Zack of course finds the dogs, and your heartstrings are tugged at a little more when you find that he can’t keep the dogs because his Bratty Sister is afraid of dogs. When she was little, she was bit by a dog, and thus has a barely noticeable scar on her eyelid which causes her to wear sunglasses all the time as she snottily dismisses the attention lavished upon her by the jocky neighbor. Zack is forced to hide the dogs, which calls for a bit of hilarity as well as more of the cockles of your heart being warmed.
At this point, your heartstrings are practically snapping as your heart is in danger of popping out of your chest.  Zack learns that the dogs heal people when he randomly walks into a doctor’s office one day and all the people in the waiting room are miraculously cured of their sniffles and coughs.

The Mom is director of a nursing home that is staffed by the nazi-esque Nurse Bleaker (Lesley Ann Warren) who doesn’t let the residents have any fun. Heartwarmingness comes in the form of a seemingly grumpy old sea captain (Charles Durning) whom Zack befriends, as well as a studly young doctor whom Mom (more than) befriends. Captain Pete agrees to watch the dogs for Zack, and of course the dogs get loose and heal all the old people, who end up having a big wild and crazy(yet heartwarming) dance party in one of the common rooms.

All the subplots intersect eventually and everyone learns a valuable moral lesson about the nature of being good with vaguely Christian overtones as the viewer’s heart is now so warm it resembles the sacrifice scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This movie is actually fairly dangerous. Although there is no sex, no bad words (unless you count “darn”), no violence of any sort, it causes heart damage. I think the American Heart Association put this movie out to keep them in business with all of the heartstring tugging and warming that goes on. I don’t think it could be any more heartwarming, in fact.

Basically: avoid this movie at all costs.

This is another movie that is specially formulated to make you cry every 5 minutes or so. It’s about a bunch of angels, who live in a library, and one of them (Nicholas Cage) falls in love with a mortal (Meg Ryan). Um, you cry some more and then they do some heart wrenching things and talk about life in ways you never realized before. We learn a great deal about taking life for granted. We also learn the most important lesson of all- don’t ride a bicycle with your eyes closed.

OK, OK– this movie isn’t set in the future, but I’m still calling it “Futuristic.” So sue me! It didn’t really fit into any of the other categories so well.

This is the story of a small town in the mountains called “Springville.” The people there get all their water from the same spring– a spring with magical healing properties. Sick people who swim in the spring are instantly healed. People who drink the spring’s water can live indefinitely, in a perpetual state of youth and beauty. However, nothing lasts forever, not even in a made-for-TV movie. Long ago, the residents of Springville signed a “covenant” that promised no resident would live to be more than 100 years old. Each citizen, on the morning of his 100th birthday, must “cross the stream,” i.e. drown himself in the fountain, with the aid of his closest friend. They even throw an all-night party and everything! It’s very cute.

Enter Dennis Conway (MacLaughlan) and his son Nick. They were driving through the mountains when they encountered a strange couple in a vintage car, stuck in the ditch. While towing them out, they couldn’t help but notice that their trunk was full of bottled water. After the strange couple takes off, Nick discovers one of their bags still in the ditch. So, they decide to be good Samaritans and return it.

When they reach Springville everyone treats them very strangely. Josh, the mean cop (Pearl,) follows their every move and interrogates them. There’s no motel in town. The mysterious couple aren’t home, and the cops are surveying their house. Dennis gives the backpack to the cops and decides to head out in the morning.

Unfortunately, over breakfast the next morning, a truck carrying tree trunks dumps its load all over his son, Nick– and Sophie, the pretty lady at the diner (Eastwood) turns out to be a doctor. Nick is rushed to the Springville Hospital, where, big surprise, his father and the doctor fall in love. OK, but why is there a hospital with doctors in Springville? Why not just truck all the sickies directly to the Spring?

Meanwhile, Josh is tailing the mysterious couple. When he finally catches up with them at a motel, their skin has taken on the texture of fried chicken, due to lack of Springville water. Josh sneers “Happy Birthday!” before suffocating them with pillows.

Dennis can’t help but wondering about the mysterious couple he pulled out of the ditch, and about why no one in Springville will tell him about them. Soon he’s looking for clues everywhere. He rifles Sophie’s desk and discovers all her snapshots. Like a good little girl, she has little framed pictures on her desk representing all the major decades of the 20th century– Sophie in front of a WWII bomber jet, Sophie at a 50′s cocktail party, Sophie in bellbottoms… Dennis is indignant. “I just want to ask you something! What were the Roaring Twenties like?! And the Great Depression– was it really that depressing?!?!”

