The View From The Mountain

Star Trek: Generations is an odd duck. Released twenty five years ago this year, in 1994, Generations was the first motion picture that featured the cast of characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation , the Star Trek sequel series that had just concluded a successful seven year run in syndication the same year this film premiered. Yet Generations was also the last Star Trek film to feature the old guard cast from the original Star Trek TV series--although it wasn’t really the entire original series cast; just Kirk, Scotty and Chekov, played by William Shatner, James Doohan, and Walter Koeing, respectively. At the beginning of Generations Kirk and his esteemed colleagues are aboard the brand new Enterprise-B, the next ship to bear the legendary name of Enterprise. Under the command of Captain Harriman (well-played by Alan Ruck, best known from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ), the Enterprise-B is off on its first voyage out of space dock when it encounters a mysterious energy field...

I was catching up on the second and third seasons of Supergirl on Netflix recently, and while I watched this wonderfully fun series with the superb Melissa Benoist playing the present day incarnation of the Girl of Steel, I marveled at the fact that the series’ savvy producers had cast Helen Slater as Supergirl’s adoptive mother, Eliza. Mindful of the fact that this year marks the thirty fifth anniversary of the release of the 1984 Supergirl film (and also because I figured that it was high time for me to view it again) I gave the Helen Slater Supergirl film a re-watch. I watched the 138 minute director's cut, which is on the Supergirl DVD set from Anchor Bay that was released in 2000. Slater, only nineteen when she was cast as Supergirl (which was her very first movie), was a revelation in the title role. Confident without being overbearing, innocent without being too mawkish, Slater was just perfect in this film, serenely embodying the very ideal of what I expected Supergirl...

Anna Kendrick stars as Stephanie Smothers, a prim and proper suburbanite living in Connecticut. A single mom, she still finds the time to help out at her young son’s school and run a cooking/arts & crafts vlog online. Stephanie is so proper that she never curses, nor does she get a chance to hear much cursing in her quaint, quiet life--at least until she meets Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), a worldly woman who drops the f-bomb every other word in her sentences. The extremely laid back Emily works at a high-pressured job in New York City, and doesn’t think of anything of having a martini (or two, or three) in the middle of the day. The fact that these two become fast friends despite their differences is a testament to the well-written script, as well as its two talented leading ladies. And if A Simple Favor simply stopped there and became a comedy/drama about this Odd Couple relationship between two women in the suburbs, it would still be an extremely good movie. But director Paul F...