Many critics have concluded that the only thing wrong with the new comedy Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star is that it's not very funny. The film stars David Spade as a former child star, who, at mid-life, is struggling to rebuild his career while working as a car attendant. Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe observes: "To the casual Spade fan, this might seem dangerously close to home. Every Spade outing fills you with worry that he's one knuckleheaded movie away from parking cars himself." An even harsher judgment of the star is provided by John Anderson of Newsday: "What Spade brings to the title character... is very close to nothing." Comments Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "There are laughs, to be sure, and some gleeful supporting performances, but after a promising start the movie sinks in a bog of sentiment." Similarly Chris Kaltenbach writes in the Baltimore Sun: "There's a funny movie struggling inside of Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Too bad it never gets out." Several critics (Ebert included) remark that the film might have been a whole lot funnier if Jim Carrey had been cast in the title role. Stephen Holden in the New York Times observes that unlike Carrey, "Mr. Spade is no comic ball of fire." All of the critics, however, do agree on one thing: the closing credits which reunites a slew of former child stars singing a kind of profanity-laced "We Are the World," is worth the price of admission.

Ironically, also opening this weekend in limited release is Party Monster, starring real-life former child star Macaulay Culkin, who is garnering mixed notices. "It is a fearless performance," remarks Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times also has praise for Culkin, who has not appeared in a film since 1994's Richie Rich. "He succeeds as an adult actor in completely unexpected ways," Thomas writes. But Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News comments: "His performance in Party Monster is so embarrassing one doesn't know where to look. (Well, perhaps at the exit.)" And Joanne Kaufman concludes in the Wall Street Journal: "His every line reading recalls a second-rate leading man touring the provinces in a third-rate drawing-room comedy." Directly between those judgments is A.O. Scott in the New York Times, who writes: "His performance is earnest and brave, but also mannered when it should be unselfconscious, and awkward when grace is called for."

Disney is planning to release a new wide-screen version of The Lion King on DVD on Oct. 7, including a new song, Morning Report, surround sound, and additional details that were created for the IMAX release of the film. "It's the most anticipated Disney movie on DVD, and the exciting news is that it's not just the movie that they all loved," Gordon Ho, marketing chief for Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment, told today's USA Today. The original version will also be included in the two-disk set. "The purists out there can see the movie exactly as it was in 1994," Hahn told the newspaper.

Singapore, which has been accused of imposing almost puritanical censorship regulations on films distributed in the country, may relax its ratings system under proposals outlined by the country's Censorship Review Committee. Liu Thai Ker, who heads the committee, told the Singapore Straits Times: "Certain things that are vital to the artistic merit of the film, we will ask the Media Development Authority to consider carefully before it rejects them." Although the committee is proposing less stringent ratings for films depicting sex, it is proposing tougher ones for those depicting violence. Distributors have balked at the proposals. Thomas Chia, director of independent distributor Lighthouse Pictures, told the newspaper, "How do you cut the violent scenes in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, or Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, when they are so crucial to the films?"

For the first time, a British film is being released on the Internet and in movie theaters in Britain on the same day. The film, This Is Not a Love Song, written by Simon Beaufoy, who also wrote The Full Monty, is being presented on the website today (Friday) only, and can be viewed by persons living in the U.K. and running Microsoft Windows operating systems. The charge is £2 ($3.40) to watch the film "streamed" to the viewer's PC or £3 ($5.10) for downloads. The film was funded by the British Film Council, which said, "We are keen to use it as a test bed now that the technology is there."

Researchers were checking this morning (Friday) to see when ABC last scored a first-place win on a Thursday night, after the network averaged a 15.8/24 for its coverage of the NFL game between the New York Jets and Washington. Combined with the 8.7/14 registered by the pregame broadcast, ABC, with a 13.6/20 for the night, held a 45 percent lead over second-place CBS, which wound up with a 9.4/14. "Supersized" reruns of NBC's Must-See-TV sitcoms performed poorly, with the network averaging only a third-place 6.9/11 for the night.

A former CNN vice president who was assigned to recruiting on-air talent has filed a lawsuit against the cable news network charging that it engaged in "a pattern and practice of unlawful race, sex and age discrimination." As reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bonnie Anderson claims in the lawsuit that when she refused to participate in the alleged discrimination, she was fired. Specifically, she charges that top CNN executives required a particular ethnic mix for each of its networks. Her charges were echoed by a second suit, filed by former CNN International anchor Marina Kolbe, who claims that CNN concentrated ethnic and racial minority anchors on its CNN International network while demanding primarily white female anchors at CNN USA and CNN Headline News. CNN declined to comment on the lawsuits.

Apparently hoping to reignite dwindling audience interest in Frasier in its final season, the producers have cast Wendie Malick, who played the beauty and fashion editor Nina Van Horn on Just Shoot Me, in the role of a woman who becomes the love interest of both Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and his father (John Mahoney). According to next week's issue of TV Guide, Malick's character had once been Frasier and Niles's childhood baby-sitter. "It ultimately becomes a competition between [father and son]," exec producer Joe Keenan told the magazine. "It's classic Frasier."

One day after a U.S. appeals court stymied new FCC rules that would allow media giants to own more stations, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to bar the commission from spending money to implement such rules. The stipulation was included in a spending bill. In July, the House passed a similar measure. Meanwhile, former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt has paid tribute to lawyer Andrew Schwartzman, who, as head of the Media Access Project, has successfully battled the FCC's efforts to relax the media ownership rules. "When I was at the FCC, even when he was berating me publicly, I always tried to listen to what he said because he was so often right," Hundt told today's (Friday) Wall Street Journal. "As a lawyer, he is more than a match for any of the lawyers the agency has or these companies can hire."

Edgar Bronfman Jr., who lost out to NBC in his effort to buy back Vivendi Universal's U.S. entertainment assets, said Thursday that he will rejoin Vivendi's board of directors once the NBC deal is completed. He also remarked that he personally plans to return to the entertainment industry, saying "I know how to run entertainment businesses, how to work with strong executives and build strong management teams, which is what I did at Universal, and I would love to have the opportunity to do it again." Interviewed by Fox News's Neil Cavuto, Bronfman also said, "We took [on] the biggest company in the world [General Electric] to the last pitch of the last inning of probably one of the largest and most complex transactions ever done." Asked whether he might make a stab at Vivendi's Universal Music company, Bronfman replied indirectly: "I think they have to get this deal done with NBC before they're going to turn their attention anywhere [else]."

Ray Romano has acknowledged that he was aware that his fellow cast members on CBS's Everybody Loves Raymond would be demanding salary hikes once it became known that he would be earning $1.8 million per episode. "It was inevitable," Romano told the New York Daily News. "When my salary came out in the papers, I knew stuff would happen." He added: "I'd do exactly the same thing as this cast did. ... I don't hold anything against anyone, not the cast or CBS. I'm loyal to both of them."