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...but I really love this movie! It's a pity this was released on the coattails of "Home Alone", since it's inevitably perceived as a knock-off. But the comparison is really unfair. "Home Alone" featured McCauley Culkin as annoying, precocious, and self-sufficient far beyond his years. The criminals who were his foils were reminiscent of The Three Stooges in their ineptitude. The one quality both Culkin and the criminals shared was a being mean spirited to some degree.

Baby Bink in "Baby's Day Out" is a true innocent who survives on luck while remaining adorably unaffected. His criminal foils are more reminiscent of Laurel & Hardy than The Three Stooges - cleverer and more subtle. In this case, the quality shared by Baby Bink and the criminals is innocence and an underlying decency.

The supporting cast is superb, led by Joe Mantegna in one of his best comic roles.

If you're not too jaded to appreciate it, I highly recommend this movie.

"Jaws" is an iconic American film, as pervasive within its generation as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Star Wars", "The Godfather", or "2001: A Space Odyssey". However, it remains a flawed film.

So, what's good about it that it achieved icon status? The cast could hardly be better with Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw all at the top of their game. John Williams' score is just about perfect. The dialog and pacing are uniformly excellent for a top-notch thriller.

So where does it fall down? First of all, the animatronic shark is somewhat anticlimactic and generally unbelievable. Fortunately, it doesn't get much screen time and what it has doesn't leave the audience too much time to think. And that brings us to the second problem. Spielberg failed to achieve the suspension of disbelief that the film requires. Although the audience doesn't have quite enough time to see the holes in the plot or the shabbiness of the FX, both are lurking in the viewers' collective subconscious.

Everyone should see "Jaws" at some point in their lives, but I can understand those from later generations wondering what the big deal was.

I could tell from the trailers that Leverage would be the kind of show I'd enjoy - good guys vs. bad guys without the ambiguity of the legal system to get in the way. It did indeed deliver on that promise. It was cleverly paced and scripted and populated with interesting, likable characters.

So why is the jury still out? The short answer is that I DVR'ed it and watched it more than once.

Although it's slick, the script had holes it just hoped you wouldn't notice. When compared to a show with really clever scripts (e.g. Burn Notice), I found too many "wait a minute" moments - places where your successful suspension of disbelief depends on the viewer's short attention span or lack of reasoning ability. I won't drop spoilers to name some of the more obvious ones - if anyone doesn't notice them, who am I to point them out?

There's a lot of talent in this series. I only hope that in the future they allow the scriptwriters a little more time to work out the kinks before shooting.