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Next Day Air Movie Poster

Next Day Air Movie Review – Box Office Results

USA Box Office Results, May 8–10, 2009

Next Day Air Movie Review – Plot

A courier (Donald Faison) accidentally brings smalltime hoods, Brody (Mike Epps) and Guch (Wood Harris), a box containing 10 kilos of cocaine meant for their next-door neighbors. Brody and Guch immediately arrange to sell the cocaine to Brody’s drug dealer cousin (Omari Hardwick). The intended recipients of the package, wannabe gangster Jesus (Cisco Reyes) and his girlfriend (Yasmin Deliz), realize the box hasn’t arrived and set out to find it before drug kingpin Bodega Diablo (Emilio Rivera) notices it’s missing.

Next Day Air Movie Review – Cast

• Mike Epps – Brody
• Wood Harris – Guch
• Cisco Reyes – Jesus
• Yasmin Deliz – Chita
• Donald Faison – Leo
• Omari Hardwick – Shavoo
• Darius McCrary – Buddy
• Emilio Rivera – Bodega
• Mos Def – Eric
• Lauren London – Ivy
• Debbie Allen – Ms. Jackson
• Trinidad Mann-Douglas – Fine Woman #1
• Ravyn Lotito-Douglas – Fine Woman #2

startrek poster

Star Trek Movie Review – Box Office Results

USA Box Office Results, May 8–10, 2009

Star Trek Movie Review – Plot

In the year 2387, the galaxy is threatened by a supernova. Ambassador Spock pilots a Vulcan-commissioned ship carrying “red matter” that can create a gravitational singularity, drawing the supernova into a black hole. Spock succeeds, but not before Romulus, the Romulan homeworld, is destroyed. Captain Nero of the Romulan mining ship Narada attempts to exact revenge on Spock for letting Romulus be destroyed, but both ships are caught in the black hole’s event horizon, traveling to different points into the past and creating an alternate reality from the originalStar Trek series. The Narada arrives first, 154 years before the supernova, and attacks a nearby Federation starship, the USS Kelvin. As theKelvin is evacuated, acting-Captain George Kirk stays behind to provide cover for the fleeing shuttlecraft, dying moments after his son, James Tiberius Kirk, is born. When Ambassador Spock arrives 25 years later, Nero captures his ship and the remaining red matter. Spock is left marooned on the planet Delta Vega—near Vulcan—so that he may witness the destruction of his homeworld.

Growing up without his father, Kirk becomes an intelligent, reckless, and cynical young man. Captain Christopher Pike, dismayed that Kirk is wasting his life, tells him of his father’s heroic efforts and convinces him to join Starfleet. At Starfleet Academy, Kirk befriends fellow cadets Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy and Uhura. In his third year at the Academy, Kirk is accused of cheating on the Kobayashi Maru test by its programmer, Commander Spock. During the ensuing hearing, during which Kirk is placed on academic suspension, Starfleet receives a distress signal from Vulcan, and the cadets are mobilized to help man the ships in orbit. Acting as his attending physician, Dr. McCoy smuggles Kirk on board theUSS Enterprise, to which both Spock and Uhura have been assigned under Pike’s command.

Kirk, recognizing similarities between the distress call from Vulcan and the encounter that destroyed the Kelvin, warns Pike that the fleet is heading into a trap. The Enterprise arrives late, by which time the fleet has been destroyed. While the Narada is drilling into Vulcan’s core, Nero orders Pike to surrender himself via shuttlecraft, using his clear tactical advantage as leverage. Pike agrees, leaving Spock in command and Kirk as first officer. En route to the Narada, Pike arranges for Kirk, Hikaru Sulu, and Chief Engineer Olsen to perform an orbital skydive onto the drilling platform and destroy it; Olsen is killed, but Kirk and Sulu stop the drill. However, it has already reached the planet’s core, and Nero launches red matter into the core, collapsing the planet into a black hole. Spock rescues most of the planet’s elders, including his father, but his mother dies, along with nearly six billion Vulcans; Spock estimates only ten thousand Vulcans are left. Nero intends to destroy Earth, and tortures Pike for the command codes to Earth’s perimeter defenses.

