Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: "Smithereens" is the kind of worthless flick which just hangs out among the cable channels taking up space like a cheesy dime novel in the public library. A worthless bit of tripe and first effort for mediocre director Seidelman, the film is fraught with bad acting, bad sound, bad camera work, and poor quality in all aspects of the film. Many better films never make it to market and why junk flicks like this one do and never seem to go away is one of life's great mysteries. (D-)

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: "Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned" is the third installment of the Gabriel Knight games, a series of adventure games about the roguish writer/paranormal detective, Gabriel Knight. Gabriel and his companion, Grace, have been asked by Prince James of Albany to investigate a series of mysterious attacks by so-called "night visitors." When the son of Prince James is kidnapped, Gabriel pursues the night visitors to Rennes le Chateau, where he begins piecing together a mystery relating to the Holy Grail.

Despite the marketing, this game is not about vampires. Vampires have a token appearance in the game, but never command center stage, as did the voodoo hounfor in "Sins of the Fathers" or the werewolves in "The Beast Within." Gabriel and Grace make no attempt to uncover the true nature of vampires, or to research lore on vampires. Although the vampires do murder three people during the course of the game, their victims are chosen at random and have nothing to do with the main plot.

A large part of the charm of the first two Gabriel Knight installments was in the relationships which Gabriel formed with the villains. Through these relationships, the player could not help but sympathize with the villain, and thus the villain was transformed into more of a human and less of a monster. However, in "Blood of the Sacred," Gabriel's only interaction with the villain is through a single, cheesy interview, which does nothing to endear the villain to the player.

The roles that Gabriel and Grace play in this mystery are fairly futile. Gabriel spends his time snooping into the identities of members of a treasure-hunter tour group staying at his hotel, but what he uncovers amounts to nothing more than a red herring. Grace spends her time researching the mystery of Rennes le Chateau, but all her research is rendered superfluous by the presence of a perplexing ally who has known the answer to this mystery for centuries.

The actions of this perplexing ally and his polar opposite --- the vampire leader --- are insupportable. The ally leaves hints about the mystery of Rennes le Chateau in broad daylight and expects Grace (and not the other treasure hunters from the tour group) to find them. However, he could have revealed the mystery to Grace in its entirety on day 1, instead of putting the kidnapped child at risk for an additional 48 hours. And in the end, he simply tells Grace the mystery in its entirety anyway.

Meanwhile, the vampire leader fails to achieve the goals of centuries of scheming, because he chooses to refrain from action for two days after the kidnapping of the child. The only reason given for his decision to delay action is that he wants to savor his victory.

The game would have been much better had it been purely focused on the Holy Grail. The kidnapping and vampires should have been omitted, replaced with a race against the Vatican to uncover the mystery of Rennes le Chateau. Since Gabriel is portrayed more than once as reluctantly Catholic, this conflict would have had many opportunities for character development.

All in all, the game was a disappointing installment in the series, despite an improved interface and the return of Tim Curry as the voice of Gabriel Knight.

Problem: Write a positive movie review.

Answer: I am decidedly not in the target audience for this film. I am a man nearly 50 who has only recently stumbled across the world of independent film. This happened quite by accident, with the discovery of a movie called Clerks late one night on television. The first two things I noticed about that film were that it was 1) technically amateurish and 2) brilliantly written. When I read an interview with the director in the local paper and he said that one of his influences was Clerks, I started to get interesting. When he said his main influence was The Station Agent, a movie I'd seen on DVD a week prior, I decided I had to go and check it out. The result could be described along the same lines as Clerks, although the two films are nothing alike content wise. Both films suffer from technical gaffes that are overcome through amazing writing. Whereas Clerks is a day in the life of a man who has nothing in his life at all and is afraid to ask tough questions about himself and his situation, Less Like Me is about a man who seemingly forces himself to be constantly busy, he's always running one way or another, filling his life with little things so that he will never have to deal with the big ones. The themes and ideas of this film are strong and poignant. I can tell from watching it that not much has changed since I was growing up, young men still have the same problems they always have. The writer dresses up these problems and themes in the modern vernacular, crafts wonderfully honest characters, and has them do completely believable things. As far as indie cinema goes, this may not be perfect from a technical standpoint, but from an artistic one, it is very close.

Problem: Write a positive movie review.

Answer:
This movie is good for TV. I like it because I'm a HUGE fan of disaster films even though this is a family film. Accuracy on the film from the book is half-and-half They got the characters names right but in the book there was no storm chaser, the the car scene involving the Hatch family running away from the tornado wasn't in the book instead it involved Dan hatch and his friend riding with a police officer on their way to the police station for safety. and in the book Dan and his friend are both 12-years old. Thats all i can think of. Overall this was a good movie even though it could of have been a little more accurate to the book. Did you know the book was based on a true story of a series of tornadoes devastating a small Nebraska town in 1980?