Yeah, alright…that William Shatner “Common/People” Star Trek mashup spoof thing has a few things in it to make it worth recommending. It is, for the most part, edited with enough proficiency that the voice of William Shatner speak/singing the 1995 Pulp anthem occasionally seems to be coming organically from the animated Captain Kirk’s mouth. Formally and in terms of choreography, there’s a sort of inverse symmetry between this and the original Pulp video: Where Jarvis Cocker’s arms and hips flail in complex patterns as if divorced from his generally blasé face, the animated Kirk and Spock’s limbs remain stiff and controlled, while their eyes and eyebrows provide implicit color commentary. Also, recast here as the backup singer on Spock and Kirk’s mating song, Uhura is totally fierce.

But it’s not as good as could/probably should be. Maybe it’s so inevitable that any kind of Star Trek fan fic will involve Kirk and Spock pledging love that we don’t actually need to see it play out, we can fill in the gaps between an opening hint and a closing one. But that doesn’t justify the fact that when this vid gives up the courtship plot halfway through –– and despite an explosion of spectacle –– it just gets kind of boring until the tacked-on pledge of manly respect coded as expression of repressed romance.

And really: How many videos based on this simple equation do we need to see? We get it: 1+1 = gay, and gay = comedy gold. Aren’t we supposed to be demanding more, or is it naive to hold on to hope that media made outside of mainstream corporate mandates could possible transcend easy formula? Why are we so content to allow the agenda for the supposed counterculture of web video to be determined by the comic crutches of people like Andy Samberg?

Hooray, it’s the Weekend of Women! As of this writing on Sunday afternoon, it looks like the Sex and the City movie is going to make at least $55 million in its opening weekend, thus establishing a new record for the best debut of a R-rated comedy in history. Bloggers and studio execs alike have already started declaring that girl power has fundamentally changed Hollywood in a single weekend. Yay!

It’s a good thing feminists who are willing to put on blinders have some kind of symbolic victory for all of womankind to hold on to, because the results of an arguably more important contest this weekend went very badly for both the woman involved and, by extension, the image of women in power as a whole. Whilst millions of my fellow American women were waiting on line for their dose of the latest adventures of Carrie and company, I was glued to the TV, watching gavel-to-gavel coverage of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting, held to determine whether or not all delegates from both Florida and Michigan will be allowed to vote at the Democratic Convention.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t present at the meeting, but she nonetheless haunted the proceedings (she’s the one who would have gained most from a full seating of these delegates, which the committee ultimately denied), and her supporters were out in full force, shouting, cheering, booing, and getting themselves ejected from the hall. Far more fascinating than the all-day debate are the YouTube clips of angry Clinton supporters exiting the RBC meeting — and reactions to those clips.

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Daniel Robin’s short film my olympic summer, about how the 1972 Munich Olympics kidnappings had the unlikely side effect of saving his parents’ marriage, won the Jury Prize earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Robin has been producing Quicktime-based web series since 2000, and before the Sundance victory, he posted on his web site a series of shorts called Kinoland, documenting the frustrations he and his classmates experienced during a semester in the graduate filmmaking program at San Francisco State.

In the first episode, Robin pitches the web series to his professor as an investigation of “the dynamic between teacher and student, how this relationship both benefits and hinders an education within this film program.” His professor’s response? “I’m asking you to do something different…we are not here to feed your website.” Robin embarks on the project anyway, and the remaining eight episodes chronicle the personal and creative battles of Robin and his classmates as they navigate an educational system that seems at best indifferent to, and often actually an aggressive barrier to their success.

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The Mena Show is a period piece, set in 1994, starring 30-year-old Six Apart co-founder/president Mena Trott as the 17-year-old version of herself. It’s “what my vlog would have looked like if I had the web tools available now … in 1994,” Trott says via the clip’s YouTube description, but technically, there’s little evidence that it was made and distributed via modern technology. There’s a knowingness with which Trott address the camera that seems a bit too assured and normalized for the era, but other than that, The Mena Show could be plausibly played off as an actual antique, a 14-year-old VHS tape updated to YouTube on a lark.

In segments stitched together with title cards accurately recalling the stop-start MTV aesthetic of the time, a beret-clad Mena addresses the camera with a series of complaints and celebrations. She’s mainly concerned with credibility –– she calls out a friend for being a Rocky Horror Picture Show poseur, she complains about jocks dancing to Green Day even though they haven’t “earned” it. This (mostly imagined) fight for street cred was the fundamental culture war of the mid-90s, and the war was mostly fought by Doc Marten-wearing teens and 20-somethings wandering suburban and college-town streets. Mena’s earnest obsession with the stratified authenticity of cool is pitch-perfect.

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Adam J. Robinson’s web series Father Wrote the Play by Leeland Greenmess consists, so far, of a single episode and two promos. Both the promos and the pilot episode mix found public domain footage with slideshow-style “animation” — the illusion of motion is created not through multiple drawn frames, but through seemingly Final Cut Pro-generated pans and zooms across the director’s childish drawings, all done in black-and-white pen and ink. It’s sort of a comedy, but there aren’t really any overt jokes, just comic juxtapositions. Well, OK — there is a poop joke.

The Death of Father from Adam Robinson on Vimeo.

Two promos and a single episode is, admittedly, not much to go on, but so far it’s enough for me to fall a little bit in love. Father Wrote the Play is magical and bizarre, and though Robinson doesn’t pull off everything he attempts (see: the poop joke), he does manage to pull it all together.

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Show me a circa-2008 satiric political web video, and I’ll show you well-meaning liberal media makers who, more likely than not, haven’t had much contact with real people (as in, not TV talking heads or vitriolic blog commenters) who represent the opposite side of the political spectrum and almost certainly have never seriously considered even a moderate Republican point of view as potentially legitimate.

This is something I think we all know about the current new media landscape, and so when confronting new works of political media art, much of the work of analysis is automatic. It’s a video about Obama? It’s probably an unquestioning celebration of style over substance. It’s a video about McCain? It’s probably kitsch-wrapped critique.

But there’s something that seems just a little bit more complex about Braxton Price: The Price of Freedom. Produced by Titan.tv and described as a “partly scripted/mostly improvised single-camera political comedy show,” Braxton stars creator Aaron Nauta as a young robo-Republican hired by the fictional National Federation of Young Republicans to host a web show-within-the show “that makes conservative ideals cool again — and also debunks loony liberal logic.”

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Were you as surprised as I was that so many people even questioned whether the first McCain Girls video was an earnest effort by genuine supporters? I was amazed that some people even went as far as to suggest that it was paid for or produced by the campaign itself.

I know the jury’s still out as to whether or not the Republican candidate has the pop cultural savvy to be our commander in chief (Was that whole “Heidi Montag is a talented actress” comment made out of utter cluelessness, or was it a knowing wink at the construction of her pseudo-reality show, The Hills?) but McCain seems smart enough to generally play away from his known weaknesses.

Plus, It’s Raining McCain simply looked too good. From the hundreds of little McCains that rained on the Girls to a green-screen gaffe caused by a certain costume, the video’s very badness had a rhythm to it that was clearly intentional. But if any doubt remains that McCain Girls is something between pure parody and Obama Girl-style, cable news-baiting performance art, the Girls’ latest video should clear that up.

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