Trekkies

There's a great deal of love in Trekkies, Roger Nygard's warm and good-naturedly funny documentary about the world of Star Trekfandom. Interviewed by onetime Next Generationcast member Denise "Tasha Yar" Crosby, the fans that parade through the frame exude a genuine joy that's all the more infectious for being hard-won. Everyone onscreen has clearly walked the shadowy valley of geek shame but thankfully lived to tell their curious, life-changing tales.

Edited by Nygard with an unpretentiously light touch, Trekkiesmakes all the requisite stops with the true believers who think Star Trek's "philosophy" can bring world peace, pausing in such subcult reflecting pools as slash fan-fiction (sexually explicit Kirk/Spock love stories) and Klingon language courses, and also hangs out with some very likable, quite regular folks. In the first group there's Barbara Adams, the commander of the Little Rock fan club, who wears her Starfleet uniform everywhere, and then there are the fans from Vulcan, Canada, who giddily announce that their yearly Trekfest is really picking up. ("Last year, a girl came!") There's a dentist who's turned his office into a memorabilia-crammed Starbase Dental, and a precocious 14-year-old with a prodigious talent for whipping up broadcast-quality special effects. (He, of course, wants to make a movie.) Trekkiesalso offers interviews with four sets of Trekcast members (with an emphasis on the original series), all obviously having given a lot of thought to what Gene Rodenberry spawned in 1969. The eye-mist quotient rises to a crescendo with a Trekstar's recollection of the quadriplegic who is able to forget her broken body only during the hour Trekis on her TV. Her story is a staple of fandom and just a tad manipulative when you realize Paramount released Trekkiesnow to counterprogram in some small way against that other sci-fi franchise. But still, you'd have to be a hard-hearted bastard not to be moved by such a moment, and Trekkies is chock-full of them.