I've been so late to Star Trek memorabilia

This was a reply in Google+ to a comment, which encouraged people not to go to watch any new Star Trek movies.

Well, unfortunately, the first 'Trek movie I saw in a cinema, was Into Darkness.
• My first physical Trek item was a keychain I got from my sister in 1995, who returned from a student trip to Florida. I loved the keychain, but after years of use, the appended Trek Star pendant was unable to hold itself onto the keychain, and is now lost somewhere. I still have the keychain part.
• My first 'Trek DVD is "Star Trek: Nemesis" (a present from a close relative).
• I bought my first and only Trek toy just a couple of years ago, and it was a small JJ-Enterprise by Hot Wheels.

I'm 34, and so late with all that fan stuff, though I've been a Trek fan since I first saw "Q Who?" on Finnish tv at a classmate's house.

And when I was a kid, I first heard of Star Trek in a hospital from an older kid (a teenager). It was the second or fourth time I was in a hospital, because I had had an ear infection (again). I still remember how he drew the outline of Enterprise-D, and said that people lived there and stuff. It was truly fascinating.

I can't exactly remember which year it was, but Estonia had not yet regained independence, and Finnish tv was officially verboten, but change was in the air already.

Not all people could see Finnish commercial tv channel MTV3 (launched in 1986), because their sets didn't have the "Finnish block" or "the Finnish antenna" (probably PAL support), but those that could see, salivated at all the yoghurt ads, and cried the most bitter tears for not having all that yummy goodness :9

Whilst we had the deficit. And there were block-long queues for sugar, for milk, for butter, for meat (any kind), for oranges (rare!),

for tangerines (only during holidays),

for bananas (the nomenklatura and the wives of Soviet officers could have a lot of everything from special shops meant for the nomenklatura, but bananas were on occasion sold to families with lots of children),

for cotton (important for the ladies),

for ciggies, for vodka, and for almost everything else.

Basically, anywhere you saw a queue, you joined it and then information about what people were standing in the queue for, was eventually passed down the grapevine. Like in that children's game of "Telephone" (-:

What went wrong with Star Trek: Nemesis

This is in reply to a post on IMDb's Stuart Baird forum thread regarding what his input was to "Star Trek: Nemesis". The advantage to this post here is that threads on IMDb get sometimes deleted as a matter of cleanup, and I can also edit this one here for further comment.

It is soon almost ten years since the film was released, well past the 2009 "Star Trek" movie directed by J.J. Abrams, and I am making my review only now.

The post herein lists some of the things I thought went wrong with making Star Trek: Nemesis and contains an opinion about the stuff that I would have made.

Indeed, it is yet another and one of many posts that list the things that were and went wrong with Nemesis. Many people, of course, do vouch to be the expert storymaker and director after a flop, yet hindsight also gives us the opportunity not to repeat the mistakes and do things better.

So, for starters, I noted a poster there was actally correct in terms of who actually ran the show, and I made a conclusion:

All in all, it was a confluence of bad calls and decisions:

* John Logan is an awesome team writer. With him doing a solo job on Nemesis, the studio should have assigned someone to take a critical look at the script before it was put into production.

The Reman storyline was ok, though fairly one-sided, as it is. I would have never allowed such a terrible name as "Shinzon". Pieces of "B4" on another planet was also a great idea, but I would have certainly scrapped the car chase for better VFX, and perhaps given the non-space-faring planet a greater role in the dispute over Scimitar the ship and weapon of mass destruction.

* Tom Hardy is a really nice actor and played his bit with vengeance. I can't really see how the appearance of his face is in any way similar to that of Patrick Stewart. Hardy also has really luscious lips :-9

* Stuart Baird is an accomplished film editor, but his directorial effort is something right out of "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn".

The more I thought of it, the more I realized that the Nemesis directing situation was almost exactly out of Burn Hollywood, where an editor by trade becomes the director (I admit I haven't seen Burn Hollywood properly, but I'm sure the situation described has happened aplenty in this industry) and is hostage to the whims of the producer, in addition getting into conflict with the actors and everyone else involved. btw, Burn, Hollywood has Whoopi Goldberg in it <:

And one more thing: "Skyfall" has John Logan as one of the writers and Stuart Baird as the editor. Skyfall has raked in a gross of almost $800 million dollars worldwide.

I believe the TNG cast still deserves another movie, one that has a polished script for starters, and preferably with Denise Crosby in it as the wily Sela. But the clock is ticking.