it’s violent and scary in parts. My wife closed her eyes and looked away during the torture scene.
Linoge: I think the parallel universes thing is a total cop-out whenever it’s used. You wind up with one universe where a piece of paper is face up and another where it’s face down because of a time traveller. With all the time travelers and all of their small changes you get an infinite number of universes. If you’re changing one of an infinite number of similar timelines as a viewer I’m inclined to say who cares – there are an infinite number of timeslines where things go badly.
So, why go back in time to change things? I guess you could say the bad guy was crazy and was just doing it for a personal sense of revenge, but I found it unsatisfying, especially since they didn’t explain how these people time travelled. (And while avoiding spoilers as much as possible, that explanation doesn’t work for another character’s time traveling. If he wasn’t trying to change destiny, what the hell was he doing?)
And then there’s all of the paradoxes of time travel. If time travel is possible, wouldn’t lots of people go back in time to see historic events like James T. Kirk’s first mission? You’d expect the Enterprise’s deck to be filled with retirees and tourists sucking on umbrella drinks and taking videos to upload to their Facebook accounts.
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But he was trying to change destiny – his (and, more directly, his wife’s/planet’s). Yeah, he was a self-centered little prat, but that is pretty much what it boils down to.
As for why he went back in time, and why more people would not if the situation allowed for it, I think the entire temporal displacement was something of an accident – after all, he did kind of accidentally get sucked into a black hole (which is not always guaranteed to be survivable, even as demonstrated by the movie). He did not know what year it was on the other side, and I think the entire thing was basically, “When the crap are we? Oh, wait, we are back here? Hm, what can I do now that I am here…”
In fact, discounting the farce known as “Enterprise”, time travel in the Star Trek universe almost universally happens by accident… At least that much is consistent.
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Ah, you’re right about how he time traveled. I forgot about that.
I like it that it is an odd anomaly. The storyline basically acknowledges that you are dealing with titanic forces on a galactic scale. It isn’t a technology that somebody possesses. As long as they stick with it being an anomaly and don’t abuse that it should be fine.
This movie is fast. Traditional Trek battles in space are ponderous affairs. This thing was blazing in its development of action and character. I almost wish they had slowed down a tad. Let me drink in a bit more of it.
The subtle way that they blended in ToS sound effects and imagery gave the movie a very unique style. The new Trek future doesn’t look like other futures we’ve seen on the screen. It is a suis generis future where military uniforms come in primary colors – and apparently a world where a lot of PC bullsh1t from the 21st century has been forgotten. Cadets get drunk and brawl – officers kiss each other in the turbolift – McCoy calls Spock a green something-or-other and nobody reports him to Starfleet HR. The new Trek future looks very un-PC.
Checkov is brilliant. I knew a kid just like that in the Coast Guard. He was bright and a bit spastic. He could fix anything but spoke in unintelligible bursts and would run down the passageways when inspiration struck him. You believe many of the characters in this movie because you’ve seen them in real life.
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