Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: Twenty five years ago, I showed this film in some children's classes in Entomology and can still remember the excitement of the kids; they were spellbound! It is not just about the termites who have built and live in the "Castles of Clay," but also about the other animals who use the mounds. There is a fantastic scene in which a cobra fights a monitor lizard while a colony of mongooses watch. It is a not only good for entomology classes, but also for teaching about ecology since there is so much about the interactions between the termites and other organisms and the whole ecology of all of the organisms that live in and around the mounds.

I wish it was available on DVD, so that I could watch it again and show others.

Problem: Write a negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: If anybody really wants to understand Hitler, read WWI history not WWII history. Find out what happened during that war, how soldiers had to live around dead corpses all the time. How so many soldiers went insane, from what they saw during WWI, at the time they called it "shellshocked" now the call it post-traumatic stress disorder. If you learn the true horrors of WWI, you will begin to understand Hitler. You will understand how a human being can become desensitized to death, not because their evil but simply because it was the only way for them too cope with the horrors around them.

This movie unfortunately misses that, as so many others do. Read some books on the subject and you should watch the movie "paths of glory", the only good WWI movie ever made. You will see the frustration of the soldiers in that movie, the sense of helplessness, and a utter devaluation of human life, as nothing more than bullet catchers.

Thats what this movie misses, its really the key point to understanding Germany. A lost war, where millions and millions of Germans lost their lives, for no real reason. Then comes an utter economic collapse, following the war. Those are the factors that create extremism.

The loss of family members and massive poverty will create always lead to extremism. Unfortunately this movie ignored these factors, and has just become another throw away piece of crap to throw on the pile. With really no real value, there are fictional movie's based upon fictional characters that could give you a better idea of Hitler than this does. They just threw Hitlers name on this so it would sell more.

Problem: Write a negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: I saw this recent Woody Allen film because I'm a fan of his work and I make it a point to try to see everything he does, though the reviews of this film led me to expect a disappointing effort. They were right. This is a confused movie that can't decide whether it wants to be a comedy, a romantic fantasy, or a drama about female mid-life crisis. It fails at all three.

Alice (Mia Farrow) is a restless middle aged woman who has married into great wealth and leads a life of aimless luxury with her rather boring husband and their two small children. This rather mundane plot concept is livened up with such implausibilities as an old Chinese folk healer who makes her invisible with some magic herbs, and the ghost of a former lover (with whom she flies over Manhattan). If these additions sound too fantastic for you, how about something more prosaic, like an affair with a saxophone player?

I was never quite sure of what this mixed up muddle was trying to say. There are only a handful of truly funny moments in the film, and the endingis a really preposterous touch of Pollyanna.

Rent 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' instead, a superbly well-done film that suceeds in combining comedy with a serious consideration of ethics and morals. Or go back to "Annie Hall" or "Manhattan".

Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer:
A Kafkaesque thriller of alienation and paranoia. Extremely well done and Polanski performs well as the diffident introvert trying hard to adapt to his dingy Paris lodgings and his fellow lodgers. Horrifying early on because of the seeming mean and self obsessed fellow tenants and horrifying later on as he develops his defences which will ultimately be his undoing. Personally I could have done without the cross dressing element but I accept the nod to Psycho and the fact that it had some logic, bearing in mind the storyline. Nevertheless it could have worked without and would have removed the slightly theatrical element, but then maybe that was intended because the courtyard certainly seems to take on the look of a theatre at the end. I can't help feel that there are more than a few of the director's own feelings of not being a 'real' Frenchman and Jewish to boot. Still, there is plenty to enjoy here including a fine performance from a gorgeous looking Isabelle Adjani and good old Shelly Winters is as reliable as ever.