You can almost hear the suits at Disney from down here in the workhouses:

"How are we going to get kids interested in a period piece with no talking animals?"

"And we can call it 'Scrooge in Outer Space' or 'Scrooge meets the Mole People' or - I've got it! - 'A-C-Squared!'"

Ah, 3D. I love 3D. Who would have imagined that Hollywood would have invented glasses that make movies similar to the experience of taking off the glasses and looking around the theater.

"You know it's 3D, right?" asked the pimple-faced box office ticketing engineer.

"Yes, why?"

"Some people don't like the 3D because it gives them headaches."

"Nothing could compare to the headache I got from the 2D G.I. Joe," I said. "As long as Robert Zemeckis takes the viewer through a 3D wreath, I'm in."

Enter Jim Carrey, whose Scrooge has a chin so long he could hang Jenny McCarthy's dry cleaning on it, and, one would hope, Jenny McCarthy along with it.

Here we are on the bustling motion-captured and 3D-animated streets of period London...and there's the 3D wreath! Wait for it, wait for it. Here we go...through the wreath! The great thing about a classic story is that it never requires gimmicks, right?

Enter Robert Zemeckis, the man who convinced us a skateboard could fly and Michael J. Fox could be a cinematic leading man.

"My next project is to motion capture some hair and comb it over my 3D scalp," said Zemeckis.

But back to our movie:

"Do I have the pleasure of addressing Mr Scrooge or Mr. Zemeckis's hair?" asked the charity guys.

"Mr Zemeckis's hair has been dead these seven years," replied Scrooge. "Are there no hair plugs? And the rugs, have they failed in their useful course?"

"I regret to say they have not, Mr. Scrooge."

"Let Mr. Zemeckis's hair die then and decrease the surplus population!"

A characteristically grumpy Scrooge retires to Bedlam, but on his door-knocker is the visage of Jacob Marley!

"I was hoping for Scarlett Johansson's knockers!" said a startled Scrooge.

"You and me both," replied the ghost-face of Marley, recognizing an adroit lift from Mel Brooks when he hears one. "I may be dead but I'm not blind! Oh, by the way, tonight you will be haunted by three spirits played by Jim Carrey."

"Are any of them funny?" asked Scrooge.

"No, this is Jim Carrey 2009, not Jim Carrey 1994," said Marley.

You know the tale: Scrooge is visited by three spirits, beginning with the Ghost of Christmas Past, whose face resembles a Jim Carrey candle and whose dialogue delivery suggests he is also the Ghost of Acid Flashbacks Past

The best part of A Christmas Carol was when a terrified and suspiciously action-figure-sized Scrooge is riding an icicle and desperately fleeing a black horse-drawn spectral carriage chasing him across the streets of London. I think that was in Dickens' original story, too - right before Scrooge's dance at Fezziwig's with Jessica Rabbit and after Wile E. Coyote drops an anvil on Bob Cratchit's head.

It's a tour de force me to watch. Never has so much money been spent to animate so many bad teeth.

"Will Tiny Tim survive, spirit?" asks Scrooge.

"I see a vacant seat and a crutch without an owner."

"Good! As long as the seat's vacant and the crutch has no owner! Phew!"

As Tiny Tim observed, keenly eyeing Disney's corporate coffers during this critical holiday season...

"God bless us, everyone!"

Scout Taylor-Compton returns as Laurie, and I can honestly say I don't know which of her three names I'm least interested in.

Director Rob Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, returns from the other side of Rob's bed and from the dead as a Holy spectre, a willowy white spirit with a big white horse meant to symbolize all manner of symbolized white symbols. If it's "purity" that this is supposed to represent, then someone should remind Rob that this is a sequel to a remake.

Let's call Jennifer Love Hewitt and have long and emotional dialogues with this spirit so she can move into the light and Love can go back to her day job of not selling even a single antique.

The tension builds as Laurie attempts to escape the unstoppable Michael Myers so she can live to see the day where she, too, can pitch Activia yogurt - and believe me, Scout, that day is coming sooner than you think. Scout's honor.

Enter a world where every TV in Haddonfield is tuned to a grainy music video of the Moody Blues doing Nights in White Satin. That's as likely as Brian Williams opening the NBC Nightly News with the headline: "World names Mr. T its new King."

Evidently, this music video is on an endless loop on every cable channel all Halloween night punctuated only by ads for Snuggies and pleas to turn your gold into cash. But who needs cash or a wardrobe that doubles as a blanket when the Moody Blues is whispering for you to slit your wrists?

So Laurie's a little crazy, and Margot Kidder is her therapist! Talk about the pot counseling the kettle black! Said Kidder, speaking from her home in the bushes behind the set, "I blame it all on the thin air during those high altitude romantic fly-by's with Superman."

