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"How can I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?" If you're a particular teen from the Chicago suburbs, the answer to such a question is to take Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Ferris (Matthew Broderick) wants to give his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) a last good time together before graduation. As he's the ultimate high school hustler, it's a small matter for them to get Ferris's girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) out of school, before the three head for a wild day in downtown Chicago. While the story is pretty thin, this one has semi-classic status thanks to John Hughes' effective use of the Chicago cityscape, and even more thanks to a terrific performance from Broderick. Also watch for cameos from Charlie Sheen (billed as "Boy at Police Station"), Kristy Swanson ("He's sick...I guess it's pretty serious"), and of course Ben Stein ("Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?").

I went with another Quentin Tarantino film tonight--Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Even more than usual with Tarantino this one is a display of style, not storytelling, combining elements from many sources. You start with Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (which provides the basic scenario), throw in an immense amount of samurai and martial arts film linkages, mix with a nice dose of Leone--and that's just for starters. The list of "movie connections" at IMdB for this one goes on forever. Uma Thurman gives a strong central performance, and there are some moments that are dazzling--the final battle sequence at the at the House of Blue Leaves is a virtuoso performance--but overall this is not as involving as Tarantino's best work.

Breaking Dawn part 1.

Walter Hill's The Driver has some of the virtues of the best B-film noirs, especially in its lean storytelling, and a touch of the style of Jean-Pierre Melville. Ryan O'Neal is The Driver--none of the characters in the entire film are given names--a specialist in driving the getaway car from a robbery. We see from the opening heist sequence and ensuing chase that he is very good at his job. On his trail, to the point of obsession, is The Detective (Bruce Dern), so desperate to put The Driver away that he'll set up a robbery to entrap the man. A young Isabelle Adjani is The Player, who is paid to provide The Driver an alibi for the first heist, and who he then enlists to help him evade The Detective's set up attempts. Don't look for much character development here--this one is all pace, action and style.

Speaking of the virtues of B-film noirs, I watched a good example of one tonight, Black Angel. When Kirk Bennett is sentenced to death for the murder of Mavis Marlowe, his wife Catherine (June Vincent) tries to prove him innocent. She first suspects Mavis's ex-husband, songwriter Martin Blair (Dan Duryea), but he seems to have an ironclad alibi. Sympathetic to Catherine, and starting to be attracted to her, Martin helps her with her investigations. This one has a nice mix of moral complexity and potential romance, and Duryea, in a more sympathetic role than was normal for him, gives a very good performance.

Tonight I watched an imperfect but effective dark thriller called Hanna. The title character is a teenage girl (Saoirse Ronan), being raised by her father in a remote cabin close to the Arctic Circle. Erik (Eric Bana) is training Hanna in some strange things, like how to hunt, fight and kill with ruthless efficiency. We learn quickly that a CIA bigshot named Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) is interested in Erik, but only slowly do we find out why, and what Marissa's motives have to do with Erik's training regimen for his daughter. The plot for this one gets a bit far-fetched at times, but I really enjoyed Saoirse Ronan's performance. She gets the audience on her side very quickly and never loses our sympathy.

The Muppets. (The new movie.) It was pretty good. It had some really funny moments & moments that I got teary-eyed at.

BD and the one before that was Eclipse. Movies are too expensive at 10.00 for a matinee where I live.

Undercover Blues has an interesting premise: Jefferson Blue (Dennis Quaid) and his wife Jane (Kathleen Turner) are vacationing in New Orleans with their baby daughter. But it seems they aren't an ordinary couple on vacation, they're government agents, and their agency wants them to mix business with pleasure by tracking down a renegade Czech agent who is also in the Big Easy. This one has some nice moments--Quaid and Turner are clearly having fun, and Stanley Tucci as a fanatically persistent but comically inept mugger is a riot--but overall it's too bland to be more than a lightly entertaining diversion.

In the late 1940s, some bright soul at Universal got the idea of combining the studio's two leading franchises; the result was Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein. When Chick (Abbott) and Wilbur (Costello) deliver a pair of giant crates to McDougal's House of Horrors, they find themselves smack in the middle of a wild scheme by Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) to revive Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange). The Count and his assistant Sandra (Lenore Aubert) plan to insert a human brain into the monster to control it, and they have a perfect candidate for a donor--Wilbur. The boys' only hope may be Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.), but he has a problem of his own--which occurs every night when the moon rises. This one is hardly a classic but it's entertaining; anyone into the classic "Universal monsters" would enjoy it, I think.