Hasbro is a big American toy company—only rival Mattel is larger. Hasbro sells Monopoly, Scrabble, Pictionary, Clue, Trivial Pursuit and dozens of other household brands—Tonka, Tinkertoys, Nerf, Mr. Potato Head, Play-Doh, Transformers and so on. The people who run Hasbro are very, very rich.

In 1963, jealous of Mattel’s success with Barbie, Hasbro launched a line of 12-inch soldier dolls for boys—Action Soldier, Action Sailor, Action Pilot and Action Marine (hence action figure). The original G.I. Joes flew off the shelves until America flew into Laos and Cambodia—preventing both Hasbro and the White House from selling war for the next decade-and-a-half.

G.I. Joe redeployed in 1985 with smaller molds and smarter marketing (to be copied by George W. Bush after 9/11)—now they were an elite international force defending “human freedom against a ruthless terrorist organization.”  There were comic books and a TV show, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, which ran weekdays on the networks. (Washington prefers to demonize al-Qaida in prime-time.) Once again, Hasbro couldn’t stamp the plastic figurines fast enough.

A Real American Hero was everything the rest of the world (that’s us!) dislikes about Americans—loud, simplistic, disingenuous and culturally tone-deaf. For instance, the ethnic-cleansing names for some of the white characters—Cutter, Torch and Sgt. Slaughter—juxtaposed with the Native American Joe, code-named Spirit (what else?), who sported braids, epigrammatic English and a pet eagle, Freedom. The Joes were not scared high-school dropouts of all races from low-income towns (like the real American “heroes”), but fearless, steroid-pumped Aryan musclemen.

Of course, racist war propaganda will only entertain children for so long. The American Hero line was retired in 1994. Which brings us to Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Hasbro’s Hollywood honcho, the man responsible for the two Transformers movies just past, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra right now, and millions of toy sales in the future.

The Rise of Cobra can best be described as a wall of noise and sound for people who like to bang their heads into walls, transporting a team of Joes from a green-screen Sahara Desert to a green-screen underwater base to a green-screen North Pole to, well, it doesn’t even matter. Channing Tatum, who plays Duke, defends the movie’s awfulness this way: “It’s a huge, 170-million-dollar movie. It’s just a big, kid sort-of driven film.” Oh. Okay, then. Paramount, who made and promoted the movie, refused to even screen the film for American critics. It’s as if your husband said you didn’t look fat, and then traded the car for a forklift.

To answer the absurdity question, the movie is worse, even though in one episode of the TV show, a dog saves the Joes by using his paws to pump a handcar out of a mineshaft.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra centers around a swarm of nano-bug-things that can eat a city. Yes, you read that right. It doesn’t spoil anything to tell you they try to eat Paris. There are costumed freaks trying to spill the bugs—the Baroness, Storm Shadow, the Doctor—and costumed freaks trying to kill the bugs—Duke, Ripcord, Scarlett, Snake Eyes and Heavy Duty. They fight—in the air, on the ground, under the water. Nobody really wins, except Hasbro. Nobody really loses, except us.

All that’s left to say is: Go, Joe. Please go.

But first, Palace Amusement wants you to know they have a card that can save you time. Also, the tabloid Chat! says hi; Burger King wants you to buy Whoppers; Guardian Life asks for your money; Digicel reminds you it is bigger and better (than what?); KingAlarm hawks their security systems; Claro sings about their 3G network (whatever that is); KIG claims to sell cars, although it’s not clear which ones; and Palace Amusement says they have more cards—gift cards this time. They will also host your child’s birthday party.

If you found that annoying, don’t go to the cineplex.

And now, the review. Here’s the truth. You’ve read all seven of J. K. Rowling’s books. You’ve watched at least one of the previous five movies in the franchise. You, or your child, or your spouse, threw both hands triumphantly in the air when you saw the TV promotional spots. And, regardless of what is printed here, you’re going to go and see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Fortunately, the movie is highly watchable. Sturdy, even. As far as these spectacles go, it’s positively masterful. Tightly plotted, appropriately macabre, surprisingly witty. The trouble with adapting the Potter stories is that everyone already knows what happens. Titanic (1997) navigated that obstacle by putting Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio at the prow, The Passion of the Christ (2004) by obsessing over visceral detail. Director David Yates and series scribe Steve Kloves, handling a truly sacred text, instead tweak Half-Blood Prince to create unexpected, fresh moments.

One comes early, when Harry flirts with a waitress in a Muggle diner, only to be interrupted by his Hogwarts headmaster, Dumbledore. Magic was Harry’s escape from reality; now the real world reveals its own charms. Hormones run high throughout Half-Blood Prince—Hermione, Ron and Harry all have uncomfortable moments with each other (not least when Ron, having imbibed a love potion, jumps into Harry’s bed).

The romantic comedy bits provide welcome relief from the dark thrills and black magic of Half-Blood Prince. More than the earlier installments, though less than the novel, the film lingers on ugly instincts—fear and revenge, pride and prejudice, power and greed.