Added Rob Zombie, "Margot was a trooper - she even wore her good teeth for the role."

So Laurie and her friends are badder and Gothier and more Zombie-licious than most babes their age. And Dr. Loomis is now a best-selling author, who answers the question "Will Michael kill again?" thus:

"As long as the Weinstein brothers own the franchise and can make sequels for dirt-cheap - Yes."

But the weakest moment by far is when Loomis is featured on Haddonfield's own version of the Jay Leno show beside guest Weird Al Yankovic. Wow, who's up next, Charo, Alan Thicke, Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp?

It seems like Rob's main purpose here was to kill off everyone from the previous film so whoever has the sorry task of picking up from here will get to start all over again. And mercy me, that would be the best place to start.

Halloween II doesn't have a single scary second. It's just one savage murder after another. And no humor, just 100 minutes of brutal and boring un-fun.

Maybe the Weinsteins will keep re-releasing this movie until it finds an audience.

Try releasing it with a homing beacon and a GPS device, boys.

Now, "look at all the beautiful babies" has become "Who wants to go to Applebees by themselves?"

Over the years Fav and Vaughn have bedded more Twinkies than beautiful babies, and the expression "you're so money" has been replaced by "you're so beyond your body's natural set point!"

Judging by his appearance on the red carpet, Vaughn's next role is as a pig in a python.

When it comes to Couples Retreat, Vince brings his patented satirical Vince Vaughn-ness and Favreau plays the kind of role that has made him famous, the role of Ben Stiller celebrity impersonator.

"Listen, we put 'Retreat' in the title of the movie. How much more direction do you need than that?" asked Favreau, who perhaps should have called this movie "Couples Run For Your Life, Screaming."

This is the first time I've gone to a movie where the popcorn bags were co-branded for barf use.

Yes, Couples Retreat opened strong. But it opened on a weekend when the only other wide release was the gas released by the guy in the seat behind me. And when your biggest competition is passing wind, almost anything smells good!

Couples Retreat is directed by Peter Billingsley, Ralphie from A Christmas Story, who could have enriched my life better if his tongue had been stuck to a frozen pole.

Kristen Bell is featured as the wife who is slightly cross-eyed, which explains why she saw something in this script nobody else did. Kristen has been trying to buy a ticket on the Reese Witherspoon/Kate Hudson express for some time now, but she can't seem to be on the right track at the right time.

Charlotte from Sex and the City is here pretending that she will ever be anyone but Charlotte from Sex and the City.

And because all of the couples need skill-building, they set about to meet with therapists and build skills.

"I learned all the exceptions to the 'i before e' rule," said Favreau.

"And I'm now a certified brick layer," added Vaughn.

Although this movie is designed to be a comedy, there is so much room between laughs Donald Trump has bought the space to build a real estate development on it.

Jean Reno is the mysterious proprietor of this Fantasy Island. Reno is most associated with assassins and murderers which must explain his attraction to a movie so deadly. Reno is the "couples whisperer."

"Yes, he trained me to pee outside the house," said Vaughn. "Aerobic use of the refrigerator door, however, is self-taught."

You can see where this movie is headed from a mile away, which is exactly where I wished I was while watching it.

In the third act, all the loose ends are tied up in such a stunningly unlikely fashion, I'd sooner expect Elvis Presley and Tupac to emerge from hiding and stage a benefit concert just so we could all get our money back.

Cue the inappropriate yoga teacher! Cue the mid-life crisis acting-out! Cue the bare bellies of Vaughn, Favreau, and Faizon Love, and thank your lucky stars that this movie isn't in 3-D! Cue the gratuitous product placement for Guitar Hero!

Cue the Kristen Bell cross-eyed reaction shot!

Cue dialogue like "Be an ass for love"!

Cue the desire for a refund.

Isn't it scarier to think of some bloodthirsty creature emerging from the grave than to imagine your friend with the temperament of a British soccer fan and the skin of Jessica Simpson pre-Proactiv?

If it's a comedy about bad skin, it's only appropriate that Zombieland features a wonderful cameo from the King of satirical comedy and bad skin himself, Mr. Bill Murray. Murray's hilarious segment is worth the price of admission, but beyond that, Zombieland is no Shaun of the Dead.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as the David Niven of awkward, and awkward is firing on all cylinders here. Eisenberg turns awkward up to 11 - especially in those scenes where he plays opposite the only thing in the universe more terrifying than a bloodthirsty zombie: That's right, a girl.

Jesse has a boatload of rules to follow which can help you survive the zomb-ocalypse. "Beware of bathrooms" is one, and this is a good rule to follow whether or not the stalls are surrounded by zombies, if you ask me. Ditto for "fasten your seatbelts" and "cardio." But what "give a hoot, don't pollute" has to do with zombies I'll never know.

