What people tend to forget is that each Spider Man movie blends about 20 years worth of comic book back story into them.

As for Bush's veto? If we put that little bit of "news" into a movie context, we'd have to suspend our disbelief that Bush is still trudging foreward into this fourth sequel (year) of a war (movie) that should never have been made. And to borrow Zacharek's sequel concept that we are lead to be nostalgic for references to the past, while at the same time ignoring that we know what's going to happen—gasp—wondrous shock of historical times: You mean to tell me that Bush vetoed the Dem-backed spending bill?

Tune in next time for the next zap pow amazing plot development of the Bush saga. Same Bush channel. Same Bush time.

"Plot" spoiler, although somebody told me it was in the previews.

Snow White sings away in homage to Fiona in the first Shrek, and gathers birds and squirrels and the entire armada of forest creatures (take that Disney), then one of the billion songs kicks in, Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," and the opening siren's song wale sends the creatures to attack the gate guards.

That humor, self-reference, and pop-culture rip off was one of the many defining moments of Shrek the Third.

Some of the animation was indeed freaky, and you can tell the animators are showing off most of the time. A couple scenes clunk, like the high school scene; it's like the four writers got bored of the thought as soon as it was thunk.

But it was damn fun, even with the "be true to yourself" theme smudged in between the verbal and visual humor thrown at you every 14.2 seconds.

And Stephanie, you need to get over your vendetta against computer animation, or just admit that you've lost your inner child and give the reviews to someone else.

The Bourne movies, to borrow from everybody else, pretty much redefine the action genre, and put the rest to shame.

Zacharek's description of Damon in a leather helmet fit for a 1940s football player makes me jealous I didn't phrase it first.

Possibly the greatest contribution of these movies is the depiction of a relentless, completely badass assassin with a heart who doesn't speak in glib one-liners.

However, I still can't look at the still moments of Damon without thinking of "Team America," and the deadpan delivery of the Matt Damon puppet who only said, "Matt Damon."

Golden Compass is quite fun to watch, with plenty of visual spectacle to marvel at along the way, but after being swept along you end up feeling a bit cheated. This is not to say I didn't like it, but that it was done for money, not love. It feels mechanical, like we're being force fed this universe of beautiful technology and garbled terminology without actually feeling anything.

The daemons are totally cool, especially Sam Elliot's sidekick, which gets far too little screen time. As for Zacharek's complaint that the polar bear is "the most believable of the movie's fake-looking talking animals" I'm a little confused. Beowulf's animation was too "real" and now the animation in Compass isn't real enough—you can't have it both ways.

Whatever. Compass will make a decent trilogy, but hopefully the sequels will be less constrained by the meticulous meddling of the money machine.