In this task, you must classify if a given review is positive/negative, indicating your answer as P or N.

Q: if you want some hearty laughs , then rat race is the movie for you .
this unpretentious little comedy , which sneaks into theaters today with very little hype ,
will have you bouncing in your theater seat .
and while the film fits neatly into the low - brow , slapstick school of comedy , one refreshing aspect is its lack of mean - spiritedness .
the plot follows a group of people chosen at random by an eccentric las vegas casino owner ( john cleese ) who must race from vegas to a bus station locker 700 miles away in silver city , n .
m .
inside the locker is a duffel bag containing $ 2 million .
the first one to open the locker , gets the bag and the money .
what the group of participants does n't know is that cleese 's donald sinclair ( " i can do anything i want -
i 'm eccentric ! " ) is staging the race as a betting game for a group of high rollers at the hotel .
the participants include vera ( whoopi goldberg ) and merrill ( lanai chapman ) , a newly reunited mother and daughter ; disgraced pro football referee owen templeton ( cuba gooding jr . ) ; italian tourist mr .
pollini ( rowan atkinson ) ; randy pear ( jon lovitz ) and his family ; the bumbling con men duane and blaine cody ( seth green and vince vieluf ) ; and cynical young lawyer nick shaffer ( breckin meyer ) .
various amusing encounters and mishaps befall the participants en route to silver city .
screenwriter andy breckman adds a nice touch by not having the racers try to sabotage one another .
the most side - splitting situations involve vera and merrill 's encounter with the squirrel lady , a nice nutsy cameo by kathy bates ; owen 's commandeering a charter bus full of lucille ball look - alikes on their way to a lucy convention ; the cody brothers misadventures with a hot - air balloon , a flying cow and a monster truck ; and the pear family 's stopover at a barbie museum , which turns out not to be what they think it is .
the pear family situation is a fine example of the way breckman 's script builds the laughs .
without going into detail , this bit segues from the museum to hitler 's touring car , to eva braun 's dark lipstick , to lovitz burning his tongue , culminating at a ceremony honoring world war ii veterans .
rat race 's cast is first rate .
cleese is wonderfully devilish and madcap ; lovitz is , at first , a bit whiny , but his character grows on you ; gooding is having a fine romp ; and dave thomas almost steals the show as cleese 's deadpan assistant , a man " born without a personality .
"
the film is directed by jerry zucker , who knows something about comedy
.
along with his brother , david , and friend jim abrahams , he was responsible for such hits as airplane ! and ruthless people .
a throwaway subplot , which is good for some laughs , features cleese and his buddies , betting on a series of outlandish situations , including one dealing with a hooker and pepto - bismol .
this is a fun little feature .
the only letdown comes at the finale , which is too touchy - feely and sweet , almost negating what came before it .
rat race is a summer sleeper , but it will keep you awake , as will the laughter of those watching around you .

A: P
****
Q: i 've never written a review for a movie i have n't watched all the way through , but i had to make an exception with powder .
i was about forty - five minutes into this one at a friend 's house when he and his brother got into a huge shouting match that would have ended in violence
had we not left the house .
so i never got to finish the movie
and i 'm sure as hell not going to pay three more bucks to watch half of a bad movie .
but i can at least get a partial review out of it , because i saw enough to know this one was n't worth finishing in the first place .
the movie centers around a freaky teenager who 's spent his entire life living in the cellar of his grandparents ' house .
when grandpa dies ( taking his department store down with him ) , social worker mary steenburgen has to take powder ( first and middle names ?
gold bond ) to a state home , where we find out he 's a different from the other kids .
actually , we find out he 's different when we first see him , because he 's the most pale individual we 've ever seen and moreover he has no body hair whatsoever .
when powder is born in the opening minutes of the movie , the father takes one look at him and says " he 's not my son . " obviously .
all i want to know is where the pillsbury dough boy was nine months ago .
so the white - faced freak leaves his neverland ranch for the state home and faces the ridicule of other kids .
that is , until they try to haze him during his first cafeteria lunch by making him " wear " his spoon ( " you can either wear it on your nose or up your ass .
" decisions , decisions . . . )
and he uses telepathic powers to draw all the silverware in the room into a giant pile in the middle of the table .
so if his father is the pillsbury dough boy , his mother must be sissy spacek 's carrie character .
and you have to factor in two more things from the subsequent scenes , as we find out powder
has some sort of
super - intelligence ( " your i .
q .
test went straight off the chart ! " ) and attracts electrical power .
this first shows up as powder visits the world of high school ( if he 's such a genius already , why would he need a high school education ? ) and sits through a demonstration in jeff goldblum 's science class .
goldblum plugs in a " jacob 's ladder " device that shows current running up two wires and immediately the current flows across the room and into powder 's chest .
but goldblum just stands there for about thirty seconds watching , instead of just unplugging the damn thing .
i guess he was too busy contemplating why he was appearing in his third bad movie in a row
( following hideaway and nine months ) .
that 's about all i saw before the big fight began and , let me tell you , that was twice as interesting as the movie itself .
but like i said , i saw enough to know this would be one of those terrible melodramas about the isolation of people who have superior abilities and how hard it is for those people to assimilate themselves into mainstream civilization .
none of these movies ever handle the subject properly , instead introducing the feeble beauty and the beast copout of having a beautiful woman fall in love with the guy 's personality , overlooking his personal appearance .
i already had the female character picked out ( the girl who was sitting next to him in the back of the room during the electrocution scene ) , but i guess i 'll never know for sure what happened .
from noraruth@aol .
com mon jun 10 15 : 04
: 03 edt 1996 article : 3654 of rec .
arts .
movies .
reviews path :
nntphub .
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att .
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not - for - mail from :
noraruth@aol .
com ( andrew hicks )
newsgroups :
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reviews subject : review : powder ( 1995 ) followup - to :
rec .
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sf .
movies date : 10 jun 1996 18 : 16 : 03 gmt organization : university of missouri - columbia lines :
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ecl@mtcts1 .
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approved :
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message - id : " > reply - to :
noraruth@aol .
com ( andrew hicks )
nntp - posting - host : mtcts2 .
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# 05425 keywords :
author = hicks originator :
ecl@mtcts2 xref : nntphub .
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reviews : 3654 rec .
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reviews :
710 status : ro powder a film review by andrew hicks
copyright 1996 andrew hicks / fatboy productions .

