by Susan Ives, Alamo PC

I couldn't have picked a better introduction to Hollywood. Roger Ebert's review of My Fair Lady glows. If it's movie reviews you're wanting, there are hundreds of sites on the Internet that offer them, from your favorite nationally-syndicated pundits to the critic wannabes. As a counterpoint to Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, you can get Gene Siskel and friends in the Tribune. If you can't envision Siskel sans Ebert, they fuse back together on their own television show-inspired site. Chicago doesn't have a monopoly on film criticism: you can also pop in on the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the Deseret (Utah) News and The Tucson Weekly. The Express-News movie review section is in their member-only area and does not include archives.

The home-grown reviews are achingly artless. I suspect most are written by college freshmen in the throes of delayed hormonal surges - half of them strike a pose of hip irony, while the remainder are in lust with Sandra Bullock, which warps their judgement. Many of the reviews are littered with inaccuracies, misspellings and gratuitous profanity.

The exception is Mr. Cranky, who started out as an online movie critic and is now hustling to get syndicated in weekly newspapers. He is irreverent and often vulgar, so if you have delicate sensibilities, avoid him. Unlike the other upstarts, however, he is a sly writer with a deadly eye for everything false and mediocre. He has a bomb rating scheme, with the best being one bomb (almost tolerable) and blasting through consistently annoying, will require therapy after viewing, as good as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and, for the real dogs, so awful that it ruptured the very fabric of space and time with the sheer overpowering force of its mediocrity. You have a chance to talk back in the Mr. Cranky forums, and diehards can buy the t-shirt.

Archives are the best feature of online movie reviews. By the time John and I reach agreement on which movie is worth the price of the tickets and popcorn, it's out of the theaters and into the video rental stores. By then, the reviews from the Express-News and the New Yorker have long been hauled away in the recycle bin. Internet review archives fill the gap between the original review and a movie's entry into the film reference books.

For a list of almost every movie ever made, the premiere site is the Internet Movie Database, claiming to archive 128,456 movies. The level of detail is unbelievable. You can search for a movie, a cast or crew member, or even a character's name. Once you find your movie, you can buy it, listen to the soundtrack, read a plot summary and reviews...the options are endless. Some films have more data and detail than others, but it's all hyperlinked. I searched for Casablanca, then clicked on Bogey to get a list of every movie he was ever in. I could click on any of those films - 84 of them - to get their details, down to the costume designer and gaffer. I could search for movies filmed in the same location, in the same year, by the same director or in the same genre. If you visit this site, warn your family that you might not surface for a week or two.

There are other film sites, of course – hundreds. Excite is the search engine with the spiffiest index for movies; Yahoo has a decent list as well. Infoseek's Movie Channel has also proven to be useful. Lycos offers only a "community guide," which in theory is the people's choice for best sites but in practice ends up being an eclectic roster of sites whose webmasters can get their friends to stuff the ballot box. For a Texas-oriented list of links, visit the Star Film Ranch, managed by Alamo PC member Gary Yantis.

There are a slew of general movie sites. Try Girls On Film, Film.Com, RoughCut, e!Online, Microsoft's Cinemania, Hollywood.com, the Film Zone or Mr. Showbiz. Each has a slightly different slant: Cinemania's centerpiece is 20,00 reviews by Leonard Matlin; e!Online wallows in Hollywood gossip; Mr. Showbiz is an ABC television affiliate. Take your pick.

You can order hard-to-find videos online. The storefronts that I have had the best luck with, in terms of both selection and price, are Critic's Choice Video and Reel.Com. Reel, for example, rents movies for $4.50 per week, plus shipping, and buys and sells new and used VHS, laserdisk and even DVD movies. You can also purchase videos from CDNow and CDConnection, two sites described in detail in my last music-oriented Net Nerds. There are numerous specialty video stores - a good list is in Yahoo. Why buy or rent videos online? It's a method that makes sense if you are looking for obscure or old videos that the local stores may have already flushed from their inventory. If you buy or rent in bulk - five or more movies - the rates are competitive with local rental stores.

If you find your dream video in a non-US store, make sure that it's in a format compatible with your VCR - Europe used a different video format and you can end up paying the more than the cost of the tape to have it converted from PAL to VHS.

Most first-run movies have their premiere on the Internet. As a special treat, start out with Still Breathing, a soon-to-be-released romantic comedy whose real star is the city of San Antonio. I've been following the progress of this film since last spring, when it swept the SXSW show in Austin; it should hit the theaters here in April. This site is a roadmap for what a good Internet movie trailer can be - it gives tons of details about the making of the movie and makes you long to see it.

