Hope things start to look a bit brighter soon.

I like your movie selection method. I’ll randomly select some schlock that I’ve seen before, usually something that was at least vaguely entertaining and just play it in the background while I do various chores and cook.

Unfortunately not! You’ve exactly one full season until “Who Watches The Watchers” (S3E4), which is the point where they started producing scripts that were actually good and not retreads of TOS episodes.

I think the idea of what a sequel is supposed to be has gotten pretty skewed these days, thanks to vocal fans’ tendency to disown anything that’s not a rehash.

They wouldn’t form a lasting peace. The gorillas and chimps, with their opposable thumbs, would eventually figure out how to snap their fingers; and then the sharks'll be on them.

Have you seen the Dietrich movie The Garden of Allah? It is a deeply silly but kind of fascinating melodrama about a monk who falls in a love with an heiress in the North African desert (which was actually Yuma, Arizona).  

Right on. I am by nature a highly analytical person, it’s one of my defining traits. But my interest in the arts tests that sometimes, because while I do wind up analyzing film and music, I too really enjoy just letting things wash over me, and absorbing them in an intuitive manner. I’ve learned over time to balance…

I have found pockets of movies over the years that for some bewildering reason or other keep me engaged and I look forward to re-watching. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with their quality as good or bad cinema.

Yeah, it’s a damn mystery. 

But you know what obvious question that brings up: why do you watch any movies, much less art-house material that probably less than 1% of the population would pay any attention to?

L’Avventura starts off with a great idea (someone vanishes but instead of it being a mystery or thriller about that, it drifts away into something else) but never really capitalizes on it.

Thanks, Binky! It seems like my replies have started being automatically accepted/posted (non-grey......whatevs) but my original posts still sit “pending”. Now, that may be because several of my recent original posts have been me screeching at the incompetent writers here and their inability to compose a handful of…

Thanks. I’m no expert on Antonioni, but have enjoyed a lot of what I’ve seen from him.

Damn, I gotta get around to Zabriskie Point. I left it behind unwatched when I started getting away from art-house film. I looooove Blow-Up though.

What I mean is that the movie so nonsensical and the movies and shows following it rarely if ever acknowledge it that it’s practically non-canonical to the point that it might as well have taken place in Kirk’s head. 

And then chuckling self-impressedly at the cleverness of his interpretation. Nimoy refused to commit to it with the script as it was first written, btw, because it strayed so far afield from what had been established as Spock’s character. Shatner had to make changes before Nimoy would come aboard.

If Star Trek V is a cookie that’s too something, I’d say it was too...cheap. Like, Shatner wasn’t allowed to go shopping first, and was only allowed to make cookies with the ingredients that had been sitting in the cupboard of a kitchen which hadn’t been used or entered for years - the vanilla with the lid not screwed…

I actually liked Star Trek V. Had absolutely no idea a long time that people regarded it as a bad movie. The ‘’Why does God need a spaceship?’’ climax was well done, IMHO.

Star Trek 5 is more akin to Star Trek fanfic than an actual Star Trek film. It’s not the worst Star Trek movie because you can largely write it off as mostly taking place in Kirk’s head. That distinction in my mind goes to Into Darkness.

The Director’s Cut was very much improved from the original theatrical “Motionless Picture” cut. Robert Wise apparently wasn’t used to working with a lot of very complex special effects, and the studio absolutely wouldn’t budge from its announced release date; the story that I read was that the effects were so delayed…