Reviews

This was a good film, but it's darker than I expected. Not a lot of funny parts, even dark humor. What jokes there were went over the heads of the children in the theater. In fact, I can't recall a single time I heard children laugh at any of it. I'm sure one or two kids must have laughed once or twice, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Jim Carrey was excellent. The idea that anybody athletic could have done the same job is idiotic. The good actor will almost always shine through the makeup and the costume, and he does. That said, though, he seemed hyperactive, compared to what I felt the Grinch was in the book. Maybe Ron Howard felt that constant activity would keep the kids in the audience entertained. That's a small point,though. I never met the Grinch, so maybe his take is the better one.

I got the impression the good people of Whoville were played for idiots. I don't think that was what Howard intended, but their makeup and speech patterns and multi-colored sets made them look like fools. Would I want to spend five minutes in Whoville? Unlikely. Of course, they do change. There's a real change in the Whoville when they discover what the Grinch did to them as they slept. They become more human. Maybe another viewing would make it clear why they were set up for the fall like that.

This is a loud film, too. That may just be the modern film disease, though. Most films are too loud these days. The crashes are louder, the gunfire, the slaps, the fistfights, the breaking bottles. All digitally diseased.

I'd have no problem seeing the film again, but mainly to admire that anybody can put together a big film these days. It's easy to slice up Ron Howard when he doesn't tap our memories and deliver the perfect version of what we thought the Grinch meant to us. However, it's so hard to make movies these days, when somebody does something somewhat satisfying, I'm perhaps more thankful than most. I thought I got my money's worth.

If I have to select a single Christmas movie to watch every year, I don't expect Grinch will be it. My favorite will still be Christmas Story. Still, Grinch is okay.

I never saw Sixth Sense. Once I read the script and knew the ending, I didn't want to be tricked by a too-clever plot that seemed based upon the dimwittedness of the moviegoer.

I went to Unbreakable because the storyline seemed fresh, compared to the sludge that Hollywood wants its moviegoers to pay money for, and to that degree, the movie works. Night builds a relationship between comics, the best in us, the worst in us, and the possibility that the worst in one person can help restore the wholeness of somebody else. That, by the end of the movie, is what has happened to the Bruce Willis character. He evolves in his relationships with his wife and his son, he overcomes his own "kryptonite" problem, and he discovers his own inner powers. Also, he clears up a loose end or two in his past. He is more whole than before the train wreck. In this way, the story reminds me of the line that a biochemist in the Tom Cruise movie, MI 2, says. Every great hero needs a great villain.

I can't imagine this film developing the audience that Sixth Sense did. Much of this film is bleak, and I have to think the ending will irritate many. Anytime you have to end a film with captions, the way they used to end episodes of Dragnet with verbal captions ("Mr Ramirez was found guilty of selling ice cream cones to diabetics, and is now serving 6-10 at Robbins State Pen"), you know the plot has a problem. I was completely unprepared for it. When it happens, you are likely to think, "That's it?" It will make sense, but it will feel unsatisfactory.

The film is well-acted. I was impressed by Jackson, because he plays a man that few will like. He's an angry man who does angry things to people. Too many actors won't play such a character. Willis was good, and it was good to see Robin Wright Penn. Spencer Treat Clark was good as the son.

Overall, it's a decent sophmore effort. It's like the second album by a rock group. You know it can't be as good as the original hit (leaving aside the Beatles and a few others). Still, this is a good film.

My, my, what nerves have been touched, judging by the comments.

This is a good film, and I appreciate anybody who makes a film about golf. It's lush, beautifully photographed, and well-acted, particularly by the second-tier actors. However, I am always a bit cautious about watching Hollywood do mysticism in sports. It's a bit like reading user comments by people who don't play golf. It's a bit like watching Hollywood do the American South.

