First, the good news. (1) It isn’t very long. If you are going to waste time at a movie, you won’t waste more than 85 minutes on this one. (2) It isn’t as bad as some of the other SNL movies, like “Superstar” and “It’s Pat.” It’s more of the caliber of “Stuart Saves His Family,” meaning that there are some very funny moments. (3) Will Ferrell is great as the husband of one of The Ladies Man’s ladies and some of the other SNL and “Kids in the Hall” veterans provide some bright spots. (4) It’s always great to see Billy Dee Williams.

Now, the bad news. You can’t make a five minute SNL sketch into a feature-length movie, even a short movie. It will have to have stretches of obvious padding, as in a useless sequence about how The Ladies Man grew up in the Playboy mansion. Most attempts to make a sketch character work in a movie try one of two options. Either he has to stay one-dimensional and get tiring or he has to have more depth and become less funny. This movie makes both mistakes, recycling the same jokes over and over and then asking us to believe that he’s really a loveable guy. Meadows the screenwriter should do better by Meadows the performer, who is much more talented than this material.

Tim Meadows plays Leon Phelps, a late-night talk show host who drinks Corvoisier as he does his broadcast and has been repeatedly fined by the FCC for using inappropriate language on the air. He and his beautiful producer Julie (Karyn Parsons of “Fresh Prince of Bel Air”) are fired and have to find new work. Julie gets organized and begins making pitches to other local stations. But Leon’s approach to problems is to “go have sex and wait for something to randomly happen.” He tries to track down a former lover who has written to offer him a fortune. He doesn’t realize that the husbands of many of his ladies have banded together to go after him, communicating via a “victims of the smiling ass” website, a reference to a tattoo of a smiley face that is glimpsed as he jumps out of the bedroom windows. Much comic chaos ensues, including a very gross bar-food eating contest.

Parents should know that this gets a well-deserved R rating for frequent and explicit sexual references. Though intended to be comic, Leon’s behavior is foolish, risky, hurtful, and exploitive. It may be an odd sign of progress in race relations that a movie like this can include a comic scene of a potential lynching, but it still may strike some viewers as uncomfortably insensitive to the tragic evidence of past racism.

Families who see this movie can talk about the ways that some people use sex to hide from feelings of sorrow or loneliness, and how Julie sees something in Leon that no one else does.

People who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the best of the SNL movies, “Wayne’s World.”

What is it about football movies? I don’t even like football, but I am a sucker for a good football movie. I’m even a sucker for a pretty good one like this lightweight but likeable story about players called in when the team goes on strike. It’s sort of “Rocky” crossed with “The Longest Yard,” “The Dirty Dozen,” and “The Bad News Bears.”

Gene Hackman plays Jimmy McGinty, a former coach of the Washington Sentinals football team brought back by the owner (Jack Warden)when the players go on strike. The other teams quickly hire professionals, but McGinty has been keeping a file of talented players who for one reason or another, have never played pro ball. One had an injured knee, one is in prison, one is deaf, one is a Welsh soccer player, one is a sumo wrestler, and one, Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves) was a college superstar who quit after a disastrous showing at the Sugar Bowl.

Not that I’m trying to spoil the ending or anything, but this is definitely a feel-good movie, and if we have to suspend a little disbelief with regard to a few small issues, oh, well, we don’t go to summer movies to think too hard.

What we do go to summer movies for is to enjoy ourselves, and that we do. As McGinty says, these guys get “what every athlete dreams of, a second chance.” They get to play for the love of the game and the challenge of defeating the other guys and their own demons. Loners get to be a part of a team. Their time on the field may be brief, but they leave forever changed. We get to see “everyday guys” playing in the big league. It is a delicious fantasy and just plain fun to watch.

Director Howard Deutch takes no chances, loading up the soundtrack with every classic sports movie standard from “We Will Rock You” to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll, Part II,” and adding in some replacement cheerleaders who come from a strip club for some sizzle. It all comes together nicely. There are some very funny spots along the way, including a prison cell rendition of “I Will Survive” and a stripper-led cheer that distracts the opposing team at a crucial moment. The romance between Falco and head cheerleader Annabelle Farrell (Brooke Langton) is handled nicely, making it clear that it is not until he begins to feel better about himself that he can allow himself to get close to her. The team’s growing sense of loyalty and dignity and the coach’s faith in them are warmly portrayed. And, when all else fails, the football games are a hoot.