Woody Harrelson is Jesse's zombie-killing sidekick. "I haven't worked opposite zombies since Courtney Love in The People vs. Larry Flynt," said Harrelson.

Woody wields a sawed-off shotgun and a taste for Twinkies, although he seeks them out in the supermarket's baking supplies aisle, which doesn't make any sense.

And spunky little Abigail Breslin has grown into the kind of frumpy teen that school libraries and mathletics were created for.

Co-star Emma Stone proves that even in the darkest moments of apocalypse its critical to slather on a maximum amount of eye shadow. "The virus may have destroyed humanity, but virtually every mirror remains intact," she notes.

"Emma if your eyes had any more shadow I could use your nose as a sundial," said Woody.

Leave it to our heroes to enter one retail establishment after another, only to discover that in every case there's a batch of zombies evidently working in the back who rush to the front when called. If zombification is the price we have to pay for attentive retail cashiers, then I say bring it on.

So our heroes head to the amusement park in LA, because what better place to evade murderous zombies than a wide-open theme park with noisy, brightly lit rides!

Woody is pining away after his lost son, with whom he manufactured a wallet out of duct tape. "We also manufactured a Big Wheel out of duct tape, but I took it away when my boy ran over the neighbor's duct tape garden and my neighbor used his duct tape iPhone to call the police," said Woody.

Zombieland is fine, but I'm still hoping for Shaun of the Dead 2.

Look who's a movie critic!

It's Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he's no fan of the new Megan Fox movie Jennifer's Body.

You'll have to forgive Mr. Ahmadinejad's shaky grasp of who the co-stars really are.

Plus, his translator seems to have learned English from Chico Marx.

While I fully expected Audrina to one day break into movies, I expected it to be on some dirtbag's flipcam in a hotel room.

There's the remarkable Leah Pipes, whose name is six degrees of separation from every double-entendre you've ever heard.

Lovely Briana Evigan, daughter of Greg Evigan, star of the fabled TV series B.J. and the Bear, where a trucker and his sole companion, a monkey named "Bear," travel the highways of America discovering adventure and townsfolk who object to the idea of a chimp being transported across state lines for purposes of companionship and adventure. Suffice it to say, Briana has B-movies in her blood, no matter where it splatters and no matter what fraction may be simian.

There's Rumer Willis, spawn of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, who has been signed by CAA not because of who her parents are but because compared to all the actors in all the world, she's just that darned good. "Actually, we only compared her to all the actors named 'Rumer,'" acknowledged one CAA representative.

And last but not least, we have Carrie Fisher. It was a long time ago in a galaxy far away that Carrie first captured our attention. Today, she's toting a shotgun around a sorority house and growling out dialogue like she's cheering on a cockfight. In a generation, Carrie has moved from Jabba the Hut to a job at the Pizza Hut - with plenty of extra cheese.

We open on a wild sorority party, where the girls jump on the bed, their pajama bottom flaps open to reveal their asses, and those don't include the asses who green-lit this movie. Feathers fly everywhere, the booze flows freely, and we are again reminded of the many charitable activities of the Greek system, especially in the particularly charitable shower scene.

So Audrina plays dead to fool her boyfriend who must be punished for cheating on her. "I'm so good at playing dead because I've been practicing for this moment all my life," says Audrina, which sparks even Carrie Fisher to exclaim "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!"

Unfortunately, things don't go as planned when Audrina's boyfriend decides that since she's dead it would make sense to drive a tire iron into her chest. "Nobody had a silver bullet or a wooden stake, so I worked with what I had," he explained.

The girls drop Audrina's body into a shaft, and suddenly, we're in the midst of one of the most horrific crimes ever committed by a bevy of young beauties while in underwear. It's hard to take things seriously when a body is being dumped by a girl in a thong with "Ride me, big boy" on the front.

Well, this isn't Audrina's first encounter with a shaft, and God knows it won't be her last.

Leah Pipes reminds the girls of their sorority motto: "Trust, Respect, Honor, Secrecy, Solidarity, Wash, Rinse, Repeat."

This is followed by what is easily the best line in the entire movie: "Let's wash off the blood and get back to the party."

Fast-forward many months, and our girls are older but no wiser, perhaps because not a second of this college experience was spent in the orbit of a classroom.

A cloaked figure appears - and this cloaked figure will have his or her revenge! With a pimped-out (wait for it....) tire iron, yet.

"One needs to know how to pimp out a tire iron when your dad is B.J. and the Bear," said Briana Evigan. "Dad always said there should be a law against high-speed grooming."

One girl fesses up the heinous crime to her boyfriend. "If he blabs that's orange jumpsuits for all of us," warns Rumer Willis. "And our house mothers will be Luis Guzman and Danny Trejo."

