TWO TO BEAM UP

Last week was tough on us Trekkies. Within a few days of each other, we had to say farewell to Walter Koenig, aka Ensign Chekhov...

...and to Patrick Stewart, aka Captain Picard...

...on The Next Generation and other Star Trek iterations.

I was lucky enough to meet both of them. In the mid-'80s, Koenig came to a sci-fi convention in my beloved hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, and between autograph sessions I got to sit down with him briefly for the Erie Times-News. He was very nice, though I recall he spent a good bit of the interview on the usual supporting actor's complaint: He wasn't given enough to do.

He grumbled that he and George Takei were "somewhere between furniture and air" in Star Trek III, though he was pleased that he had just gotten to do a funny bit in Star Trek IV; asking about "nuclear wessels" in a Russian accent on the street in San Francisco in the middle of the Cold War. He also mentioned that he had just gotten to write an issue of the DC Comics Star Trek series, and had agreed to do so only if Chekhov's name was in the title and his picture was on the cover...

It was startling, last week, to realize that the perennially boyish Koenig was 90 when he died. Looking at contemporary pictures of him, his age doesn't seem real; he looks like a college kid made up to play Nonno in Night of the Iguana...

My Patrick Stewart story is a little better. I met him in L.A. in 1996, on Paramount's joint press junket for Star Trek: First Contact and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. Stewart came in apologizing that he had a cold, and sat next to me at the critics round tables.

He was given a small plate of fruit, which he picked at as he told me that he hoped to do King Lear twice, once as a character part when he was relatively young and vital, and then again when he was actually old and doddering. I can find no evidence that he ever did play the role onstage (though he played Cornwall opposite Eric Porter in the early '70s). But he did play "John Lear" in a 2002 TV movie Western adaptation called King of Texas.

When he finished his session, Stewart thanked us graciously and got up, then placed his less than half finished plate of fruit in front of me. I wasn't about to miss the chance to share a fruit plate with the great Patrick Stewart, so I snarfed the remainder up. And caught his cold.

Unlike Koenig, Stewart didn't seem boyish at 86--he probably never seemed boyish, even when he was a boy--but he did seem vital. It was shocking to hear he had passed, and of dementia at that; it seemed like he was working until very recently.

I've never been a passionate fan of The Next Generation; I like it, and I like the movies spun off from it, but I never got in the regular habit of watching the series, and there are many episodes I have yet to see. Stewart, however, I'm a big fan of. I think the first time I saw him to notice him was as Claudius in a 1980 BBC production of Hamlet starring Derek Jacobi; it was impossible not to notice Sewart's voice and presence. He was also one of the best, most imaginative versions of Scrooge, in a 1999 TV-movie of A Christmas Carol.

To commemorate Koenig and Stewart, this weekend I watched 1994's Star Trek: Generations...

...the only adventure (I think) in which both Chekhov and Picard appear, though they have no scenes together.

I was trying to think which episodes of the original series would be most Chekhov-forward for use in a memorial retrospective. I read that Koenig's own favorite episode was "Spectre of the Gun," in which he had a romance--with Wavy Gravy's wife in real life, Bonnie Beecher--and got to bravely face death. Okay, fair enough, but there should also be episodes that show his cool hand during battle, episodes in which he went murderously crazy, and above all...episodes in which he screamed. Walter Koenig was the Fay Wray of Star Trek; he had a better, more agonized shriek than any of the women on the show.

So here is my Chekhovian Top Ten:

"Spectre of the Gun" (because he liked it.)

"I, Mudd" (because he gets to act silly.)

"The Gamesters of Triskelion" (because he has an awkward scene with an imposing, deep-voiced woman who likes him, and refers to him as "Cheek-oov.")

"The Deadly Years" (excellent scream near the beginning.)

"Mirror, Mirror" (gets to act evil; also screams.)

"The Trouble with Tribbles" (claims, of Scotch, that "a little old lady from Leningrad inwented it.")

