... FOR "UNFAIR EXPECTATIONS AND THE CRITICS' CONSENSUS ON 'CARS 2' (COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING)"

Holy crap – have you seen the aggregate rating for Pixar's Cars 2 on Rotten Tomatoes? As of this writing, it's currently holding at 33%! That means, out of all the critics who've seen the movie, only 1/3 actually liked the movie enough to recommend it. For a Pixar movie, that's unheard of – unprecedented even. Especially when you look at their Rotten track record: Toy Story (100%), A Bug's Life (91%), Toy Story 2 (100%), Monsters Inc. (95%), Finding Nemo (98%), The Incredibles (97%), Cars (74%), Ratatouille (96%), WALL-E (96%), Up (98%), and Toy Story 3 (99%).

Look at that list again. Did you notice anything else peculiar about it? That's right: Out of all the Pixar films to grace our theater screens, Cars and Cars 2 rank the lowest. Frankly, this is baffling to me. What's everyone's problem with Cars? If you read any of those reviews, the general consensus seems to be that no one buys that particular world. I get that. A world populated by talking anthropomorphic vehicles? Sports cars, passenger cars, trucks, helicopters, airplanes, bugs? Are you serious? Sure, I can buy walking, talking toys and insects and fish and monsters in my closet, but vehicles with mouths and eyes and hopes and dreams? That's a little too much to grasp, thank you very much. Who "manufactures" these cars anyway? Where are all the people? Who built the highways? Who carved all those structures in the mountains? Help, my brain is melting!

... FOR "LOWERED EXPECTATIONS (PART 3 - 'HOW DO YOU KNOW' EDITION)

Another entry in a (potentially) long list of titles that aren't quite as bad as their reputations would have you believe. Or vice versa, for movies that fail to live up to the hype.

So here we are again. Up to this point, we've covered an OK movie that's not quite as bad as everyone would have you believe, and a movie that's a lot better than I actually expected. That's what happens when you temper your expectations a bit – more often than not, you wind up pleasantly surprised. (Not that I'd tell anyone to rush out and see Jonah Hex, but still.)

But what happens when you expect something more out of a movie than what you actually get?

... FOR "LOWERED EXPECTATIONS (PART 2 - 'MEGAMIND' EDITION)

Another entry in a (potentially) long list of titles that aren't quite as bad as their reputations would have you believe. Or vice versa, for movies that fail to live up to the hype.

I'm not the biggest fan of DreamWorks Animation. On average, I find they're too "hip" and self- referential for their own good. Unlike, say, Disney/Pixar, which practically oozes "quality entertainment" each time out (and sometimes even surpasses those expectations), DreamWorks' track record is a bit... splotchy at best. While the folks at Pixar divide most of their attention between pesky things like "theme" and telling an actual "story," the geniuses at DreamWorks worry instead about cramming as many in-jokes and pop- culture references into their movies as possible, to be "of the moment," as it were – too eager to cash in on current trends.

... FOR "LOWERED EXPECTATIONS (PART 1 - 'JONAH HEX' EDITION)"

Another day, another project.

You ever happen to avoid a particular movie title like the plague just because everyone says it's a gigantic waste of time? And then years later, you happen to catch that same movie on TV, and you stop on it just long enough to have a look, because there's nothing else on? And you sit through it a bit and you wonder, Why did everyone trash talk this movie so badly? It might not be great, but it's surely not the lamentable piece of trash everyone said it was. What's the big deal?

By letting the positive/negative hype factor wash over you like that, two things tend to happen. Either a) those movies everyone hailed as near- masterpieces turn out to be mild-to-major disappointments, or b) those so-called "bombs" don't stink quite as bad as the movie-going public would have you believe.