EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
There are few things that get remade, revamped, remodeled or resurrected in such a way that actually makes me happy to see/visit it again. The newest take on the Star Trek franchise has made me a happy camper for sure. I blame this on several things actually...

SEVERAL THINGS
Director J.J. Abrams, popular television maestro of Alias, Felicity, Lost, and Fringe uses his talents to guide us on this Trek. P.S. - Abrams has commented that he was not a Star Trek fan prior to directing the film.

Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have woven together a smart, witty, self-referencing, action story that does its best to please both old and new fans. Orci and Kurtzman have both collaborated with Abrams on previous projects. I assume the writers were fans or did a lot of homework. I have been a mild mannered Star Trek fan throughout the years. I know enough to keep up when talking to uber geeks. I repeatedly found myself impressed with the dialogue.

“A mob doesn’t think. It doesn’t have time to think.” - Sylvia Sidney as Katherine Grant

Fritz Lang wasted no time in establishing his reputation in Hollywood as the master architect of the thriller. His first American film after having fled Hitler’s Germany is a searing indictment of the dark side of the American character that pulsates with an almost unbearable tension for its first half as a collision of combustible elements in a small town ignites into a shocking act of cold blooded mob violence. Lang wanted to do a film about the culture of public lynching in the U.S. and the curiously grotesque party atmosphere that has historically accompanied them. He felt that his protagonist would have to be guilty of the crime for which he was being lynched and that he should be African American in order for the story to truly resonate in this country and for the film to have the maximum impact. MGM would never agree to either of these stipulations, so he geared his story around a young Spencer Tracy as an American everyman in the wrong place at the wrong time, who faces the full unhinged brutality of a mob of townspeople calling for his blood.

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." — Orson Welles

“I like the dark. It’s friendly.” — Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna

In 1942 at RKO Pictures, Orson Welles had been given the boot by the studio’s top brass because he cost the studio too much money, on movies they could not figure out how to sell to the public. It was a dismal end compared to the fanfare that greeted his arrival in Hollywood in 1939, when the sky was the proverbial limit to what he would accomplish. But RKO was battle-scarred having suffered the full wrath of the William Randolph Hearst publicity machine over their objections to Citizen Kane, while The Magnificent Ambersons was all but junked in a panic over its length and sophistication. RKO was now determined to do things differently—to rein in costs and start churning out movies without the controversial flair that Welles brought to his projects. The new motto at the studio after Welles left was “showmanship in place of genius” – a direct rebuke to Welles the troublemaker. Around the same time that Welles was finished there, a writer from New York named Val Lewton was hired to helm a string of B horror pictures to compete with the highly popular Universal horror films. These films would be made quickly, for very little money, and would have really silly titles whenever possible. But the ironic thing, and something that no one at RKO expected, is that Lewton was a serious artist, almost as revolutionary as Welles was, in terms of what he brought to a genre that no one expected anything from except cheap thrills and a good time.

Anthony Mann had a storied career as a director of westerns, many of which starred Jimmy Stewart (Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur). He directed one of the most ecstatically bizarre examples of the genre—The Furies starring the great Barbara Stanwyck. But before he made his name with westerns and sprawling epics such as El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire, he is best remembered as one of the original progenitors of the noir style. Mann made some of the most classic films associated with noir in the late 1940s and, for my money, nothing beats his shadow-drenched masterpiece Raw Deal. With its rich expressionist visuals and eerie Theremin score, Raw Deal is a poetic depiction of a world in perpetual twilight.

Dennis O’Keefe —one of those beautifully rough hewn actors in the Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden mold—plays Joe Sullivan, a guy doing time in jail for a crime he didn’t commit (as a favor to a local crime syndicate boss with the promise of $50,000 coming his way if he plays along). Joe’s girl Pat is played by Claire Trevor, who provides a haunting voiceover throughout the film in a whispered voice that suggests she’s mourning Joe before he’s gone. She would do anything for him, and he is happy to let her. She shows up for a prison visit with information about how she’s going to spring him from jail. Rick, the crime boss of Corkscrew Alley, a.k.a the bad part of town, has engineered a scheme to bust Joe out of jail and have him snuffed out before he can claim his 50 Gs, but all Pat knows is if things go as planned he’ll be out of the big house and back in her arms that night. Joe has another woman in his life complicating his relationship with Pat, though. Marsha Hunt plays Ann, his case worker, a prim brunette to Pat’s life-hardened blonde, who believes that the real Joe Sullivan is a decent guy who deserves a second chance in life if he agrees to play by the rules. But Joe never had much luck from the start and he has no intention of going straight now. At dusk he makes his escape, barely outrunning prison guard gunfire to a waiting car and, once inside, Pat and Joe make their getaway. But before they can get out on the lam Joe insists they first take Ann hostage and force her to play along until they get to the hideout (which is really a set up) that Rick has arranged for Joe.

The Shanghai Gesture is an impressively sordid film noir with the gauzy atmospheric haze of an opium induced nightmare. Director Josef von Sternberg went admirably overboard in depicting his idea of an exotic horror show. As in his most famous film and the one that introduced the world to the Teutonic splendor of Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), Sternberg had a thing for dropping weak-willed characters into dens of iniquity, only to let those poor suckers become enslaved by their obsessions and get taken for every nickel. He seems to enjoy the spectacle of their descent from flawed innocents to vice-addled wrecks. Whereas The Blue Angel was about a priggish professor led into ruination by the low rent charms of Dietrich’s Lola Lola cabaret chanteuse, in The Shanghai Gesture it’s a beautiful young woman (Gene Tierney) who starts out as the privileged daughter of a British developer abroad and ends up a raving gambling and who-knows-what-else-addict. Although the play on which The Shanghai Gesture is based is reportedly far racier and more explicit than the film, Sternberg still finds lots of shadows to explore in the material, resulting in a film slightly less disturbing than The Blue Angel but still a lot stranger than most studio fare of its time.