"The Day of the Dove" (goes nuts toward the Klingons because of his non-existent brother "Pyotr"; also sexually assaults Susan Howard as a Klingon woman who looks like she could knock him on his ass.)

"The Tholian Web" (goes crazy; screams; "And the Children Shall Lead" would be another alternate.)

"Journey to Babel" (cool in battle; "Elaan of Troyius" would be another alternate.)

"The Way to Eden" (the notorious "hippie" episode; he gets a romance with an old flame.)

And of course, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan should be mentioned, for Chekhov's memorable encounter with Khan's pets. Also, he screams.

Peace and joy eternal, gentlemen; thank you both.

TRIUMPH OF THE BILL

Last March, for my birthday, The Wife gifted me a ticket to William Shatner Live at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix, preceded by a showing of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Thursday night was the big night!

Great to be at the Orpheum, and among my people: Boomer nerds!

My pal Gayle was there...

Among other friends and costumed fans...

There were many great Star Trek t-shirts, but I also saw one guy wearing a black shirt with "DENNY CRANE" in white letters across the chest. That's a serious Shatner fan, I thought.

Walking up the aisle I saw a woman that I know, who has never struck me as the Star Trek type.

"I never knew you were part of this particular dorkdom," I said.

"It's [my husband's] thing," she quickly assured me. "I told him I wanted to walk around saying 'Nanu, Nanu' to everybody."

Great also to see Wrath of Khan again. I hadn't seen it from beginning to end in some years; it holds up most entertainingly. Not only as a ripping adventure yarn but as a rumination on age and youth and mortality and the needs of the many and of the one, it felt far more meaningful to me now than it did when I was in my twenties.

And then there was the star of the evening. As soon as I entered the Orpheum's lobby, I was urged to get into a second line to sign up for a post-show VIP experience of a meet-and-greet, autograph, picture and access to exclusive merch. I resisted, but hundreds of people (including Gayle) lined up.

After the film, two hosts, local radio morning man John Holmberg and the talented comedian and impressionist Frank Caliendo came out, both doing pretty respectable Shatners. Then the man himself, now 94, came bounding onstage. At very little provocation from the emcees, he started talking...

...and talking and talking...

...and talking. His talk ranged from knock knock jokes ("Who's there?" "KHAAAAN!") and stories of using the men's room at the Denny's in Quartzsite to extended riffs about his conversations with Neil deGrasse Tyson and his (Shatner's) belief that the Universe is sentient, to a strange story about DeForest Kelley's dog, to a stranger story about his own dog, in his barnstorming theatre days in Cape Cod. Among much else. He rambled, losing the track of one story and shifting to another, often searching for words which the audience called out to him.

It was wonderful to be there, because there he was, up on stage: Captain Kirk himself. Of course he isn't Captain Kirk, and never was; by most accounts he was always a hyper, frenetic fellow. Now he seems like a crazy old man, but with the energy and exuberance of a man at least forty years younger.

All of which is well and good and enjoyable, as long as he isn't being exploited by this tour. It was almost 11 p.m. when the main show was over, and as I walked back to my car it occurred to me that he still had those hundreds of VIP fans to work through, after which, he said, they were headed on to Anaheim for a Friday show.

The next day I asked Gayle how the experience was, and she texted back "quick. he didn't say a word. he just smiled when i said he was my first crush...they ran us through there like a streamlined machine."

This was the second time in my life I saw Shatner, by the way. For many decades I have been "collecting" meetings with the original series Star Trek cast: I interviewed DeForest Kelley and Walter Koenig and, by phone on my KTAR radio show, Grace Lee Whitney. And I got an autograph from James Doohan. Alas, I missed Leonard Nimoy, Majel Barrett and my first crush, Nichelle Nichols. And I'd still like to catch up with George Takei.

