By Ewan McDonald
Baldly going where no one has gone before, Captain Jean-Luc Picard kickstarts the Enterprise for its ninth movie adventure - Star Trek: Insurrection - released on video this week.
Not the biggest box-office hit of the year (maybe Trekkies are a stay-at-home bunch), and very much the mixture as
before: warp-speed action, wry laughs and even old-fashioned romance.
But, as the knowledgeable Australian reviewer Evan Williams put it, Star Trek remains the longest running and "most engaging of all the comic-strip space sagas."
Picard (Patrick Stewart) gets word that Data has run amok and taken a cultural survey team hostage. His first concern is to save Data, who will have to be destroyed if he cannot be repaired.
The hunt leads Picard to the Ba'ku planet, where the Federation and their Son'a allies are conducting a cultural survey. The Ba'ku seem to be a simple race of only 600 people, living in one village on their isolated world. But when Picard meets a Ba'ku woman he learns that there is more to her people than meets the eye: she, like most of her fellow Ba'ku, is more than 300 years old.
Picard also learns that the survey is only a cover for a plot to remove the Ba'ku from their world. The Son'a have discovered that the planet is bathed in radiation that reverses aging. The aged, dying Son'a want it for themselves.
Picard confronts his superior, Admiral Dougherty, only to find that the leaders of the Federation are part of the scheme. After all, says the admiral, there are only 600 Ba'ku. Why should they stand in the way of progress? He orders Picard to withdraw.
Decision time for Picard: should he stay or should he go?
So is it worth staying for the ninth innings? Perhaps if you've hung around this long. Trekkies, in an Internet viewing guide, rated Insurrection 7.1 out of 10.
* The perfect end-of-the-millennium movie/TV series has four or five twentysomethings who spend their time hanging out in a trendy bar, preferably in Los Angeles, rambling on about life, work, the ins and outs of love and the opposite sex. With a soundtrack tie-in.
And that's L.A. Rules, starring Lauren Adams of Chasing Amy (which, come to think out of it, was a movie about four or five twentysomethings ... ).
She's Shirley, who is trying to figure out the place of four friends in her life - Trippy, always laughing the loudest at his own jokes, though unfortunately he's usually laughing alone. Troy, if he didn't take himself so seriously, might be a decent writer. Bradley just wants someone to tell him it's OK and give him a Prozac or two. And Tony. Someone told him he could act ... a little. He took them literally.
Together they talk about making it big in Hollywood. And talk.
* Denzel Washington teams with director Spike Lee for He Got Game, playing Jake Shuttlesworth, who's granted temporary release and promise of an early discharge from prison to persuade America's top basketball recruit - his estranged son, Jesus - to play for the state governor's old school.
Just as Jesus Ray Allen of the Milwaukee Bucks faces pressures and temptations over his decision, Jake is also forced to consider not only what's best for himself, but what's best for his son.
* That's it in a light week of rental releases. On sale are ...
You've seen the series, read the women's mags, heard the record, heard the record, heard the record, bought the hype. The video of TrueBliss' meteoric rise to, oh, at least three minutes of fame, Behind the Dream, is essentially a repackaging of the Popstars TV series, with some extra out-takes.
Edward & Sophie - A Royal Celebration is the BBC's commemorative video of the recent royal wedding. The network was granted access to Windsor Castle for the day and the video includes a foreword by Edward, a 30-minute interview with the couple, the wedding ceremony and the couple's drive through Windsor in a horse-drawn carriage.
Great Expectations is the BBC's Bafta award-winning adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, with Charlotte Rampling as Miss Haversham. Like the Bafta award-winner Our Mutual Friend, TVNZ also passed up the opportunity to show this classic piece of quality television - it will screen on Prime sometime next year.
Three years in the making, the BBC's The Planets shows Earth's nearest neighbours as they have never been seen before and tells the stories of the pioneers whose work unveiled them.
With footage from the Apollo, Voyager, Pioneer and Viking missions, the film-makers describe the truth of what's really out there, investigate the possibilities of life elsewhere in the solar system and speculate about the evolution of the solar system over the next five billion years. Which is about as long as they reckon we've got.
Like the aforementioned Dickens series, this is too good for TVNZ to rush to our screens. We may see it sometime this millennium.
And, almost 50 years after its original release, Cinderella is set to wow younger audiences again when Disney/Roadshow releases a digitally restored collector's edition of the 1950 movie.
* Join the Hobbits
The Hobbits are coming. With planning for Peter Jackson's epic - and expensive - Lord of the Rings well underway in Wellington, Warner Bros Video has re-released an earlier movie of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy.
Ralph Bakshi made his animated version of the fantasy saga in 1978, telling the early part of the battle between good and evil in the realms of Middle Earth and the struggle to claim the magical ring which gives its owner great powers.
7Days has 10 copies of Lord of the Rings to give away. To be in the draw, simply write your name and address on the back of an envelope or postcard and send it to:
Lord of the Rings, 7Days, New Zealand Herald, PO Box 3290, Auckland.
Entries close Friday, July 23. Winner published in 7Days on Thursday, July 30.
By Ewan McDonald
Baldly going where no one has gone before, Captain Jean-Luc Picard kickstarts the Enterprise for its ninth movie adventure - Star Trek: Insurrection - released on video this week.
Not the biggest box-office hit of the year (maybe Trekkies are a stay-at-home bunch), and very much the mixture as
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