Who is killing these beautiful sorority girls, and how is it that Nancy Grace isn't all over this story? Is it Audrina, back from the dead and now favoring dark colors, even in the spring? Or is it her sister who has her own score to settle by using sex as a weapon because she missed shop class the time they taught you how to pimp out a tire iron?

Fortunately the climax of this movie is shrouded by bubble bath, which has shrouded more than its fair share of climaxes.

Who will emerge from the bubbles alive? And will they insert comedic remarks into all the wrong places, by which I mean pretty much all the places?

See for yourself.

Or, more wisely, don't.

Wait, you can command the technology required cross interstellar space and overcome the speed of light, but you still can't resist riding on fumes?! Next we'll discover their windshield wipers don't work in the rain!

So the massive ship hovers, stalled, over South Africa.

"Las Vegas refused hovering clearance," said one alien. "Even after we came all this way to see Bette Midler at Caesers!"

"That will teach you not to buy your tickets ahead of time," said the South African authorities, who proceeded to usher the aliens into a slum-camp known as "District 9," giving all-new meaning to the term "illegal aliens."

Yes, the alien ship hangs dead and dark over the land, like the Christmas twinkle lights hang over my neighbor's house in July.

Called "prawns" for their similarity to bi-pedal crustaceans, these aliens even have precocious young juveniles in their midst, or as they are affectionately known, "shrimp scampis."

The wiser humans learned to speak the alien language, especially one particular wiser human who boasts an uncanny resemblance to Steve Carrell. And with a documentary crew in tow, it's only a matter of time until Prawn Jim hides Prawn Dwight's phone above the acoustic tiles.

"Is that dark line down the middle of that Prawn what I think it is?" asked one hapless camera operator?

"Yes, it's a poop-chute," replied Steve Carrell's South African doppelganger. "The law requires Prawns to cover their poopers with government-issued dickeys!"

What do aliens eat? Cat food! And not the fancy kind on the silver platter with the Lauren Bacall voiceover. I'm talking about the kind issued to G.I. cats dug into trenches in WWII.

"We also tried that Newman's Own," explained one Prawn, "because on the way over from the Mother Galaxy we watched Cool Hand Luke 1.47 million times."

So Steve Carrell ingests something by accident that begins to transform him into something else. "Just like an American pro baseball player," he aptly notes. "It's a metamorphosis," he shouts! "Like butter and flies into butterflies!"

But when his transformation begins he becomes a tool of the government - he is uniquely able to use alien weapons which are tuned to their own biology much like the poop chute down their middles.

Steve's father-in-law is a government official who wins the prize for "most creative expression of disapproval over a daughter's partner decision ever" when he gets Steve secretly kidnapped to be dismembered by government doctors.

District 9 is a cautionary tale about man's inhumanity to aliens, especially those aliens who are high in cholesterol.

Shot for a measly $30 million, you could make this movie six times for what it cost to make the more than poop-chute-worthy G. I. Joe.

And let's hope somebody does.

District 9 is one terrific movie.

Are you as embarrassed for having seen this crappy movie as I am? The studio didn't screen this one for the critics - that's like not allowing a taste-test when you know the food is poisoned. And this cinematic junk food is more toxic than a field trip of swine flu school kids.

You know you're in for a rough ride when a movie is produced by a company, Hasbro, whose finest product is a barrel of monkeys. Having once hung those monkeys arm in arm and thus exhausted the play potential of that toy in about sixty seconds, one can only acknowledge the endless wrong paths that could be taken by a movie based on that greatest of American heroes, G.I. Joe.

And good luck finding a path here that isn't wrong.

Not that any of it matters, of course. The moviegoing public will have its fix of commandos in costumes that resemble either Iron Man or Transformers or both.

When a G.I. has a fatal pulse beam headed his way and screams "Oh My Gosh!" you know you're fighting the Battle of the Ratings Board, where massive casualties are acceptable, but taking the Lord's name in vain will send you back to the cutting room.

Ah, the plot, such as it is. We learn that a defense contractor has invented "nanomites": Microscopic soldiers that can eat through a tank, a national landmark, even an entire city like an army of tiny Artie Langes!

Pity poor Dennis Quaid whose once trim features are as heavily padded as anything surrounding G.I. Joe's mechanical getup. Quaid's nose alone seems to be carrying a troop transport of reinforcement flesh.

"Congratulations," said General Dennis Quaid. "This squad will be the first in this nation's army to sport camo-gear with shoulder pads!"

Quaid's secret government lair is located deep under the Sahara, just beyond the Pyramids. "I was digging out a new office when I uncovered the lost tomb of Queen Nefertiti, and I'm like, 'What's this Egyptian broad doing in a U.S. Government facility?!'"