Kirk attempts to convince Spock to travel to Earth to stop Nero, but Spock maroons him on the nearby Delta Vega and orders the ship to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet. On Delta Vega, Kirk encounters the elderly Ambassador Spock, who relays the future’s events through a mind meld and insists that Kirk must become captain of the Enterprise. The two travel to a nearby Starfleet outpost where they meet the talented Montgomery Scott. Spock helps Scott refine his equations for “transwarp transportation” to allow Kirk and Scott to beam aboard theEnterprise. There, Kirk manages to anger Spock, forcing him to cede command due to being emotionally compromised. Spock, Scott, and Pavel Chekov devise a plan to bring the Enterpriseto Titan and take advantage of Saturn’s magnetosphere to disguise their presence, allowing them to beam Kirk and Spock aboard the Narada unnoticed. While Kirk rescues Pike, Spock retakes the future Spock’s ship, using it to destroy the drill and lure the Narada away from Earth before piloting a collision course. The Enterprise arrives and beams Kirk, Pike, and Spock away before the collision, which releases the remaining red matter and creates a black hole within the Narada‘s superstructure. Though Kirk offers to help rescue Nero and his crew, the Romulan refuses and the Narada is torn apart. The Enterprise narrowly escapes the same fate by ejecting and igniting the ship’s warp drive reactor cores, the resulting explosion pushing them clear.

Kirk is promoted to captain of the Enterprise, relieving the newly promoted but wheelchair-bound Admiral Pike. While searching for his father, Spock encounters his older self in a hangar; Ambassador Spock is departing to help found a new colony for the remaining Vulcans. Spock informs his older self of his intention to leave Starfleet to help in the rebuilding. Ambassador Spock tells his younger self that he and Kirk need each other and that he should remain in Starfleet. Taking his older self’s advice, Spock does so, becoming first officer under Kirk’s command. As the Enterprise warps away, Leonard Nimoy recites a version of the “Where no man has gone before” monologue.

Star Trek Movie Review - Cast

• Chris Pine as James T. Kirk. Pine described his first audition as awful, because he could not take himself seriously as a leader. Abrams did not see Pine’s first audition, and it was only after Pine’s agent met Abrams’ wife that the director decided to give him another audition opposite Quinto. Quinto was supportive of Pine’s casting because they knew each other as they worked out at the same gym. After getting the part, Pine sentWilliam Shatner a letter and received a reply containing Shatner’s approval. Pine watched classic episodes and read encyclopedias about the Star Trek universe, but stopped as he felt weighed down by the feeling he had to copy Shatner. Pine felt he had to show Kirk’s “humor, arrogance and decisiveness”, but not Shatner’s speech pattern, which would have bordered on imitation.Pine said when watching the original series, he was also struck by how Shatner’s performance was characterized by humor. Instead, Pine chose to incorporate elements of Tom Cruise from Top Gun andHarrison Ford’s portrayals of Indiana Jones and Han Solo.
  • Jimmy Bennett plays James Kirk as a boy.
• Zachary Quinto as Spock. Quinto expressed interest in the role because of the duality of Spock’s half-human, half Vulcan heritage, and how “he is constantly exploring that notion of how to evolve in a responsible way and how to evolve in a respectful way. I think those are all things that we as a society, and certainly the world, could implement.” He mentioned he heard about the new film and revealed his interest in the role in a December 2006 interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: the article was widely circulated and he attracted Abrams’ interest.For the audition, Quinto wore a blue shirt and flattened his hair down to feel more like Spock. He bound his fingers to practice the Vulcan salute, shaved his eyebrows and grew and dyed his hair for the role.He conveyed many of Spock’s attributes, such as his stillness and the way Nimoy would hold his hands behind his back.Quinto commented the physical transformation aided in portraying an alien, joking “I just felt like a nerd. I felt like I was 12 again. You look back at those pictures and you see the bowl cut. There’s no question I was born to play the Spock role. I was sporting that look for a good four or five years.” Adrien Brody had discussed playing the role with the director before Quinto was cast.
  • Jacob Kogan plays Spock as a child.
• Leonard Nimoy reprises his role as the elder Spock (referred to in the ending credits as Spock Prime), who has come from the future. Nimoy befriended Quinto after being cast in the role. Although Quinto watched some episodes of the show during breaks in filming, Nimoy was his main resource in playing Spock.Abrams and the writers met Nimoy at his house; writer Roberto Orci recalled the actor gave a “‘Who are you guys and what are you up to?’ vibe” before being told how important he was to them. He was silent, and Nimoy’s wife Susan Bay told the creative team he had remained in his chair after their conversation, emotionally overwhelmed by his decision after turning down many opportunities to revisit the role.Had Nimoy disliked the script, production would have been delayed for it to be rewritten. He was “genuinely excited” by the script’s scope and its detailing of the characters’ backstories,saying, “We have dealt with [Spock being half-human, half-Vulcan], but never with quite the overview that this script has of the entire history of the character, the growth of the character, the beginnings of the character and the arrival of the character into the Enterprise crew.” Abrams said “it was surreal to direct him as Spock, because what the hell am I doing there? This guy has been doing it for forty years. It’s like ‘I think Spock would…‘“

