That these blood-gushing movies — among the year's biggest and starriest — are arriving just when audiences might be in the mood for some cheerful family entertainment isn't so surprising.
" 'The Rescuers' doesn't belong in the same category as the great Disney cartoon features," Vincent Canby wrote in The Times, adding that "it's a reminder of a kind of slickly cheerful, animated entertainment that has become all but extinct," (Walt Disney Video, Blu-ray/DVD combo $39.99, DVD $29.99, G).
Ballet Tech, Mr. Feld's company, is offering two weeks of cheerful family entertainments at the Joyce Theater.
But over the past week, I have found reasons to be cheerful in popular entertainment, specifically the films Up and Avatar.
Kevin Smith's comedy, the foul-tongued, bare-limbed "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" is another twist — God help us — on those cheerful M-G-M entertainments.
This is the kind of American novel that sees the world through a wide-angle lens, and try as it might to incorporate tragedy, it is essentially a cheerful enterprise with a guaranteed entertainment value.
In the first book, reclusive, artistic Jeremy animates a cheerful monster whose incessant demands for hand-drawn entertainment prove exhausting.
As if to offset the malice of their trade, hosts like Mary Hart of "Entertainment Tonight and Lara Spencerr of "The Insider" are pageant-pretty, cheerful and unshakably sweet.
In his carefully constructed tribute, Mr. Holmes, an entertainment king in Las Vegas, approaches his subject with a cheerful reverence.
"I definitely want to find other things outside of music and entertainment to get myself into," T. I. said, backstage after bidding Ms. Behar a cheerful farewell.
