This pleasant but forgettable sequel to Disney’s “Peter Pan” is not just not up to the original animated feature. It is not even up to the standard set by the vintage Pluto cartoon (“Pluto’s Fledgling,” from 1957) that precedes it.

The original has terrific songs (“You Can Fly,” “Never Smile at a Crocodile”) and one of my all-time favorite movie moments, as Peter, Wendy, Michael, and John soar around Big Ben and look down on Victorian London. This version manages a couple of magical moments, especially the opening credit sequence and Captain Hook’s pirate ship flying through London, but the music, performances, animation, and story are strictly at the straight-to-video level.

Wendy has grown up, and is married with two children, Jane and Daniel. She loves to tell them stories about Peter Pan and Captain Hook. But World War II is underway, and London is blasted by bombs. Wendy’s husband leaves for the war, telling Jane to take care of her mother and brother. Jane is strong and brave, leading Nana 2 through London in the midst of an attack. But she can’t let herself believe in Peter Pan or fairies, because that would make it even harder to bear the loss and destruction – and the fear. So she gives her little brother socks for his birthday (a size large, so he will have room to grow), and is given to crisp pronouncements like, “I’ve no time for fun and games” and “I don’t know why you fill his head with silly stories.”

Just before Jane and Daniel are going to be sent away to the countryside, where it is safer, Jane is kidnapped by Captain Hook. He thinks that if he captures Wendy, Peter Pan will come to save her. Because he lives in Never Land, he does not realize that Wendy has grown up. But then, neither does Peter, who does come to rescue her, and is just as happy when it turns out to be Jane. But she does not want to stay with the Lost Boys, even when they make her a Lost Girl. Before Jane can go home, though, she will have to learn to believe in “faith, trust, and pixie dust.”

For a story about the power of imagination, the movie is especially lackluster. The original story’s crocodile has been replaced by an octopus for no particular reason, and the action sequences are replays of the first version. The sexism and racism of the original are excised – Jane rescues Peter in this one. But that is not enough to make up for a script that even at under 90 minutes, is just too long. Of all the changes, though, I think the one that would most upset James M. Barrie, the very British man who created Peter Pan, is probably hearing Peter speak with an American accent and even use baseball slang.

Some of Disney’s recent follow-ups have been quite good, especially the sequels to “The Little Mermaid” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” with theater-quality voice talent and animation and some bright new songs. It is hard to figure out the reasoning that had both of those movies go straight to video and give this one a theatrical release.

Parents should know that while the movie is rated G, there is some peril, much comic but some a little scary. Children may want to know more about the Blitz (the movie never tells us who it is that is dropping bombs on London, we briefly see children being sent away from their families by train, and we can’t tell from the end if the war is over or not).

Families who see this movie should talk about “faith, trust, and pixie dust,” and how even children have to be brave and helpful during difficult times. Some children may make a connection between the Blitz and the terrorist attacks.

Families who enjoy this movie should watch the original, one of Disney’s best. They will also enjoy another Disney classic, like “Peter Pan” written in Victorian times and filmed in the 1950’s, “Alice in Wonderland.”

Like the life of its subject matter, there is a lot that is wrong with this movie, but there is also something right enough for a bittersweet happy ending.

Drew Barrymore stars in the true story of Beverly Donofrio, whose dreams of going to NYU and becoming a writer seemed impossible when she became pregnant at age 15. Beverly was the daughter of a policeman (James Woods) and a homemaker (Lorraine Bracco). When she became pregnant by a sweet but irresponsible drop-out (Steve Zahn as Ray), her parents insisted that they get married. They spent the next seven years on welfare. As the movie begins, Beverly has written her life story. She and her son, now in college, have a wintery journey of reconciliation as they seek out Ray to get him to sign a release so that the book can be published. The story alternates between that snowy car ride and flashbacks to the past that led up to it.

The commercials for this movie make it look like an up-beat story with a lot of cute sit-com-y moments, but it is not. Bev is not a good mother. She is so angry at Ray, her son Jason, and her parents that her behavior is often selfish and bitter. If an actress less irresistible than Barrymore were in the role, we would stop caring whether she ever got to college. The script makes some odd choices in showing us too many scenes of Bev’s despair and nothing about what she did that finally pulled her life together. Jason’s romantic involvement seems to tie up too many loose ends to be authentic. Director Penny Marshall bangs too hard on the cultural signifiers of each era Bev lives through. Her music choices are uncharacteristically pedestrian, with nothing that hasn’t been used dozens of times before. I hereby propose punishment of a week in movie-maker prison for the next person who puts “I Feel Good” in a movie. It is the most over-used song in movie history.

But the movie gets four stars just for Barrymore’s performance as she shows us Bev at 15, 20, and 35. Zahn, always a marvelous actor in comedy or drama, gives a performance of great generosity and heart. There are also great moments from Brittany Murphy, as Bev’s friend Fay, and Woods as Bev’s dad.

