bpinzka

I disliked An Unmarried Woman, starring Jill Clayburgh and Alan Bates. Clayburgh's character gets dumped by her philandering husband, of whom she suspected nothing of the sort. She keeps the gorgeous apartment and seems financially fit;something that seldom happens in real life. While wallowing in her grief and self-pity, on her first try she finds the perfect shrink and then her first date is a dashing, sensitive artist played by the dashing, sensitive Alan Bates. I saw this with another recently-divorced woman and we were rolling our eyes skyward throughout the movie, asking the good Lord for patience.

Let's see a movie about a woman without any real marketable skills who gets dumped, with several children to care for, who has to depend on public social services for help? BTW, there's some value in comparing this to the 2005 movie The Upside of Anger, in which another woman, this time played by Joan Allen, gets dumped and, in her case, is left with four teenage daughters. While she hasn't financial woes, the psychological trauma rings far more true than in the self-serving Unmarried Woman.

Why did I give it a 6? The outstanding cast and production teams. Consider it a gift.

I stumbled upon the Icelandic-produced LazyTown while turning on my TV one Saturday morning, and ended up watching the entire show. LazyTown's characters are a mix of live actors and clever puppets, and the action provides a lovingly skewed look at the oft-confusing world of a contemporary child.

One puppet character, for example, apparently is hooked up to every electronic gadget invented and looks like a prototype for still more. All of the characters are displayed in unique but matter-of-fact ways -there's a young girl with brilliant pink hair, for example, and the Mean Adult looks like a recycled Elvis - suggesting a world free of racial prejudice. One character is black, a rarity in Iceland, which has been known, unfortunately, for a poor record in race relations.

While the copy is relatively simple and easy-to-understand, at no time did I feel it condescended to younger children. My impression was that the show was created by fans of the long-missed Pee Wee's Playhouse, a highlight of "children's" entertainment in the late 1980s (many adults watched as well, and even admitted doing so). LazyTown lacks the budget that Pee Wee's creators had, but they use what they have well and creatively. I found the mix of special effects and live action in a satisfying balance.

The episode I saw did not attempt to be educational, although a health practice (getting enough sleep) was taught in an easy-to-digest manner.

Hurray for LaxyTown - intelligent and entertaining TV food for children and even adults!

VERY VAGUE POSSIBLE SPOILER The only possible surprise in this movie is that a character you assume is a good person isn't.

Otherwise, What Lies Beneath is an over-the-top, faintly veiled rehash of almost every horror/thriller movie technique of the past 30 years or so. As a friend and I watched, we laughed and hooted - not shivered and cowered - as one implausible scenario after another unreeled.

How Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford ended up in this mess is hard to understand. Even their considerable skills fail to raise to so-called plot to a believable level.

Save it for a MST night with your friends, or a showing to tweens who haven't yet been soured on the genre.

As a veteran of more English costume dramas than I care to recount, I single this one out for an amazing amount of verisimilitude in depicting the reality of life in England in the period immediately before Victoria's ascension to the throne - a period that was as open and colorful as the Queen later pulled life into its dark corners by the end of the century.

Street sets - depending on whether you are in a rich or poor area - are depicted so well you feel you can smell the slops the walker uneasily tries to avoid. Inside homes, some conveniences are making life a little easier and the wealthy adorn themselves not only with baubles but the new-found fabrics and colors of the expanding British empire.

Altogether sumptuous, Vanity Fair is worth watching if you have ever read a period novel and want an idea of "real life." As for this production, I found Reese Witherspoon's lead performance quite capable but the secondary leads were not given room to develop many tones in their portrayals.

What a disappointing movie! No one in the cast could have read the script before signing on, as it is nothing but a series of humorless and witless third-rate jokes about sex and various body functions.

Here are assembled several of the world's best living actors, and all they can do is mug their way through this disaster? Are they that desperate for money/ That willing to sell out for money? If they were making their money on pictures like this so they could afford to do indie films that they care about, that would be nice. But it's been a long time since I saw the once-revered De Niro, Streisand, Hoffman or Danner name in a first-rate film. Or have first-rate films just disappeared into the seeming desert of creativity currently afflicting US cinema?