Q: argh! this film hurts my head. and not in a good way.

maybe it's just my growing hatred for the action genre, but even as a kid when i would swallow tripe like Navy Seals, i still regarded this film with dislike. now i utterly despise it.

take one fairly good fast-paced story. keep the title and throw the rest away. instead use some half-assesd future gladiators storyline thats so full of plot holes the whole things in danger of collapsing (why is there a rebel base in the middle of the arena, what about the cameras? why have clearly marked footage of what really happened at bakersfeild in an unguarded room?)

the whole film screams eighties, from the truley awful score to the goofy shiny costumes. ugh.

don't watch this film. i know some people liked it, but some people get off on being peed on and i don't understand them either. OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive
A: negative
Q: "Fever Pitch" is a sweet and charming addition to the small genre of sports romances as date movies or movies a son could be willing to go to with his mother (though the guys in the audience got noticeably restless during the romantic scenes).

I have lived through a milder version of such a story, as my first exposure to baseball was dating my husband the spring after the Mets first World Series win and then I watched the Mets clinch their next one because I was the one still up in the wee hours with our two little sons, who have grown up to teach me more about baseball through our local neighborhood National League team's other heartbreaking failures to win it again (and it was me who took our older son to his only Fenway Park game as I caught a bit of Red Sox fever as a graduate student in Boston).

So compared to reality, the script believably creates two people with actual jobs. It is particularly impressive that Drew Barrymore's character is a substantive workaholic who has anti-Barbie skills, though she pretty much only visits with her three bland girlfriends during gym workouts that allow for much jiggling and the minor side stories with her parents don't completely work.

It is even set up credibly how she meets Jimmy Fallon's math teacher and how she falls for his "winter guy" -- though it's surprising that his Red Sox paraphernalia filled apartment didn't tip her off to his Jekyll-and-Hyde "summer guy." Their relationship crisis during the baseball season is also played out in a refreshingly grown-up way, from efforts at compromise to her frank challenges to him, centered around that they are both facing thirty and single. Fallon surprisingly rises to his character's gradual emotional maturity.

While the ending borrows heavily from O. Henry, the script writers did a yeoman job of quickly incorporating the Sox's incredible 2004 season into a revised story line (with lots of cooperation from the Red Sox organization for filming at the stadium).

The script goes out of its way to explain why Fallon doesn't have a Boston accent, as an immigrant from New Jersey, but that doesn't explain why his motley friends don't. The most authentic sounding Boston sounds come from most of his "summer family" of other season ticket holders, who kindly kibitz the basics of Sox lore to neophyte Barrymore (and any such audience members).

The song selection includes many Red Sox fans' favorites, from the opening notes of the classic "Dirty Water," though most are held to be heard over the closing credits as if you are listening to local radio and are worth sitting through to hear. OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive
A: positive
Q: Why on earth should you explore the mesmerizing nature documentary "Earth"? How much time do you have on earth so I can explain this to you? OK, I will not elongate my review exploration on "Earth" to infinity, but I must stand my ground on why this is a "must see". The documentary takes a nature round trip on the migration paths on three animal families: a female polar bear and her cubs with the real life subplot of the father bear daring it out to hunt for food in his isolated path, a mama of a whale with her baby whale taking a whale of a migration tour for prey, and an elephant mama with her small (maybe not so small, they are elephants) offspring migrating in Africa. Directors Alastair Forthegill & Mark Linfield did an "out of this earth" job in also capturing the survival skills of many other animal species besides the magnetic shots of our three animal family protagonists. The cinematographically skilled team of Richard Brooks Burton, Mike Holding, Adam Ravetch, and Andrew Shillabeer were animales in camera shooting the wondrous nature sites and animal instinctive behaviors; not to mention, the slo-mo animal prey shots were u n b e l i e a v a b l e. "Earth" is also a lesson learner on the global warming effect on the animals; the papa polar bear in the doc is the poster animal boy on that consequence. So fellow earthlings, it is time to take the documentary voyage to visit "Earth" today! **** Good OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive
A: positive
Q: There is this private campground in Plymouth, Massachusetts, that's been around since 1959. My grandparents were among its founders, my parents had a site starting in 1965, and my two brothers have sites there now.

(This doesn't have anything directly to do with the movie; bear with me.)

I spent summers at Blueberry Hill from when I was five years old to when I was eighteen, and it is to people like me to whom this film speaks: the ones for whom a group camp in the woods was, as my fiancee tells of me, "the good and happy place." If you've never experienced the lifestyle, Indian Summer will probably be lost on you; don't bother. It's not quick-paced, it doesn't have rapid cuts, the plots aren't in the least bit convoluted, it has no explosions, such dramatic tension as exists is mild, there aren't any A-list actors, there are no rapid-fire quips just to show off how clever the scriptwriters are (other than, perhaps, Kimberley Williams' killer line about how her fiance shouldn't "overwind his toys." That is not the least degree what this movie is about, any more than The Godfather is a slasher flick just because it has a lot of on screen gore.

But Indian Summer is Godfather's polar opposite. If you have experienced the lifestyle, see this movie. Don't read any more, just do it.

For me, this is a 9/10 film. OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive
A: positive