But I saw Shatner first. In 1973 my Mom took me and my Trek-loving cousin Debbie to the Kenley Playhouse in Warren, Ohio, to see Shatner in Arsenic and Old Lace, supported by Sylvia Sidney as one of the lethal Aunts and by Peter Lupus of Mission: Impossible as Johnny Brewster (I later learned that this role was originally cast with Lon Chaney, Jr., but he died just before the production and was replaced by Lupus at the last minute; I've often thought that if I saw both William Shatner and Lon Chaney Jr. on the same day my head might have exploded).

 

Seeing that show was a big, formative highlight of my childhood. My memory is that Shatner was genuinely first-rate as the panicked hero Mortimer Brewster. As with Wrath of Khan's themes of age and youth, to see Shatner scramble around farcically onstage when I was 11, and then to see him do it again now that I'm 63 certainly gave me a circle-of-life feeling.

A VIEW FROM THE RIDGE

Any play that begins with a figure in black brandishing an inflatable pterodactyl on a stick deserves some credit. A Klingon Hamlet, a Ronin Theatre Company production playing for just one more weekend at Stage Left in Glendale, has many such flourishes of very low-tech theatricality.

As the title indicates, it's a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet performed in Klingon drag. The actors are costumed, and made-up with the ridge-browed foreheads, of Klingons, the warlike aliens from the Star  Trek franchise.

The adaptation, by Keath Hall--who also directed, and plays the title role--and E.C. Darling-Bond (who plays Horatio), boils the play down to its bare essentials and substitutes many words and phrases for Klingon references. The duel is fought with Klingon weapons, for instance, and Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to Earth rather than to England.

Familiarity with the Klingon language, invented by the linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek movies, is not needed to watch the show, however. At the beginning the handy "universal translator" is engaged so that we hear the actors in English, except for the play-within-the-play, which is indeed in Klingon, with a projected translation. Hall and Darling-Bond wisely see to it that the whole thing clocks in at under two hours; they don't let the gag wear out its welcome.

They also don't try--again, probably wisely--for any deeply tragic tone. The flavor is droll and facetious, right down to Hamlet singing snatches of contemporary pop songs, or putting on an "antic disposition" by donning a red clown nose, and wearing it for a fair amount of his stage time.

The skill of the actors varies widely, but everyone is game and committed. At ten, however, the cast is too small; the doubling gets pretty awkward at times. The show could have used at least one more actor, possibly two. Maybe there just weren't enough ridge brows for any more.

C.D. Macauley delivers some true Shakespearean music as The Ghost, The Player King and The Gravedigger; he nicely sings Spock's ballad from the original series episode "Plato's Stepchildren" in the latter role. Kate Haas generates some honest emotion in Ophelia's mad scene. Wes Martin's Claudius is commanding and despicably genial.

The star, however, is Hall. His antic approach to the title role works well with his persona, which comes across like a contemporary comic leading man in the movies, a Vince Vaughn or a Jason Bateman. More than many other Shakespearean plays, the success of Hamlet depends on the likability of the lead, our ability to identify with him, root for him, enjoy his company. Even if it had nothing else going for it, and it does, on that score alone A Klingon Hamlet succeeds.

SPACE STAGE

Check out my Phoenix Magazine preview of Ronin Theatre Company's A Klingon Hamlet...

...playing, in an abridged form, at Phoenix Fan Fusion at 4:30 p.m. today, June 7, and full-length at Stage Left Productions in Glendale for the last two weekends in June.

Let the record show that Your Humble Narrator has been covering the Klingon-Shakespeare connection since 2002, when I wrote this for the Detroit Metro Times.

Also online at Phoenix Magazine, here's my preview of playwright Ashley Naftule's latest, Selena and Judy Go Dancing...

...opening this weekend at Space 55.

DOVE TALE

Again and again I find myself sheepishly admitting that Star Trek, as in the original series, is my all-time favorite TV show. It's a little embarrassing to acknowledge that, north of sixty years old, I keep going back for comfort and refreshment to the corny sci-fi show that I loved as a kid.

