Gilmore Girls is one of those rare shows that has maintained a consistently high standard of quality throughout its run and has even managed to get better with age. The show started with the Lorelei (Lauren Graham) & Rory (Alexis Bledel) as mother & daughter who are best friends. Rory was an innocent intellectual who was starting a prestigious high school as sophomore. Through the years, the show has transformed her from a young girl who lost herself in books and education to a young woman who is experiencing life first-hand. The change started at the end of season four when Rory sleeps with her ex-boyfriend, the married Dean (Jared Padalecki) and continues in this season with her relationship with the rich Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry). The change in Rory is startling and Lorelei has a tough time dealing with it thus creating rift between the two. This season also shows the blossoming of her relationship with Luke (Scott Patterson) and how that relationship is handled by her parents Emily (Kelly Bishop) and Richard (Edward Hermann). One particular funny episode involves Richard taking Luke golfing. The best episodes of the season involve Richard & Emily's wedding to renew their vows and the fall-out from Emily's visit to Rory's father Christopher (David Sutcliffe) who shows up at the wedding and gets into a verbal fight with Luke. The season ends with Rory and Logan stealing a yacht and Rory decides to drop out of Yale. Lorelei goes to her parents for help in this matter and they agree Rory shouldn't drop out. They provide the cruelest slap of all in Lorelei's face when they renege on their promise and Rory ends up moving into the pool house. Ms. Graham is particular superb in this season and fact she was snubbed for an Emmy nomination is criminal. Gilmore Girls continues to be among the best shows on television and season five only reinforces it greatness.

This is a truly amazing film brought to life by four truly amazing girls-- Alexis Bledel as shy Lena, Amber Tamblyn as rebel Tibby, Blake Lively as fun-loving Bridget, and America Ferrera as writer Carmen. Each girl has a different story to deliver from different parts of the world. Lena's in Greece with her grandparents, Tibby's at home working a dull job at Wallman's, Bridget is at soccer camp in Mexico, and Carmen is visiting her father in South Carolina.

Together, they form the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants after discovering that a hot pair of Levi's fits each of their different body types perfectly. They decide that the best thing to do is to share the jeans since they'll be spending the summer apart, wearing them for one week and then mailing them to the next person. Lena gets them first, almost drowning the first day she wears them, only to be rescued by a cute Greek boy, who will no doubt get her out of her shell. Tibby gets them next, who is staying home to work to get money for more camera equipment to make her "suckumentary." She meets a vivacious 12 year old named Bailey, a girl who loves life as opposed to Tibby's "life sucks" attitude. Carmen then gets the jeans-- she learns that her father (who left her when she was young) is remarrying a woman with two children. She feels like an outcast in a see of blonde Brady Bunchers. Then the jeans head to Bridget. She's still coping with her mother's suicide, and flirts with the off limits soccer coach because it gives her something to do other than be sad.

So the jeans travel between each girl throughout the movie, each time getting a new story and opening up new chapters in these girls' lives. This is a wonderful movie. Very well played out and extremely well written, surprisingly so for a film about girl power... it stacks up much better than films like Sleepover or New York Minute, which absolutely stink compared to this rare summer jewel. RECOMMENDED!!

Just so you know, this is the IDENTICAL PILOT THAT IS IN THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON SET. I give the show itself 5 stars, and for everyone who just wants a taste, buy the DVD. BUT if you own the first season, there is NO NEED to buy this one.

While it's probably a total cliche to say it by now, Sin City really is a wild thrill ride of a movie, and quite possibly the most entertaining thing that will hit theaters all year. Adapted by director Robert Rodriguez from Frank Miller's graphic-novel series, it's an energetic slab of neo-noir, complete with twisted characters, ambiguous morality, and deadly serious dialogue. For those who thought the Kill Bill movies weren't bizarre or violent enough, Sin City ought to seem like a stylish, action-packed gift from guy-movie heaven. It's filled with negativity, outrageously over the-top bloodletting, and some of the blackest humor known to man, but it all works anyway. I even managed to forgive the incessant voice-over narration, normally a rather lazy device, because it's so oddly poignant and poetic. It's not really that big a deal anyway, because this movie is so impressive visually that the characters could speak in gibberish and I'd probably still be moved to give it at least three stars.

It should be noted right off the bat that Sin City is not a movie for everyone, but if you're the type who would like it you presumably know who you are. IF you like crime movies, especially those filled with action and atmosphere, you will almost certainly get a kick out of Sin City. If you prefer lighter, more "socially redeeming" fare, you may still like it, or you may be overcome with bile filling your throat for most of its two-hour running time. It's all a matter of how willing you are to accept what's going on without asking too many nagging questions like "How exactly did Mickey Rourke just take out ten armed riot cops with nothing more than his fists and a hatchet?" or "is it really possible or even necessary to manually tear off a man's scrotum?". Everything about this movie is utterly outsized, from the themes to the characters to the action, but in the end it's a rousing success at what it intends to do, which is entertain. It's precisely because this movie was so utterly entertaining that I found myself unwilling to nitpick; you'll probably be too busy having your senses assaulted to linger on any problems you may have with the movie. Nothing is more key in movies (or TV, or novels for that matter) than getting the viewer to suspend disbelief, to simply let go and enjoy what's transpiring regardless of the plausibility level. Some of my favorite movies are wildly unrealistic, but at some point when watching them I just decided to go with it. Sin City is one such movie: I realized early on that the events unfolding onscreen bore little to no resemblance to reality as presently constituted; I just didn't care. I went to see this movie with my wife (who is, to put it mildly, not a fan of dark or violent movies), and she may have summed up the experience of watching it the best when she said simply "I was never bored." That, ultimately, is the secret to Sin City's success: it's so gripping to watch that it's hard to care about anything else.

