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I've been watching this with my 5-year-old and find it's watchable by both adults and kids. The writing and dialog aren't wooden or simplistic. Although it's not at the depth of an Aaron Sorkin show, there is intrigue and nuance in the conflicts between Aang and his adversaries as well as among the adversaries themselves.

It's this kind of writing that can absorb and involve a first-grader yet not drive his parents up a wall that makes this more interesting to watch than say a "Fairly Odd Parents" or Disney's "Aaron Stone". These are writers/creators who trust their audience to "get it" and who try to keep things accessible without talking down to the audience. That takes both talent and skill.

Burt Reynolds plays a retired poker player who quit after losing his nerve and all his money. He's been out of the game for 20 years.

Brett Harrison is the up and coming young shark with natural talent, but a lot to learn. Burt offers to stake and coach him for a piece of the action... Sounding familiar yet? I don't need to tell you the rest of the plot because you should be able to figure it out for yourself. There are NO surprises in this movie. None.

Meanwhile, the stars sleepwalk through a script that presents no challenges.

According to IMDb's data, the film cost $5 million to make, grossed less than $100,000 in theatrical release, and got Burt Reynolds a Razzie nomination for Worst Supporting Actor.

'Nuff said?

Alan Masters was a good man, victimized by a corrupt police force and corrupt judicial system that framed him for a crime he didn't commit.

They didn't even get him on murder. He went to jail on wire fraud charges... and he spent the rest of his life there.

You can buy Hollywood's biased account if you want, but this is a TV movie of the week with Treat Williams for cryin out loud. Who were they going to get to play him if Treat wasn't available, Eric Roberts? Don't buy into this shameful smear campaign. Alan Masters was a good man who was betrayed by people close to him. Don't buy into this melodramatic hatchet job!

Caught this on BBC America and have been Tivoing it ever since. The characters are great, but some tend to do the same joke over and over again. So, though this may not be a wonderful show for extended viewing, the first few episodes you see will have you in stitches.

Overall, I've seen about 7 episodes and haven't gotten tired of it yet. The show draws its humor from a deep well of absurdity, a natural resource the British seem to have in abundance.

They tell me I'm required to put 10 lines of text in this comment, so for the rest of this message, I will make giraffe noises.

Thank you.

At 35, this is the worst sitcom I can remember seeing in my entire life. Considering some of the stinkers to hit TV, that's a heck of a distinction.

The mixed puppet/human cast (some sort of bad Alf rip-off) didn't work. The characters were awful and the jokes were pitifully hackneyed. If they showed this on a TV in a prison, the convicts could sue for cruel and unusual punishment. It was that BAD.

Anyone who fondly remembers this was probably 4 years old when they saw it, because anyone over that age (or over that *mental* age) would be hard pressed to stomach one episode of this.

The huge car chase scene probably makes this movie, with everything else paling in comparison. The sheer scale of the destruction is amazing. I haven't enjoyed a chase this much since Pierce Brosnan took that tank for a joyride in Goldeneye.

My main complaint is that with the change from Edward Furlong to Nick Stahl, John Connor went from being a whiny snot to a brooding snot, but remained a snot nonetheless. If Nick Stahl's John Connor tried to give me an order, I'd push him down and stand on his head.

If they do a T4, let's see John Connor be a bit more heroic, a bit more confident and in charge of himself. In T2, Connor was a marshmallow. In T3, they added a graham cracker's worth of hardness. But to lead like his character eventually must, you need to be a sword, not a s'more.

And let's forget the comparisons to Michael Biehn I've been seeing in the user comments here. The only thing Stahl's John Connor has in common with his "dad" is stubble and ragged wardrobe.

• G

I really enjoyed this film. Think Elmore Leonard meets Donald Westlake, and you've got an idea of the kind of plot and quirky characters you're in for. The Elmore Leonard feel is mainly in the Miami setting (and possibly the fact that director Barry Sonnenfeld also directed "Get Shorty"). The rest... reminds me of some of Westlake's funnier, quirkier stuff, like "Why Me".

I laughed out loud, which I don't often do at movies, and I *loved* the supporting cast.

I'm disappointed that some reviewers have let September 11th make them hypersensitive about anything involving explosives or an airport. There aren't any actual terrorists in the film, no Arabs or other Middle-Eastern types with evil on their mind, just silly characters.

This was good, comic fun, and when it comes out on DVD, it will be a welcome addition to my collection.

