free enterprise Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The greatest space captain ever turns 78 today. Oh, sure, some of you will argue for Edward James Olmos as Admiral Adama in Battlestar Galactica, which just concluded its run, but I say that man cried too much. James Tiberius Kirk never cried, at least, not as played by William Shatner. Shatner as Captain Kirk embodied the ideal symbol of authority: strong, decisive, and smart. Yet he also had a delightful sense of humor, valued his longtime friends, and was something of a ladies' man.

Shatner has fielded plenty of criticism for his supposedly stiff manner and his distinctive, rat-a-tat style of delivering dialogue, which has made him an easy target for imitators and detractors. On the other hand, one of his best performances came in Robert Meyer Burnett's Free Enterprise, in which he played himself -- or a fictional variation of "Bill Shatner" -- as a lonely soul, a ladies' man gone to seed, with impossible dreams of mounting a six-hour rap musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar.

In recent years, I never missed an episode of Shatner as Denny Crane in Boston Legal -- he and James Spader had a chemistry rarely seen on TV -- but I've missed seeing him on the big screen. I've always heard great things about Roger Corman's The Intruder. Are there other hidden gems in his movie career awaiting discovery?

Getting back to Star Trek, what are your favorite Shatner performances as Captain James T. Kirk? I favor the traditional even-numbered ones, but do you think Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is ready for reevaluation? Should Bill have gotten some kind of role in J.J. Abram's upcoming Star Trek?

• Breaking News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
• Free Enterprise: Special Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and Mindfire Entertainment's website features a rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at 157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also available.