Down the elevator goes into the desert sands - a man-made lake at this level, a working reconstruction of the Bush years at the next level, Kim Kardashian's closet at the level past that.

Hey, that's Marlon Wayans as one of our G.I. heroes! I don't know about you, but when I think "military special forces" the first thing that comes to my mind is the term "Wayans Brothers."

Somewhere between the Joe of my youth and the Joe of the Big Screen, the foxholes have been replaced by foxes. And the image of terrorism has enjoyed major cosmetic upgrade, now featuring skin-tight leather outfits, plenty of cleavage, perfect lipstick, and sparkling white teeth that gnash at the very thought of truth, justice, and the American way. Never has the notion of screwing the terrorists seemed so appealing.

If Sienna Miller is the new look of terror, then Homeland Security had better frisk everyone exiting the Playboy Mansion. And I say "exiting" because even Homeland Security can't keep up with all the entering in that joint.

Nearly every actor spends at least part of this movie as a 3-D hologram. "I'm a big believer in an actor possessing at least two more dimensions than the rest of the movie," said Christopher Eccleston, who thanks God daily for having the kind of foreign accent characteristic of movie-land international super-criminals.

What performances! No, I mean what performances? This is the kind of acting talent usually reserved for a cruise ship or the BeetleJuice stage show at Universal Studios. "It's great practice for a career in commercials," said star Channing Tatum. "I'll save the day, for I am prettier than a girl! Easy, breezy, beautiful, Cover Girl, that is!"

This is what happens when you hire actors who are dumb as rocks but look good in form-fitting uniforms brandishing state-of-the-art CGI weaponry.

"What's with all this CISCO product placement?" asked co-star Jonathan Pryce. "Are folks in this audience in the market for a data center switch?"

Last but not least is the Cobra himself - Part man, part vacuum cleaner, and the creator of a race of super-soldiers who feel no fear. Says the Cobra, "Not unlike when Hitler crossed Aryans with Gorillas and came up with a fearless race of warriors who liked banana-flavored Becks!"

So the bad guys have nanobot missiles and they need to get them "weaponized," which is a fancy word for spinning them around in a crystal cylinder until they glow green. Then they can be fired at the Eiffel Tower so it can dissolve into a nanobot stew, which is just where my brain was headed at about this point.

Director Stephen Sommers knows no shame. Nor would he know a character arc if it were stuffed inside Dennis Quaid's already bulky nose.

"I knew I left my character arc somewhere," exclaimed Quaid. "But I thought it was in the divorce settlement to Meg Ryan."

I still can't figure out what this movie is about, other than one incredibly dumb moment after another.

Evidently, on some August weekends, that's enough.

Enter Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard who go in search of a living as they await a call from Mr. Scorcese.

Sarsgaard is best known for wedding the ambiguously sexy Maggie Gyllenhaal, thus hoarding a Guinness World Record number of vowels into one family name.

Vera and Peter know sign language because their baby daughter is deaf. "She may be deaf but this script is dumb" volunteers Peter as he eyes wife Maggie's seven figure take from The Dark Knight with envy.

Peter and Vera and their kids are just a regular family - living in a snow-covered mountain villa! Just when you think the only thing missing is the tree-house, cut to the tree-house. And on the way to the tree-house, make sure to stop by the greenhouse, and bring your brand-spanking new kitchen with you! I don't know what Peter is writing at his little drafting table but I suspect he's forging C-notes.

When you've got this much money it's time to buy some love. And that's just what Peter and Vera do with the new adopted daughter Esther.

The nuns have been raising Esther in a quaint, rustic orphanage known as the "Home for Well-Behaved White Girls in Uniforms." There's a sell-a-thon on and the nuns have special financing rates on various late-model youths.

Naturally, Peter and Vera are attracted to the solemn, artistic one with no friends and a fashion sense straight out of the Patty Duke Show.

"Let's bring her back to our snow-covered villa and ply her with gifts!" says Peter.

"Yes, let's!" says Vera. "And then when she tries to kill us we can shrink into helpless, simpering, sniveling saps."

"That's too much alliteration for a guy with two adjacent vowels in his last name," warns Peter.

Yes, parents terrorized by a pre-teen child. It's based on the scene that plays out every day in the checkout line at Walmart.

Young Esther hails from Russia, although the constant references to "moose and squirrel" are thanks to linguistic coaches Boris and Natasha.

"Say it like Mr. Chekov would, my dahling!" says Boris.

"Anton Chekhov, author of The Cherry Orchard?" asks Esther.

"No, Pavel Chekov, navigator of the Starship Enterprise!"

Once Esther turns evil, the fake Russian accent comes in handy as she sits in a wheelchair, strokes a kitty, and mutters "Goodbye, Mr. Bond."

Says Peter, "Vera, do you think it's a problem that Esther is painting pictures of our house burning which are only visible under a black light?"