A: N
****
Q: waiting at the train station near the beginning of fury , joe says : ' after all , we 're human . '
in the context of events to transpire , joe 's line is prophetic , foreshadowing the internal conflict of the protagonist in the latter half of the film .
does being human necessarily imply humane behavior ?
through the baseness of human character exemplified in the formation of a mob , fritz lang prompts the viewer to consider whether our inclination towards impulsiveness supersedes our civility . expressing his abhorrence towards the rise of nazism in his homeland , lang takes great care in creating a sense of discomfort during the scenes of mob hysteria .
in the scene prefacing the lynching , the mob achieves critical mass at the bar .
deputy meyers is brought in as an exalted informant , but when he is unable to augment the mob 's myth of joe , he is quickly renounced from his position as town gossip .
we see in a shot where two bar patrons are arguing that the deputy looks around nervously at the growing monster and then carefully slips out of the bar .
what is quietly horrifying is the realization by both the audience and the deputy that the crowd no longer exists within the confines of reason and has succumbed to what the barber referred to as impulse .
what once was excitement to the deputy has turned into fear with the realization that he is now powerless .
to the audience , the deputy 's quiet exit concurs with their own sinking feeling of uneasiness as the mob 's delirium crescendos .
lang educes this discomfort not through movement of the camera , but rather its stillness .
the shot 's composition places the audience equidistant and directly across from the pair of arguing patrons and the deputy effectively becomes a mirror to our own apprehensions .
as the intensity of the mob closes around deputy meyers , it does so around the viewer as well .
the stationary camera in this shot heightens our fears because when the deputy escapes , we are deserted by our reflection and the viewer becomes the sole proprietor of sensibility amongst a swarm of irrationality .
because the camera does not track the deputy 's movement , we are left with an amplified perception of desertion and vulnerability .
as the bar scene progresses , the camera pans 180 degrees to reveal the fury of the mob .
this shot is unique because it is a point - of - view shot where the audience , not a character in the film is the subject .
while a long , or dolly shot may objectively reveal the size of the mob , panning from the mob 's belly distorts the audience 's spatial reference and exaggerates the claustrophobia of the scene ; we feel we are at the epicenter of something infinitely large .
we see close shots of people 's faces , contorted by their rage .
with the pivot of the pan being in the center of the mob and angry members within a short radius of the pan , lang offers the viewer a sense of what it feels like to be the subject of a lynching .
in this shot the audience is at the mercy of the mob ; lang 's camera makes us feel vulnerable and powerless as joe must have felt in the jail .
in some greater sense , it must have been what lang felt when he saw his countrymen overcome with unjustifiable hatred towards their own humankind .
lang 's observations of his fellow man succumbing to mob behavior left him with an indelible image of malevolent human behavior .
as joe faces his peril , trapped in his burning cell , his dog rainbow rushes to be by his side .
lang makes rainbow a martyr to contrast his humanity against the recklessness of his human counterparts .
using his camera to create shots that elicit disturbing images of mob mentality , lang depicts man 's volatility and ' impulse ' towards inconceivable cruelty .
reprising joe ' s line at the train station
, we are induced to question why our primeval impulses so easily transcend our humanity .

A:
P
****