Worse yet, for all the show's sophomoric heavy-handedness and cultural chauvinism and ludicrous science and inconsistently applied social values, I keep finding relevance, even prescience in it.

For instance, this past weekend I watched the third-season episode, scripted by the redoubtable Jerome Bixby (also author of the story that became the Twilight Zone favorite "It's a Good Life"), called "Day of the Dove..."

You may remember it: Both the Enterprise and a crew of Klingons arrive at a planet, lured there under false pretenses by a powerful incorporeal alien Entity. Through a variety of mind tricks and matter transmutation, the Entity gets the Federation crew and the Klingons trapped together aboard the Enterprise, which is hurtling out of control on course to leave the galaxy.

Onboard, the factions are allowed their own turf, armed with swords--Scotty admires "a Claymore..."

...and psychically aroused to furious hatred toward their adversaries and even toward each other. They soon discover that the conflict between them is self-renewing; their wounds heal miraculously and the Entity allows neither side complete victory.

As a kid, I always thought it was a pretty cool episode. It had plenty of action, including swordfights, and the coolest and most badass of all the original series Klingons, Kang, played by the rumbly-voiced Michael Ansara...

...towering over Shatner...

It was also the only glimpse we ever got, in the original series, of Klingon women, notably Susan Howard as Kang's wife and science officer Mara...

In the course of the show Chekov, under the Entity's evil influence, attempts to violate Mara, although it looks like she could smack his little ass across the corridor with one hand.

Along with Chekov, Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura all get to work themselves up into highly entertaining angry lathers in this one. Shatner's in particularly hilarious, wound-up form here: "Look at me...Look. At. Me." And there's the great moment when the hysterical Scotty, responding to Spock's attempt to calm him, says "Keep your Vulcan hands off me," but it sounds like he said "Keep your f**kin' hands off me."

But watching it the other night, it occurred to me that this episode seems unusually relevant these days. I noticed this a few years ago about the second-season episode "The Omega Glory" as well. The theme, about the dangers of fetishizing and theocratizing America's foundational documents and other objects of patriotic regard like the flag, seems like a pedestrian, basic civics lesson. But it turns out that our society needs to be reminded of it regularly.

Similarly, with "Day of the Dove," the message might seem, at a glance, like the usual honorable but ineffectual Star Trek platitudes about the horrors of war and the bondage of bigotry and the liberating virtue of tolerance. But now, in light of the revelations from the Dominion lawsuit, it has a strikingly specific subtext. Because, of course, the reason the invading Entity is attempting to create this hellish eternal conflict on the Enterprise is that it feeds on violent hatreds, turning from yellowish-white to a happy shade of red...

...when it sucks up some delicious fury.

It creates false narratives in people's minds to stir up their bloodlust--Chekov claims his brother was killed by the Klingons; Sulu later explains that the brother is imaginary, as Chekov is an only child--and feeds both sides with propaganda to gin up enmity. Essentially, the Entity is a farmer, planting outrage so that it can harvest rage. 

In other words, the Entity is Fox News, and the "news" media machine of which Fox News is the most successful and egregious example. I mean, isn't it, kind of?

In this context, some of Bixby's lines take on an extra resonance, as when Kirk speculates "Has a war been staged for us, complete with weapons and ideology and patriotic drum beating? Even...Spock...even race hatred?"

Or, when Kirk says "It exists on the hate of others," and Spock replies "To put it simply. And it has acted as a catalyst, creating this situation in order to satisfy that need."

Or, again, Kirk's desperate appeal to Kang, in the climactic minutes: "...and it goes on, the good old game of war, pawn against pawn! Stopping the bad guys. While somewhere, something sits back, and laughs, and starts it all over again."

In the end, Kang is persuaded, a truce is ordered, and the weakened Entity is chased off the Enterprise to hearty laughter from both sides...

Kang slaps Kirk on the back and for a second it looks like Kirk is going to pass out. A lovely moment; I would highly recommend it for our nation right now. But as the Entity goes flittering off the ship into space, it's all too easy to imagine it scurrying down to some TV "News" Network on some unsuspecting planet.

