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For some reason, it's very hard to represent nerds onscreen. Movies keep trying it, but, for whatever reason, they seem to end up with endless variations of the characters from Revenge of the Nerds, with their thick glasses, pocket protectors, questionable hygiene, and adenoidal voices.

Fired Up shouldn't be worth a damn, and, for the most part, it isn't. The film, after all, details the adventures of two smug, smartass high school jocks sneaking into a cheerleading camp in order to bed as many cheerleaders as they can. The leads, played by Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D'Agosto, aren't characters so much as walking punchlines machines, and are really only distinguished by the fact that Olsen, who mugs a lot, is quite a bit more unsufferable than D'Agosto, who has a Beatles haircut and spends a lot of time looking soulful.

This is a good time for animation -- maybe one of the best ever. Just look at some of the films that have been made in the past few years, such as Pixar's Wall-E and Howl's Moving Castle from Studio Ghibli. Even a lot of the mediocre fare is great fun, such as the Shrek films, which might not be great art but know their way around pointed satire and clever parody. Heck, even television animation, such as Robot Chicken, is about as smart and as funny as you could hope television might be.

Taken is a movie about a government spook whose daughter is kidnapped abroad, so he tracks her down and kills everybody connected to her kidnapping. I'm not giving away anything by telling you that -- the plot is spelled out by the advertising campaign, which features the spook talking to his daughter's kidnappers and informing them, in a quiet and measured voice, that they will soon all be dead. Frankly, if the spook didn't do what he promised, there wouldn't be much of a movie. So there are no surprises in the film's plotting. For some critics, the surprise is in the casting.

There is a real lowbrow pleasure to making movies that pit iconic monsters against each other, and Hollywood has been doing it for a long time, creating such inevitable clashes as Frankenstein's monster battling the wolf man in 1943, King Kong attacking Godzilla in 1962, and Mexican wrestling superstar Santo versus both Dracula and the Wolf Man in 1972. Heck, even Billy the Kid got in on the action, battling Dracula in 1966 in a particularly silly entry into the genre, although, admittedly, it is a bit of a stretch to think of Billy the Kid as a monster.

I didn't really want to write about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I didn't like the movie, and I feel like my time is better served by writing about things I do like, but the Oscars seem to have fallen in love with the film, and that makes it newly important. In a sentence, I found the film to be a rickety and overlong affair that misapplies its essential concept and some superlative effects work to tell a story that is fundamentally shallow. The film purports to be the story of a life lived backward, but squanders that theme. The original story, by F.

There have been quite a few marginal film genres that have unexpectedly changed themselves into art. The Western, for instance, which kicked around the trenches of Hollywood for a long time as a reliable but poorly regarded genre, and then, suddenly, grew up, transforming from simplistic morality tales set on horseback to a mature and unblinking look at the mythology of the creation of the United States.

Darren Aronofsky's film The Wrestler, which netted Mickey Rourke a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture last night, is not the first movie to have that title. Back in 1974, here in Minneapolis, American Wrestling Association owner Verne Gagne produced his own movie, inspired by his own status us the AWA's undefeatable champion, starring himself and Ed Asner as a wrestling promoter.

The death of Senator Jesse Helms.