Bagger Vance is similar to many of the characters you can read about in true-life accounts of mysticsm. If you live long enough and welcome it, you will probably have an experience similar to Matt Damon's character. A strange person enters your life, doesn't seem quite human, seems to have direct knowledge of events and conditions most of us don't, and after helping, he leaves. It isn't so unusual. My guess is, it happens more often than we know. Somebody once went to Boris Pasternak and criticized Dr. Zhivago for having too many amazing events, to many coincidences. Too many people who hadn't met in years just bumping into each other. Pasternak replied in so many words, if you don't believe in that, it's because you don't know Russia. That's how things are there. You expect them to happen because they're commonplace.So, the Will Smith character is completely reasonable, and the performance properly underplayed. Zen master/yogis generally don't get too excited or loud.

There were some nice moments in the editing and sound. In our theater, at least, the movie opens in silence. The Fox logo comes up, and you expect the trumpets, but it's all quiet until we see Jack Lemmon playing golf. The very climax of the golfing also happens in silence. If I had to read anything mystical in that, it might be that our greatest achievement might be to reach the level of the Absolute, which is silence. By the way, I got the impression that Bagger Vance maybe saves the life of the Jack Lemmon character. It's subtle, but it is suggested.

This is the kind of film you really want to see in a movie theater. It will lose a lot when it shrinks to the VCR and DVD. I forget the name of the course they shot it on, but the course itself is one of the charcters.

It will be a while before we know if anything spoken in the film drops into our day-to-day usage. Nobody says, "Be the ball", but the movie does have some good moments. For people who don't play sports, a lot of what Bagger Vance says makes no sense, such as when he says Matt Damon needs to see the field clearly. WHAT? Well, there was a book or article written maybe 20 years ago by George Leonard, in which he discusses how the great basketball players have "soft eyes", a vision which pulls in much more than the average player can see. It's inherent in us, but rarely developed.

Anyway, this is a good film, but one that challenges the viewer. If you don't believe in things you don't believe in, it's like watching fog. If you have had experiences in athletics or meditating, much of it will make sense.

I enjoyed Pay It Forward, but not a lot. The acting by the principals is good: Spacey, Hunt, and Osment. However, I just never felt connected with it. It's a movie that just missed being better. There seems to be a problem with the structure.

Can Hollywood do an authentic white trash movie? It's as if they want their stars to look good, even though they're playing wrong-side-of-the-freeway types. The result is that the young man who Osment befriends doesn't convince me he's been on the streets. And when we see Angie Dickinson as a kind of bag lady who lives in her station wagon, we don't believe it. The place she lives with her other downside friends is not convincing. It's too pretty for being a dump. This is important, because part of the difficulty Hunt and Spacey have is about class separation. She's the so-called white trash, and he's the teacher who uses words most of us don't know. To Hunt's credit, though, she doesn't make false moves, for the most part. When she struggles with taking a drink, you sense the struggle is genuine. Her gradual improvement is also genuine.

The acting of the lesser cast members didn't make me feel they were genuine. The main problem is overacting. There's a reporter who tracks the story of the Pay It Forward "movement". I never felt he was a reporter. Early in the film, there's a hostage drama in the rain that's boring. The reporter drives up, bothers the police with his questions, then loses his car when it's smashed by the escaping hostage-taker. A real reporter wouldn't do that. It was a Hollywood way of getting him into the scene to lose his car. So, when his car is smashed, I don't care, and I don't really believe his emotions.

There's a young black man who pays it forward to help a girl with breathing trouble. I just never got the feeling he'd ever been behind any bars, unless he was a bartender. This seems to be a good example of how important the so-called lesser roles are. They're the world in which the principal actors operate, and they didn't persuade me.

I wasn't fond of some of the camera work. The camera would move around the face of a character for apparently no necessary reason. I was wondering, "Why are they showing us this side of Osment's face, then the front, and then the other side?" In other cases, they gave a new view of Vegas. It didn't look like the Vegas I've seen on visits. They didn't just take the obvious establishing shots, but did some homework.

This talk of Academy Award contention isn't justified. It's a good film that makes you think about how anybody can make the world a better place, particularly a kid. However, I got the sense that some in the audience felt manipulated, especially near the end.