A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE REACTION

Check out Your Humble Narrator's short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, about the upcoming TCM/Fathom Events revival of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan at select AMC Theatres on Sunday, September 4, Monday September 5 and Thursday September 8...

...and also of the showing of Nosferatu at the Orpheum Theatre here in Phoenix next Tuesday.

It's bad enough that Nosferatu is marking its centennial this year, but it's really irksome that Wrath of Khan is being shown in observance of its fortieth anniversary. Wrath of Khan is forty freakin' years old.

I have a bit of personal history with this film. My review of Wrath of Khan was the first movie review of mine ever to appear in a daily newspaper, the Erie Times-News. I was twenty years old, and had been submitting my work to the editors there for a while without success. My break came because the regular reviewer disliked sci-fi, and horror, and action pictures, and pretty much any kind of movie in which, as he liked to put it, "the dialogue appears in word balloons over the characters' heads."

Needless to say, I was more than happy to relieve him of this beat, and Wrath of Khan was my first opportunity to do so. I dragged my then-girlfriend to it at the Strand on 10th Street in Erie. I think she was a little taken aback at how much I responded to it. She knew I was a nerd; she didn't know I was that much of a nerd.

Forty years later, it's still a favorite of mine. All these years, however, I've had a complaint about the movie, and I doubt there will be a better occasion than now to air it. But it involves a moment in the very climatic scene of the film, so if you've never seen it, and want to discover it for yourself, consider this a MAJOR SPOILER warning.

Okay, for those still reading: Near the end of Wrath of Khan, Kirk's titular nemesis, grandly played by Ricardo Montalban, is dying aboard the starship Reliant, scarred by radiation burns, but still lashing out at Kirk by trying to detonate the Genesis Device, spewing Ahab's invective toward Moby-Dick all the while. Meanwhile, aboard the Enterprise, Kirk and his crew are frantically trying to regain warp speed so that they can escape the blast zone. The director, Nicholas Meyer, cuts between the two vessels, with Khan's crazed, disfigured face gleefully watching the Enterprise on his viewscreen.

At the last second, of course, warp speed is attained, and the Enterprise zips away to safety as the Reliant explodes behind her. Yay, the good guys win; all is well, except...Meyer doesn't cut to a reaction shot so that we can see Khan register, in that final second, that Kirk has defeated him once and for all.

I've never understood this omission. Everything about the way the scene is shot and edited up to that point seems to set up such a reaction shot, maybe even a final "NOOOOO!" from Montalban. It would have been the perfect payoff to Kirk's much-parodied roar of "KHAAAAAN!" earlier in the film.

I'm well aware that the reason for the dissatisfaction I feel at the lack of this shot has to do with my persistent, spiteful feelings about revenge in melodramas. Khan himself, in this movie, quotes a "Klingon proverb" that "revenge is a dish best served cold," but the innumerable action pictures that end with the bad guy simply being killed leave me cold; they're entirely unsatisfying. Far better that they should live long to wallow in their defeat; at a minimum, they should die knowing that they've lost. There are a few movies that have grasped this: the original Cape Fear, also The Princess Bride among them. But few movies have ever left me hanging in this regard as badly as Wrath of Khan, wonderful as it is.

Was such a shot planned, but never filmed? Was it filmed, but cut for some deliberate reason, or just for time? Did Montalban have to leave early that day? Or was it truly never considered? If I ever get the chance to interview Meyer (no matter what the subject of the interview is supposed to be), these are likely to be the first questions I ask him. Or, by some chance, does the shot exist after all, and is it at last included in the "Director's Cut" being shown at the TCM/Fathom Events revival?

In the meantime, I'll ask you: Am I the only one that ever noticed this or felt this way?

RELAY RACE

The passing of the glorious Nichelle Nichols, my first crush...