Parents should know that the movie includes some salty language, sexual references, and highly suggestive cheerleader moves. There is also substantial violence on and off the field, mostly punching and shoving, and a few mildly gross moments as well. Characters smoke and drink, and there are scenes in bars.

Families who see this movie should talk about what it is that makes people feel good about themselves, how a leader can make all the difference on a team, and whether fame and money hurt professional athletes and sports. Families should also talk about the coach’s comment that the difference between a winner and a loser is that a winner gets back on the horse and keeps trying.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “M*A*S*H” and “The Longest Yard” (both for mature audiences).

A hard-line judge is selected as the President’s new general in the war on drugs. Front-line cops in Mexico and the US go after the small-time distributors and try to make cases against the sources of the drugs. A pampered wife, pregnant with her second child, finds out that her husband’s legitimate businesses are just a front for his real import — cocaine. The judge’s teenage daughter becomes a heroin addict.

Director Steven Soderbergh (“Erin Brockovich,” “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”) ably keeps these stories on track, cutting back and forth to let them provide context and contrast for each other, and using different color pallattes to help keep them straight. There are some good lines: a character compares efforts to cut off the drug supply to a game of “Whack-a-Mole” and when a wealthy high school kid overdoses, one of the other teenagers at the party says, “He can’t die on the f**ing floor–his parents are in Barbados!” And a cop notes that “In Mexico, law enforcement is an entrepreneurial activity.”

Despite a first-rate all-star cast, the movie feels flat and a little formulaic, almost like one of those old “Dragnet” episodes about the dangers of drugs. The script moves the characters around like chess pieces. Packing so many stories in so little time requires a lot of narrative short-cuts like coincidences and stereotypes. The Zeta Jones character switches from innocent and doe-eyed to commanding and vicious faster than you can say “Michael Corleone.” Individual scenes have some tension and some fine performances (especially by Benecio del Toro and Don Cheadle as cops), but the overall impact is muted.

Parents should know that the movie has everything that triggers an R rating: violence (including the death of major characters, murder, torture, and a teenage overdose), explicit sex (including the judge’s daughter trading sex for drugs), and strong language. Characters betray each other and there are intense family scenes. However, this is at its heart a morality tale, and all of the R-rated material is in the service of the overall anti-drug message.

Families who see this movie should use it as an opportunity to talk frankly about drugs, both their own views on individual drug use and the impact that the drug business has on the community and the country. As teenagers what they think about the way the judge and his wife responded to his daughter’s drug use, and about his decision at the end of the movie. Was it the right one? Why did the drug dealer’s wife decide to become involved in his business? Did the movie make you feel differently about the role that illegal drugs play in the lives of people around us? When the judge asks the staff for new ideas, the response is silence. What should the next person to hold the anti-drug czar job do?

Families who like this movie should see some of the other performances by its outstanding cast, including Del Toro (who won an Oscar for this role) in “Snatch” and “The Usual Suspects” (both for mature audiences) and Cheadle in “A Lesson Before Dying.” Families who enjoy this movie might like to see the English miniseries that inspired it, “Traffik.”

The Viet Nam battle drama “We Were Soldiers” spends half an hour making us care about each of the characters and the rest of the movie blowing them up.

It is based on the book by Lt. Colonel Harold G. Moore, a devout Catholic who is as devoted a commander as he is a father. Moore was asked to develop the “air cavalry,” a system for using helicopters in combat. He led the Americans into their first major engagement in Viet Nam. They were hopelessly outmanned, with just 400 soldiers to 2000 Vietnamese. They fought bravely and did their best to look out for each other. And most of them were killed or wounded.

There have been thousands of war movies, and dozens of movies about the Viet Nam war, but this is one of the few to truly honor the men who fought and the women they loved. This is not a movie about politicians (though there are some digs at those who sent these men into battle without adequate resources) and it is not a movie about whether the US involvement stemmed from imperialism or a commitment to freedom. This is a movie about those who put their lives on the line not for their country but for each other.

The movie has some weaknesses that, in context, work very well. The battle action is often hard to follow, though perhaps that is a good way to replicate the relentlessness and disorientation of war. The characters and dialogue are clichéd, even corny. But in the context of the movie, they become paradigms. Mel Gibson, as Moore, is the man we would all want to lead us into battle, a true hero who promises his men that he will always be the first on the field and the last to leave, and that men may die, but none will be left behind. He trains his men to learn the tasks of the man above and teach their own tasks to the man below, and directs them, above all, to take care of each other, he gives them a purpose and a dignity that, sadly, the conflict they were sent to fight and the politicians who sent them there never could.

