The movie is pretty cornball. Little kids would probably enjoy it, but their older brothers and sisters will be rolling their eyes, and their parents will be using their iPods.

The story is formula from beginning to end: The plucky girl and her plucky car, both disregarded by the dominant male culture, but gritting their teeth, or radiators, for a chance to prove themselves. The ineffectual dad. The teeth-gnashing villain. The racing footage.

Well I haven't even scene the movie and I knew it was going to be corny. Herbie was quite the lovable Bug back in the 60's and 70's, with the huge popularity of modern remakes this idea was not to far fetched and expected. Personally I was very surprised to see the cast that was put together for this movie, all of them great names. Lindsay Lohan mentioned above, who is still learning, but hey lets face it, she's a babe. I'm just as shallow as the next guy and I will end up watching Herbie to see LL in a jumpsuit alone. Michael Keaton plays LL's father and who can say a bad thing about Keaton. His last movie "White Noise" was certainly a flawed movie, but Keaton was the element that saved it from utter complete failure. Finally we have Matt Dillon who plays the villain. I'm not really a big fan of Dillon but I also can't say he's a bad actor - I just don't get pumped up to see him in things. As you can see the casting was done very well so what was the movies major issue?

"Herbie: Fully Loaded" opens with a montage of headlines and TV coverage from Herbie's original burst of fame, as chronicled in three earlier movies. That leads me to wonder (a) why Herbie ended up in a junkyard, when such a famous car should obviously be in a classic automobile museum in Las Vegas, and (b) why, when Maggie appears with the rebuilt and customized Herbie, no one in the racing media realizes this is the same car.

Never mind. The real story is Herbie's intelligence. The car seems to be self-aware, able to make decisions on its own, and able to communicate with Maggie on an emotional level, and sometimes with pantomime or by example. Why then is everyone, including Lohan, so fixated on how fast the car can go? The car could be up on blocks and be just as astonishing.

It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: "God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought." His editor cabled back: "Forget flood. Interview God."

~Roger Ebert
Sun Times

Thanks Ebert, allthough I have yet to see the movie -and probably wont until it's on HBO inDemand- I will now watch it without any disappointing expectations. Instead I will focus my attention of Lindsay's cute ass!