Young Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) was born in the back seat of his daddy’s car, as his mom was trying to get to the hospital. Unfortunately his dad decided that it was just time to go fast.

A few years later, we stop in on Ricky in elementary school, and it’s career day. As the teacher calls on him, and he tells her that his dad isn’t there, suddenly his dad shows up, to tell everyone that he’s a race car driver, and to dispense the ultimate wisdom: “If you’re not first, you’re last.”

It is these words that Ricky Bobby will live by for quite some time.

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At the site of a lavish celebratory party, thrown by a Japanese company wanting to celebrate their purchase of a US company, the mood turns decidedly unhappy when someone turns up dead on the boardroom table. The fact that it’s a young woman, who is most assuredly not Japanese, is probably not a good sign.

Detective Webster Smith (Wesley Snipes) is called in to investigate, and quickly teamed up with Captain John Connor (Sean Connery). This partner arrangement, where a younger. more inexperienced investigator, would be paired with a wiser, more seasoned man, is quite common for the Japanese. Apparently.

Unfortunately, Webb isn’t too happy about either his new partner or the fact that the Japanese don’t want their party to be disturbed. But life is about to get a lot more interesting for him.

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As Dr. Rae Crane (Lorraine Bracco) arrives in the Amazon jungle, she is met by a number of natives, and the focus of her trip – Dr. Robert Campbell (Sean Connery).

It seems that Dr. Campbell has for some time been operating on his own, without following typical company procedure, such as filing progress reports, and now that his contact has retired, the duty of figuring out just what he is up to down here has fallen to her. She isn’t exactly pleased. But then, neither is he.

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Will Randall (the incomparable Jack Nicholson) is on his way home from a business trip when he strikes a wolf. Who would have thought? A wolf? In this day and age? But still, he hits a wolf. When he gets out to check it, it bites him. What is this world coming to?

Over the next few days, the bite starts to take hold of him, but it’s not all bad – at least, not at first. The wolf seems to have imparted some of its qualities to Will, and he finds that his senses are sharper, and for the first time in a while, he feels more awake (though he had to sleep for twenty hours first). Then he can see without his glasses, hear every little thing that happens and his libido awakens with a vengeance. But that’s just the start.

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Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) has just suffered another in a long line of failures. So when accountant Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) comes to do the books, and notices that he collected more money than he put out, he’s not too anxious to worry about such details.

But when Leo makes the comment that it’s actually easier to come up with deductions and make money on a losing production than it would be to do so on a success, Max perks right up, and decides that perhaps it’s time that he and Leo go into business.

While Leo may be an accountant, you see, he’s always wanted to be a Broadway producer, so the timing is perfect. Max just needs to convince Leo that it’s worth the effort.

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On the morning of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), an American Terrorist sets off a bomb in an SUV aboard a ferry, killing more than five hundred people aboard, as the fireball sets off another explosion in the boiler, and eventually the remains sink to the bottom of the river.

ATF Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) is assigned the grisly task of figuring out exactly what happened, and as such, he’s one of the first on the scene collecting evidence. His partner, who had just taken off for vacation, is nowhere to be found, not even answering his cell phone.

Before long, Carlin is assigned to a special task force researching the event, and finds himself drawn into a special new technology that allows the investigators to look back into the past four-and-a-half days (technically, four days and six hours, but no one seems to notice this, so I’ll pretend not to do so either) to see what’s happening. The only catch is that this time window is open only for that exact period, and once that time window is gone, it can’t be recovered.

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When Memphis (Hugh Jackman) drops the egg of his baby penguin during the long, cold, Antarctic winter, he is afraid that he may have literally dropped the ball. But luckily – for him – the baby does hatch, albeit a bit later than the other penguins, and Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) won’t be upset when she returns from the feeding grounds.

But when young Mumble (Elijah Wood) can’t seem to find his heart song, Memphis blames himself. In this Disney-fied tale (which is actually by Fox), the penguins grow up, and sing their heart song in order to find their mate. Without such a song, Mumble is not only doomed to live out his life on his own, he is just about a disgrace. To make matters worse, he does this thing… with his feet.

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Edward Norton stars in this film, where he is billed only as The Narrator. We don’t actually ever get to hear his name, which is interesting, but strangely, you don’t find yourself missing out on that fact (or at least, I didn’t).

When we meet him, he is simply a body in motion, moving through airports, living a life that most of us can associate with, finding some measure of satisfaction through filling out his apartment with items in the IKEA catalog, slowly making where he lives into a reflection of what you see on each page.

And then on one of these trips, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). That’s when everything changes.

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Doctor Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) has turned up dead, and it seems that the most likely suspect is the one being who can’t be a suspect at all. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that the law clearly states that murder has happened when one human kills another human, which leads directly to the second reason. The suspect isn’t human. It’s a robot. And according to the Three Laws, a robot should not be able to kill a human, which means that there shouldn’t be anything to investigate – even if the law were to apply here (which it doesn’t).

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On January 20, 1960, Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood) arrived at Alcatraz to become prisoner #AZ1441. As with many other inmates of the prison, he was sent there because he had a tendency to escape other prisons, and Alcatraz was built to keep people from escaping.

However, according to most records, Morris almost immediately began planning his exit from The Rock. While it may or may not be completely true, on the arrival of two of his former associates, John and Clarence Anglin, Morris accelerated his plans, and on the night of June 11, 1962, they were gone, never to be heard from again.

The events surrounding the event are of course lost, so the details are dramatized for the movie. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good one to sit through.

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