Word: kurtzman
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...Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman share the writing credit for this astonishing mishmash of Hasbro advertising copy and every movie in the good-vs.-evil ilk. But Revenge is director Michael Bay at his purest: gleaming machines, humans that glisten with an omnipresent layer of sweat, dozens of locations and a story line so messy it borders on the abstract. He's even given one of the Decepticons testicles (brass, swinging). The whole experience is like having your nose pressed into Bay's manly armpit for 2½ hours...
...there were plenty of challenges for scripters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who wrote MI3 and the new generation of Transformers epics, and have worked with Abrams on his TV shows. Their mission was to graft the characters from the original show onto a modern sensibility. Creator Gene Roddenberry was fond of moral and political lessons declaimed by actors in pastel polyesters; that was, after all, the late 1960s, an epoch so distant that the word irony hadn't yet been invented. Solemn homilies had to be replaced by gritty action, and thinky by feelie. (Read Richard Corliss' reviews...
...Orci and Kurtzman managed this by making Star Trek a standard revenge epic, as punk rebel James Kirk becomes a man by chasing down Nero, the renegade Romulan who killed his father at the very moment James was born. (In the inevitable sequel, will Kirk find out that Nero is his real father?) For the first third of the movie, James is a budding sociopath; as a kid he steals a car and, when pursued by a cop, nearly drives it over a cliff; later he picks bar brawls with packs of space studs. Anger management was not a major...
...There are many satisfyingly sly flourishes in Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman's script. You probably always assumed, as I did, that McCoy was called "Bones" because he was a doctor. But as he meets Kirk, he's half-drunk and grumbling about how his ex-wife just cleaned him out in a divorce. "All I've got left is my bones," he says woefully. Now there's some back-story...
...laughing matter: Harvey Korman, 81, the brilliant supporting clown for Carol Burnett and Mel Brooks; Dick Martin, 86, the actor and director who, with his comedy partner Dan Rowan, co-hosted the Vietnam-era gigglefest Laugh-In; and Will Elder, 86, one of the artists who elevated Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book to the level of sublime satire. He later collaborated with Kurtzman on the lavish Little Annie Fannie comic strip for Playboy...