It's just a jump to the left

Star Trek

Crit

You know what word I haven't used much lately? Fun. Well, this is a whole year's worth of adrenalinic, self-referential, mind-warping fun. I'm no Trekkie (or whatever it is that they prefer to be called), but I'm aware enough of the tropes of the original series to get at least the most obvious jokes about what Jennie Tonic calls Star Trek Babies. And I'm a humanist, not a physicist, but I guess I get enough of the weird pseudoscience to sort of get the time-warp. And I've sure as hell seen enough Indy Jones and Star Wars flicks to appreciate the adrenaline rush. All of which equals fun.

Alternate reality: credited as a concept artist (whatever that is) is one Ryan Church, which is the name of one of my favorite New York Mets. Now, I have a compulsion to give esoteric nicknames to my Mets, and when Church joined the team, I immediately translated his surname to the Scots and Middle English version of the word, which led naturally to . . . right: Captain Kirk.

Trailers

Seven of them, seven! Can I even remember them all?

• Let's start with the ones I want to see, both Jews vs. Nazis, one literal, the other figurative: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Shane Acker's expansion of his like-titled Oscar-nominated short 9.
• Next, the ones based on toys: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Ryan Church is a concept artist [whatever that is] for this, too) and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (which, if nothing else, destroys the Eiffel Tower pretty terrifyingingly).
• Let's see, what else? Oh, right, first there's the sequel of a film I didn't like, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian; then the latest keep-pushing-Will Ferrell-before-he-runs-out-of-gas exploitation Land of the Lost; and finally the broad-but-maybe-funny Mike Judge project Extract.