The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

With the latest installment in the Star Trek movie series set to debut today, we figured he could help us divine the prospects for Viacom (VIAB Quote - Cramer on VIAB - Stock Picks), the Hollywood overseer of the Star Trek franchise.

At the very least, it couldn't hurt.

Kozinets has a mixed outlook for the new movie, which he says is called Star Trek Nemesis, but what we quaintly call Star Trek Enough Already.

The apparent good-vs.-evil dichotomy in Nemesis (though Kozinets has gobbled up all the pre-release materials, he hasn't actually seen it yet) corresponds closely to a body of thought firmly established in the U.S. these days, says Kozinets. The villain, he says, is "one horrible guy who represents this whole regime that's going to destroy everything that's good about our civilization."

That's a plus for Viacom: The us-vs.-them nature of Nemesis' universe will likely resonate with audiences better than, say, a rerelease of the touchy-feely, save-the-whales Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

On the downside, Kozinets notes, there's no shortage of good-against-evil tales and moral clarity at the box office these days; Star Trek will have a particularly difficult time going up against the second installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, due next week. "That's going to mess up Star Trek," he says. "I'm not sure why they didn't release [Nemesis] on Thanksgiving or delay it until springtime."

Of course, Kozinets acknowledges, unlike the Research Lab, nobody from Paramount asked his opinion.

4. The Guns Also Roses

The problem with rock stars, of course, is that they behave like rock stars.

The latest company to learn this lesson is Clear Channel Entertainment (CCU Quote - Cramer on CCU - Stock Picks), which up until Wednesday had the honor of promoting the first full tour in eight years of the band Guns N' Roses.

OK, it wasn't exactly the band that "originally exploded onto the music scene in 1985," as Clear Channel put it in a September press release. Pretty much, it was bandanna-wearing frontman Axl Rose and some other guys.