The first and last time that I saw The Lion King was during its initial theatrical release in the summer of 1994. I was 16 at the time and was temporarily back in the U.S. from my then-current home in Hong Kong, enjoying the extended vacation that State Department families received in the middle of four-year tours abroad. Movie-wise, it was a good summer to be stateside. While most Hollywood fare made it across the Pacific, there was generally a time delay that could range from weeks to months depending on the movie in question. In the span of our roughly five-week stay in the U.S., I saw in quick succession, Keanu Reeves piloting an out-of-control city bus in Speed, Jack Nicholson getting his werewolf on in Wolf, Alec Baldwin donning cloak and fake nose to play The Shadow and Tom Hanks eating his way through a box of chocolates in Forrest Gump. And somewhere in the middle of all that, we also made time for that year's Disney offering The Lion King, because if you came of age during the Mouse House's late-'80s renaissance, going to see the studio's latest animated feature was just something you did, like breathing, eating or picking Ryu over Ken for marathon Street Fighter II sessions.

Objectively speaking, Glee is a cash cow. It translates into anything, be it board games, apparel, books series, reality competitions... nothing is too much of a stretch to brand. When I originally heard of the concept of the Glee Live! In Concert! tour, I thought they were pushing it. And when I found out that they were slapping together a 3D documentary about the concert in a mere six weeks, I was ready to deem Glee bastardized beyond the point of return. But I was wrong: Glee: The 3D Concert Movie not only surprised me as a film, it restored a faith in the series that had been lacking for me. And as it turns out, a lot of my original assumptions going into the movie turned out to be incorrect.

The beauty of the Smurf "language" is that it is open to so much interpretation. One could translate the title either as: "This Movie Is So Freaking Great That You Leave Smiling" or "This Movie Is So Annoyingly Painful That You'll Leave Complaining" or any variation of those two. Though if you are over the age of eight, you'll probably find the latter interpretation to be the most accurate.

It's tempting to award Disney's Winnie the Pooh a rave review based on all the things it doesn't offer. To wit, it's not in 3D, it doesn't have any large-scale action sequences and it was primarily animated by hand rather than on a computer. All of these omissions set it distinctly apart from virtually every other American-made cartoon feature released within the past five years.

It's been six years since Winnie the Pooh and his fellow fluff-stuffed residents of the Hundred Acre Wood's last feature film outing, Pooh's Heffalump Movie. That may seem like a fair amount of time, but there are other classic Disney characters that have been exiled from movie theaters for much longer. Consider this the start of a campaign to get them back on the big screen where they belong.

The following is an excerpted transcript of the podcast What Planet Earth Are You From?, a co-production of The Daily Bugle and Wayne Entertainment.

In all the hoopla over the new trailer for Super 8 (which looks like J.J. Abrams taking on The Goonies, a.k.a. awesome), people have happily forgotten that yesterday saw the debut of the first full-length trailer for The Smurfs. Now, I'm only a moderate Smurf fan, but I've been dreading this movie since I first heard about it, because I knew it would be a train wreck of Garfield proportions. Unfortunately, the trailer does not seem to be proving me wrong, as there are numerous elements that have dreading the day I will be forced to see it for review purposes. As a sneak peek of that review, here are the things I found the most annoying, terrifying and disgusting about the trailer.

Any movie that combines the themes of Harry Potter with The Lord of the Rings has the potential to be a smash hit, but, as the box office for the last chronicle of Narnia showed, it can't also be a grim, dreary bore. So while Prince Caspian felt like it was mostly about armies charging at each other, Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a much more swashbuckling adventure, with wonderment and comedy and, yes, even more heavy-handed Christian allegory. I forgot how much I missed it!

While I saw Megamind last weekend, I guarantee when this movie comes out on DVD six months from now, I'll be scratching my head trying to remember what the plot of it was. It reminds me of Monsters vs. Aliens in that way. Not a terrible movie, not particularly original, fine to watch for an hour and a half but totally unmemorable. In fact, I know that I'll start saying "Ho-lo" instead of "Hello" and not be able to remember at all where I heard that. I know it's going to drive me Google crazy in the future.

Everybody is talking about how creative and original Christopher Nolan's Inception is, but it turns out Gyro Gearloose thought of it first. The inventor/anthropomorphic goose actually invented his own shared-dreaming device back in 2004, in an Uncle Scrooge comic book, and the Beagle Boys tried to use it to get the combination to Scrooge's giant money vault. Did Nolan read a Disney comic book six years ago and forget about it? Or did somebody plant it in his brain while he was sleeping? Out of curiosity, we skimmed through our comic book collections to see what's what, and found that all of Nolan's movie plots can actually be traced back to kids' comic books and comic strips. Scandal!