This is a hilarious movie that provoked uncontrolled laughter in the theater, though people standing outside in line for their tickets were generally unamused.

Finally, De Niro does a great job in a movie where he isn't a mob boss or a cop. Stiller and everybody else are also quite good in this.

I like the way the De Niro character is revealed bit by bit. We think we know him, and then we see something new. This continues throughout the movie, so things stay interesting. I'll never look at a lie detector again without thinking of this film.

One of the most amusing moments is when Ben Stiller has to say grace. The movie telegraphs his prayer, though. Pay attention to the music playing when Stiller and De Niro visit the drugstore, and you'll know what his prayer becomes.

It's a pleasure to see what Hollywood can do when talent prevails over pubesence.

This is the funniest movie of the year. The last time I laughed so much, it had to be Galaxy Quest, but the jokes then were often about Star Trek and other space shows, not just the situation itself. The laughter in the audience was so different, here, though. Much stronger, probably the way Airplane was in the theaters. Made it hard to follow the movie, so many people kept laughing, you missed the next lines. A good reason to see it again.

I was a fan of SCTV about 20 years ago, even though the show was uneven, but I loved the way Catherine O'Hara acted, and she's quite good here. So is Eugene Levy.

If you don't know the plot, it's about dog show contestants. We follow six couples as they prepare to leave home for the Mayflower dog show in Philadelphia, and then we watch them in the competition. We finally see the winner after the show has long gone, about a year later. The style is mock documentary, even though we never see who's doing the "documentary". It's just the style.

Wish it had been longer, guess it was about 90 minutes. It never slowed down, even though there are clearly sections where they don't go for sustained laughs, especially for the guy who lives in a town called Pinenut.

The film is remarkably kind to strange people, though it uses them for laughs. It nevers flips over the edge into cruelty. For instance, there's a chesty woman who has a lot to do with Anna Nicole Smith, who has married a real, real old geezer for the money. The geezer is hilarious, even though he never says a word. If he'd said any lines, it would have been at the expense of good taste, I expect. Instead, we simply are invited to imagine what he is like.

This is the best movie of its kind. Of course, I've never seen a movie about dog shows. I'll go see it again very soon, at least to start finding all the other stuff I didn't hear over the laughter. I don't recall anything anybody in the movie said, though, which means I doubt it will have the influence of Caddyshack or Airplane. Still, the flick is funny on its own terms.

By the way, it gets the laughs without making fun of the idea of dog shows. People in the audience loved the dogs, so the jokes didn't alienate them by questioning the validity of the dog show itself.

I saw this in a small Berkeley theater. Hope it gets picked up by the large megaplexes.

Woof! Woof! Woof! (3 out of 4 woofs)

Here is my prediction. This week, Duets makes 2 million. Next week, 200,000. The week after, 20,000. The final week of its national run, it will make 2 dollars. That's a duet of dollars.

I read the reviews and thought, "I want to see a film that doesn't work. I'm a student of cinema. Why doesn't the film work?" To that degree, the movie was worth seeing, just to count the ways a well-intentioned film fails to deliver. In some ways, though, the movie just missed being something better.

Reason one: it spends an hour to develop the characters. For the most part, they don't hold my interest. It's all formula. Did the producer/director think a star or two would raise our interest?

Reason two: The movie mixes social satire with comedy with drama with sentimentality, and that's too many spices in the soup.

Reason three: plot holes or disappointments. There's a murder in a 7-11 kind of store. The only reason I know that isn't from the film. Guns are fired, we never see anybody hit, and the next scene is miles away in a hotel. Two of the characters are now on the run from the law, and we have no direct knowledge of that. Another plot hole is at the end of the film. The big Karaoke championship is in Omaha, with the winner getting $5,000. Best I can tell, no winner is ever announced. I know for a fact we never see anybody with a trophy. It's implied that the police action during the championship halted it, but there's not even somebody getting up to make an announcement. Somebody dies in the movie, but we never see it. Somebody wins the karaoke tournament (or doesn't) but we don't know. Duh.