"No," says Vera. "What are the odds of our house ever being under a black light?"

Perhaps Esther suffers from a "character-disturbance," if we assume for the sake of argument that her role can accurately be described as a "character."

Who are the "character-disturbed"? "They are superficially cheerful, but adroit manipulators who have difficulty getting and keeping friends," said Vera.

"You've just described the entire cast of The Real Housewives of New Jersey," said Peter.

It's at this point that the plot reaches its climax and takes a twist only slightly less wacky than discovering Esther is an alien who crash-landed at Roswell and has been home-schooled at Area 51 since 1947.

I'm not going to tell you what it is because it will make you want to light the theater on fire under a black light.

Suffice it to say, goodness prevails.

Except for cinematic goodness, of course.

Our heroes are older now, but they have taken time out from writing their wills to return to Hogwarts, the school of their youth which now offers continuing education students the opportunity to learn retirement planning.

"Wands out!" someone yells as danger approaches.

"My wand has been out for years," says Harry Potter. "And it's still itching for a fight - which is better than that itch after my media tour of Thailand, if you know what I mean."

"What's with this Dark Lord Valdemort?" asked Hermione. "He can have the whole world but he can't he stop haunting his elementary school! This would be like Madonna haunting Detroit."

"I didn't hear a word you said," replied Ron Weasley. "I was too shocked that the trajectory of this story actually made us the unlikeliest couple since the leopard who nursed a baby baboon."

Yes, Hermione and Wesley. I'd sooner expect matter and anti-matter to "give us a hug."

It's back to Hogwarts, where Dumbledore still wears his beard smartly twist-tied about half way down. "It's called a 'pony-beard,'" he says, as Maggie Smith looks on, wagging her finger at his hippie-freak insolence.

Ah, Maggie Smith. She hasn't aged a bit since the first Harry Potter movie. Then and now, she doesn't look a day over 90.

"You must be wondering why I summoned you, Harry" said Dumbledore.

"No," said Harry, "but I am wondering why Alan Rickman reads past periods in his dialogue the way drunk drivers speed through a red light."

"Yes, Rickman's pauses are all in the wrong places, aren't they?" said Dumbledore.

At that, the door burst open, and Alan Rickman strode in.

"Mr. Potter," said Rickman, "how grand it must be to be the..."

As the minutes pass, Harry and Dumbledore regard each other in head-scratchng silence.

"...chosen one."

"Punctuate-us Appreciate-us!" says Harry as he waves his wand.

With just a touch of Dumbledore's arm, Harry Potter is transported through space. "I used to have young boys touch my wand," said Dumbledore, "but that was before I was transported through space to Azkaban Prison."

Here we meet Horace Slughorne, part man, part La-Z-Boy. "They wanted me to be a death eater," explained Horace, "but I was more interested in eating mince pie and a custard tart."

Pity young Draco Malfoy. "When your character's name is the root of 'Dracula,' even a resemblance to Ricky Shroder can't alter your fate," said Malfoy.

Great Merlin's Beard, there are a lot of identical twins in the world of Harry Potter! "Methinks there's some fertility potion in the Yorkshire Pudding," says Ron Weasley, as Hermione fans him with a palm branch and drops grapes into his mouth.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a thoroughly enjoyable Summer ride - even the moment where all of Hogwarts pays tribute to a fallen hero the way concert-goers pay tribute to Bruce Springsteen.

When the prisons were filled with hardened criminals with fresh haircuts in striped pajamas. Men who actually used the word "see" at the end of every sentence as in "stick 'em up, see?" Men who didn't need to break out of prison because it was so easy to serpentine your way out. Men who referred to their dames as "sister" despite being unrelated. Men with tough yet laughable names like Melvyn and Homer. Men with Chipmunk names like Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.

Ah, those were the days, when folks robbed banks instead of the other way around. When men wore hats for fashion rather than to cover what was left of their hair. When men referred to their love muscle as "Prince Albert," even though His Highness wore a helmet rather than a crown.

Who knew that Dillinger called his penis "Prince Albert"? And what does it mean that mine is "Queen Isabella"?

It's a dicey thing to make a period film in an age where audiences prefer exclamation marks. Particularly if you're Michael Mann, who would rather project a film in slow motion than have it run less than two and a half hours.

Johnny Depp is John Dillinger, the Demon Gangster of Fleet Street, a brutal killer, and - in accordance with the bad-boy fantasies of teenage girls everywhere - a really sweet boyfriend. And I mean to both his girlfriend and his hookers.

Evidently, getting caught was extraordinarily difficult back in the day. The FBI had a task force to catch Dillinger, but despite the task there wasn't much force. These guys couldn't catch an STD from Brett Michaels.

