This film is made to bring together a handful of fresh young faces (well, they were fresh at the time), but the story isn’t bad. Though I’m not up on my mob history, the fact that “Lucky” Luciano (Christian Slater) and Meyer Lansky (Patrick Dempsey) reshaped the mafia as it was into the mafia that it became is a pretty interesting one to see.

What’s too bad is that it looks too much like a teeny-bopper movie than a serious flick, so instead of being a competitor to Goodfellas, it’s seen more as a joke. That’s a shame.

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Like Dennis the Menace, this movie won’t win many awards – but it is a pretty decent family flick. The only problem it has in that regard, in fact, is one scatalogical expletive (a fairly funny one, but still).

Beyond that, the plot is simple. Jason Alexander is the manager of a five-star hotel in New York, and his two kids live there with him. They are naturally hard at work trying to make his life miserable and he is hard at work trying to keep the hotel up-to-snuff for its high-falutin’ guests.

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As the poem goes, the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. Rebecca De Mornay stars as the widow of a doctor who takes his own life after being accused of inappropriately touching his female clients, and she decides that her hand should be the one to rock the cradle of the one who caused her so much pain.

After waiting a few months for things to settle down, she insinuates herself as a nanny to the one who started the whole mess, and at first things go swimmingly. But slowly they start to fall apart. Mentally disabled helper Solomon (played excellently by Ernie Hudson) sees her breast feeding the baby that she is supposed to be watching, and she makes short work of him by planting some evidence to get him kicked out.

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The inimitable Walter Matthau stars as Mr. Wilson in this live-action telling of the classic comic strip tale, and if that’s not enough, comic veteran Christopher Lloyd plays a role as Switchblade Sam, the robber nabbed by Dennis in the film.

Sure, it’s a bit of fluff, but it’s also a good fun film that the family can enjoy. The younger kids will enjoy the physical comedy, while the older kids can enjoy the dialogue and even the adults can get a laugh from the film too, without feeling as if they’re losing brain cells while listening to another rendition of another sappy song for the umpteenth time. It’s a fresh change of pace if you’re in need of something that’s okay for the kids to watch.

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The tagline for this movie says that it is a comedy that takes place in 24 hours on the Sunset Strip in 1972. I think those facts are correct. Except I don’t recall laughing. So you might not want to consider it a comedy. The trailer mentions that the lives of six friends intersect, except some of them don’t seem to know each other, so I don’t know if that’s exactly true either.

What does appear to be true is that a handful of people (unless you only have five fingers per hand, in which case it might be two handfuls) are living in or about 1972 in the Sunset Strip area of Hollywood, and this movie tells you about what they do during a roughly 24 hour period. What it doesn’t do is say why you should care, and in the end, there didn’t seem to be much reason why you should.

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Adrien Brody stars as Jack Starks in this cross between Jacob’s Ladder and The Butterfly Effect.

While it starts off by making you think that you’re about to watch a war movie, it’s definitely not a war movie. That just gets things started. Once Starks dies on the battlefield, he is found walking down a road, where he helps a little girl and her mother get their car started. Later on the same road, he ends up getting arrested as an officer is shot and killed. We never find out if he did it or imagined the other person who did the killing to mask part of his mind.

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I recall watching this on TNT (I think it was TNT) when released and thinking that it was pretty good. I don’t think I had seen it since. I’m glad that we watched it again, because it really is quite an excellent telling of the tale. Even Kenneth Branagh, who I don’t really like, fit perfectly. Normally I find him just a little too self-absorbed. In this case, that’s exactly what was needed. He directed as well, and did a fine job.

Meanwhile, the always excellent Robert de Niro ably filled the body of the creature and actually gave the role some life. Uh, so to speak.

For those who aren’t familiar with the tale, Victor Frankenstein has gone to university to study medicine, only to become obsessed with bestowing life on dead tissue, because his own mother died in childbirth. Unfortunately his own brilliance becomes his downfall, as he spirals into the world of his own making, and when he does create this life, it is to see his own life fall apart around him.

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Though perhaps not the best movie ever, this Denzel Washington vehicle is certainly a good movie to watch on a lazy weekend afternoon when you’re surfing the channels looking for something to pass the afternoon.

The story centers around a small school that’s suddenly been given a surprise for the new school year – they will be joining together with a black school, and in even more of a surprise, the head coach of the black school will become the head coach of the football team. Needless to say, this doesn’t go over well.

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This classic starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford is one of the greats. At this writing, it sits at #82 on the IMDB Top 250 List (an accomplishment in itself), but moreover it’s one of those movies that stands the test of time.

Perhaps part of the reason is that the movie is set in 1930 – so the fact that it was released in 1973 isn’t as much of an issue as some other more recent movies. It’s still going to seem dated. Perhaps more importantly, the storyline isn’t so dependent on money (though some of the sums certainly seem less and less significant each time I see the film) as it is just a good caper.

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This movie is an odd bird. For those of you who like to see Pierce Brosnan in his fancy suits, you may not like him here. He’s more like Leisure Suit Larry than James Bond. But I think that this role actually fits him better.

Julian Noble is a Fatality Facilitator (his words). In other words, he is a hit man who takes care of situations for people who needs things done. Nothing so fancy as a spy or a mafia Wiseguy. His clients are from the corporate world, or so he says, and they come to him as they have for 22 years. The only problem is that it’s his birthday and he’s left without a soul in the world to talk to, so he heads to the bar, and there he finds Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear), in Mexico City trying to make the sale of a lifetime.

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