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Don;t know how I missed HIGHER LEARNING when it first came out. This look at the first year of college at a major university has the ring of truth about it, although perhaps hyped up a bit for dramatic appeal. The primary player in the group is Omar Epps, a student on an athletic scholarship who is trying not to be compartmentalized by everyone. A fellow black student who seems to be living in the 1970s (Ice Cube) sees him as a sellout while one of his professors (Larry Fishburne) is working hard to get him to learn. Michael Rapaport is a loner with a hearing problem who falls in with a gang of skinheads. Kirsty Swanson is a naive miss from the boonies who undergoes a major transformation after being raped by a fellow student. The film is dotted with familiar faces, most if not all of whom have gone on to stardom of one sort or another, including Cole Hauser, Jennifer Connelly and Tyra Banks. Definitely worth a look.

I will admit I have been unhappy with the final season of SCRUBS. The episodes I have seen rarely rose above the mediocre, and used many well-worn gimmicks and plot devices from the previous six seasons. Laughs have been few. Now comes what appears to be the final episode of the series, MY PRINCESS. It starts out ordinarily enough, with the crew trying to save a patient, but takes a turn for the verse when Cox tells his son a bedtime fairy tale that has Janitor playing a 10-foot ogre with a taste for babies, Ted as a hideous hunchback, Turk and Carla as a two-headed something or other, Cox as (what else?) a heroic knight, Kelso as an evil warlock, J.D. as the village idiot and Elliott as a very fetching princess. This fairy tale goes back and forth from Cox's fantastic telling to the actual events in the hospital that parallel Cox's Grimm Brothers version. The laugh meter is on high and the cleverness of the episode helps make up for the debacle of Season 7. If this indeed is the final episode, it is a fitting one. One small plot hole: Kelso apparently is back in charge of the hospital. No explanation. But who cares, really?

Part 2 of a 2-parter to close out Season 3 has Melinda coming to grips with her father and her childhood. In the previous episode, she thought her father Tom Gordon (Martin Donovan) may have shot himself to death, but discovers he has survived. He has been intermittently possessed by a masked ghost who spent time in jail on a murder charge thanks to Tom Gordon when he wass a prosecutor and appears to want revenge on Gordon and family. But nothing in this episode is as it seems, and it takes a very long hour before things get straightened out. Anne Archer is back as Melinda's mom. By the way, the spectre behind the mask in this and the previous episode is Corin Nemec, a former child actor who has popped up on TV and in some "B" flicks in more recent years. Not one of GW's beter episodes, this season ender plays more like a soap opera than a thriller drama. The very end, with everyone marching arm in arm, contains an unexpected gag.