Dillinger is everywhere - out in the open: There's John at the track. And there's John at the movies. And there's John at a fine restaurant. And there's John on the street in his straw hat searching for the other three members of his barbershop quartet.

Why, Dillinger would almost have to stroll right into the task force headquarters to be recognized - and then he strolls right into the task force headquarters without being recognized. This is like Osama Bin Laden taking the White House Tour before returning to his cave away from cave.

As G-Man Melvyn Purvis said, "If only Dillinger's dame would wear an 'I'm with Public Enemy #1' t-shirt, our troubles would be over, see?"

Added FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, "Forget Dillinger, let's pick up his girlfriend - I want to try on her stockings, see?"

Christian Bale returns to the big screen after a long absence of two weeks as Purvis, doing his best Matthew McConaughey accent - that's two accents removed from his own. It was thanks to Bale that Mann dropped this into the credits: "No Director of Photography was harmed during the making of this picture."

"I'm imitating McConaughey because I want to prove to Hollywood that I, too, can be cast in romantic comedies opposite Kate Hudson," said Bale. "Assuming there's a sequence where I beat the living Hell out of her."

Listen, ya mug, Public Enemies is great if your goal is to count down the minutes before the utterly predictable Diana Krall jazz club appearance.

But if it's heat you want, rent Heat.

And as anyone who knows me will tell you, I can't afford much dripping.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is two-and-a-half-hours long, two hours of which are spent watching cars and trucks transform into robots. These robots come from another planet where there's evidently some evolutionary advantage to driving on the right side of the road.

If you're going to send me a hero, I always say make it one with a built-in cup-holder, Michelins as hip-bling, and car doors for wings!

But what can you expect from a movie co-produced by the company that makes games which constitute obvious moviegoer warnings like "Risk" and "Sorry." Next up from Hasbro comes the action-adventure "Mr. Potato Head and the Crystal Skull of My Little Pony."

"Punk-ass Decepticon!" shouts one Transformer using language learned from watching some version of MTV that transformed into actual music videos.

Sadly, the Sci Fi channel was hoping to make their own version of the Transformers saga. "Unfortunately," said a spokesperson, "Erik Estrada and David Keith were unavailable."

The aptly named Megan Fox is the hottie-tron once again matching half-wits and quarter-shorts with Shia LeBeouf. She works in the kind of garage you only see in movies and imagine in Whitesnake videos featuring Tawny Kitaen splayed out on a hood.

Shia goes off to a college where the academics may be dubious but the student body is a perfect ten, and there's no shortage of majors in Advanced Nymphomania and Applied Bulimia. Forget the robots, let's get back to the dorm mixer! Why save the world when all the Optimus Prime is in class?

Reportedly, a frustrated Shia LeBeouf muttered "If I'm going to play opposite a robot, why not make it Scarlett Johansson?"

Get set for 150 minutes of dumb, vastly forgettable and redundant robot tussles, interspersed with coming-of-age chestnuts and commando strike forces. I ask you, what coming-of-age movie can't be improved by commando strike forces?

"Only a 'Prime' can defeat 'The Fallen,'" says one Decepticon inventing a mythology one script page at a time. "That means only a number divisible by itself and by '1'," he adds, quickly confusing that tiny part of the audience that wasn't absorbed by the character arc that is Megan Fox's cleavage.

Shia must find "the matrix of leadership" in order to stop the Decepticons from killing our sun, although by this point in the movie they have already killed our appetite, our soul, and our will to live.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is bound to be one of the biggest hits of the year, its box office grosses exceeded only by its overall air of crappiness.

Quality-bots, attack!

Imagine my surprise then when I discovered a horror movie! And one with a fractured twist of humor oh so characteristic of director/writer Sam Raimi, even if the marketing geniuses at Universal don't seem to know it.

Yes, Universal knows how to market anything with a roman numeral, but give them a subversively comic horror flick with no franchise precedent and you've got an orphan even Angelina Jolie wouldn't adopt.

Well, maybe she would. Along with my orphan socks.

The joke is on when Drag Me To Hell opens with folks speaking Spanish, which is almost a foreign language nowadays. From there, the ground opens and a boy is literally and aptly dragged to Hell.

"As dreadful as that sounds, it beats autoerotic asphyxiation," said Raimi, peering at his brother Ted, who has been holding his breath in the hope of something automatically erotic since 1994.

Enter the Mac guy and Alison Lohman, for whom "PC" means "perfectly cute."

Alson's task is to suffer every indignity dreamt up by Raimi and his special effects team, usually involving the ingestion of foul bodily fluids, scores of insects, or both in the same disgusting cocktail. Since when does a SAG card need to be accompanied by a SAG barf bag?

Alison meets a weird old lady whose personal hygiene ranks somewhere between Lilly Munster and the Swamp Thing. She removes her teeth to eat a candy - and it's too late for the candy to change its mind.

