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(L-r) Sara (CAMERON DIAZ) enjoys a good day on the beach with her daughter Kate (SOFIA VASSILIEVA) in New Line Cinema's drama My Sister's Keeper, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. The film also stars Abigail Breslin. (CNS SIDNEY BALDWIN)

Star Trek

(3-Disc Blu-ray Special Edition)

WHILE hard-core purist fans of the first Star Trek series may moan about how this prequel from director J.J. Abrams gleefully reinvented and reinterpreted the Star Trek canon, those voices are destined to be dust in the solar winds. Abrams successfully jump-started the exhausted Star Trek franchise and gave it new life with a fresh perspective.

Abrams establishes kinetic overdrive in the first few minutes as we bear witness to the under-fire birth of future Capt. James T. Kirk, jettisoned from his doomed father's starship as it is destroyed by a mad Romulan warlord named Nero (Eric Bana).

Back on Earth, the fatherless "Iowa farm boy" grows into a swaggering young stud (Chris Pine) who would rather raise hell than corn. Kirk joins Starfleet, promptly befriends the prematurely cantankerous doctor Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban) and establishes a reputation as a womanizing hotshot, even as he fails to get on the same hailing frequency as a hot xenolinguist named Uhura (Zoe Saldana).

In contrast, the young half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto) is a brilliant by-the-book young officer who has succeeded by tamping down his emotional human side and attacking the program with pure logic.

Both would-be officers are promptly put to the test when a mysterious craft appears above the planet Vulcan. If Abrams' reboot has a particular failing, it is that it favours the spirit of summer movie escapism over the intellectual adventurism of Gene Roddenberry's series. Turning off the brain and going for a ride may be an acceptable option for a regular summer movie, but it ill becomes a Star Trek movie.

But the film is sufficiently smart and engaging that Abrams has effectively guaranteed the characters will be back for further adventures. And if the maiden voyage isn't all that intellectually stimulating, we can take comfort that Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty and the rest are still young.

The three-disc Blu-ray edition boasts three hours of extras, including a gag reel, nine deleted scenes, a vessel simulator and a digital copy of the film. 'Ö'Ö'Ö'Ö

My Sister's Keeper

THEATRICALLY released at the same time as the heartless, mindless Transformers sequel, director Nick Cassavetes' film was clearly intended as counter-programming, wielding sufficient melodramatic torque to wring a tear out of a Decepticon.

Call the embattled Fitzgerald clan a nuclear family on the cusp of a devastating meltdown. Everyone revolves like electrons around the nucleus of Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), a 14-year-old girl who has spent most of her life fighting cancer.

Her affliction is the only reason Kate has a younger sister. Anna (Abigail Breslin) was conceived for the specific purpose of providing life-saving blood, bone marrow and stem cells to her older sis.

When Kate's kidneys fail, Anna is expected to donate one of her own to prevent Kate's inevitable death. But after serving 11 years as a cellular bank for Kate, Anna rebels and scrapes up $700 to hire lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin) to sue her parents, Sara and Brian (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric) for "medical emancipation."

Sara, furious, returns to the legal profession she abandoned to care for Kate to fight the case in the court of an emotionally shaky judge (Joan Cusack) who has recently lost her own daughter.

Eschewing the conventions of the disease-of-the-week movie, Cassavetes fractures the narrative to jump back and forth in chronology, leaping to and from each character's perspective, including Kate's oft-ignored brother Jesse (Evan Ellingson), whose own battle with dyslexia almost fails to register with his parents due to mom's single-minded obsession with keeping Kate alive.

If the film occasionally succumbs to out-of-place clichés (a photo booth montage might have been lifted from Charlie's Angels), Cassavetes gets sufficiently strong performances from his cast, especially Vassilieva, and including Diaz, that the film's denouement may hit like a ton of bricks. Plan accordingly.

The DVD includes 15 minutes' worth of deleted scenes. 'Ö'Ö'Ö1/2

1. Up

2. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

3. The Ugly Truth

4. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

5. The Proposal

6. The Line

7. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

8. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

9. Land of the Lost

10. Orphan

-- Rogers Plus, week ending Nov. 15

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 19, 2009 E4