The good news: Fox ordered another thirteen episodes of Joss Whedon’s problematic yet frequently awesome “Dollhouse”. Maybe this time they’ll actually air all thirteen of them, instead of saving one for the DVD set.
The weird news: It seems Kevin Smith has announced plans to make a feature-film adaptation of Warren Zevon’s “Hit Somebody! The Hockey Song”, with “Tuesdays with Morrie” author Mitch Albom writing the screenplay.
I am having trouble getting my head around this, because it sounds like the combination of elements would either nullify one another, or react like a helicopter full of antimatter and destroy everything in a five-mile radius.
Still, neither Nicolas Cage nor Werner Herzog is involved, so maybe we’re still on the safe side of the threshold …
Great news about Dollhouse. And Star Trek…definite multiple nerdgasms!
One technical question, since improper screening is a pet peeve of yours – are the music and dialogue on different tracks? During Star Trek the dialogue was fine, but the score was wonky.
Unless you saw it in a really old theater, I’d blame the surround decoder in your auditorium — “Star Trek”, like pretty much every movie these days, comes with a multichannel soundtrack, with dialogue isolated in the vicinity of the screen and music and effects dispersed throughout in the front and rear surround channels.
I’m wildly oversimplifying, of course; you can find a more detailed discussion here, with diagrams and everything:
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-sound.htm
My worst experience with bad audio was a press screening of the wretched Martin Lawrence comedy “Black Knight” with a defective DTS track — somehow, the front-right channel was encoded to buzz loudly in time with any spoken dialogue. It was unbearable, and it took the projectionist over an hour to realize the only way to screen the film without hurting the audience was to shut off the front surrounds entirely.
Come to think of it, that’s the only reason I remember that movie at all …