"You have staples in your head!" Alison screams at her.

"All the better to collate my thoughts!" sneers the old crone.

The elderly witch wants an extension on her mortgage payment because, surprisingly, being a horribly ugly and terrifying old biddy makes it tough to earn a living. But she is denied her wish and places a curse on Lohman, as if going wide opposite Pixar's Up weren't curse enough.

You know there's a curse on when a fly lands on Alison's face and strolls into one nostril and out the other - a level of access even TMZ can't boast.

Beware the Black Goat! He, the taker of souls. As well as the eater of grass and the giver of goat cheese! Beware! For this goat shall take you to Hell - or at least a very hot petting zoo!

Naturally, Alison doesn't want to lose her soul, marking a Hollywood first. "I don't want to burn in Hell for eternity," she said, "because in my profession eternity ends at age 40."

Alison seeks the help of an Indian fortune teller as grateful for the business as he is not to be playing an Arab terrorist.

Look out! A terrifying handkerchief is fluttering about, threatening Alison's visibility! And there it is again...and again! I don't know who this handkerchief's agent is, but Lou Diamond Phillips really wants to know.

Drag Me To Hell is a fun excursion into the kind of cult-comedy-horror that makes Raimi's Evil Dead pictures such a joy.

Even if it is more fun seeing Bruce Campbell get tortured than cutesy Alison Lohman.

Fresh from the new Henry Jaglom movie Irene in Time, star Tanna Frederick meets MovieJuice for a second interview, meaning that I didn't humiliate myself enough in the first one.

Hear Tanna chase her stuff down the street, explain what - if anything - is lurking under Henry Jaglom's trademark hat, and whether or not Tanna knows that Karen Black can pilot a 747 with a hole in the cockpit.

And check out Tanna's new movie, Irene in Time, coming to a theater near you.


MP3 File

"We have destroyed your world!" said the Terminator.

"Ohhhhh, goooood for you. And how was it? I hope it was f**king good, because it's useless now, isn't it?"

The Terminator - like most machines who aren't relatives or employees of Christian Bale - was so stunned, the skull-shaped grin was wiped off its spit-shine polished face. "Aren't saviors supposed to be more even-tempered?" the T-600 anxiously asked, shooting a glance for support towards director McG.

"I want you off the f**king set you prick!"

And so rages the war against the machines - and the war against whoever is holding back the Xanax.

Wait, which prick was Christian talking to? This is Hollywood, which would be called Prickwood if only the term wasn't redundant. We have pricks who park other pricks' cars and fetch other pricks' drinks and shop other pricks' doctors to triple up on every prick's prescription meds. Prickwood r us, right down to the engineer who's recording this pricky outburst so he can leak it to that prick Perez Hilton so all his fan-pricks can enjoy a momentary sense of su-prick-eriority before collapsing back into the soupy, disappointing muck of their prick-filled lives.

What led the notoriously combustible Christian Bale to this role? "Who could pass up an artistic collaboration between Common and Jane Alexander and the bar brawl they're likely to inspire?" said Bale. "My next film features Lady Gaga and Ernest Borgnine and either club moves or Red Buttons stories - ideally both."

"Send in the Transformer-sized Terminators," said Skynet central, "and if you can find a flesh-covered Terminator who has lasted more than 45 minutes without losing the left side of his face, give him some kind of prize."

Bale is a leader of the resistance fighters, who are mostly resistant to ugliness, facial blemishes, a few extra pounds, roomy flight suits, and old age.

You can spot danger wherever you see glowing red eyes and the bottles of hooch which produce them. No wonder Christian Bale is alarmed! "The giant Transformer-sized Terminator has a cannon for a head - which makes him really hard to identify at an ATM!"

But what's this: A new bio-Terminator who believes he's human, thus making him the only cast member who can be so sure.

"Evasive maneuvers!" shouts Christian, as if the unlikely John Connor maturation pathway from Edward Furlong to Nick Stahl to Christian Bale wasn't evasive enough.

Suddenly, here comes Arnold Schwarzenegger, or at least a cartoon rendering of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's all ah-da-da-dah, like this in the background.

"It's the Manga-nator!" shouts a member of the resistance. "The Hanna-Barbera-nator!" said another. "The animated twin brother of Danny DeVito-nator," said Brice Dallas Howard, the only member of the cast who remembers any cinematic history older than Batman Begins.

Christian Bale must free captive humans, including one young boy with an Afro more expansive than the scope of human history itself. That's to block a future where a character gives his body to science much like Katie Holmes gave her body to Scientology.

Terminator Salvation isn't half bad, but even the good half is better suited to a battle with the machines than to a battle at the box office with Ben Stiller in a museum.