Parents should know that the movie has non-explicit teenage sex and pregnancy. Characters drink, smoke, and use drugs, including use of a hallucinogenic drug while watching a child and heroin addiction. A character sells drugs, and Bev and Fay briefly become involved in helping him. There is a painful scene of withdrawal. All of this is presented in a realistic manner with realistic consequences that should help teenagers understand the seriousness of this behavior. There is also some strong language.

Families who see this movie should talk about how families support members who have made bad choices and the importance of accepting responsibility for your mistakes. What did Bev’s family do wrong? What did they do right? Why was she able to achieve her dream? What did Jason do to make her see things differently? What do you think about Ray’s comment that the best thing he could do for Jason was to leave him?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Diner (some mature material).

In fairness to the intended audience for this movie, the following review was written by my 16-year-old, who wanted to give it more stars: Road Trip, a raunchy comedy in the style of Detroit Rock City and American Pie, is a laugh out loud movie that’s good to see with friends if you’re a teenager (probably guys will like it more than girls.) while parents will avoid it for its vulgar humor and its parents-just-don’t understand star Tom Green.

Road Trip starts at Ithaca University with Barry (Green) practicing his typical bother-everyone sense of humor to possible future students he’s touring (he tells them he’s attended Ithaca for the past eight years and makes up stories about the buildings) and eventually gets them caught up in a story about his friends, where trouble starts when Josh (Seann William Scott) cheats on his girlfriend since he was five (Rachel Blanchard) with the girl he really likes, Beth (Amy Smart) and not only is his video camera accidentally left on but his friend accidentally mails it to his girlfriend in Austin. So he and three friends set off on an 1,800 mile epic road trip on which they blow up their car, constantly run out of money and regain it in various ways, meet all sorts of crazy people, (blacks who think its funny to put a KKK mask in Kyle’s backpack and pretend they found it, suspiciously blind lady, and Barry’s parents, the Manilows, to name a few) and learn their respective lessons about standing up to your parents, getting girls, friendship, etc.

Throughout the movie they shoot back to Barry, who stays on campus because he wants to feed Josh’s snake while he’s gone. His attempts to get it to eat a mouse, sing folk songs and help Beth find Josh (“He went to Austin. It’s in Massachusetts.” “You mean Boston?” “Yeah.”) had the audience laughing harder than anything else. Throughout the movie he seems to be just thrown in to make it funnier until the ending where he unwittingly saves the day. Although the entire cast is very good and Green is not the main character, it’s really his movie.

Contains foul language, crude humor, nudity, sexual situations, and a character who does drugs to hide his sensitivity.

Parents should know that the version on video includes even raunchier scenes deleted before theatrical release in order to get an R rating. The unrated version released on the video would have been likely to receive an NC-17 rating from the MPAA and parents might want to view it themselves before allowing their children or teenagers to watch it, even if they saw it in the theater.

Plot: Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) is a sweet-natured but not very bright boxer and small-time enforcer for a loan-shark. He has a crush on Adrian (Talia Shire), the painfully shy sister of his friend, Pauly (Burt Young). Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) is the heavyweight champion, whose big upcoming fight is canceled when his opponent is injured. Creed and his promoters decide to give an unknown a shot at the title, and pick Rocky.

Rocky has never really committed to anything before, but this opportunity galvanizes him. He works with Mickey (Burgess Meredith) a demanding trainer. He takes Adrian on a date, and they fall in love. When her brother becomes furious over their relationship, she moves in with Rocky. Rocky knows he cannot beat Creed; his goal is to “go the distance,” to conduct himself with class and dignity in the ring and still be standing at the end of the fight. Apollo, sure of himself and busy marketing the fight, neglects his own training. Apollo wins, but it is a split decision. Rocky goes the distance. Surrounded by fans and the press, he bellows over and over “Adrian!”

Discussion: In Rocky’s first fight, we get a glimpse of his potential. But it is also clear he has failed to make a commitment to anything. Mickey wants to throw him out of the gym because he doesn’t take boxing seriously enough. It is less an insult to boxing than an insult to himself. He takes pride in small things, like his pet turtles, and the fact that his nose has never been broken. When he gets the call from Apollo, he assumes that he is going to be invited to be a sparring partner for the champion, the greatest honor he could imagine for himself.

But Apollo’s impetuous offer gives Rocky a chance to see himself differently. That offer does for him what Paul does for Billie in “Born Yesterday,” what Miss Moffat does for Morgan in “The Corn is Green,” or Obi-Wan does for Luke in “Star Wars.” Rocky has a chance to think of himself as someone who can hold his own with the world champion, and once he has that image of himself, it is just a matter of taking the steps to get there. That image also gives him the courage to risk getting close to Adrian. Rocky also gives Adrian a chance to see herself differently. He was told when he was young that he was not smart, so he should concentrate on his physical ability; she was told she was not pretty, and should concentrate on her mental ability. Each of them sees in the other what no one else did. He sees how pretty she is; she sees how bright he is; each sees the other as loveable, as no one has before. This, as much as anything, is what allows both of them to bloom.