...brought me back to a slightly embarrassing truth: Star Trek, as in the original Star Trek, has been my favorite TV show for more than fifty years now. I have vivid early memories from a couple episodes in the original run ("Arena" and "The Savage Curtain," stayed with me, no doubt because of their monster content). But it was when the series went into syndication in the early '70s that I became a full-on addict.

I saw every episode dozens, probably hundreds of times. I played with the action figures and (ineptly) built the plastic model kits. I had coloring books and jigsaw puzzles and View-Master slides and calendars and posters, including a poster of Ms. Nichols in her "Mirror, Mirror" costume that hung in my bedroom as adolescence approached. I made my parents take me (along with a like-minded nerdy cousin) to Warren, Ohio, to see William Shatner in Arsenic and Old Lace with the Kenley Players, and later to Fredonia, New York, to hear Gene Roddenberry give a lecture at SUNY.

The franchise was also a big reason why I became an avid reader: I read the James Blish Star Trek anthologies, and Blish's Spock Must Die! was, I think, the first full-length novel I ever bought for myself. I read Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds and the Gold Key Star Trek comics, not to mention the non-fiction books; Stephen E. Whitfield's The Making of Star Trek and David Gerrold's The Trouble With Tribbles and The World of Star Trek were sacred texts for me.

As I got older, while adding countless other obsessive pop culture enthusiasms, I never quite grew out of Star Trek. I even monetized it, a little; over the course of my writing and radio career I had the opportunity to meet and/or interview Walter Koenig, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan and Grace Lee Whitney.

Of course I realize that what I'm describing is a very routine level of fandom by Star Trek standards. I've never cosplayed, or learned Klingon, and only once, in reaction to the death of Leonard Nimoy, did I ever write a piece of parody fanfic (which I managed to get published). I never became a serious fan of any of the sequel shows (though I've enjoyed Star Trek: Discovery very much). But I still own a couple of Star Trek t-shirts, and I have a Gorn bobblehead on my desk, and I regularly watch the original series reruns; they're an ongoing source of amusement and comfort to me.

Which makes it peculiar whenever I discover that there are areas of Star Trek ephemera with which I am completely unfamiliar. Like for instance, The Mystery of Black Sulu and White Uhura.

No, really.

A couple of weeks ago The Wife was browsing in the vinyl section of a junkshop, and scored for me a piece of Trek merch I had never encountered: one of the albums in the Star Trek series from Peter Pan Records.

It was from 1979--it has a still from Star Trek: The Motion Picture on the cover--at which time I would have been unlikely to notice an album for kids.

On each side is an original story, performed radio-theater style (by uncredited actors who don't sound like the original cast members). And inside the sleeve is a read-along comic illustrating the tales. And in this rather nicely-drawn comic...Sulu appears, quite unmistakably, to be African-American, and Uhura appears to be white, indeed blond. Their roles are otherwise exactly as they were on the show, but their pigmentation is altered.

I was baffled at this. Certainly Star Trek has long been admired as, for its time, a pioneer in racial diversity on TV, but this didn't seem to make sense as part of that tradition, nor does there seem to be any other reason for the change. I looked online for guidance, to find that the oddity had, indeed, been noted on various fansites, though none I saw offered any explanation for it.

I did learn, however, that most of the audio dramas on the Peter Pan Trek records were written by Alan Dean Foster, the prolific sci-fi author who also wrote the Star Trek Log books, paperback adaptations of the cartoon series from the '70s (not to mention the original Star Wars novelization). I messaged Foster to ask if he knew anything about it.

His reply: "As to the miscoloring, I believe some of it was done overseas and no instructions were given to the artists."

As good an explanation as any, I guess, although the likenesses of Kirk, Spock and McCoy look impressively accurate. So do those of the uniforms, the sets and the Enterprise herself. Maybe whatever pictures were given to the overseas artists for reference didn't include Sulu and Uhura; a serious omission if so.

Anybody else ever heard of any other reason?

