Space Jam

“Space Jam” is a happy marriage of good ideas--three films for the price of one, giving us a comic treatment of the career adventures of Michael Jordan, crossed with a Looney Tunes cartoon and some showbiz warfare. It entertains kids at one level while giving their parents a lot to smile at, too. It's an inspired way to use, and kid, Jordan's image while at the same time updating Bugs Bunny & Company to doing battle in the multizillion-dollar animation sweepstakes.

Warner Bros. has historically been a studio with a rich legacy in animation; such great cartoon directors as Chuck Jones helped fashion their stable of stars. But six-minute cartoons are a neglected art form, and “Space Jam” looks like a Warners vehicle to catapult their Looney Tunes characters into the feature-length arena to do battle with Disney.

There are hints of the rivalry all through the film. The outer space amusement park is named “Moron Mountain,” perhaps a tribute to Space Mountain at Walt Disney World. And when a professional hockey team is mentioned, Daffy sputters, “The Ducks? What kind of a Mickey Mouse organization would name their team the Ducks?” Will the Warners strategy work? It will if they can keep co-stars like Michael Jordan on board. It is difficult for an actor to work in movies that combine live action with animation, because much of the time he cannot see the other characters in a scene with him. But Jordan has a natural ease and humor, an unforced charisma, that makes a good fit with the cartoon universe. By not forcing himself, by never seeming to try too hard to be funny or urgent, Jordan keeps a certain dignity; he never acts as if he thinks he's a cartoon, too, and that's why he has good chemistry with the Tunes. He's a visitor to Looney-land, not a resident.

There are other funny live action scenes involving Jordan and Hollywood's favorite unbilled guest star, Bill Murray, and scenes, too, with Wayne Knight, as a baseball publicist who comes along as an adviser and confidant. The film was produced by Ivan Reitman (“Ghostbusters”) and directed by Joe Pytka, who has directed Jordan in a lot of his best TV commercials; their work was blended with the animation of a team headed by Ron Tippe, and the result is delightful, a family movie in the best sense (which means the adults will enjoy it, too).

The Blind Side

Coach Cotton (Ray McKinnon) convinces board members of a small Christian private school in Memphis, Tennessee, to admit Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a gigantic African-American from the slums of the city. He knows that the boy can't play football unless his grades are up to snuff. Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) is a feisty interior designer married to Sean (Tim McGaw), a laid-back fast food entrepreneur, and mother to Collins (Lily Collins), a pretty teenager, and SJ (Jae Head), a spunky little boy. Learning that Michael is homeless, she decides to do the right thing as a believing Christian and give him a place to stay.

Leigh Anne is a take-charge woman who immediately goes shopping with her new guest and buys him some clothes. At school, Michael is quiet and isolated from the other students who are all white. Although shy and tight-lipped, one of his teachers discovers that he is quite bright but unsure of himself. Michael just needs time. Living with the Tuohy family opens him up to new possibilities.

When this gentle giant finally shows up on the football field, the coach is shocked to see that he has no killer instinct. Little SJ takes charge of his training regimen and single-handedly tutors him in the essentials of the game. But it takes the wise counsel of Leigh Anne to connect with Michael's nurturing instincts. She says to him: "This team is your family and you have to protect them. Tony is your quarterback. You protect his blind side. When you look at him think of me."

Michael takes this message to heart and becomes a formidable left tackle. His aggressiveness and talent serves as a spur to the team who suddenly become winners. But to continue in the sport, Michael has to raise his grades and so the Tuohys hire him a tutor, Miss Sue (Kathy Bates). She shocks these proud NRA Republicans by telling them she is a Democrat. In addition to his grades, Michael faces one last hurdle to entry into big-time college football.

Writer and director John Lee Hancock (The Rookie) has adapted this true sports story from a book by Michael Lewis. Michael Oher now plays for the Baltimore Ravens and as we see in this inspirational story of his life, the source of his transformation is the love, appreciation, support, and counsel of his adoptive mother — Leigh Anne Tuohy. Sandra Bullock carries this film with her nuanced, emotionally powerful, and compelling performance. Her experience illustrates a key spiritual lesson: giving to others reverberates back to the giver, deepening and enriching her life. The film also challenges us redefine the meaning of family values.

The Blind Side is an unabashedly feel-good movie, and it deserves a large and attentive audience. Hancock again signals to us that engaging sports stories can deliver spiritual messages that speak to all of us.

