Ranpitsu

What pictures like Surrogates show is that there’s no substitute for a compelling story. Much of the awkwardly-titled Surrogates’ marketing time was devoted to establishing the context and setting of its near future world where humans live their lives through robot surrogates, from a trailer that started as a commercial (a la ads for The Island and others) to billboards of models with parts of their robotic skeletons exposed. However, relatively little time was devoted to the story, characters and action, which were left vague and nondescript. Given the volume of other like-minded movies, the robot or avatar premise alone does not possess the wow factor with audiences, and, lacking a clear connection to the real world, served only to disconnect Surrogates from moviegoers.

While the Ice Age franchise’s migration from spring to a more competitive summer might be bandied about as a reason for Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ relatively more glacial reception, the picture suffered from looking like more of the same in its marketing campaign. No compelling reason was presented to make it as big a theatrical event as The Meltdown, and the proceedings may have been confounded by the anachronistic inclusion of dinosaurs, which were seemingly intended as a shortcut to audience expansion.

Issues of personal taste usually shouldn’t be a factor when engaging in legitimate movie criticism. The good movie critic should be able to aptly assess a film’s merit regardless of their own personal preferences for what they like to see on screen. Yet when it comes to a movie like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, personal taste is the major factor that will determine the response of everybody who sees it. Those who embrace the aesthetic of Michael Bay or were a fan of the first film are most likely going to have a good time with this one. For those who think Bay’s films are emblematic of everything wrong with contemporary Hollywood cinema, Transformers 2 will prove to be further evidence to fuel their fire. While many will defend this film and many others will despise it, there’s one thing this film is sure not to do: disappoint. Whatever expectations you have going into it—whether it be a bombastic summer-fun explosions-and-cleavage fest or a bloated schizophrenic mess of incomprehensible noises and images—Bay delivers fully on these expectations.

Efron’s brand of star acting is a purring geniality that in an older man would make you want to vote for him. Movie stardom is a form of politics in which people vote by buying tickets. But the electorate is fickle. The Efron effect could be evanescent.

A movie ticket is not of a price that causes people to feel guilty for spending their money. People have traditionally complained about ticket prices, but in this economy, for an outside-the-home activity, it’s looking like a relative bargain.

It looks like they might bring this one in at under three hours, so I’ll curb my complaining. And I’ll close by noting that this seemed not only like a relatively brief Oscar ceremony, but a small one. Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come. Like it or not, the movies have lost their pop-cultural supremacy, and the fate of the Oscars may either be to go after a vanished mass appeal or to scale down, acknowledge the shrinking of the audience and turn into something like the Tonys. More of a coterie affair, appealing to the aficionados and the curious. It would be an honorable outcome.

There were no permits and no planning — just sheer nerve. “After 26 blocks, from Bay 50th to Bay 24th Street, I ran out of film, but I knew I had enough,” Mr. Friedkin said. “The fact that we never hurt anybody in the chase run, the way it was poised for disaster, this was a gift from the Movie God. Everything happened on the fly. We would never do this again. Nor should it ever be attempted in that way again.

I worked the Oscar circuit in 2006 and watched Mr. Ledger in support of “Brokeback Mountain,” then a favorite for best picture, and can say he never was much of a campaigner. A polite, nice man, he had little aptitude or appetite for trite talk at parties or events, even when he was up for a best actor Oscar, as he was then. For “The Dark Knight” the studio has eschewed any R.I.P. allusions in its trade advertising, instead relying on a steady (and not frantic) visual presence of somebody now best known for his absence, showing him in various guises: the crazed man in the nurse’s uniform, the immovable object standing in the middle of the street.

The use of “pervert” in the movie’s title is a bit of a come-on. Although there is kinky behavior in a number of clips (especially those from the Lynch films), this is not a textbook in Krafft-Ebing. The word merely refers to the Peeping Tom aspect of moviegoing. In the darkness of a theater we can unashamedly gape at bodies and fantasize without being observed, and in doing so we confront our demons in a safe environment. The movies of Hitchcock, who was obsessed with emotional manipulation, repeatedly toyed with the notion of the viewer as voyeur.

Parents say, ‘I thought, “How bad could [the movie] be because they have all these toys?” ’ ” says Susan Linn of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. “And then they take their 5-year-old to ‘Iron Man,’ and there are extended scenes of torture.