Blu in Your Face: April 30th, 2013

Today in Blu-ray could be a budget buster if you’re a Star Trek fan. First, there’s this:

If all of Season 3 with new extras is too overwhelming, “The Best of Both Worlds” is available separately, albeit edited together into one feature-film-length story. But that’s not all – movies 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 10 are also available individually on Blu-ray starting today. It is an old saw that these mostly odd ones are the worst ones, but that isn’t entirely fair.

Insurrection, the ninth film, is the only one that I would call an outright dud, full of juvenile humor based on silly indulgences like Klingon zits and the singing of showtunes; I remember when it first came out, a year before Star Wars Episode I, and used the tagline “Join the Rebellion!” in an obvious attempt to piggyback on the hype. Sad then; even sadder now. Nemesis, the tenth film, is mostly notable for the villainous performance of a young Tom Hardy, who came off so prissy that it was tough to believe he became the muscle-monster of Bronson and The Dark Knight Rises.

One and three have unfairly bad reps – the first film suffers a bit from wannabe-Kubrickitis, but as an attempt to do a more realistic, cerebral piece of sci-fi than so many of the TV episodes, it succeeds – not to mention it has perhaps the best dramatic Shatner hand-gesture in the whole series, when he insists that a bearded and ’70s medallion-bedecked Dr. McCoy shake his hand. Three was a plot device to bring Leonard Nimoy back, but Christopher Lloyd as the Klingon Kruge kept things entertaining.

Five? Arguably fan service for those who preferred the campier, space-hippie episodes – a pointless trip to meet a fake God doesn’t really have enough obstacles, but along the way you get to see a space toilet and hear Shatner sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” So it’s not a total waste. Generations gets less and less interesting with time – for the franchise’s sake, maybe Kirk did need to die, but it wasn’t handled well, and that and the Enterprise crash are pretty much all there is to it. Honestly, if you’re completist enough to want all of these, you probably bought them as a set already.

In non-Trek, stuff, we have this…

Peter Cushing versus lesbian vampires, yep-yep. And then finally there’s Silver Linings Playbook – not sure if nerdy, except to the degree that it involves socially awkward, obsessive, crazy people finding each other, and proves Oscar-winning movies can be profane and hilarious.

Anyway, those are my main picks. What are yours?