Star Trek: Voyager (season 6)

New from The Movie Snob.

Voyager: Season 6.  Oops! I finished watching Voyager long ago but somehow never got around to reviewing the last two seasons. Anyway, there’s no doubt that season six is the best season of Voyager yet.  Garnering three A’s, a whopping sixteen B’s, and seven C’s, this season crosses the finish line with a very respectable 2.85 grade point average.  Of course I must insist you watch the A-listers.  First there’s “Survival Instinct,” about the plight of three former Borg drones—they’ve been psychically linked to each other and cannot tune out each other’s thoughts.  Then there’s “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy,” a very funny episode in which some spying aliens detect the Doctor’s outlandish daydreams and mistake them for reality.  Finally there’s “One Small Step,” a touching story in which the Voyager crew discovers an ancient NASA spacecraft inside a space anomaly.  I won’t list out all the B-grade episodes, but I’ll note that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) guest stars in the solid episode “Tsunkatse.”  A nice continuing story is set in motion in “Collective” when Voyager encounters some Borg children who have been cut off from The Collective.  “Ashes to Ashes” is a weird, thought-provoking episode about an alien who claims to be the reincarnation of a deceased member of Voyager’s crew.  “Good Shepherd” is a fun episode focusing on three lowly crew members that we’ve never seen before.  And “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” is a ghost story that would make great Halloween watching.  But the whole season is worthwhile, so get to it!

Babette’s Feast

The Movie Snob gets all movie snobbish.

Babette’s Feast (B). This movie won the 1988 Oscar© for Best Foreign Language Film, and it seems to be remembered mostly for featuring one of the most sumptuous depictions of food in all of film (the titular feast, of course). But beyond that it’s a nice, if slow-moving, little drama. Our setting is a bleak, wind-swept Danish fishing village in the mid-1800s. Some years before, a Protestant minister founded a small, puritanical church there. Through flashbacks, we see his two daughters as young women who turn down opportunities to leave the village for love or fame. Back in the present, the sisters are unmarried, on the high side of middle age, and still tending to their deceased father’s aging congregation. But lo! A somewhat younger French woman named Babette turns up in the village one stormy night, having fled a revolution back in France, and she begs the sisters to allow her to stay as a servant. Although poor themselves, the sisters take her in, and she provides a small touch of grace to the village. As the title gives away, there’s a feast at the heart of the film’s last act, and I won’t say more about it lest I commit spoilers about a 34-year-old movie. Anyhoo, I think it’s worth seeing.

Spy Kids

The Movie Snob takes one for the team.

Spy Kids (D). I didn’t expect this movie to be this bad. It has spawned, like, a million sequels, right? And yet, it just isn’t very good. The plot is kind of like the much superior flick The Sleepover. Here, two kids are surprised to discover that their parents (Antonio Banderas, Ruby Sparks; Carla Gugino, San Andreas) are actually retired superspies. When the parents come out of retirement for one last mission, they get captured by the bad guys, and the kids have to suit up and become — spy kids. The bad guys’ scheme for world domination is a half-baked mess. The action scenes are ho-hum. The dialogue is not clever, and the characters are not particularly likable. I guess there must be been slim pickings for family-friendly fare back in 2001 for this yawn-fest to become such a big hit.