Star Trek: Voyager (season 4)

The Movie Snob goes where no man has gone before.

Voyager: Season Four.  This show continues to improve, in my estimation.  Using letter grades, I gave this season’s 26 episodes 16 Bs, 9 Cs, and only a single D, for a 2.58 grade-point average.  A large part of the reason for the season’s high marks has to be the appearance of a new crew member—a svelte former Borg drone known as Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan, Down with Love).  Her long years as a Borg have left her super-smart and super-unemotional, and her struggle to get in touch with her long-suppressed humanity becomes a running motif.  (Her joining Voyager also means the end for Kes, a character I kind of liked.  Kes bows out in the second episode.)  The crew continues to find the Delta Quadrant a dangerous and even savage place, repeatedly crossing paths mid-season with an extremely belligerent and cruel race called the Hirogen.  And around that same time, the crew manages to communicate with Starfleet, though only briefly and incompletely, which is kind of exciting and generates some repercussions in future episodes.  The only episode you must avoid is number 21, about some weird molecule called Omega, which Star Fleet has a top secret directive to all starship captains to destroy.  There are lots of good episodes, but I’ll single out episode 14, in which the Doctor gets to interact with another snippy emergency medical hologram played by Andy Dick (TV’s NewsRadio), and episode 23, an unusual episode set 700 years after Voyager’s unfortunate detour to the Delta Quadrant.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

New movie review from The Movie Snob

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids  (C).  This was my first time to see this 1989 “classic,” so my grade is a little generous to factor in the era in which it was made and the fact that a geezer in his 50s is not the target audience.  That said, it’s really not very good.  Rick Moranis (Little Shop of Horrors) plays an absent-minded scientist type who’s also a suburban father of two.  He’s trying to invent a shrinking machine, which he unwisely keeps in his house’s attic.  Through a mishap, his kids and the two boys who live next door get shrunk down to a size smaller than an ant.  When the tiny kids accidentally get thrown out with the garbage, they have to cross the now-immense back yard to return to the house and then somehow draw their parents’ attention to their plight.  The kids’ adventure part of the story is okay, but throughout the movie the humor is generally terrible.  Extra demerits for the next-door dad character (Matt Frewer, Dawn of the Dead (2004)), a stereotypical boor who hounds his sensitive older son to be a football player and is otherwise generally unpleasant.  The lovely Marcia Strassman (TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter) plays Moranis’s wife.  I didn’t recognize any of the child actors, but The Borg Queen informed me that Jared Rushton was in Big.

Monsters University

A movie review from The Movie Snob,

Monsters University  (C).  I only dimly remember the 2001 animated film Monsters, Inc., and I think I liked it OK.  Twelve years later, Pixar came out with this prequel, which I just saw.  The little green one-eyed monster Mike (voice of Billy Crystal, The Princess Bride) has the ambition to be a “scarer” when he grows up, and he gets into Scare School at Monsters University.  There he quickly gets crossways with another freshman, a big, blue, natural-born scarer called Sully (voice of John Goodman, 10 Cloverfield Lane).  And then it gets very predictable: opposites Mike and Sully are both kicked out of the program.  Desperate to get back in, they team up, join the lamest fraternity on campus, and try to carry their fraternity to an underdog victory in the Scare Games in hopes of being let back into Scare School.  Lots of vocal talent, including Steve Buscemi (Fargo), Nathan Fillion (Serenity), and the formidable Helen Mirren (The Queen) as the crusty old Dean Hardscrabble, can’t lift this overly long (104 minutes) movie above mediocrity.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It, by Justice Neil Gorsuch with Jane Nitze and David Feder (2019).  I wasn’t really planning to buy this book, but then I paid my first visit to Interabang Books, an independent bookstore (!) in Dallas, and I saw that it had signed copies for sale.  Just a few weeks later, the store got wiped out in those crazy tornadoes!  (I guess that all happened about a year ago?  More?)  Anyhoo, this book is a collection of speeches, essays, and judicial opinions by the man who replaced Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.  He promises to out-Scalia his predecessor, writing with conviction about the importance of the separation of powers and textualism in statutory and constitutional interpretation.  I enjoyed the book, but I was already sold on most of the ideas he’s selling; your mileage may vary.  And I didn’t see anything in the book explaining who Jane Nitze and David Feder are or what they did on this book, which I was a little curious about.