These books have absolutely zero visual coherency.  From the the horribly generic hand drawn fantasy illustrations to the horribly generic software rendered fantasy illustrations , none of it goes together to sell the setting.  Instead it looks like it was held to the exacting standards of a 5th grade math notebook illustrator.  Don’t let the good cover on this book confuse you, the inside looks like garbage.  I’ve seen better artwork adorning crpg manuals from the 80’s.  I can’t fathom why WotC, who employs some of the best artists in the industry for their Magic the Gathering line, can’t seem to come up with a single illustration for this book that doesn’t scream ‘immature product development!’ or ‘we didn’t give a shit about this product!’.

Those of you with a copy, lets turn to page 34 and look at the drawing accompanying the Dragonborn race.  Does anything jump out at you?  The female Dragonborn has boobs. Boobs. WHY THE FUCK DOES A REPTILE HAVE FUCKING MAMMARY GLANDS??  Can you explain this for me?  Purely within the context of this fantasy realm, do female dragons wear giant brassieres to keep their massive, scaly, dragon-titties from flopping around while they’re devouring entire villages??

Next example, page 36.  Dwarves. This dwarf has a two dimensional axe.  At least I think thats an axe, although my friend Jeremy who is more or less an expert on medieval weaponry might have strong opinions to the contrary.  Whatever it is, whoever drew it needs to A) take a fucking fundamental drawing class and B) stop playing WoW for at least as long enough as it takes to come up with a moderately fucking original take on this fantasy setting staple. DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS INSPIRED WOW, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND

Skip to 213.  Lets look at the armor.  Looks like they took the shitty ‘edgy’ non-functional armor designs from 3.x and completely raped any last pretense of style right out of their ridiculous, recently-deceased corpses.  216, Weapons.  Admittedly not as bad as the atrocities preceding them, they still look like something found in a sketchbook of a failed Disney artist.  Speaking of sketchbook, what the fuck is up with this trend toward ’sketched’ weapons anyway?  Too busy drawing tits on dragons to include some fucking finished artwork for this page?

46: Another two-dimensional weapon.  48: Why the fuck do all the weapons in this book look like they were made from sheet metal and crayon?  224: An Elf with down syndrome.  258: Holy shit something that wasn’t inspired by WoW artwork, thanks EverQuest!

This travesty of art and design is inexcusable in the face of products such as Black Industries cum Fantasy Flight Games Dark Heresy book.  You only need to hold the two side by side to see which design team actually gives a fuck about their product and which one is trying to cash in on the cashcow fanbase of a derivative product that just happens to be making more money.

I was going to write about the first year college student page layout but I’m sick of talking about this subject.  Rest assured, you could probably do better with a copy of MS Publisher and a Sunday afternoon.

Boy was I wrong. I fell asleep at some point fairly early on and woke to a car driving through a city. For five minutes. I almost passed out from the boredom. In the book and 2002 movie Kris Kelvin gets to the Solaris station lickety-split, but for some reason director Tarkovsky felt it was necessary to spend a good hour on earth with characters mostly sitting in silence. Or driving through a city.
Then came the next 2 hours.

I really like the look of the environments in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for being filmed in 1968 it doesn’t come off as being that dated. Solaris is another matter entirely. I was excited to see what the Russian take on ships in space would be. What I got was nothing like the simple elegance of 2001. Solaris could have taken place in an office building in downtown Moscow and nobody would be the wiser. Except for the one hallway that was dressed entirely in diamond plate and a row of dimming lights down either side although that could easily be passed off as ‘office building entrance of THE FUTURE!’.

The one ray of sunshine in the three hours of wasted life was comparing the shots in 1972 Solaris to 2002 Solaris. Soderbergh took more than a handful of scenes, dusted them off, dressed them up and put them back on display. But I can assure you that anyone who hasn’t seen the new version as many times as I have would neither notice nor care about these meta-details.

Final Score: ZZZZ

The story about these kids something we’ve already seen in other movies (Shawn of the Dead comes to mind) and this is just a bare-bones version. Its almost as though there are 2 different stories going on in Cloverfield, (the kids, and the *thing*) and each one is afraid of overshadowing the other. I don’t want to spoil anything so I won’t say more. It wasn’t a bad movie, but the *thing* is just so cool that I wish there was more about *it*.

I think it might be neat if we get a sequel in the future that actually happens simultaneously with the first movie, but involving new characters that helps elaborate on the *thing* and *its* story.

But thats not why I’m posting today. THIS is why I’m posting today:

The new Star Trek trailer.

Wow. Wow wow. Wow.

Ok so its just a teaser, and you don’t get to see any of the actors or story or action or really anything of the movie itself, but what you do see is the Enterprise. Under construction. On Earth. With a Leonard Nimoy voice over. And an old school 60’s style Starfleet Logo.

This thing gave me chills. Ok I’m a nerd. I admit it. I got chills from a 20 second trailer for a Star Trek movie. A movie in the Old-Trek setting is about the coolest thing ever. For this fan the Trek movies are ranked in order of appearance, with the series falling off rapidly after movie #4 and all of the Next Generation movies being utter garbage. So I’m firmly in the highly optimistic camp rather than the jaded, cranky fanboy camp.

I think Simon Pegg as Scotty is a good choice, although I don’t know enough about the actors in the other roles to make any sort of call as to their suitability (update: I think John Cho is a GREAT choice for Sulu!). I’ll let the fanboys on all of the usual movie and Star Trek sites argue that one out. As for JJ Abrams, well, I just hope he doesn’t let Cloverfield and Lost give us a Trek Movie that leaves us scratching our heads.