Now that Dennis knows the Springville secret, he wants to stay there and live with Sophie. But will the residents of Springville allow him to stay? And what about Gus, the mechanic with whom Dennis is forming a close, homoerotic friendship– will Dennis be able to help him “cross the stream?” And what is Sophie’s dark secret? You’ll just have to stay up late at night watching cable and eating Cracker Jax to find out!

This movie has a good intention. I mean, nobody likes to be in the hospital, and suicidal “Patch” Adams sees this. His whole deal is to turn his life around- go from a suicidal depressed person to a doctor who will heal his patients with humor. It’s all very noble, but in order to do this, he must go around making heart-warming speeches all the time.

Plus, he’s Robin Williams. I mean, he’s very good at being Robin Williams, but do we really need to see him be himself in another movie? I mean, we could have just -shudder -rented Mrs. Doubtfire… Ok, scratch that idea. If you like Robin Williams doing what he does best, you’ll probably like this film. My aunt thought this was the greatest movie ever made, and so did a lot of people. Don’t listen to me, I hated Forrest Gump- go read The Bridges of Madison County again.

When Patch is not making speeches, other people are making speeches to counteract his speeches. Ok, ok, we get the idea. Patch is Right. Everyone else is Wrong. Will you stop with the speeches already?

Basically, speeches and all, Patch Adams is scientifically designed to make you cry at every moment. Things get a little sad when the Love Interest (Potter) dies, but come on- why did the happy-go-lucky Patch fall for the bitchiest, most sarcastic and anal-retentive girl in his medical school? And why did she, a pretty, promising young woman fall for an annoying guy who’s twice her age? They get certainly get a prize for Most Unbelievable Couple of the Month. I think this movie was based on a true story, so maybe in real life, the aforesaid anal-retentive med. student did fall for the goofy guy, and vise versa. However, in the movie, this idea was so far fetched it was just silly.

Patch Adams was a totally predictable, totally middle-of-the- road sap fest. For Cheese connoisseurs, it should be watched for the Sceenwriting 101 cheesy dialogue only.

OK, I’ll admit that watching this movie was nice. The special effects were pretty and the scenes of Hell were really cool. However, besides the effects, there’s not much else. This is yet another movie that’s scientifically formulated to yank as many tears as possible from the innocent moviegoers’ heads. I think it was actually written and released by a group of aliens who feed on human tears. Anyway, I wasn’t moved. I mean, I find it sad when people die. I’m not a completely unfeeling rock. However, when I am repeatedly bombarded with the command to feel sad, It just makes me a little irritated rather than teary.

Besides the effects, there was not much to this film. If you took the swirling colors and painted skies out, the movie was basically kind of meandering and dull. The kids die. The Dad dies, the Mom commits suicide… she goes to Hell, but along comes Dad to bust her out. Then they all live Happily Ever After with their dead dog in Heaven. Isn’t that sweet?

This movie was just another attempt to placate the masses into thinking that everything is going to be OK forever. The afterlife is one big happy place, and love will conquer all etc. etc. Maybe it’s because I’m a cynical Agnostic that I don’t buy into it. Maybe it’s just because seeing little angels all over everything on the K-Mart shelves gets on my nerves. I think Atheists, Agnostics and Born Again Fundamentalist Christians were most annoyed by this film. I’ve never been in the same category as a Christian Fundamentalist before, and this is kind of interesting! A lot of people found this movie to be “life affirming” and comforting. I say, go read a good book and then visit an art museum. You’ll save a lot of money on tissues.

OK, I’ll admit that Juliette Lewis is one of my least favorite actresses on the planet, so this review is a little bit biased. In fact, one of the only things worse then seeing Juliette Lewis in a movie is seeing Juliette Lewis play a retard in a movie. Sigh. This movie was painful for me to watch (it was a family bonding moment with my aunt, who had rented this video).

Juliette, in all of her hesitant, twitchy glory plays a mentally challenged girl whose mother treats her, well, like a retard. That is, her mother is not ready for her to grow up and assume the responsibility of an adult. I can’t figure out why, because, aside from Ms. Lewis’s abnormally slow hesitant monotone that slowly caused me to want to rip my eardrums out of my head, lest I go on hearing it, she didn’t act any different from say, my sister (note: my sister is not mentally challenged, she just acts like it most of the time).

Anyway, we get to see Juliette drawl on a lot and assert herself as she goes to college and gets decent grades, falls in love with another retard (Giovanni Ribisi,) and generally makes a lot of heart warming speeches about how she can do anything. It’s all very sweet. It’s also scientifically formulated to make you (that is people in general, not me) cry a lot. If you’re at all considering becoming a Scientologist, picture yourself locked on this miserable planet for eternity with Juliette Lewis. Maybe then you’ll change your mind.