Reason four: We're stuck in the same karaoke bar, no matter what city or what bar we're in. There are several good karaoke numbers by the characters. I give them points for doing them well and using them to support the character development, and even the plot. BUT they all seem like the same bar. The eyes want a little variety, and I felt mine were getting tired from straining to see in the darkness of the bars.

Reason five: The action leads to Omaha, and I did not see a single indication the characters had arrived. This has to be a major rules violation of directing. It's a small point, but indicative of the sloppiness of the movie. It's like doing a movie about San Francisco, and leaving out everything unique about SF. They could have sent a second or third unit there to at least get some establishing shots, but they were up in Vancouver, instead. They should have said the Karaoke championship was in Vancouver.

This isn't a bad film. You see how much they cared about the work they were doing on the set. It's just a disappointing one. Oh, Gwyneth Paltrow can sing, and she plays a dimwit with a heart of gold very well.

Went to see this film on the review by Roger Ebert. It's okay. It plays with the busted gold heist, gives the star a wisecracking urban adorability, and holds the audience interest through the end. It's heavy on the high tech, illegal surveillance angle. I lost count of the number of monitors the feds have as they track the Jamie Foxx character, so I hope they got a good deal at Circuit City.

The movie does a lot with a little. For instance, in the first scene, we see Jamie Foxx and a friend about to rob a seafood warehouse for a couple of thousand dollars. Foxx makes a point to his friend -soon to be a coward- that they aren't hitting a shrimp joint. They're prawns. Foxx gets a lot of mileage from that exchange. Jamie Foxx is quite funny with the faces and the one-liners. However, it means the film is flipping between semi-comedy and murder/thriller styles. That's hard to do.

The suspense of the film is compromised by one thing. The tension of the last half-hour is based on the threat that the mastermind of the gold heist will kill Jamie Foxx's girlfriend and baby. It became clear to me early there was no way she and the baby were going to die, so that punctured the anxiety the movie wanted as a timebomb ticks down to the inevitable explosion.

Finally, the ending of the film is preposterous. You don't see it coming, but when it comes, it's beyond my capacity for belief. Given the fact that the gold heist was busted, it's hard to understand how in the world the film's conclusion could have been arranged when the bank robbers were clearly in a state of confusion and duress. It's an attractive conclusion, shot with an aerial perspective, but it wasn't supported by the facts in evidence. I think Hitchcock or somebody like him said you have to design a film so it's immune to "refrigerator logic". That's when the viewer of the movie gets home, decides to grab a bite, and when he is at the fridge, he thinks about the film, "There's no way that could happen." That's the ending.

Still, it's a good action film, it goes by quickly, it has a few laughs, and the photography is very good. Ebert was right, three stars.

A movie like this has so many opportunities to fall on its face and die, because the concept only works if you believe Renee Zellweger can see her husband murdered, forget the event, and so identify with her favorite soap star, she actually believes the television actor and her were engaged once. If an acting team can create that illusion and make it work, they've done something impressive. The movie works because the cast makes everything appear so real.

This is Morgan Freeman's movie, but Renee Zellweger is right up there, too. Morgan Freemen is like Gene Hackman to me. Soon as he signs up for a part, the credibility of the story goes up. If you haven't seen Roger Ebert's review of the movie yet, take a look. He captures very well the change in Freeman. The most important story is Nurse Betty, how she makes it through a horrible trauma, makes it to LA, and makes it to her favorite soap to meet her heart surgeon tv star. Just as rich,though, is the story of Freeman's character. He has his own changes, too, as he becomes enchanted by the photograph of Betty, to the point of imagining her in a dance at the Grand Canyon. I won't go into the rest of the cast, except to say everybody is so good in this flick. The supporting roles are all rich. In some ways, this film is like Ruthless People. Hilarious off-the-wall stuff, followed by danger. They both exist in this film, and they both seem right when they happen. The exit line of Morgan Freeman -the last thing he says to Nurse Betty- is a summation of his philosophy. In its own way, it reminded me of the last line I recall from Spartacus, when the wife of Spartacus shows her husband their boy, and tells her husband on the cross, "He's free." It seems to be the final wake-up call for Nurse Betty, the last one she needs to rejoin this agreed-upon illusion we call reality.

