That pretty much covers the range of appropriate responses to "Road Trip," a compact little collegiate farce that packs a haphazard assortment of cheerful gags and boyish horny-toad adventures into its modest frame. It certainly doesn't match the genre-establishing status of "National Lampoon's Animal House" or the giddy originality of "There's Something About Mary." But like last year's "American Pie," "Road Trip" crisply delivers the goods: vaguely rakish heroes, vaguely kinky sex and highly naked nubiles. Also a little song, a little dance, some French toast down a fat guy's pants. Multiplexes should be thronged with howling, high-fiving young men deep into summer.

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First there are the heaping dreadlocks of the Psychlos, the evil alien race that rules the Earth in the year 3000. Then there are the flowing, Manson-era tresses of the rebellious humans led by Jonnie (Barry Pepper), who sports the rawhide trousers and bad attitude of Billy Jack. I found a picture of director Roger Christian on the Web, and he's got golden Fabio locks. (Most Hollywood directors, by contrast, resemble trolls who got trapped in the tanning booth.) Everybody in the film, in short, looks like they know where to find truly excellent weed.

If you're the kind of sci-fi fanatic who has to see every new futuristic action movie no matter how crummy it is -- and I come pretty close to that category myself -- then of course you'll check out "Battlefield Earth" regardless of how many cheap jokes critics crack at its expense. The action sequences are acceptable in a generic, Sci-Fi Network way and the Psychlo costumes at least look cool. But don't say you weren't warned.

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Despite the subtitle that Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor have given their engrossing and massively detailed new biography of Daley -- "His Battle for Chicago and the Nation" -- the authors depict a man who was rarely concerned with national politics or with political theory or philosophy. The Daley of "American Pharaoh" is a shrewd manipulator who approaches every issue, every conflict, as either a threat to his power or an opportunity to consolidate it. For all his famous malapropisms ("The policeman is not there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder"), Daley was always intensely focused on his prime objective: preserving political power at any cost whatsoever.

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With the lone exception of "Thelma and Louise," which is atypical of his work in many ways, Scott's post-1982 films have failed to capture filmgoers' imaginations or to strike the sparks of cold genius that seemed so evident in his early, visionary masterpieces. Yeah, I know that "Legend" and "Someone to Watch Over Me" have their defenders (myself included), but that's not the point. As for "1492: Conquest of Paradise," "White Squall" and "G.I. Jane," well, please. We're talking expensive candy -- really expensive candy -- with no chewy center.

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This "Where the Heart Is," adapted from an Oprah-endorsed bestseller by Billie Letts,
starts off with two adorable female stars and a tone of folksy, trailer-park melodrama
that puts it squarely in Fried Green Endearment country. But as its story becomes more
and more ludicrous, its vision of American life becomes more and more canned and
condescending -- a prefabricated blur of ambulances, tornadoes, tearful homilies and
Life Lessons. Maybe the novel's good intentions felt more genuine, but what director
Matt Williams and the longtime comedy screenwriting duo of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo
Mandel ("EdTV," "A League of Their Own" and "Parenthood," just to name a few) give
us here is strictly Middle America as seen on CNN.

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There is another creature, of course, that walks on two legs, cannot fly and counts itself separate from the birds and the beasts. "Dreambirds" concerns people more than it does ostriches, and mostly it concerns Nixon himself; it's a personal memoir clad in exotic plumage. For Nixon, a native of South Africa who has lived in the United States for 20 years and now teaches literature at the University of Wisconsin, the ostrich is a shifting signifier, a symbolic presence that travels through the background of his story without ever coming clearly into focus. In the fable of the ostrich, he seems to see something of his own rootless, peripatetic nature. He departed South Africa in sudden and clandestine fashion at the nadir of the apartheid era, cutting himself off from his family and the haunting desert landscapes he had cherished as a child. He can return only obliquely, by retracing the route of an awkward, flightless bird that, like him, had wandered from Africa to the New World.

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Left unanswered in all this, however, is the question of what the suburbs actually are. In both the Oscar-laden "American Beauty" (a very fine film, in my estimation) and the April 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine, with its "Suburbs Rule" cover package, the issue is clouded by an understandable ambivalence as well as, perhaps, a lack of focus. The suburbs are liberating; the suburbs are confining. The suburbs have become just like the city, or maybe it's the other way around. The suburbs are full of minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians; the suburbs remain small-minded bastions of fear and conformity. The ambivalence with which Americans regard suburbia is the same ambivalence with which they regard, well, America. On one hand, it's the home of the free. On the other, to paraphrase that great poet of the late-mid-suburban era, David Byrne, How did we get here?

