The Wall Street Journal reported on the following very creepy business practice …

Suppose you have a bunch of executives who are owed deferred compensation like a pension.

Rather than keep money and have it count against your bottom line, use the money to buy out life insurance for your employees.

The life insurance premiums count as an investment so don’t hurt the bottom line.

The payouts, when your employees die allow you to pay out your executives.

Wolfram and Hart, the evil law firm from Angel,  bragged that you had to sign a contract for all time, who knew that this wasn’t fiction.

So employers not only made money from you in life, but also made money off of your death.

And yes, your relatives got none of this money.

And yes, even if you quit the company or got laid off, the firm still made money off the premiums.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Very rarely does a film and a director re-invent a genre,  creating a new story that is so utterly consistent with the original story to leave you breathless with the audacity and the vision.

And I will contend, I have never seen a story teller re-invent the story in a way that is utterly and completely totally consistent with the original story.

JJ Abrams may, over time, deliver a crappy series, and the rest of his Star Trek movies may suck, but this movie will remain a magical moment in the history of story telling.