This should be on the top-ten lists by the end of the year.

Maybe a dozen years ago, Siskel and Ebert were discussing one of the most valuable qualities a winning movie has: felt life. You see the movie, you feel you know the place and the environment. So, you see a movie about gladiators, and you feel you know the life in that time, and in that profession.

This is a fine film which deserves better distribution and more attention. The way it provides felt life is in the way it takes us into the world of the gamblers and the people who take their money at the tables. We learn the way gamblers cheat. We learn a bit of the croupier mentality. We see the way the public and private lives of the croupier blend.

This is a British suspense film, which means, not a lot of suspense by American standards. When there is an attempt to rob a casino, we don't see bombs and bullets flying. It's a little too civilized for that. That's okay.

There's a lot in the film to see, though, since it isn't filled with mind-numbing violence. You get the time to watch Jack the croupier change as his career steals more and more time from his writing. In fact, you see him become more like Jake, the character from the novel he's stitching in his spare time.

There are a couple of small plot point problems I have with the film, but that may be from not following it closely enough. Jack comes into some money at one point, and he makes it clear in the narration that he can't spend the money, it could be demanded back from the people who gave it to him if their project collapses. By the end of the film, when the project has collapsed, the money drops as an issue. The final scene opens up more issues that couldn't be resolved earlier, so they hang a bit in the air. That's a small point, though. I have no trouble recommending this film, even if it's small, melancholy.

It's a crying shame that you could make ten of these films for the price of a summer studio megafilm, maybe 20. Instead, we get a monster attacking a city or an asteroid about to collapse a monster who is attackng a city.

This is worth taking a look at. Walken does a commendable job as the small-time crook, now out and self-employed, trying to stay honest fixing cars in a garage. Cindi Lauper is good, piling on a thick NYC accent, first time I've seen her in a movie. She's likeable, very grounded in the movie. The supporting cast is very real. The result is, you don't like many of them a lot. They're average people, and we see them in less than flattering scenes. To that extent, you do like them because they're dealing the best way they know with events.

The movie works, in part because of what it doesn't do. It doesn't make us endure one of those speeches the wife or girlfriend or best pal gives the ex-con, just before he's about to commit to one more heist. Here, Lauper just tells Walken to hit the road, she knows somethings up, and it's gonna spoil the plans they made. Very low-key. No need to get into melodrama, everybody knows the Walken character, they're not going to change his mind with wailing.

I wouldn't drive across town to see the film, but if it's convenient, this is a good character study. It has some humor, too, but only as a byproduct of things going on, not a goal. The tone of it reminded me of the movie, Thief, but only in the sense that we're watching people who live in a realm most of us never go. I'd rather see this kind of movie than another one of those idiotic gross-out comedies.

Finally, a summer movie I enjoyed. This is exactly what it promises. You see four aging stars show what acting is all about. There are some interesting plot twists that keep this from turning into nothing more than a team-saves-satellite predictable yawner. I won't spoil them here. Enough to say that Clint Eastwood delivers again. The special effects -I think they were from ILM- were pretty good. The only thing that bothered me a bit was the final scene. It really, REALLY stretches credulity to assume Tommy Lee Jones or anybody else could reach his destination. However, it didn't ruin the movie.

There are some weaknesses in the movie. It slows a bit in parts, mainly to play some more with the fact that all four astronauts are old, but it never pushes that button too much. There's a point where the jokes about old men stop, but most people in the audience wouldn't remember when, so the old men jokes aren't exessive.

The ending is never really in doubt. You know there's no way Clint Eastwood will fail, but they do put enough doubt in it to make it thrilling near the end.

Small item. In the credits, Clint gets credit for a song called "Espacio", though I didn't catch if it's a vocal or instrumental, and where it comes in the action.