• Karl Urban as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy. Like Pine, Urban said of taking on the role that “it is a case of not doing some sort of facsimile or carbon copy, but really taking the very essence of what DeForest Kelley has done and honoring that and bringing something new to the table”. Urban has been a fan of the show since he was seven years old and actively pursued the role after rediscovering the series on DVD with his son. Urban was cast at his first audition, which was two months after his initial meeting with Abrams. He said he was happy to play a role with lots of comedy, something he had not done since The Price of Milk, because he was tired of action-oriented roles. When asked why McCoy is so cantankerous, Urban joked the character might be a “little bipolar actually!” Orci and Kurtzman had collaborated with Urban on Xena: Warrior Princess, in which he played Caesar.

• Zoe Saldana as Nyota Uhura. Abrams had liked her work and requested that she play the role. Saldana never saw the original series (Ironically, Zoe played an airport employee who happened to be a “Trekkie”, Vulcan hand sign and all, in the movie “The Terminal” opposite Tom Hanks.), but agreed to play the role after Abrams had complimented her. “For an actor, that’s all you need, that’s all you want. To get the acknowledgment and respect from your peers,” she said. She met with Nichelle Nichols, who explained to her how she had created Uhura’s background, and also named the character. Saldana’s mother was a Star Trek fan and sent her voice mails during filming, giving advice on the part. Sydney Tamiia Poitieralso auditioned for the part.

• Simon Pegg as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott. Pegg was the only actor who did not audition: Abrams just sent him an e-mail asking if he wanted to play the part. To perform Scotty’s accent, Pegg was assisted by his wife Maureen, who is from Glasgow, although Pegg said Scotty was from Linlithgow and wanted to bring a more East Coast sound to his accent, so his resulting performance is a mix of both accents that leans towards the West sound. He was also aided by Tommy Gormley, the film’s Glaswegian first assistant director.Pegg described Scotty as a positive Scottish stereotype, noting “Scots are the first people to laugh at the fact that they drink and fight a bit”, and that Scotty comes from a long line of Scots with technical expertise, such as John Logie Baird and Alexander Graham Bell. Years before, Pegg’s character in Spaced joked that every odd-numbered Star Trek film being “shit” was a fact of life. Pegg noted “Fate put me in the movie to show me I was talking out of my ass.”

• John Cho as Hikaru Sulu. Abrams was concerned about casting a Korean-American as a Japanese-American character, but George Takei explained to the director that Sulu was meant to represent all of Asia on the Enterprise, so Abrams went ahead with Cho. Cho acknowledged being an Asian-American, “there are certain acting roles that you are never going to get, and one of them is playing a cowboy. [Playing Sulu] is a realization of that dream — going into space.” He cited the masculinity of the character as being important to him, and spent two weeks fight training. Cho suffered an injury to his wrist during filming, although a representative assured it was “no big deal”.James Kyson Lee was interested in the part, but because Quinto was cast as Spock, the producers of the TV show Heroes did not want to lose another cast member for three months.

• Anton Yelchin as Pavel Chekov: As with the rest of the cast, Yelchin was allowed to choose what elements there were from their predecessor’s performances. Yelchin decided to carry on Walter Koenig’s speech patterns of replacing ”v”s with “w”s, although he and Abrams felt this was a trait more common of Polish accents than Russian ones.He described Chekov as an odd character, being a Russian who was brought on to the show “in the middle of the Cold War.” He recalled a “scene where they’re talking to Apollo [who says], ‘I am Apollo.’ And Chekov is like, ‘And I am the czar of all Russias.’ [...] They gave him these lines. I mean he really is the weirdest, weirdest character.”^[29]

• Eric Bana as Captain Nero, the film’s time-travelling Romulan villain. Bana shot his scenes toward the end of filming. He was “a huge Trekkie when [he] was a kid”, but had not seen the films. Even if he were “crazy about the original series”, he would not have accepted the role unless he liked the script, which he deemed “awesome” once he read it.Bana knew Abrams because they coincidentally shared the same agent. Bana improvised the character’s speech patterns.

• Bruce Greenwood as Christopher Pike, the captain of the Enterprise.
• Ben Cross as Sarek, Spock’s father.
• Winona Ryder as Amanda Grayson, Spock’s mother.
• Clifton Collins, Jr. as Ayel, Nero’s henchman.
• Chris Hemsworth as George Samuel Kirk, Sr., Kirk’s father, who died aboard the USS Kelvin while battling the Romulans.
• Jennifer Morrison as Winona Kirk, Kirk’s mother.
• Rachel Nichols plays Gaila, an Orion Starfleet cadet.
• Faran Tahir as Richard Robau, captain of the USS Kelvin.
• Deep Roy as Keenser, Scotty’s alien assistant on Delta Vega.
• Greg Ellis as Chief Engineer Olsen, the redshirt who is killed during the orbital skydive.
• Chris Doohan, the son of the original Scotty, James Doohan, makes a cameo appearance in the transporter room. Pegg e-mailed Doohan about the role of Scotty, and the actor has promised him his performance “would be a complete tribute to his father”. Chris Doohan previously cameoed in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
• Paul McGillion auditioned for Scotty, and he impressed producers enough that he was given another role as a barracks officer.
• Greg Grunberg has a vocal cameo as Kirk’s alcoholic stepfather. Brad William Henke filmed scenes in the role which were cut out.^[38] Star Trek: Enterprise star Dominic Keating also auditioned for the role. Grunberg was up for the role of Olsen but dropped out due to a scheduling conflict. Grunberg was also interested in playing Harry Mudd,who was in an early draft of the script.
• Spencer Daniels as Johnny, a childhood friend of Kirk. Daniels was set to play his older brother, George Samuel “Sam” Kirk, Jr., but the majority of his scenes were cut and James Kirk’s callout was overdubbed.

Tyler Perry appears as the head of Starfleet Academy. James Cawley appears as a Starfleet officer, while Pavel Lychnikoff and Lucia Rijker play Romulans, Lychnikoff a Commander and Rijker a CO. W. Morgan Sheppard, who played a Klingon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, appears in this film as the head of the Vulcan Science Council. Star Trek fan andCarnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch (who died on July 25, 2008) cameoed as a Kelvin crew member, and has a line of dialogue.^[43] Majel Barrett, the widow of Star Trekcreator Gene Roddenberry, reprised her role as the voice of the Enterprise‘s computer, which she completed two weeks before her death on December 18, 2008. The film was dedicated to her as well as Gene, to whom the film was always going to be commemorated as a sign of respect.

Orci and Kurtzman wrote a scene for William Shatner, where old Spock gives his younger self a recorded message by Kirk from the previous timeline. “It was basically a Happy Birthday wish knowing that Spock was going to go off to Romulus, and Kirk would probably be dead by the time,” and it would have transistioned into Shatner reciting “Where no man has gone before”.But Shatner wanted to share Nimoy’s major role, and did not want a cameo,despite his character’s death in Star Trek Generations. He suggested the film canonize the novels where Kirk is resurrected,^[48] but Abrams decided if his character was accompanying Nimoy’s, it would have become a film about the resurrection of Kirk, and not about introducing the new versions of the characters. Nimoy disliked the character’s death in Generations, but felt resurrecting Kirk would also be detrimental to this film.

Nichelle Nichols suggested playing Uhura’s grandmother, but Abrams could not write this in due to the Writers Guild strike.^[49] Abrams was also interested in casting Keri Russell, but they deemed the role he had in mind for her too similar to her other roles.