Call it "kids of the big guns." Colin Hanks, son of Tom, plays Shaun, a California surfer dude whose girlfriend, Ashley, played by Schuyler Fisk, daughter of Sissy Spacek, doesn't want him to leave Orange County to study writing at Stanford. The director, Jake Kasdan, 26, is the son of Lawrence, director of The Big Chill. Got that?

It doesn't matter. Hanks and Fisk are charming. And Kasdan has lucked out with a deft script by Mike White — both worked on TV's Freaks and Geeks — that elevates the usual teen twaddle by grounding the laughs in feeling. It helps that a wow cast, including Jack Black, as Shaun's druggie loser of a brother, and such vets as Catherine O'Hara, John Lithgow, Chevy Chase, Lily Tomlin, Garry Marshall, Harold Ramis and Ben Stiller (son of Jerry), keeps the fun at full tilt. It's the new year's first happy surprise.

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.