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If the clueless twosome of wrestling fans played by David Arquette and Scott Caan have an obvious lineage that includes such previous duo comedies as "Dumb and Dumber" and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (not to mention countless other pairings stretching back at least to Abbott and Costello), they do this Zen-moronic tradition proud. What really puts "Ready to Rumble" over the top into delirious delight, however, is the hysterical, completely deadpan performance of Oliver Platt as Jimmy King, a swaggering wrestling icon with a scepter, cape and pasteboard crown that would look cheesy at the Tulsa Renaissance Faire. Sure, this movie has some truly embarrassing moments (let's not talk about Martin Landau's performance as an aging wrestling wizard), but for each of those there's another that's laugh-till-you-puke funny. Obviously 12-year-olds across the country will be clamoring to see it, but "Ready to Rumble" should also have a long afterlife ahead as a late-night cult treat for cackling stoners.

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Then again, "The Skulls" also features another character being dragged away in a straitjacket while howling, "I'm innocent! I'm innocent!" He ends up, of course, in a loony bin that looks like the House of the Seven Gables enclosed by barbed wire. At one point, the hero, Luke (Joshua Jackson), who has decided he must know the truth at all costs, is issued a dire warning: "You keep digging, Luke, and if you keep digging you're gonna dig your own grave." Honestly, though, my favorite line arrives when an allegedly artsy coed named Chloe (Leslie Bibb) has invented a computer program to shoot splotches of paint at the canvas, ` la Jackson Pollock. "Am I the artist or is the machine?" Chloe wonders aloud. "Maybe it's chaos in its purest form."

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Take Brian De Palma's "Mission to Mars." I'm sure everyone involved with this clumsy and dispiriting attempt at space opera hopes it's rapidly forgotten. But that's not going to be easy. This isn't merely a big-budget dud with a name director; it's the sort of spectacularly misguided A-list movie that invites superlatives. Is it worse than "Ishtar"? Worse than "Waterworld"? Worse than "The Sicilian"? (Definitely, probably and maybe not, respectively.) Wherever it ranks in the pantheon of badness, "Mission to Mars" is startlingly inept from start to finish -- it's atrociously written, poorly shot and edited and fatally unfocused. I've seen plenty of worse movies, but most of them were cheap and cynical. This is an honest, earnest epic that fails on every level.

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This is such a shock because most of Douglas' previous characters are guys whose entire raison d'jtre seems to be avoiding the aging process. Grady, on the other hand, is long past meltdown; he hasn't just gone to seed, he looks like he's got mushrooms growing in his ears. He's still a soul in anguish -- maybe Douglas can't help bringing that to his character -- but it's a pretty genial, vague, marijuana-steeped anguish. Grady is the genuinely likable if profoundly flawed hero of this literate upscale entertainment, adapted from Michael Chabon's novel by Steve Kloves and directed by Curtis Hanson, whose last film was the atmospheric if haphazard "L.A. Confidential." With a cast this terrific and a story this rich and wry, "Wonder Boys" really can't miss, even if it thumps to an underwhelming and moralistic ending that undoes a fair amount of its goodwill.

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This is apparently Vin Diesel's big week. In this film, playing Riddick, a
sinister, laconic convict with hidden depth, he looks like the first new
action star of the 2000s. Meanwhile, in the next chamber of the multiplex,
you can see him as a youthful stock-trading shark in the ensemble drama
"Boiler Room." (Previously, Diesel had a small role in "Saving Private Ryan"
and was the voice of "The Iron Giant.")

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David O. Russell's fine "Three Kings" was completely shut out and several other high-end films -- "The End of the Affair," "Magnolia," "Topsy-Turvy" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley" -- were severely dissed. But the biggest industry story of the day is clearly Jim, spurned again.

Judging by the Oscar nominations, 1999 looks a little less like a groundbreaking year in the history of American film and little more, well, ordinary. Two of this year's best picture nominees are huge hits that dabble in the supernatural ("The Green Mile" and "The Sixth Sense"), two are critics' darlings that did mediocre business in the heartland ("American Beauty" and "The Insider") and the fifth is a family oriented heartwarmer that falls somewhere in between ("The Cider House Rules"). That's a pretty typical ratio for the Academy, which can always be trusted to veer to the right at the last moment.

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This film may seem slow, and its concerns distant to many American viewers. But "Not One Less" is a movie whose humanity is irresistibly, even joyfully, accessible. In its own modest way, it's also daring. This tale of a young schoolteacher's impossible odyssey in search of a lost pupil unites technique and subject matter to create a highly compelling, sensually rooted realism that goes beyond the clichis of the "village movie." As a chronicle of childhood in desperate circumstances on the underside of the Information Age, it belongs with Walter Salles' "Central Station," and, like that film, it shares something of the quiet, mythic tragedy of Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief."

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