To a certain kind of filmgoer—okay, a certain kind of female filmgoer—Nicholas Sparks films are cinematic comfort food.

With the exception of The Notebook—which came closest to approximating the rhythms and cadences of an actual movie—the films based on his books are bland, easy to digest, and virtually interchangeable. And what could be more comforting than that?

We have our beautiful boy and girl. We have an appealing setting (a beach house, a resort town, a funky dog kennel in the North Carolina countryside). We have a powerful attraction (rarely made believable by the script—Sparks believes that beautiful people should be together simply because they are beautiful, and who am I to argue?). We have the thing that drives them apart ™ . Then we have a little rush of action/melodrama toward the end. And finally we have our happy ending (or sad mushy ending cause occasionally the thing that drives them apart ™ is leukemia or somethin’). (Sad face.)

The actresses who appear in these films are often music stars trying to show-off their cinematic chops, like Mandy Moore and Miley Cyrus, or on-the-rise ingenues (like Rachel McAdams and Amanda...

Here’s the problem with bullying, as Lee Hirsch delineates so brilliantly in his new documentary Bully: Half of the people reading this don’t even think bullying is a problem. “Kids will be kids,” they say. “Kids can be cruel.” “Bullying is a natural part of growing up.”

Parents of bullied kids are likewise unaware. Since the bullied kids are usually embarrassed, they tend not to tell their folks the extent of the torment. And when they do speak up, their ordeal is often trivialized—“smile more,” the parents might say. “Learn to defend yourself,” etc. etc.

School administrators are defensive about the subject, which carries the intimation that they are not protecting their charges. And to avoid potential liability, they want to shift the blame squarely back on the shoulders of the parents.

And so it goes. A perfect storm of inaction—with bullied kids paying the ultimate price.

Are there more teen suicides these days as a result of bullying? I don’t know. I suspect the problem has been under the radar for generations. But not anymore. Bullying is finally getting the attention as a serious social plague that it deserves, largely because of Dan Savage’s galvanizing “It Gets...

From the moment rookie cops Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) get their assignment to go undercover in a high school, because, according to their sergeant, the force’s higher-ups “lack creativity” and simply “recycle old ideas from the ’80s,” I knew I was in good hands.

Look, 21 Jump Street is hardly the first film to playfully acknowledge its own lame concept or to send up the buddy cop genre with a wink, but it certainly does it with style.

There are all sorts of clever recurring bits in this film, but among the best is the fact that, although Schmidt and Jenko are only seven years out of high school themselves—Schmidt was a brace-faced nerd and Jenko was a bullying big man on campus—all the rules have changed.

No one calls on the telephone anymore. (It’s all about texting now.) Not caring about anything, which Jenko tells Schmidt is a sure way to secure popularity, has been replaced by environmental and social activism. Nerds are now cool. Gay kids are celebrated.

“I know the culprit,” moans Jenko. “Glee.”

Another ingenious bit: Jenko is so dim-witted he has forgotten his undercover assignment name, so he ends up with the wrong identity. Now,...

Six years ago, I went on WBAL radio and boldly announced that if Brokeback Mountain didn’t win the Academy Award, I would eat my shoe.

Well, you know the rest: I was forced to blow 60 bucks on a chocolate shoe I found at an online candy store and was later mocked by a complete stranger at the dentist’s office: “Did you chip a tooth eating your shoe?” (For what it’s worth, the overrated Crash ended up getting the nod.)

Ahhh, good times. And times, I feel, that will no longer be replicated.

One of the many problems with this newish phenomenon called “Oscar season”—a season filled with not just a surfeit of award shows (including, full disclosure, one that I vote for: the Critics' Choice Award), but an endless chamber of mirrors of prognostication, analysis, praise, backlash, backlash against the backlash, Tweeting, and live-blogging—is that it has taken almost all the suspense out of the Oscar season.

Don’t get me wrong, there have always been people who were Oscar experts, who analyzed the trajectory of a particular actor or film’s chances the way brokers follow the stock market. But those were a somewhat rarefied bunch, insider types who subscribed to the...