Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way.

What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away.

The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.

Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.

It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought. His editor cabled back: Forget flood. Interview God.

And the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.

Dr. Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center, said they took some four and five year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched their brain activity with real-time monitors. At first, when they were figuring out the games, he said, the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point.