Big budget films go all-out. I enjoyed the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and intend to see the movie. The Warner Brothers official Web site contains a first-rate virtual tour of all of the actual settings in Savannah. If you're obsessed with the film there is a fan site that contains every link on the Internet that has anything to do with the book or movie.

At the Amistad site I downloaded a screensaver; the photography is stunning, but the soundtrack, consisting of grunts, chants, breaking waves and rattling chains, is disconcerting when it kicks in unexpectedly. Alien Resurrection not only has a screensaver, but also theater trailers in quicktime video format, a downladable 3-D game, background on the Alien series of movies and a store where you can purchase reasonably-priced glow-in-the-dark t-shirts and action figures. The Deconstructing Harry site has an online game that lets you reconstruct the characters in the film - it barked rude comments when I tried to slide Kirstie Alley's body under Woody Allen's head.

You get the idea. Search for your favorite new release, or get a good list of them from any of the search engines or general movie sites listed above.

Jurassic Park was rated PG-13, but every six-year-old kid has probably seen it twice with no harm to their tender psyches. Most of the parents I know are confused by the movie rating system. An R-rated film might only have a hint of violence, while a PG-13 might have fairly explicit sexual content. Mom and Dad can turn to the Internet for advice.

The Family Style Movie Guide charts the levels of profanity, nudity, sex, violence and drugs in current theater and video releases. They promise soon add a database of 4,000 additional films. Many of my friends are waffling about whether to take their kids to see Amistad. We are advised that there is little profanity, some "female upper, full; male, rear, full" nudity and that violence is abundant, consisting of "intense, graphic, beating, bloody/gore, drowning, emotional, explosions, shooting, stabbing, torture and whipping." Mr. Magoo also gets and off-the-charts violence rating, for "graphic slapstick, shooting." The charts make good shorthand, but don't answer the really hard questions. Magoo, gets a profanity rating of "very little, vulgar." One word of profanity, if it's the wrong word, can be too much.

Other sites go into more detail. PG-14, for example, is a monthly e-mail newsletter written by parents and teachers. A few reviews are online (all will be soon) including Mr. Magoo. They identify the vulgar language as being: "H-ll (2), screw up, shut up, idiot. (D-mn is heard in out takes which are shown at the end while the credits roll.)" This is the level of detail parents need to know, but I sure wouldn't want to be the unlucky mug who had to sit through a hundred movies ticking off cuss words and body parts.

Freeze Frame also goes into explicit detail, but has an eclectic roster of videos. It lists many movies that most responsible parents would never dream of letting their young kids watch, such as Demi Moore in Striptease, which has "PROFANITY: 8 - "F" words / 18 - "S" words / 8 - "A" words / 3 - deity name as profanity / 2 - "SOB" / 10 - slang sexual terms SEX & NUDITY: 6 extended scenes of female breast nudity." Caspar, of the friendly ghost ilk, was listed as having "PROFANITY: 3 'butt', 1 "Oh my God", 2 vomit scenes, 2 "gas passing' jokes." I don't think I'd even want my husband to see these!

The best parental advisory site is probably ScreenIt!. It lists hundreds of movies with a easy-to-use interface and exquisite detail. For Dante's Peak they describe 15 scenes that could agitate sensitive kids (or twitchy adults), such as Harry tries to drive through a lava stream that's covering the road and the truck gets stuck and catches on fire and the kids inside are very scared. They describe profanity, sex, nudity, alcohol, tobacco and drug use, and even scarey music.

There are extensive plot summaries, and the common sense advice is right on target. You probably won't want to drag your middle-schoolers to Amistad, the reviewer maintains, not because of the brief nudity but rather because they would be bored out of their skulls by the courtroom scenes that dominate the second half of the film.

There are several excellent film history sites. A good starting place is Media History Project Film History Connections, which has links to other sites. A hidden gem is the Film History and Resources site being assembled by a University of Minnesota professor (the product of many long winter nights huddled around a blazing VCR for warmth, no doubt.) This is a fascinating proto-book on film history that is both enlightening and entertaining.

If you are a budding screenwriter, director or other film professional, the Internet can help you turn your dreams into celluloid. Start with the Cyber Film School. It contains some original content but its real strength is a massive directory of thoughtfully annotated links to other pertinent sites under the "learning Online" icon. Also look at the files download section, which contains several Microsoft Office templates for formatting screenplays in Word or film budgets in Excel. Even if your aspirations don't extend beyond producing a home video of the grandkids, there is practical advice here for people of all levels.

Susan Ives, president of Alamo PC, always aces the movie questions in Jeopardy!