"It's a cookbook!" was the punch line to that episode.

Serling always was a guy with a moral. Even if his morals were sometimes very Old Testament (an unforgiving, cruel God who tortured and destroyed people, even when they wanted to make amends or didn't seem all that evil).

Even before he died, he saw his formula being misused. The people who produce many shows that claim to be descendants of the original Zone only produce exercises in sadism. Torture people to death or worse, leave a hopeless conclusion; the only lessons these shows teach is not to trust anyone, to see the entire world as your enemy.

Well, that helped build an audience psychologically ready to torture enemy combatants and let people drown in New Orleans. The power-mongering minds behind The New Twilight Zone and The New Outer Limits aren't that different from Dick Cheney and the great minds of AIG.

The Earthlings don't deserve to live..

I haven't seen the movie and you have, so I can only comment based on what I have heard about the picture, but you seem to have missed a little joke about Ginormica when you state that she grows to be 50' tall at her wedding. I have heard her height stated as 49'11"...in other words, an insignificant significant (sic) distinction that clearly alludes to the 50' Tall Woman from the 1950s for fans of the genre.

Also, you dismiss "Your mother wears army boots" as an epithet. I doubt anyone today under the age of 50 or so has even heard the phrase, and certainly no one uses it anymore. However, during WWII, when the phrase was current, it must have had a very distinct meaning. I puzzled over it for years and then I had an intuition that it must have been a coded way of accusing a woman--"your mother"--of sleeping with a soldier...other than her husband. In other words, she has a strange man's clothing--his "army boots"--in her bedroom. So, at the time, it was probably quite a pointed, if jocular, statement to direct at someone.

End of discussion.

"end of discussion"

Wrong.

The trailer for this movie is a hideous mess. The characters are awful and the dialogue is banal. Seth Rogan? He's as subtle as a train wreck. Compare this to WALL-E. Pixar has it over Dreamworks in spades.

@Peter Joshua and @Robert1014,

You are both right.

Dreamworks has technicians, Pixar has storytellers.

I was excited to see the film because 1) Monsters vs. Aliens just sounds like a cool concept and as a fan of old horror and sci-fi I have some affection for the movies MvA is tweaking 2) my 9 y/o stepdaughter never wants to see anything at the movies and she LOVES the preview for this one.

The reviews aren't very encouraging. I'm getting the sense this one is technically proficient but paint-by-numbers? I'd rather it go way off the deep end into flamboyantly awful.

Ah well...

The old movies this film borrows from are all B movies, to put it kindly. None of them were anything more than kitsch entertainment.

I don't see why anyone would expect a film that borrows so heavily from such old flicks to be transcendent art. That's asking too much.

This movie, and other recent kid flicks I have seen ("Space Chimps," "Beverly Hills Chihuahua," "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," "Pink Panther 2") view better when you stop larding them with social meaning.

It's not that I am opposed to criticism. It's just that criticism isn't always necessary.

"trying too hard", "conveyor belt", "packing in the requisite number of inside jokes"

These are all the reasons I won't pay to see this film in a theater - in spite of my kids wishes otherwise.

I admit that Shrek grew on me after awhile, but even there the characters come second to the nudges and the winks. Dreamworks' films are snarky, fitful and trite. They don't even try to hide the fact that their only reason for existing is to make money. The technical aspects of the animation are the only thing keeping the DW catalog above 'B' Movie status.

I have given DW every opportunity, but no more. I will take the ethos and pathos of Pixar every, single time.

Between Pixar and Dreamworks, Pixar wins solidly.

I love animation, kids cartoons and other juvenile fare. The only Dreamworks animated picture I can stand watching is Shrek and even that one gets old.

The previews for this do not interest me, it looks like a silly stupid movie, off a formulaic palette with the wink nods to old B-movie sci-fi flicks. I'm sure children will just love it though. The review did leave out that Stephen Colbert voices the President in the movie.

Who cares about how pretty thier movies are if the plots and characters are dull?

Loud, obnoxious, loud, mostly stupid. Yeah I know; the old man says 'get off my lawn.' But cartoons belong on TV like the Bugs Bunny show.

seriously? watch the Incredibles, Ratatouille and WALL-E. If you have then you must be cold as ice to think those characters are boring: there is so much psychological depth in those characters (even the shitty human ones in WALL-E)! And plot? For-freakin-geddaboutit! You obviously haven't seen them.

Your knowledge of what is possible in animation is as limited as the minds at Disney and Fox. While it's true that the Japanese had (that's correct, past tense) a lock on mature animation for people of all ages, other people can do marvelous work, too.

You might find Persepolis in the better video stores (obviously not Blockbuster) which takes you through the life of an Iranian woman trying to find her own way through the rein of the Shah, the restrictions of Islam and the uncomfortable freedom of Paris. Just so you know, the woman who wrote and drew the original graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi, was involved in the film - which was based on her own life.

You might also loosen up. This film may not be one of the finer examples of American pop-culture entertainment, but it looks silly and fun, entertainment for the little kid in me. After getting suicidal after Watchmen, we could all use something cheery and goofy. And with a woman whose breasts did not expand disproportionately to the rest of her body.

(By the way, the copyright owners of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman refused to let DreamWorks use that name. So they made her slightly shorter in an attempt to snark those grouches.)