Finally got to see Magnolia on the big screen. What a brilliant film, so rich in detail, with so many unforgettable scenes.

I can see why people would chafe at the synchronistic events in the film. As somebody who has them happen every day, I can look at them in the movie and feel they're completely appropriate. Somebody who read Doctor Zhivago once went to the author and told Pasternak how unbelievable his book was, all those coincidences happening, two people separated by years meeting at precisely the right time. His answer was: you don't know Russia. That happens all the time, you expect it to happen. That's how I feel about Magnolia.

The performances are all touching. If you have never met the characters PTA has created, you haven't lived. These people are real, they're in LA and SF and one or two other places. It would be easy to snipe at some of them for being over the top, but these people are all in the grips of something huge that is disrupting their lives. They're all being knocked around by the past and the present, and they're struggling to cope.

I don't see this as bleak a film as some reviewers. It reminds me of American Beauty, which seems the same, but actually shows us hope, disguised as it may be as calamity.

The film has beautiful moves of the camera, at times, as if the camera is a character. The way we follow the participants in the tv quiz show through the studio offices is quite good. I liked all the small ways in which the main characters are connected from scene to scene. The most obvious is the way they all sing "Wise Up". Another is that, when one scene ends with a character taking a drink, the next one starts with taking a drink. PTA is making a point, we really are related.

It's a great movie to mark the end of the 1900's.

The first time I heard about BS was when the original film was released. I saw the last minute on a cable channel and thought, "Wow! Where has there ever been a gunfight like that?"

I just saw the re-release of BS, July 2000, and have to say it doesn't measure up to the hype. However, it shows the germ from which the other Coen movies have sprouted. To that degree, it's interesting.

Visually, it's got some good stuff. There's a moment when two characters, miles away from each other, are looking up at their ceiling fans. Okay. There's an interesting scene in which blood from the back seat of a car continues to flow, long after the dead husband has been removed. I thought it was done better, though, in Tess, when the blood from the floor above stains the ceiling below. I got tired of seeing how artistic they tried to make headlights in the night. There is a good moment, though, when you see how truly stupid the boyfriend of the widow is. He digs a grave for a body, finally gets it to stay there, all in the protection of night. When the sun begins to come up, we discover he drove into a farmfield next door to a farm house.

This isn't the classic I hoped for, but it shows where these guys were headed. By the time they did Raising Arizona, though, they were cooking. RA is a wonderful film. At a minimum, even though the characters in it are doing something illegal, you care at least for them. In BS, I just don't care if the wife lives or dies, if her idiot boyfriend lives or dies, or if the dead husband really comes back from the dead.

As usual, Emmet Walsh was the reason for seeing this film. You can't take your eyes off him when he shows up. In Ordinary People, he had about one line, the one about not letting anybody give him electrical shock therapy, but it stuck with me long after I forgot eveybody else's lines.

This was my first Jackie Chan film, and it's surprisingly good. I was expecting a bad plot/script that simply hooked the action scenes together, but that was only because I just saw MI2. Shanghai Noon, though, has a real story, and a touching one at that.

This is a slower, more contemplative movie than the trailers want us to think. That's why some critics say it lags here and there. If a Jackie Chan movie goes five minutes without his breaking something, that doesn't mean it's lagging. There's a real issue being developed in this film, right from the start in the Forbidden City. That's the question of personal freedom and honor. The Chan character has to settle that for himself, loyalty to the Emperor and the lock-step mentality of the East, or loyalty to something more important, his own sense of what's right. His selfless motivation in the beginning of the film gives him the opportunity to live a less restricted life in the West. This also ties in well with the fact that Chan and his partner Owen are being chased by the law, so the ideas of being in the law and outside it, and being bound by the imperial decree and being free of it co-mingle here. A smarter movie than it will be given credit for.

However, most of the movie isn't about the high ideals, it's a funny, exciting film that's shot beautifully. It has a very clean look, very crisp. It has lots of good scenes, such as the bath Chan and Owen take, and no bad ones. A perfect summer movie, and I would be thrilled if it beats MI2 week after week.