Rocky

The movie ventures into fantasy when the world heavyweight champion (Carl Weathers, as a character with a certain similarity to Muhammad Ali) decides to schedule a New Year's Eve bout with a total unknown -- to prove that America is still a land of opportunity. Rocky gets picked because of his nickname, the Italian Stallion; the champ likes the racial contrast. And even here the movie looks like a genre fight picture from the 1940s, right down to the plucky little gymnasium manager (Burgess Meredith) who puts Rocky through training, and right down to the lonely morning ritual of rising at four, drinking six raw eggs, and going out to do roadwork. What makes the movie extraordinary is that it doesn't try to surprise us with an original plot, with twists and complications; it wants to involve us on an elemental, a sometimes savage, level. It's about heroism and realizing your potential, about taking your best shot and sticking by your girl. It sounds not only clichéd but corny -- and yet it's not, not a bit, because it really does work on those levels. It involves us emotionally, it makes us commit ourselves: We find, maybe to our surprise after remaining detached during so many movies, that this time we care.

The credit for that has to be passed around. A lot of it goes to Stallone when he wrote this story and then peddled it around Hollywood for years before he could sell it. He must have known it would work because he could see himself in the role, could imagine the conviction he's bringing to it, and I can't think of another actor who could quite have pulled off this performance. There's that exhilarating moment when Stallone, in training, runs up the steps of Philadelphia's art museum, leaps into the air, shakes his fist at the city, and you know he's sending a message to the whole movie industry.

The director is John Avildsen, who made "Joe" and then another movie about a loser who tried to find the resources to start again, "Save the Tiger." Avildsen correctly isolates Rocky in his urban environment, because this movie shouldn't have a documentary feel, with people hanging out of every window: It's a legend, it's about little people, but it's bigger than life, and you have to set them apart visually so you can isolate them morally.

And then there's Talia Shire, as the girl (she was the hapless sister of the Corleone boys in "The Godfather"). When she hesitates before kissing Rocky for the first time, it's a moment so poignant it's like no other. And Burt Young as her brother -- defeated and resentful, loyal and bitter, caring about people enough to hurt them just to draw attention to his grief. There's all that, and then there's the fight that ends the film. By now, everyone knows who wins, but the scenes before the fight set us up for it so completely, so emotionally, that when it's over we've had it. We're drained.

Happy Gilmore

Adam Sandler's new comedy, ``Happy Gilmore,'' takes a gleefully puerile view of what constitutes a working-class hero. The movie's title character is a failed hockey player who accidentally discovers he is a whiz at golf and becomes the bad-boy sensation of the professional circuit.

To describe Happy's antics as boorish is putting it mildly.

Injecting the violence of hockey into the genteel world of golf, Happy exhibits all the grace of a zonked-out metal rocker trashing a fancy tea party. Whenever Happy flubs a shot, he flies into a rage, stamps on the ground, tosses his club in the air and spews out a torrent of profanity. Happy crudely taunts his rivals.

When teamed with the game-show host Bob Barker at a celebrity tournament, he punches out his partner, and the two end up fighting like dogs. This sort of bad behavior makes the television ratings for golf soar. It also attracts a motley group of fans - bikers, geeks and alienated types - who follow Happy from tournament to tournament and make everybody uncomfortable.

But if ``Happy Gilmore'' contains the germ of what might have been a pungent comic satire of class warfare and sports, it is far too eager to be the ``Dumb and Dumber'' of the links to take its ice-hockey-versus-golf metaphor to the next step.

The movie presents Happy with an archrival, Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald), who is so snidely supercilious that there is no contest when it comes to likability. Happy also has a goofy grandmother (Frances Bay) who enjoys greeting him at the door wearing a pointy-tongued Kiss mask.

As for humor, the movie, which was directed by Dennis Dugan from a screenplay by Sandler and his writing partner, Tim Herlihy, simply doesn't deliver. As effectively as Sandler projects the volatility of a superannuated teen-ager, he is too sluggish and inexpressive a screen personality for his antics to convey kinetic excitement. Happy's tantrums, which the movie pretends are liberating explosions of self-expression, aren't nearly maniacal enough to reach comic delirium.

The movie desperately relies on such sight gags as elaborate miniature-golf stunts, and the increasingly mangled prosthetic hand of Happy's athletic golf coach, to generate the occasional smile.