This is the kind of movie where, about 30 minutes in, you wish you were really stoned, because you get the feeling the writers were really stoned when they wrote it, and being in the same state might actually make it funny as they seem to think it was.

Well, maybe the director was stoned, because about half of the jokes in the film that fail do so merely because of poor timing and inept handling. Maybe it was actually a good script, but the ham-handed directing ruined it.

Only the filmmakers will really know exactly how this film went wrong, the audience just knows where, and that's on screen.

I'm a fan of the genre, enjoy good parodies and satires, and felt completely let down by this film. The only "state" the writers of this film were in was one of catatonia.

I started watching this late-night on cable. Now I know why Kate Hudson wants nothing to do with her father.

At the beginning, I was thinking it had potential. First, it's a great trivia reference. Dee Snyder's serial killer in his 1998 film "Strangeland" takes his name from Richard Kiel's zombie killer in this film. I didn't know that before.

Then you look at the cast list... names to truly wow a connoisseur of comedy and character actors: John Larroquette, Keenan Wynn, Charlie Callas, Julie Newmar, Clint Walker, Murray Hamilton (the mayor from "Jaws" and "Jaws 2") as the mayor, Fraklin Ajaye, Bud Cort... as I watched the credits roll, my jaw was dropping.

Then the movie started. My mouth closed and only opened to laugh once (the Jaws reference) during the hour of it I watched. Most of the attempts at parody were ham-handed and poorly executed. It was sort of like watching Fozzie Bear going "wokka wokka wokka" over and over again. Problem is... when Fozzie says "wokka wokka wokka" like it's supposed to be a punch line, he's a parody of people like the Hudson Brothers who apparently think it *is* a punch line.

It seems like they were *trying* to be sort of a combo of Mel Brooks and Zucker Abrams Zucker (the team behind "Airplane"), but they try too hard. The jokes are obnoxiously over-the-top, the delivery is poor, the direction is awful, and the acting... uggh.

Maybe there's some good stuff after hour one that I missed by going to sleep, but it would have to be the funniest stuff I'd ever seen to justify sitting through that agonizing first hour.

Some movies are so bad, they're good. This one is just so bad, it's bad. I give it a 1 out of 10.

If you're looking for a serious monster movie, this isn't for you. But if you're a fan of the Tremors series, remember how fun and funny the first film was, and can keep yourself in that mind-set, then you'll enjoy this one.

It's a bit slow to get started, but when they introduce the latest evolutionary phase of the graboids, the film moves into overdrive, with action and comedy galore.

Sadly, the script has a few plot holes and the acting is merely so-so, so it's only a 6/10 in my book, but on a boring evening when there's nothing decent on, it's a great alternative to re-runs.

If you've seen a few episodes of "The Twilight Zone" or you saw "The Sixth Sense", you're going to figure out the 'pay off' to this film long before it arrives. Although the set-up has some originality and there are some good performances, once you figure out the ending 'twist' (well before it's revealed, if you're smart), it becomes hard not to hate this movie for the 'been there, done that' feeling you get.

I can't believe the film is so highly rated and getting such good reviews. I felt so betrayed by the cliché ending that anything good up until that point wasn't enough to compensate for it.

I give it a 2/10.

William Petersen plays Jake, a down-on-his luck writer who has lost his muse and crawled into a bottle. One night, he drunkenly takes on an obnoxious bar tough, Lew (played by Meat Loaf), who takes him outside and begins to hand him a serious beating. The beating is interrupted by a low-level Irish mob enforcer, Frankie (Wincott), who had an appointment with Lew for a collection. Frankie puts a hurting on Lew and takes Jake home where Frankie's girlfriend, Melissa (Diane Lane), who happens to be a nurse, provides medical attention for Jake.

Though Jake is obnoxiously resistant at first, Frankie wants to be his friend and help him out of the hole he's dug himself into. In exchange, Frankie wants Jake to help him become more educated and erudite.

While this could turn into a sappy story on the level of Danny DeVito in Renaissance Man, instead it's a cool, dark tale of conflicting loyalties and desires with a little redemption thrown in to boot. Well acted and with solid dialogue, the film has a few cliche moments, but they are ultimately forgivable in the end.

Shrek is an ogre living in a swamp. He enjoys his solitude, enjoys scaring off the villagers who try to roust him out, and enjoys a nice bowl of eyeballs for lunch.