No, they didn’t actually say this in the film, but I was sorely tempted to yell it at Scooter while we were watching “Death Drug.” This is the story of Mr. Tubbs from Miami Vice battling the drug WHACK– not the same as our good friend Crack, as PMT explains in this film’s intro, but similar (being part of a broader class known as the “ack” drugs.) This was the weirdest part of this tape– even though PMT made this film in 1978, way ahead of his Miami Vice days, the rental version was spliced together with some 80′s footage, in a sad attempt to capitalize on the TV show. This made for some really weird shifts in continuity– in the movie PMT is a jazz musician, but in his music video he’s a new-wave rocker. In the movie he dies undiscovered and penniless– but two minutes later on the news, he’s a major celebrity and his death is a national scandal. They obviously added this footage on purpose… you’d think they’d at least try to make it fit somehow.

You gotta love the boy, though. In the intro he goes on about how sometimes an actor is handed a role which really challenges him to look deep into himself… how sometimes a role is more than just a job! This dude was gearing up for the Academy Awards banquet! PMT was obviously having a deeply personal looking-into-himself experience, because he only has about three lines in the entire movie. His main job is to run around hitting things during the drug flashback scenes.

Anyway, if you haven’t already guessed, PMT plays a starving musician / plumber (I can’t remember what his character’s name was, and the IMDB is no help, so I’m going to keep calling him “PMT”) who suddenly hits the big time one night in a club. Unfortunately, evil whack dealers are also on hand to give PMT his first taste of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. For a while, PMT thinks he’s on top of the world, until the drug starts to take over, and he lashes out at his band, his producer, and his pregnant wife (qualifying this film as a cheesy tearjerker.)

Rosalind Cash (from The Omega Man) is also in this movie, and she’s becoming one of my favorite actresses. PMT’s wife runs into her at the community center and confides that he’s using the whack. Dr. Rosalind takes her to the clinic to see the whack detox ward– a horrifying place full of wailing, moaning whack victims who do things like thrash around on gurneys and have convulsions in whirlpool bathtubs.

In the final scene, PMT’s wife brings their five-year-old son to visit daddy’s grave, and while she’s busy having a hysterically poignant crying fit, the tot wanders off to the far end of the cemetery… where, behind the fence, lurks the same whack dealer who gave PMT his first hit! And, as if the cheese couldn’t get any thicker than this… there’s a largely pointless outro featuring PMT harping on about drugs, etc. etc. This boy can’t stop mugging for the camera!

Normally I would recommend seeing most films in the theater if you can… but this rental tape is really something special. I really don’t know what else to say. Words fail me!

Lexi is a small town girl with a lot of ice skating talent. She gets discovered by a big ice skating talent agent and goes to the big city where she has lots of adventures, including going blind. We see her overcome adversity in a touching way.

Lee, my mom’s hippie burnout friend, watched this movie on TV and cried. He blamed it on a certain frequency of vibrations that the filmmakers put into the soundtrack to make the audience cry. Er…yeah.

A great feelgood cheesy tearjerker. Sometimes we all need a nice 100% predictable film to sit in front of the tube and pick on!

This is the story of Todd Lubitch (Travolta,) the Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Why is he in the bubble? Because he was born with no immune system. That’s right, even a simple case of the sniffles could cause Todd to kick the bucket at any moment. Our story opens as Mr. and Mrs. Lubitch discover that they’re about to have a baby. Mrs. Lubitch is mightily upset, since she lost her last child to the same affliction that’s about to afflict Todd. Todd’s Dad, (Robert Reed, aka Mr. Brady) is totally into having this kid, however. He tells his wife over and over again that everything’s going to be OK. Boy, is he ever wrong! Then, cut to the hospital; the Lubitches receive the bad news. Todd’s already in the Bubble, so there’s a pathos-laden scene of Mrs. Lubitch cradling her baby with giant rubber gauntlets.

OK, so maybe I’m no immunologist, but this entire movie seems pretty whacked to me. First of all, none of the doctors seem to have any idea exactly what’s wrong with Todd. Nobody seems to know when or if he’ll ever get out of the bubble. Also, throughout the movie, the doctors keep saying that Todd’s body “has built up some immunities on its own,” however, since Todd’s never been exposed to a single virus or bacteria in his life, I don’t really see how this could happen. But whatever. Todd’s main responsibility in life is to look cute and pathetic, not to fight off pathogens.

