Summer has been the feel-good movie season for so long, we've started to get picky. Just last week at "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," I saw a preview of "The Guardians of the Galaxy" that recycled an old rock song made famous by "Reservoir Dogs." Five main characters, one a dog, are briefed by John C. Reilly in a lineup. Cut to these characters engaged in intergalactic shootouts with comic interplay dropped in between the action scenes. Then the final comic quip at the end. I really, really hope those aren't the funniest parts of the movie. That's what happened with "R.I.P.D." last year. It goes back to David Denby's comment in the New Yorker a few years ago: Hollywood is making what it thinks it can sell versus what people want to see. Feel-good can be touching, insightful, one can even learn from it. Or, there's a deeper truth. Take "Dodgeball," where the underlying question is, does one really need a nice gym in which to work out? It doesn't take a whole lot, and you don't want to show all your cards on the first hand among all the noise.
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