Enter everyone in fairydom (major fairy tale cameos here). Lord Farquard is clearing the fairy folk off his land and resettling them... in Shrek's swamp.

Shrek and Donkey (a talking donkey Shrek accidentally saved from the resettlement squad and now can't seem to get rid of) go off to get Lord Farquard to get all these people out of Shrek's swamp. The result is a bargain. Shrek will rescue a cursed princess from a castle in a lava pit that's guarded by a dragon and Farquard will remove the fairy folk from the swamp.

It's a cute movie and there are definitely some funny scenes. It feels like they did a bit of tossing in everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to parodying fairy tales, some modern institutions, and even The Matrix, but the bulk of it works and what doesn't can be forgiven in the face of the many laughs that do come along.

All in all, a good cuddly date movie if you've got an evening free, and a good family movie for the weekends. I'd give it a 7/10.

I'm going to have to agree with the sentiments seen in other comments where men essentially said "I went to see this with my girlfriend, thinking it would be a 'chick flick', and was surprised to find it was really funny." If you're a guy, it's a relatively painless way to score points for "suffering through" a movie that your wife or girlfriend will definitely want to see.

Bridget is a sort of everywoman. She'll likely remind you of at least one female friend, if not more. It's easy to become emotionally invested in Bridget's successes and failures, and suspend disbelief (forgetting that it's an actress playing a character) while watching the film.

Personally, I would have liked to see a bit more of Bridget's father in the film, but only because I think Jim Broadbent is such a great character actor. Other than that, I find it hard to find fault with the film. It's well paced, lots of good solid laughs, and a satisfying end.

I've recommended it to my mom, my sister, and any of my male friends who have a wife or girlfriend to take.

The performances were weak, the directing was minor, and the screenplay was absolutely awful.

I don't want to give away spoilers, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to see everything in this movie coming 5-10 minutes before it happens. You can't spoil this movie because there is not a single surprise in it. You always know what's coming next, not because of any heavy-handed foreshadowing, but because it is so cliche and formulaic. Even the red herrings in the film are moldy.

Ford, Pfeiffer, and most of all Zemeckis, should be ashamed of this film. It was really awful.

This show already got cancelled a while back, to the joy of many, but it's worth noting how awful it was for posterity.

This poorly written and poorly acted show was given a plum Thursday night slot right after "Friends" and lost a *significant* amount of that audience, which would come back a half-hour later for "Seinfeld."

It was just plain torture to watch most of the time, and proved a very good point. Some people will watch anything, even if they hate it, if you sandwich it in between two of the most popular shows on television. It also proves more people need to get off their butts and turn off the TV instead of watching a half hour of *crap* to kill time.

Aside from making that criticism of people who watched it for no other reason than there was nothing else decent on and "Seinfeld" was just a few minutes away, I also offer a mea culpa for being guilty of doing the same thing. But after this stinker, I've learned from my mistakes.

Essentially, about an hour and forty minutes of decent movie followed by 15 minutes of the most ludicrous mishegoss it has ever been my displeasure to see. I was just laughing at the end, but not *with* the movie... *at* the movie. Any guffaws were derisive in nature.

Once again De Bont proves he has a great talent with action, but has no talent with a story. The ending was so cliche, so trite, so hackneyed... It's like he took every horror movie cliche he could find and threw them all into the last 15 minutes.

He's a director who needs some studio masters to take him in hand and assign him projects where he cannot deviate from the screenplay. A decent development exec or producer with a head for a story instead of bean counting and testing things to death, combined with De Bont's skill, and you could get a few more good movies out of him.

Sadly, the grosses on this one are likely to give De Bont carte blanche to do a couple more bad movies.

It's 1998, America is out of gas both literally and figuratively. People live in permanently parked cars, walking, jogging and biking to work.

When a Native American billionaire who loaned money to the government to cover the national debt threatens to foreclose on the nation, a telethon is held to raise the money to save the country.

An early work from Neal Israel, the man who would later create such classics as the *original* "Police Academy" and "Real Genius," the movie brims with humorous high-concept jokes. For example, in schemes to raise money, San Diego is sold to Mexico and a daredevil (played by Meatloaf) battles a car.

Aside from the comedy, there's a great soundtrack with songs by the Beach Boys and Elvis Costello (who makes a cameo appearance). One of my favorite films of the late 70's, this is a great addition to anyone's video collection.