In classic made-for-TV style, this movie keeps threatening to have a plot, but then doesn’t. We follow Todd as he faces such crises as choking on a loose button from his teddy bear (watch the movie to see how well a four year old actor can play a choking scene,) having a horse jump over his porta-bubble, and having his space suit malfunction, all with tremendously anti-climactic results. I kept waiting for the tear-filled moment when Todd would be rushed to the hospital, and speeches would be made, and True Feelings revealed, and all that, but it didn’t happen. Irwin Allen should have made this film.

Ah, yes, the Space Suit. You see, as Todd becomes a teenager, he eventually takes classes at the High School via closed-circuit TV. But then someone invents a burnt-orange space suit that enables Todd to walk about at will, causing the other kids to treat him like a freak. There’s even a cute make-out scene in the back of his parent’s van, when his girlfriend / next-door-neighbor Gena (O’Connor) kisses him through his Plexiglas visor.

Throughout all of this, Todd acts like a complete jerk towards everybody. He bosses his parents around, treats his nurse like a slave, and barks orders at people through an intercom. Hey, I guess he has poor social skills! At one point, he goes to the hospital for a few weeks and his roommate at the “Laminar Air Flow Center” is a kid whose immune system is shot due to chemotherapy. They commiserate about not being able to go out with girls, etc. Then they talk about masturbation. Eeeeeew. While at High School, Todd and his friends sneak off to the football field to smoke pot. Since Todd can’t breath anything but purified air, he has to tell his friends how he can achieve out-of-body states through meditation, to make up for the fact that he’s not stoned. Then he goes off about how he’s really from a planet called “Themopolis,” here on an exchange program. Poor Todd! Maybe he was just born with a bad script!

Eventually, however, Todd falls in love with the girl next door, and after a few scenes of her being alternately nice and mean to him, she falls in love with him, too. What are they going to do? Gena’s about to go to Art School in New York, whereas Todd will forever be stuck in his Plastic Bubble. Todd again asks his doctor if he’ll ever be able to leave, but his doctor just shrugs. The doctor doesn’t even know if Todd could leave the bubble right now. He could be fine, or else… so Todd is faced with a dilemma. Should he sneak out of the bubble and take his chances with love / germs, or should he stay in the bubble and play with his pet germ-free mouse? (I especially love the hamster-trail-within-bubble metaphor!) I won’t spoil the surprise ending for you, but at least this movie eventually developed some kind of plot, even if it was during the last five minutes.

Then there’s the Love Theme from The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, which goes, Leave us alone / We live in the country / We’ll make it just fine / Happy in a one-room shack / And we won’t look back… Maybe it’s just me, but Todd wasn’t happy in his one-room shack… but then again most of this movie left me slightly mystified. PS: Look for Vernee Watson-Johnson as “Gwen,” who played Philip Michael Thomas’ wife in Death Drug.

This film wasn’t exactly cheesy, per se, but it was presented in an extremely cheesy manner. The story itself was interesting– Ishmael, a white guy in the 1950′s Pacific Northwest (Ethan Hawke) is dumped by his Japanese childhood sweetheart (Youki Koudoh) for a Japanese guy (Rick Yune). The Japanese guy is now on trial for murder in an extremely racially biased case, and Ishmael has evidence to prove he’s innocent. Will he let the past slide and do the right thing? Or will he let bitterness well up inside him until he gets back at the girl for dumping his ass? It’s an interesting story, with dialogue that only bordered on corny a couple of times, but didn’t really go overboard.

However, the entire film looks like a giant Calvin Klein commercial. It’s gorgeous to look at. I spent the first few moments gazing in awe at the panoramic views of snow-covered trees and pebble beaches. There are washed-out slow motion battle scenes of dead soldiers lying on beaches with waves lapping at their bodies. And there’s the fish imagery. Why do we keep seeing washed out images of dead fish? Probably generations of film students will explore this, or maybe it’s already obvious to you and not to me, not being a film student.

Anyway, all of the photography is completely breathless, until you realize that it seems like it’s been eternity since we’ve had any plot development. Something will happen that’s central to the plot, and then we are subjected to a ton of artsy montages of beautifully dripping trees and flashbacks of little kids laughing in the sunlight in strawberry fields. It actually gets irritating after a while. It’s really distracting, at any rate. I was thinking OK, OK, I’ll buy the next Sierra Club calendar– when do we see the movie? I kept waiting for the words “Obsession by Calvin Klein” to pop up on the screen.

All in all, it was gorgeous to look at. If they wanted to make Koyaanisqatsi III with the images that would be fine. I wouldn’t be writing this at all if they had made two separate films, or even one with only a few artsy shots. But I suppose if you took all of the artsy imagery away, the film would be about 15 minutes long.