Metro Pulse Online: Movies, Past &Amp; Future

Armed only with his mysterious mental connection to the feral minds of studio executives, the Movie Guru reveals just how good or bad this week's new releases will be:

Bruce Almighty (PG-13)
Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is complaint-prone television reporter in Buffalo, New York. After a particularly bad day, he goes on a rant, blaming God for all his problems. God (Morgan Freeman), fed up with Bruce's whining, gives the reporter all His powers and challenges him to do a better job. At first Bruce uses his powers for selfish reasons, such as giving his girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston) bigger boobs. Will he learn that "with great power comes great responsibility"?
Prediction: If the old saw about the best bits of movie being shown in the commercials holds true, this one's got trouble. On the plus side, this flick reteams Carrey with his Ace Ventura director, Tom Shadyac. So this could be a return to old form for Carrey.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (R)
Based on the Japanese animé TV series of the same name. Space cowboy and bounty hunter Spike Spiegel (voiced by Steven Jay Blum) and the rest of the crew of the spaceship "Bebop" have to head off a deadly scheme that menaces the human colony of Alba City on 22nd century Mars, involving beautiful two-bit cybercrook Faye Valentine (Wendee Lee) and lowlife scum Vincent Volaju (Daran Norris).
Prediction: Not for all tastes, but if adult-cartoon noire is your cup size, this film's for you.

The Dancer Upstairs (R)
Political drama directed by John Malkovich, set in Peru during the 1980s. Police officer Augustin Rejas (Javier Bardem) spends his career trying to catch a Marxist guerilla group leader. Despite having a wife and child, during his lengthy investigation (he follows the Marxist leader for 12 years), Rejas gets involved with a beautiful dance instructor (Laura Morante).
Prediction: Lushly photographed and solidly directed by neophyte director Malkovich, this is said to be a rewarding, deliberately paced story.

The In-Laws (PG-13)
They are about to become in-laws, so naturally loony CIA agent Michael Douglas gets mild-mannered podiatrist Albert Brooks mixed up in one of his cases. Personality clashes compete with bad guys as sources of conflict.
Prediction: As good as the 1979 original was, it just doesn't seem possible that Douglas and Brooks can muster the same chemistry that Peter Falk and Alan Arkin created in the lead roles of that film.

Spider (R)
After a long period in a mental institution, "Spider" (Ralph Fiennes), a mentally disturbed man, takes up residence in a halfway house near where he grew up, in East London. As he begins to remember the unpleasant events of his childhood, he also begins slipping back into the schzysophrenia that institutionalized him.
Prediction: Director David Cronenberg is no stranger to this Gothic sort of material, but given that the story is told entirely from Spider's unreliable point of view, can an audience stay engaged in the character all the way through?

Family, Valued

Easily, the most laughable aspect of the latest round of Iraqi conflicts came from the Dixie Chicks fiasco. That patriots intent on seeing Iraq liberated could come down so hard on a pop country singer using her own civil liberties is either highly ironic, downright stupid, or a bad episode of The Twilight Zone.

All is not lost. For those still hungry for healthy doses of controversial free speech, look no further than the recent DVD release of Fox's The Family Guy (Seasons 1 and 2).

Simply put, this animated series was too brilliant and too offensive for prime time. The show debuted after the Super Bowl in 1999 to rave reviews. Soon though, the critics were backpedaling, with Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide offering up vitriolic reviews. Add to that Fox's refusal to leave the show in a single time slot, and it's no wonder Seth McFarlane's creation was canceled after a sporadic third season.

The Family Guy begs comparison to The Simpsons. The Griffin family is every bit as dysfunctional as Homer and Marge's genealogical entourage. Father Peter is a chauvinistic dolt from the Homer finishing school. And Lois, Peter's wife, is every bit as long-suffering as Marge. Add to the mix Peter's equally feeble-witted son Chris, socially inept daughter Meg, matricidal infant Stewie, and Brian, the Dostoevsky-reading, talking family dog, and you have another family that would leave Ned Flanders sputtering.

But the Griffin family was ballsier than The Simpsons ever dared be. Who could forget a scene where Saddam Hussein and other dictators discuss the finer points of Seinfeld? Or Hitler as a daytime talk show host? Or even Stewie using sacred newspaper comicThe Family Circusas a diaper?

The Griffins did more than put the PC crowd on orange alert, though. The show combined hilarious sight gags, obscure pop culture references, surreal flashbacks, and parodies of movies, commercials and television shows into possibly the smartest, funniest animated series of the day. Simpsons purists will disagree, but in a three-year block when Homer and family were drowning in celebrity guest spots and bizarre road trips, the Griffins were the animated Fox family worth watching.

—Lloyd Babbit