Of course it's over the top. Of course it's implausible. Of course it's Woo repeating ideas from his other films. Of course, of course, blah-blah.

This is a very good summer action movie. It has so many plot holes, they should have filmed it in Switzerland. Still, it has great action sequences, it is not gratuitously violent, it has a couple of interesting plot twists (usually involving identities), and it's a good travelogue of Australia. Most of all, it does not end with a helicopter chase under the English Channel. Oh, it also civilizes the audience by giving them a little culture about the ancient mythological being, Chimera.

So, I give it good marks for doing exactly what it should, and even Anthony Hopkins is there to remind us what real acting is about.

Oh, there's no way Tom Cruise did all those stunts. I know, John Woo says he did, and his wife is supposed to have been angry at Tom for doing them. Nope. I think when Woo is quoted as saying, "Tom did all his own stunts", it really means, he did all the ones that he did. Nevermind, Tom seems to have a lot more fun in this film than in the first, and he even pokes fun at himself; the evil character complains about the hardest part impersonating Cruise's character once in disguise: it was flashing that silly grin every fifteen minutes.

Sean Connery was good as James Bond, but Dr. No wasn't his best acting performance. By Goldfinger and Thunderball, though, he had hit his own tempo wonderfully. Maybe MI3 and MI4 will do the same for Cruise.

This is a very funny movie. Having never seen a tv show or movie with Ed Norton, Ben Stiller, or Jenna Elfman, it was a treat to see three professionals shine. They all embodied their roles so well, you never felt they were Ed Norton being a priest, Ben being a rabbi, and Jenna being a corporation rescue expert.

There are two levels of humor in this film, in terms of physical comedy: the big-laugh routines, and the small stuff. The small stuff had me laughing in the theater when nobody else was. Small stuff, like when Ed Norton needs a drink in Jenna's apartment, opens the little fridge, and stuffs a bottle of beer or liquor into the pocket of his jacket. It reminded me of old Ben, the guy living on the beach in "Local Hero", when he went to a party and stuffed snacks into his jacket pockets.

Good marks to the supporting cast. I completely didn't notice that the old priest who Ed Norton consulted late in the film was Milos Forman. Anne Bancroft was delightful. They flesh out the film so well, you can enjoy the stuff the supporters do.

The writer of the script, a guy named Blumberg, I think has a cameo. Early in the movie, when Ed and Ben hold a sign at the airport for Jenna to recognize them by -it reads "Anna Banana"- somebody is standing near them with a sign, "Blumberg". So, you might check that out.

It runs a bit long, and they could have cut some of it out in the "second act", when the friendship of the three is threatened by two of them falling in love (not Ed and Ben), leaving one man out. However, I was never bored. You can spot the ending long before it comes, but so what? It's a wonderful, light-hearted romantic comedy, it treats the religious issues with respect, and the most important question it deals with -keeping faithful to the things we say we love- is explored intelligently here.

Excellent film, go see it. It's a great date film.

This wasn't a bad film at all. I had a free ticket to any film in the cineplex, so I figured I might as well see Mission to Mars, given how it was savaged by critics.

It was not bad at all. I enjoyed it. Had I paid for it, I would have felt it was worth the money. An entertaining summer movie.

The special effects are quite good. So good, you take for granted how easily they recreate the gravity-free and articial gravity scenes. The end toward which the film gravitates was completely plausible. My best guess is that we didn't evolve here anyway. In Europe, evolution has been dropped from many school systems, since big holes have appeared in the theory. I like the view of this movie.

The acting is pretty good. The characters are NASA types, so you can't expect Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey scenes or attitudes. These are scientists and flyboy types, and the characters get a lot out of the script. You care enough for the characters that, when Trouble comes to some of them, you feel a sense of loss.

The script was better than the lame cliches I expected, given the barbs the critics heaved. There were only a couple of times I winced, but they went by fast.