Rocky is realistic about his goal. He does not need to win. He just needs to acquit himself with dignity, to show that he is in the same league as the champion. In order to achieve that goal, he will risk giving everything he has, risk even the small pride of an unbroken nose. He develops enough self-respect to risk public disgrace. This is a big issue for teenagers — adolescence has been characterized as the years in which everything centers around the prayer, “God, don’t let me be embarrassed today.” Rocky begins as someone afraid to give his best in case it is not good enough, and becomes someone who suspects that his best is enough to achieve his goals, and is willing to test himself to find out.

It is worth taking a look at Creed as well. Like the hare in the Aesop fable, he underestimates his opponent. He is so sure of himself, and so busy working on the business side of the fight that he comes to the fight unprepared.

It is especially meaningful that the action behind the scenes paralleled that in the movie. Stallone, a small-time actor, was offered a great deal of money for this script, which he wrote. But he insisted instead on selling it for a negligible sum, provided that he play the lead. The entire movie was made for less than $1 million. Stallone beat even longer odds than Rocky did when the movie went on to win the Oscar as Best Picture. Stallone also became only the third person in history (after Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles) to be nominated for both Best Actor and Best Screenplay.

Questions for Kids:

· Why did Mickey want to throw Rocky out of the gym?

· Why didn’t Rocky have higher aspirations, until after he got the offer from Apollo?

· How is Apollo like the hare in the fable about the tortoise and the hare? Why is it so hard for Rocky and Adrian to get to know one another?

Connections: There are four sequels, all increasingly garish and cartoonish. They are barely more than remakes, and are only for die-hard fans.

There is logic, there is movie logic, and then there is the kind of “throw some big musical numbers and some good-looking stars on the screen and no one will notice that it makes no sense whatsoever — just look at ‘Flashdance'” logic. “Rock Star” is in that last category, and while it is not as preposterously entertaining as “Flashdance,” it is still has moments of guilty pleasure.

The story goes back to “Cinderella,” or at least to “Rocky,” with a little bit from Pinocchio. Chris (Mark Wahlberg) a 1980’s metal band’s biggest fan, gets picked out of obscurity to become the band’s new lead singer, only to find that dreams are not always what they seem from the outside. The equivalent of Pinocchio’s visit to the place where boys get turned into donkeys is Chris’s life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, with increasingly more of the former. But before you can say “This would make a great episode of ‘Behind the Music,'” he sees the error of his ways, and finds the girl who loved him all along. I think he even invents grunge, the next new music craze, because he somehow goes from shrieking hard rock in leather pants to playing anquished ballads in a Seattle coffee house. Then there’s the clinch and the fade-out, followed by the movie’s most entertaining scenes, the out-takes shown during the credits.

The movie’s biggest problem is that it cannot make up its mind whether it wants to be a satire or play it straight. It tweaks the rock star worldview now and then, but no one could ever send up metal bands better than that masterpiece mockumentary, “This is Spinal Tap,” and they do not even try. That leaves us with an umimaginative rise-and-fall story that never really captures our hearts or even our attention. At least that makes it easier to ignore major lapses in the storyline.

Wahlberg enjoys himself onscreen, but it is impossible not to compare this to his performance in the vastly more complex and intelligent “Boogie Nights,” another movie about a naive young man who is brought into a world of debauchery and corruption. Jennifer Anniston is woefully underused in a standard-issue “good woman who stands by her man and holds on to her values” role that gives her only a few brief opportunities to show her crackerjack timing and ability to give snap to anything within 50 miles of a comeback. It is nice to see the musicians played by real-life guitarists Zakk Wylde and Brian Vander Ark, bassist Jeff Pilson and drummer Jason Bonham.

Parents should know that the movie is rated R for very strong language, nudity, explicit sexual situations (including group sex and bisexual encounters), and abuse of every kind of licit and illicit substance (even hotel room furniture). Many characters give the finger. There is an explicit close-up of a very unhygienic nipple-piercing. A gay character is insulted and fired from his job. The overall message is that the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll lifestyle is empty and destructive, but not unappealing, for a short time anyway. Interestingly, there is some suggestion that it is a cynical marketing strategy, though that appears to be rationalization. One nice shift from the usual format for this kind of movie is that Chris has parents who are entirely loving and supportive of his passion for metal, and genuinely enjoy the music themselves.

Families who see this movie should talk about how some people limit themselves to dreaming that they can be exactly like someone else, instead of thinking about dreams that allow them to be most themselves. Why was it so easy for Chris to lose his way, while Emily saw that it was wrong? Why was it important for her to have her own life and career? What do we learn about Chris from the way he gets back on stage after his fall? What does he learn about himself? Do you agree with the comment that “we all owe somebody an apology along the way?”

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy This Is Spinal Tap (Special Edition) (mature material). They also might like to compare the Steel Dragons’s song “Anything Goes” to a classic song by the same name by Cole Porter.