‘Galaxy Quest’: a guilty pleasure for the ages

Reactions to art have always involved individual perception. Sometimes, by force of argument, perceptions move from the individual to the generally accepted. But some commentators never join in.

Take the paintings of Jackson Pollock, some of which hang in New York's Museum of Modern Art. As one critic argues in The Guardian, Pollock has always had his detractors. But the very fact that people still get upset over Pollock's "drip" style shows just how important that still was — and still is.

Or as the critic writes, "(I)t's hard to see people getting so worked up over an artist, more than 40 years after his death, unless there's something in his work that truly matters."

That's a long-winded way of introducing the notion of the guilty pleasure, which I define as something that might not fit into everyone's idea of quality but nevertheless is enjoyable — and maybe good in its own right as well.

One of my favorite movie guilty pleasures is Dean Parisot's 1999 sci-fi parody "Galaxy Quest." One of those kinds of movies that both makes fun of a specific genre, and yet at the same time works as a good comic representation of that genre, "Galaxy Quest" is the kind of film that I can watch again and again (I've seen it at least five times in full, and in part at least twice that many).

And now we can all enjoy the stories behind the making of the film, as "Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary" is set to screen at 7 p.m. Tuesday at two area Regal Cinemas theaters: Northtown Mall 12 and Coeur d'Alene's Riverstone Stadium 14.

If you go and for some reason you can't score tickets, though, don't worry. As Dr. Lazarus vows, "By Grabthar's hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall be avenged."