“Happy” Gilmore (Adam Sandler) is a hockey lover nursing a childhood dream of making it on a professional-league team. The problem is that while he can hit the puck, he’s a klutz on skates and has a violent temper. Happy’s guardian is his beloved grandmother (Frances Bay), who’s being thrown out of her house—she hasn’t paid her taxes. While supervising the state repossession agents who are emptying grandma’s house, Happy accidentally discovers that thanks to his hockey training, he has a particular talent for golf, especially the “long drive.” Encouraged by ex-golf pro Chubbs (Carl Weathers) and supportive Pro Tour publicist Virginia (Julie Bowen), Happy endeavors to win enough prize money on the golf circuit to save his grandmother’s home from the auction block. Organizers are initially appalled by Happy’s crude, uncouth game antics, but leave him be when his charismatic earthiness begins to gain him a large audience of rowdy supporters. As ...

  One of the most popular espionage subjects that originated in World War II was the German Enigma machine. Using the device, the Germans were able to send and receive coded messages without fear of the Allied Forces being able to understand them. The Germans used codes in World War I as well—most armies did—but the Enigma machine was cutting-edge tech at the time. Where the first codes were based on language and could be broken within hours, the Enigma machine created code based on mathematical equations that resulted in days and weeks of code-breaking skills. The time consumed was too large to allow the Allies any chance at acting on the intelligence they gleaned from breaking the codes. During World War II, especially in the North Atlantic area where the German U-boats were wreaking havoc with the shipping lanes, cutting off aid and supplies to Great Britain, opportunities arose to capture the Enigma ...

  “Saturday Night Live” superstar John Belushi stepped onto the silver screen with this National Lampoon produced opus of college days, a perennial favorite. The movie was actually an ensemble piece, but Belushi he stole the show so successfully that most people who have seen the movie remember him and the things he did better than they do the movie overall. First released in 1978 to an unsuspecting audience, “National Lampoon’s Animal House” quickly became the battle cry for a nation of rabble-rousers and introduced the idea of toga parties to the public at large. The movie set the style for most of the college films made since’ generally they all feature at least some of the same kinds of characters, problems, and situations. Without this film, we wouldn’t have “Van Wilder”; “Accepted”, or any of the “American Pie” movies. It opened up a whole new world to the moviegoing audience. “National Lampoon’s Animal House” ...

  In the name of honesty—I don’t like sports. I don’t like to watch them on TV, I don’t like to see them in person, and I don’t like to participate in them. This may be because, as a fat nerd, I was always chosen last, but be that as it may, I don’t like sports. But I often like sports movies, which are very rarely about the sport in question, and instead about the people who are involved. “Friday Night Lights” goes a step further, and in so doing, becomes a unique sports movie, and one of the best of the last 20 years. It’s not about a sports figure, but about how a town and its inhabitants live, even exist, through their high school football team. Evidently, high school football is enormously important in west Texas, even more so than in other areas of the U.S. Writer H.G. Bissinger spent ...

  Hunter S. Thompson is often credited with radically altering modern journalism; he’s also credited as the source of Uncle Duke in the “Doonesbury” comic strip. And not long ago, he was credited, all too accurately, with his own suicide. When you fly to close to the sun, you tend to burn your wings, but instead of going down in glorious flames, Thompson had long since immolated at least his reputation. He went from a gonzo journalist—his own term—of incredible insight and floods of stream-of-consciousness reports on a wild variety of topics, to a burned-out, somewhat creepy has-been. After a variety of directors, including Martin Scorsese, had passed on directing a movie version of one of Thompson’s best-known books, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Alex Cox picked up the reins and engaged Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando as stars. But Cox left the project due to the standard “artistic differences,” Nicholson and Brando ...