Latest video: Sense of deja vu

By EWAN MCDONALD

Saving the planet has always been a winner at the movies, and film-makers carry it to great lengths in this week's video releases. Most feature themes recycled from earlier efforts; one is a remake of a big-screen classic.

* EDtv arrived less than a year after The Truman Show and - although it has a different approach - director Ron Howard's movie follows a similar line of ratings-obsessed executives chasing enormous audiences watching as an ordinary man brushes his teeth, clips his nails and is deceived by a wicked woman.

Unlike The Truman Show there's a willing victim, just as there is on many of the real life! home video! fly-on-the-wall! shows that infect TV. Matthew McConaughey stars as Ed Pekurny, a Texas charmer who is discovered during auditions by the desperate True TV channel and producer (Ellen DeGeneres). She hits on the idea of televising Ed's life; her boss (Rob Reiner) has doubts.

The channel signs Ed and his extended family: brother Ray (Woody Harrelson), girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman), mother (Sally Kirkland) and stepfather (Martin Landau).

The show starts slowly (well, DeGeneres' channel is rating lower than the Gardening Channel and Ed's show features a toenail-clipping demonstration) but things pick up after Ed and Shari start cheating on Ray. When the ratings start to flag Ed's birth father (Dennis Hopper) appears for some true confessions; when a USA Today poll shows viewers are bored with Shari, the producers arrange for a British sex bomb (Elizabeth Hurley) to appear.

EDtv isn't in the same class as The Truman Show. That has an original story, subversive themes for mainstream American entertainment, and Jim Carrey, an actor at the peak of his powers. Expect some laughs from a movie that promised much but dissolves into, essentially, just another romantic comedy.

* Here's something that's definitely heavyweight, and has another actor at the peak of his powers: Bob Hoskins in almost a solo show, Twentyfourseven.

The story takes place in a desolate post-industrial wasteland in England, where the unemployed spend their days watching the telly, visiting the pub and weighing the possibilities of petty crime. Fun is spitting in a friend's chips when he isn't looking.

Just like Daniel Day-Lewis in The Boxer, enter Hoskins, who used to live around here and remembers when there was a boxing club and times were better. He decides to start the club again and recruits the local louts - including one who's better off than the others because his dad is a gangster. The gangster, happy to see his son occupied, pays for the club. Hoskins, meanwhile, is trying to romance a shop girl who is not interested.

Bleak humour and good local colour, but a curiously empty feeling when it's over.

* You'll most likely recognise Oliver Sacks' name from the feelgooder Awakenings or the recent late-night TV documentary series Time Traveller. At First Sight is based on another Sacks case study.

In Awakenings, Robert De Niro plays a man locked inside a rare form of sleeping sickness. Under treatment by a brilliant doctor (Robin Williams), the man, who had not been able to speak or move for years, regains normal abilities. He even falls in love.

In At First Sight, Val Kilmer plays Virgil, a blind man who meets and falls in love with Amy (Mira Sorvino). She steers him to a doctor (Bruce Davison) who may be able to restore his sight. Amy, a New York architect, has left an unhappy relationship, goes on holiday and sees a man skating on a pond. Later she hires a massage therapist, who turns out to be the same person, Virgil.

Virgil knows his way everywhere in town, knows how many steps to take, is friendly with everybody. He is protected by a possessive older sister, Jennie (Kelly McGillis), who sees Amy as a threat. But Amy and Virgil take walks, and talk, and make love, and soon Virgil wants to move to New York City, where Amy knows a doctor who may be able to reverse his condition.

About this time At First Sight dissolves in its own saccharin and becomes one of those Saturday-night disease-of-the-week telemovies. If that's what you're looking for ...

* ... here's another one: The Theory of Flight, with Helena Bonham Carter as Jane, a young woman in a wheelchair who uses a voice synthesizer to help her communicate. Jane has had bad luck with her helpers until she draws the quirky Richard (Kenneth Branagh), an artist who has been assigned to her after being sentenced to community service for having caused a lot of trouble when he jumped off a building with homemade wings.

Jane wants to experience sex, and informs Richard by playing a little speech that she has programmed into her synthesizer. "Help me lose my virginity," she says. "I know realistically I'll never get the whole deal. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't get as much as I can."

From there it's cute but not too syrupy. Fairly enjoyable.

* Inherit the Wind remakes a 50s classic with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott arguing the case for and against the Darwin's theory in what's become known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, when the Deep South establishment was forced to consider the possibility that we might be related to the apes. Even if it might be true, should schools in Dixie be allowed to teach it?

* Rhapsody in Bloom is a straight-to-video soapie with Penelope Ann Miller (The Relic) as a woman who's spent five years caring for her widowed brother and his three children. Her world's turned upside down when he announces plans to remarry.