macross_sd

Film...the final insult. These are the voyages of the aircraft "Falcon." Her 2-hour mission: To revisit tired, old clichés, to seek out the phone-it-in skills of William Shatner and Judd Nelson, to hammily go where too many action films have gone before!

Seriously, folks, AVOID THIS FILM AT ALL COSTS. I saw it on the Action Channel, and although it purported to be a thriller, it was bloody funny. Not that it intended to be, mind you. However, with the talents of William Shatner (Does anyone even remember he debuted with Yul Brenner in "The Brothers Karamozov?") and Judd Nelson (the jock in "The Breakfast Club," now playing a computer geek with a gun), a penchant to use every cliché convention in the book (the psycho cowboy who lives only to shoot, the overbearing use of "videotaped" confession segments --often with NO RELATION TO THE DAMN PLOT), and writers who have no conception of the laws of physics or how a bloody airplane works, I can do nothing but laugh or whimper -- "limper," maybe? In the end, all I can say is that it made no sense. It was, to steal from a far superior writer "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I caught a showing of this variety show over on Trio, and cannot say I'm overwhelmed by this relic of the Carter Years. The idea was certainly original enough: Take a popular (and actually pretty talented) idol-singer duo from Japan, team them up with a second-banana American singer and craft a variety show around it. Nice idea, lousy execution. Where to begin...

1. The writing is rivaled only by those apocryphal monkeys trying to write Shakespeare, an sad fact as Mark Evanier is easily capable of much better than this dreck (look at his consistently funny co-writing work on "Groo the Wanderer")

2. Mei and Kei are talented enough singers, and probably were talented actresses in Japan, but they didn't have enough of a command of the English language to grasp the right comic timing for the language.

3. Jeff Altman DOES have enough of a command of the English language, and he couldn't make a man being tickled to death laugh.