As everyone (and probably their brothers) knows by now, Sin City was filmed using real actors against a black-and-white CGI background with some touches of color added for dramatic effect. It may seem like a gimmick at first, but Sin City is all about bringing the viewer into a sort of parallel universe, so this unconventional device works perfectly. Sin City is a movie dealing with lives on the edge, and it conjures up a delightfully dark, grimy, and gritty atmosphere to go match the depravity of its subject matter. Weighty themes and over-the-top violence abound here, and it's only fitting that the movie's look and feel should be so uniformly haunting. Consisting of three tangentially related stories occurring out of sequence, Sin City brings the viewer into an underworld populated by thieves, murderers, hookers, and dirty cops, and the morality is viewed entirely in shades of grey. In the Basin City of the movie, where the good guys are bad and the bad guys are even worse, violence is often a virtue, or at the very least a prerequisite for survival. If there's one redeeming value to Sin City's cartoonish ultraviolence, it's that it's painfully clear that its recipients generally deserve it.

Anyway, if there's one theme running through all of these stories, it's that of redemption. The protagonist in each tale (Bruce Willis's Hartigan, Rourke's Marv, and Clive Owen's Dwight) is a most unlikely hero (although Hartigan is just a regular cop and therefore not exactly bad, whereas it's clear that Marv and Dwight are murderers), but each finds himself driven to acts of extreme courage and sacrifice in order to see justice done. Sin City portrays a kind of heroism not typically seen in movies (especially big-budget, sanitized Hollywood productions), one that comes from doing the right thing even when it's nowhere near being the easiest thing. Rourke's Marv is probably the most memorable character, a hulking thug with a highly overdeveloped sense of vengeance who managed to arouse some of my sympathy even as he cut a swath of unimaginable destruction through his enemies on his way to avenging a murdered prostitute. Out of the legions of other figures in the movie, the great Benicio Del Toro deserves some special mention as a comically malevolent crooked cop who won't shut up even after he meets his unfortunate end.

Now, although I've gone on too long already, I'd feel remiss if I didn't talk about Sin City's staggering violence quotient. Yes, this an extremely graphic movie, and much of the violence is downright disturbing to watch (Elijah Wood's character being cut up and fed to a wolf is a prominent example, even if much of the violence in that case was implied), but it's just as true that context is an important factor when considering just how offensive such bloodletting is. Now, for one thing, Sin City is meant to be a piece of escapist cinema, so nothing that takes place onscreen should be taken too seriously anyway. After all, no one got offended during the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur cut off the Black Knight's arms and legs; that scene was meant to be funny and it was. Perhaps more to the point, the violence here is so ludicrously over the top from the opening scene that it's hard to imagine any rational person getting too upset. You have to just go with it; if you're the kind of person who makes it a point to be huffy and offended all the time you shouldn't be seeing this movie anyway. 'Nuff said

Gilmore Girls is one of those rare shows that has maintained a consistently high standard of quality throughout its run and has even managed to get better with age. The show started with the Lorelei (Lauren Graham) & Rory (Alexis Bledel) as mother & daughter who are best friends. Rory was an innocent intellectual who was starting a prestigious high school as sophomore. Through the years, the show has transformed her from a young girl who lost herself in books and education to a young woman who is experiencing life first-hand. The change started at the end of season four when Rory sleeps with her ex-boyfriend, the married Dean (Jared Padalecki) and continues in this season with her relationship with the rich Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry). The change in Rory is startling and Lorelei has a tough time dealing with it thus creating rift between the two. This season also shows the blossoming of her relationship with Luke (Scott Patterson) and how that relationship is handled by her parents Emily (Kelly Bishop) and Richard (Edward Hermann). One particular funny episode involves Richard taking Luke golfing. The best episodes of the season involve Richard & Emily's wedding to renew their vows and the fall-out from Emily's visit to Rory's father Christopher (David Sutcliffe) who shows up at the wedding and gets into a verbal fight with Luke. The season ends with Rory and Logan stealing a yacht and Rory decides to drop out of Yale. Lorelei goes to her parents for help in this matter and they agree Rory shouldn't drop out. They provide the cruelest slap of all in Lorelei's face when they renege on their promise and Rory ends up moving into the pool house. Ms. Graham is particular superb in this season and fact she was snubbed for an Emmy nomination is criminal. Gilmore Girls continues to be among the best shows on television and season five only reinforces it greatness.