The movie also takes the unusual step of treating the soldiers on the other side with dignity as well, making them human beings with ability, honor – and wives left behind to mourn them.

Parents should know that this is one of the most brutally violent movies ever released, with up-close, graphic, and relentless violence and the deaths of many characters. There is some strong language and a mild sexual situation.

Families who see this movie should talk about how we decide to risk American lives in a war, and how, knowing that lives will be lost, we prepare and motivate our armed forces. They may want to discuss their own views on the war in Viet Nam and the treatment of veterans.

Families who appreciate this movie will also like Saving Private Ryan, Platoon,and The Right Stuff. They should also see the under-appreciated Gardens of Stone.

A man sees what no one else can, and we call him a genius. A man sees what no one else does, and we call him crazy.

This Oscar-winner for Best Picture is a movie about a man who was both, the true story of genius John Forbes Nash, Jr., who revolutionized mathematics and then became mentally ill. More than 40 years later, as he edged back into sanity, his contribution was recognized by some people in Sweden. They awarded him the Nobel Prize.

As the movie opens, it is just after World War II, and a group of bright young mathematicians are arriving at Princeton. They are proud because “mathematicians won the war,” and they are eager to make up for lost time. Nash (Russell Crowe) stands out. He is tactless, he does not go to class, and he does not produce anything publishable. A teacher once told him that he had a double helping of brains but half a helping of heart. It is not that he does not seem to care about norms of social behavior and academic performance – he does not even seem to notice them.

Then Nash has an idea, an anti-Darwinian notion that proves that more success for more people is achieved through cooperation than through competition. The elegance of his proof is a stunning achievement, and he is rewarded with an important position and allowed to select the classmates he wants as his colleagues. He even meets a beautiful student (Jennifer Connelly) who enjoys his directness and appreciates his “beautiful mind.” Nash is successful, saving the day when only he can see the pattern in a string of numbers from an intercepted Soviet message.

But then Nash begins to see patterns where there are none, and he is hospitalized. His powers of logic and focus and the love of his wife help him to reconnect to reality, and after decades of effort, he is able to teach at Princeton.

There is a heartbreaking moment near the end when Nash is leaving a classroom and a man he does not know approaches him to ask him something. Before answering, Nash turns to a student to ask whether she sees the man, too, because he is still not sure which people he sees approaching him actually exist. He has simply adapted to his delusions, by requiring proof, in classic mathematical or at least empirical terms.

This is an extraordinary story, and it has been made into an extraordinary movie. Crowe is, as always, simply magnificent in a role that would provide irresistible temptation for showboating for most actors. There are superb performances by everyone in the cast, including Connelly (an Oscar-winner for Best Supporting Actress), Paul Bettney, Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer, Judd Hirsch, and a dozen others. What is really special here is the way that screenwriter Akiva Goldman and director Ron Howard have found a way to present both Nash’s genius and his mental illness in such compelling, cinematic, and accessible terms. Both in essence become characters in the story as we go inside his head and wonder with Nash what to believe. This is what makes the movie more than a disease-of-the-week special with color-by- numbers “heartwarming” moments of triumph over adversity. This is what makes the movie itself a true work of art.

Parents should know that the material might be very upsetting for kids, or for anyone who has relatives with mental illness or who knows very little about it. There are some strong scenes of family tension and peril, including a child in jeopardy, scuffles, and potential domestic abuse. There are graphic scenes of shock therapy and self-destructive behavior. A character is in peril involving shooting. There is also some crude language with sexual references.

Families who see this movie should talk about mental illness, about how people with mental illness need to be treated, and about what is different now in the way we treat the mentally ill from the days depicted in the movie. Families who want to know more should check the website for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “Apollo 13” and “Parenthood,” also directed by Ron Howard. They might also like to read the book, by Sylvia Nasar, or Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, a very engaging book about a brilliant physicist. Families who like board games should try Go, the Chinese board game played by the mathematicians in the movie. The rules are fairly simple, but the strategies are endlessly complex.

NOTE: DVD extras include all kinds of extra goodies, including an entire separate disk featuring footage of the real John Nash and more information about his work.