Midnight Ramblings

First and formost, I've got my review of Serenity up! Go read it!

Spent some time today enjoying my new DVDs...on the new Mallrats: 10th Anniversary Edition, Kevin Smith offers up why he wanted to do an extended edition. It originally started out as an intriguing concept. See, out of all of Kevin Smith's films, Mallrats is the only one that Smith didn't edit himself. So, his original concept was, "What if I edited it?" He sat down to re-edit it, and came to a horrible conclusion: his edit would be no different. See, as it was only his second film, Smith wasn't very big on "coverage" or "alternate takes" yet, so there was really only one or two shots for each scene. What Smith ended up doing was putting a lot of those cut scenes back in, and thus creating a "work print." This would have been what you would have seen in a test screening a long time ago. Anyway, I can hardly wait to sit down and watch it!

And watched a little bit of the bonus stuff on the new 2-disc special edition of Star Trek Nemesis. I think it was worth buying that film again if only to see the much-hyped but sadly cut Wesley Crusher scene. Nothing big...he exchanges a few words with Capt. Picard at Riker's wedding, and we find out that Wesley is now the cheif engineer on the Titan, Riker's command. It was only 45 seconds...I don't see why they had to cut it.

But the one thing I really wanted to see was this one Easter egg. You know Bryan Singer, right? He's the director who brought us the first two X-Men films and next summer's Superman Returns. Well, Singer is actually a huge trekkie, and he has a "blink and you'll miss it" cameo in Nemesis as an Enterprise security officer. This Easter egg is a 3-minute interview with Singer about why he loves Star Trek. Singer even shares the tale of the first time he was on the bridge of the Enterprise. When he was an aspiring film student, he was attending a lecture on the Paramount lot. He snuck away from his group and onto the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They weren't filming, so he hung around and tried out the captain's chair until a security guard threw him out.

I just watched that and though, "Man, now that was a missed opportunity!"

Think about it. Here's Bryan Singer. Thanks to X-Men, we know he's capable of doing large-scale sci-fi action with a large cast of characters. And he loves Star Trek. We know he could have done justice to the characters and given us one kick-ass film. Why the hell didn't anyone think of getting him to do a Star Trek film?

Oh, what could have been.