When you settle in to watch the Academy Awards Sunday night, don’t forget your laptop. Kenneth will be blogging along, live, and you’re encouraged to log in and share your thoughts and questions here.

It’s easy to tell which side is virtuous and which side is debased in <i>Red Cliff</i>, John Woo’s spectacular war film set in third-century China. The virtuous leaders love music and tea, and they commune with nature. The debased ones desecrate their dead.

Newt Gingrich, you’ll recall, shut down the federal government because Bill Clinton made him use the back door of the plane. Depending on whom you ask, the stakes aren’t quite so high in the marvelous British sports film <i>The Damned United</i>, but like the Gingrich story, this movie likewise warns us that grudges can lead to disaster.

Some children’s stories work primarily for…children. Some please both children and adults. But some are mostly for adults — and that may be the case with Spike Jonze’s new movie from Maurice Sendak’s famous 1963 picture book <i>Where the Wild Things Are</i>.

It took years of hard work to get tax and other official state incentives for major film productions in Wisconsin, and just a quick flick of the pen to destroy them. That’s the simplified version of the story, anyway. But the fact remains that for a brief and shining moment, the Badger State boasted one of the most inviting tax environments in the country for movie makers.

In 1937, director Leo McCarey, who had spent almost all of his career as an expert maker of comedy movies, decided to direct something entirely different. He wanted to make a classic movie tear-jerker, based on <i>The Years Are So Long</i>, Josephine Lawrence’s novel about elderly parents and their neglectful children. The result was <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i>.

Three-quarters through <i>Valentine’s Day</i>, director Garry Marshall pops in for a seconds-long cameo as a mariachi band player. At the sneak screening, you could feel a little ripple go through the crowd — sort of a “ha!” coupled with an “aww!”

When we think of Paris and the movies, we think perhaps of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, of songs by Edith Piaf or Django Reinhardt. Not in <i>From Paris With Love</i>, though — however the title may fool us.

I don’t mean to argue that all romantic figures in the movies should conform to the same ideal — variety is the spice of life, after all — but was the world really begging for a leading man in cropped cargo pants?

<i>Amelia</i> is an old-fashioned, overly romantic movie, but likably so. It’s true that director Mira Nair and writers Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan don’t spring many surprises while telling us the story of the famed trailblazing aviatrix Amelia Earhart — an iconic American figure of the ’20s and ’30s who vanished over the Pacific while on a record-breaking, gender-smashing, ’round-the-world flight. But I’m not sure I wanted them too.