In any case, it's a testament to how iconic even the supporting characters in Star Trek are that this innocent, probably even well-intentioned variation seems so shockingly weird. On the other hand, maybe smoldering encounters of Black Sulu and White Uhura could be the basis for a whole new genre of fanfic.

TOURING, CARS

Happy December everybody! Check out this month’s issue of Phoenix Magazine for the cover story, “Live Like a Tourist,” composed by Your Humble Narrator.

You can also check out my “Four Corners” column on new-and-newish Valley eateries.

  

Ford v Ferrari—Despite its promising stars and director, I admit that I dragged my feet a little when it came to seeing this one. This wasn’t because of the film’s formidable two-and-a-half hour running time. Nor was it because of my lifelong lack of interest in auto racing, and in movies about auto racing.

No, my reluctance where Ford v Ferrari was concerned was more parochial than that. In the rural America where I grew up, a partisan alignment with one automotive company over the others—and in opposition to them—was regarded, at times, almost more like a political affiliation or even a religious denomination than like mere brand loyalty. And I grew up in a Chevy household. My father, far less fanatical than many of his neighbors on such matters, was known in his later years to wear a cap reading “I’D RATHER PUSH A CHEVY THAN DRIVE A FORD.”

Even though I was largely indifferent to cars and car culture, my eventual understanding of Henry Ford—his notorious antisemitism, Hitler’s shout-out to him in Mein Kampf—and of his company—the Pinto scandal of the ‘70s and other safety and environmental shortcuts in the years since—gave me no reason to question my Dad’s wisdom in this matter. And the title Ford v Ferrari suggested that I would be asked to root for Ford.

The movie dramatizes the efforts, in the mid-‘60s, by sports car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and race driver and mechanic Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to develop the Ford GT40, in hopes of defeating Ferrari in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. This was a marketing strategy by the young Lee Iacocca (John Bernthal) to jazz up the flagging Ford’s staid middle American image with younger customers. But it became, at least according to the film, a vengeful mission after Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) insulted Ford during an abortive attempt to acquire the Italian company.

I needn’t have worried. The film makes Ford look bad. Henry Ford II is amusingly played by Tracy Letts as a thin-skinned, blustering, blubbering buffoon, perennially in his father’s shadow. And one of his executives, Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), is presented here as a toadying, conniving weasel. The company is depicted as at least as much the antagonists to Shelby and Miles as their Ferrari rivals are. As to the degree to which any of this is accurate or fair, your guess is as good as mine and quite possibly better, but since it didn’t ask me to cheer on Ford, my lifelong conditioning was satisfied.

Beyond that, Ford v Ferrari is a well-acted, well-executed racing drama. This is a genre for which I’ve never been able to work up much enthusiasm. Having admitted that, I can also say that the long-underrated director James Mangold got fine performances from—along with the caricatured Ford execs—Damon, as the unflappably diplomatic Texan Shelby, Bale as the barking, explosive Brit Miles, Caitriona Balfe as the patient Mrs. Miles and Noah Jupe as his adoring little son.

Did the picture really need to be quite so long? I’d say maybe not, but there are probably motor-heads in the audience who wouldn’t want a single gearshift or tire-squeal omitted, and even non-car buffs can enjoy the rich ‘60s period detail and atmosphere. And when we finally get to the Mad-Max-like mayhem of Le Mans, there’s no denying that Mangold’s direction makes it an exciting ride.

RIP to influential Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana, passed on at 80.

BACK TO THE GRINDSTAFF

Last week we paid tribute to the late Douglas Grindstaff, the brilliantly imaginative sound effects man whose contribution to the atmosphere of the original Star Trek would be hard to overstate. But I think Grindstaff deserves at least one more monster, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's acknowledge the "neural parasite" that attacks poor Spock in the second-season episode "Operation--Annihilate!"

In one interview I found, Grindstaff claimed that he produced the creature's icky sounds by using samples of kissing.

While we're on the subject of Star Trek, check out...Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek!