I took it as that he meant to say "stayed" but just flubbed his line, yet was missed by the director.
Man McCoy has the worst comeback ever in TUC.
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I took it as that he meant to say "stayed" but just flubbed his line, yet was missed by the director.
You're probably right. I had the same thought the first time I heard it. On the other hand, I'm sure there are metaphors I've never heard, and I also considered the possibility that this could have been one.
It's a historical reference, and goes back long before the film ever shot a frame, according to a 1989 article in the Los Angeles Times. Pretty sure I heard the phrase myself a few times when a wee lad.
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-09/news/vw-1199_1_joe-jacobs
"stood in bed"? That sounds awful.
The scripted comments of Uhura, McCoy, Chekov and especially Scotty's conclusion take too much of the focus away from the tension between Kirk, Chang and to a lesser degree Spock and Gorkon.
Chang seemed pretty if not excessively villainous overall but I thought the dinner scene generally, including Azetbur did show how divided and uncertain the Klingon society was, giving some good misdirection about how noble or reformist Gorkon was and where the plot would go.
Chang seemed pretty if not excessively villainous overall but I thought the dinner scene generally, including Azetbur did show how divided and uncertain the Klingon society was, giving some good misdirection about how noble or reformist Gorkon was and where the plot would go.
^The fact that they were arguing doesn't necessarily mean that there were division between them. It could also be their normal way of reaching a decision.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/should+have+stood+in+bed,+i
This ungrammatical colloquial phrase—properly put as stayed in bed —is ascribed to fight manager Joe Jacobs, who in 1935 saw his first baseball game, the opening game of the World Series between the Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs. It was a very cold day, and when asked what he thought of baseball, Jacobs replied, “I should have stood in bed.”
I'm fine with the way Kirk said it and I understood it's intent. What I don't like is that IMHO this was another of Meyer's "Let's show the audience how well read and intellectual I am moments" just like the "Only Nixon can go to China", all the Shakespeare lines and the "An ancestor of mine said that when you eliminate the impossible whatever remains......" line. (Spock was related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle WOW!!!!! AND Meyer directed a Sherlock Holmes film....Man it sure is a small universe)
At the very least if Meyer was going to do his intellectual thing he could have gotten the meaning right. Lebensraum means "living space" not "breathing room". Am I nit picking...maybe but breathing room can mean your girlfriend is being too needy and you tell her to back off you need some breathing room. Or that you need some "breathing room" this work project, meaning more flexibility. Living space is specifically saying you or others need more area in order to live to the lifestyle you and or others deserve.
And again what the hell did needing breathing room have to do with this anyway? The mission was to save the Klingons from dying as a race, not to expand their empire so they could have more territory.
I think by having Kirk quip it in such a specific Meyer thought people who weren't familiar with German history would be impressed like "Wow he knows the year of the speech where Hitler said that concept.....man he's smart"
Kirk could have easily said "Yeah Hitler and the Nazis were fond of that phrase too" and it would have had the same impact and been more accurate.
I've believed for a while now that Harve Bennett (RIP) actually reigned in Meyer's flair for the dramatic in this way in TWOK and kept it to where Khan's Moby Dick references actually made sense and worked. If Bennett hadn't been there I have a feeling Meyer would have found another classic for Kirk to respond from all the time, and when Spock died it would have sounded like the end of Romeo and Juliett, but I think Bennett decided that we only need a little bit of this kind of drama in it and it should be Khan.
Without Bennett in TUC Meyer had a free hand to indulge himself and I think it clearly shows, to the detrement of the film in some ways.
I am grateful for what Meyer brought to Star Trek but, IMHO, his major shortcoming was he often used it as a vehicle to display his own intellectual prowess.
Heh... It would be rather literal "breathing room", what with Praxis poisoning the very air (either with ozone, or by turning the ozone that was already there deadlier somehow, take your pick on the ambiguous wording).
For that literal need, Chang would indeed need "room" in the cubic lightyearage sense: new resources to cope with the ozone problem, while the old ones were all in use by the escalation programs... Although any figurative "breathing room" would mean letting the Klingons continue their conquest-minded ways, amounting to much the same thing.
Timo Saloniemi
Having them debate with each other or at least debate the issue would have been better than what we got. It seemed the show wanted to paint the heroes as simple racists rather than dealing with a complex issue. The actors didn't have their hearts in playing racists, even if the idea was they would repent by the end of the story.
The heroes should have had legitimate social concerns that could possibly be related to racism. It would be up the viewer to decide if they were a little racist at the beginning, but it would clear they changed their minds when they realized people profitting from war on both sides were conspiring.
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