This is a bit of a visionary movie. It's obvious it borrows from other movies, but so did those other movies. It has enough unique elements to create its own environment. At the end, when you see the opportunity Gary Senise has, you find yourself weighing the decision yourself.

I'd say: the critics went too far against the movie, much in the way that maybe the same critics went nuts for American Beauty. I gave Beauty a big score on my review. Mission to Mars is worth a look. I gave Beauty an 8, and Mission a 6. I haven't seen many space movies at all that I'd give an 8 too, anyway. Mission created the feel of what it's like to go there, and that's no small achievement.

I broke off part of a tooth during Galaxy Quest while I was eating popcorn. That normally would bias me against a film, but I won't hold it against Galaxy Quest.

It's wonderful escapism. The movie begins darkly, though, since the cast members of Galaxy Quest, the television series, are caught in a hellhole called fan club conventions. They have to be the Star Trek-like characters they haven't been in almost 20 years, and you really feel for what their lives have become.

The movie lightens up when the aliens show up. They need the help of the Galaxy Quest crew to deal with another race of ruthless aliens, whose names I forget. The good aliens are called Therians, I recall, and they are blissed-out always, even in the face of death. Something in their programming won't let them be unhappy. There's an innocence in these technologically superior beings that's quite touching. Their hearts are so pure, they just don't understand that the Galaxy Quest tv shows they've been studying weren't historical documentaries, but pretend.

I won't give up all the details of the plot or why the show works. I had doubts going in that I could accept Home Improvement's Tim Allen as a former television space commander, who must rise to the role of real space commander and deal with the evil aliens. He does it though, as do Sigourney Weaver and the other cast members. It's worthwhile seeing the characters adjust from their roles as former tv stars to real spacecraft crewmembers.

I give this movie a strong rating. I saw it on Christmas day morning, and left feeling pretty good. I did black out of my movie attention for a few moments when I felt the piece of my tooth in the mouthful of popcorn and had to fish it out, and then worried what I'd do on Christmas if the discovery was followed by a howling pain in a molar or cuspid or bicep or whatever tooth it was. Fortunately, it doesn't hurt.

So, go see Galaxy Quest, have a good time, but make sure all the popcorn seeds that didn't pop are at the bottom of your popcorn bag. Learn from the error of my ways.

This is a great film. Give the Oscar to Spacey, and probably one to Bening.

This is a hard film to categorize. I'm reminded of Princess Bride, not a similar film, but a film that was also hard to promote because it wasn't just one kind of movie. I didn't know much about the film when I went, but was put off by the only plot line I knew, that a middleage dad falls in love with his daughter's friend. That never dominates the film, fortunately. As Spacey is swept away by his personal life changes, the question of will he or won't he make it with the daughter's friend is put on the back shelf for most of the film.

This is a completely wonderful film, but it left me wondering something. Virtually everybody's life in this movie is destroyed. It leaves the viewer to speculate how each character left standing will adapt. Why, then, did I have such a feeling of wonder about it? In many ways, it's Ordinary People with laughs. It works because Spacey shows how somebody can find himself after years in a wasteland. Wes Bentley, the boy next door, has a gift for seeing the beauty in all things, and for feeling a connection with the flow of the universe. The film shows us those gifts, and that's part of its success.

The movie also shows on a subtle plane the power of the spoken word. There's this idea that anything we say is broadcast to the mystical universe, then created for us if our intention or power is strong enough. There's a point in the film when Spacey says he will frame the company's management evaluator, Brad, for sexual misconduct. Later in the film, it is Spacey who is framed for sexual misconduct, as seen by the retired Marine colonel. Similarly, Spacey's daughter wants her dad dead, Wes Bentley offers to do it, and even though they both agree it isn't something they really want, conditions are changed just enough to create that reality.

I hope this film gets the Oscars, but it's dark and risky. I admire the cast for putting so much into this film, knowing that when they entered the project. You can't run ads for it as a feel good movie, but I left the theater wanting to see a plastic bag being whipped around by the wind.