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I just got done watching "Spaceman" starring Adam Sandler and the only good news is that I am here to I report that you can spare wasting an hour and a half of your life on it. Since it starred Adam Sandler and was about space travel, I thought it would be some sort of funny space comedy. WRONG! Instead it was an exceedingly maudlin and sad story that pretty much goes nowhere.I can break it down to Man meets Giant Spider who acts as his shrink to make him appreciate his wife. I kid you not. Also we are...

Julie & Julia, an unbearably cute movie from Nora Ephron, hangs all of its laughs and most of its tears on absurdly small obstacles, aiming at an audience for whom the idea of taking a year to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking — why, that’s almost one and a half food items a day! — seems a really interesting and daunting challenge. Julie Powell (played by redhead Amy Adams, who stuffs her performance with Meg Ryan perkiness) is a bored worker whose job is to field complaints about Ground Zero for the Lower...

God it must be fun to be Meryl Streep. She always seems to be having a blast. It’s certainly fun to watch her in “Mamma Mia!” You don’t often get to see 50-something women be as randy and rowdy as the boys in “Superbad.” But that’s what Streep, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters do while they steal the film away from every young hot body on that Greek island. And what an island. Sigh. If I lose my mind and get married I’ll head to that gorgeous church at the top of those winding stairs. What a magical place. It’s...

I must admit that one of my weakest areas of overall knowledge is the “chick flick” genre of film. I basically avoid seeing movies designed to appeal specifically to women as I don’t happen to be a female, and this, unfortunately, precludes my interest in a good deal of the Harlequinisms passed off as blockbusters by the motion picture industry. However, that’s not to say that I haven’t been exposed to many of these specialty productions because I have, although, generally, under duress. The foulest one I ever experienced was Bridges of Madison County which not even Clint Eastwood could...

Studio: Miramax Films Starring: Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon

The word "funny" is not the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the name "Gore." Last year, when Miramax announced it had commissioned Kristin Gore, daughter of Al, to write a comic novel about a single woman working in Washington, Jay Leno turned the book into a punch line of his own. "It's about a Capitol Hill staffer who works with a congressman on a health-care subcommittee," he said. "Apparently that boring gene doesn't fall far from the tree." Turns out, yes it does. "Sammy's Hill" is a laugh-out-loud literary debut, certain to draw comparisons to "Bridget...