Around 1940, with war close at hand, many German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood. Their expressionistic aesthetic fused with American paranoia to create film noir—cheap crime thrillers with high-contrast lighting, oblique camera angles and a persistent sense of pessimism, suspicion and gloom.

A similar sensibility pervades Half-Blood Prince, with its Dark Arts, dementors and Death Eaters, so Yates and his cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel borrow the film noir look. Hogwarts has never been so menacing—cathedral windows cast prison-bar shafts of light onto cold stone passages. Many scenes are staged at night. Even the posters for the film betray the heritage, its text askew, its heroes half-hidden.

Warner Bros. spent more than US$150 million just to market and distribute Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, trying to get people excited enough to line up and buy tickets. This time, the excitement is warranted. But try to be late. With a little luck (drink some Felix Felicis), you’ll skip the ads.

Digital 3D is the latest attempt by American film distributors (like Ice Age’s 20th Century Fox) and global film exhibitors (in Jamaica, that means Palace Amusement) to lure people to the cineplex.  In geological time, it comes hot on the heels of other gimmicks like sound (1927), color (1929), old-fashioned 3D images (1952) and widescreen (1953).

Those changes were panicked responses to falling attendance (the Great Depression in the 1930s) and disruptive technologies (television in the 1950s).  Times change.  Now movie execs are worried about falling attendance (the global recession) and disruptive technologies (broadband Internet access and Blu-Ray discs).  Guess it’s time to trot out widescreen 3D movies again.

The first anaglyphic 3D film, 1952’s Bwana Devil, promised viewers ‘a lion in your lap.’  That same year, theatres showing Cinerama widescreen gushed that ‘you won’t be gazing at a movie screen—you’ll find yourself swept right into the picture.’  Half a century later, Ice Age 3 gives us a tiger, while the press release from Palace Amusement wants us to ‘get ready for the movie experience that puts you smack dab in the picture.’  Sound familiar?

To be fair, Ice Age 3 is a more immersive experience than, say, Ice Age 2.  Depth perception makes the desolate icescapes more sepulchral and the chase sequences more immediate—when Diego hunts an antelope early in the film, the camera hurtles along for the naked adrenaline rush.  And the limited viewing angle and ghosted images that plagued analog 3D have been banished—every seat gets a sharp image.

But immersion is not investment (although Palace’s accountants might beg to differ).  No amount of whiz-bang gadgetry can fake a good story.  Diego’s chase pales in comparison to the wildebeest stampede in the hand-drawn, two-dimensional The Lion King (what is it with jungle cats, anyway?)—three minutes of absolute terror as a young child, facing death, is saved by his father only to see him murdered, as in Hamlet, by his uncle.  It would have been riveting with sock puppets.

The plot in Ice Age 3 skates on thin ice.  Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) is taken away by a Tyrannosaurus, forcing the rest of the herd—woolly mammoths Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah), opposums Crash and Eddie, and Diego (Denis Leary)—on a rescue mission.  Which would have been fine, except Ellie is massively pregnant.  And there’s a tropical jungle under the ice that nobody noticed until now.

So what?  It’s harmless fun for kids.  That’s why, of the two female characters, one is knocked up and the other is a shrew, prompting both Diego and rock rat Scrat to flee the supposed confines of domesticity.  Harmlessly teaching our young men that monogamy and marriage are to be endured, not enjoyed.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs—three-dimensional image, one-dimensional story.

One day, Jo was taking the train from Manchester to London when an idea—a big, glorious, billion-dollar, global franchise idea—popped into her head. It was the story of a orphaned boy wizard. Jo wrote the idea down, and when she got home, she kept writing. She wrote for the next five years, stopping only to move to Portugal, get married, and have a child. She named the girl Jessica, and the boy wizard Harry Potter.

To Jo’s surprise, children all over the world liked Harry Potter. So she wrote more books. Children even found their parents reading Harry Potter, too. Jo sold so many books, she became richer than the Queen of the Kingdom.

Far to the west, the nobles of another state heard about Harry Potter and Jo’s money. Being nobles, they wanted some of the money for themselves. So they flew Jo over and asked her if they could leverage her original properties across multiple platforms, finding synergies between their media conglomerate and transnational corporations for merchandising tie-ins, yada, yada, yada. J K Rowling said yes, and the nobles jumped with joy, giggled with greed and lived happily ever after.

The five Harry Potter movies (with three more to come) have amassed about US$5 billion, making it one of the most lucrative film franchises ever. That kind of cash inspires the sincerest form of flattery. Thus was adapted J R R Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, which harvested another billion. And C S Lewis’s classic children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia, whose third installment is now about to begin filming. And Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. And now, Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy comes to the silver screen, starting with Inkheart.

Funke’s three fantasy novels—Inkheart, Inkspell and Inkdeath—and soon, their film counterparts, suffer from being in the right place at the wrong time. Which is to say, these perfectly enjoyable stories, originally written in German, have the bad luck to be turned into films at the tail end of a decade stuffed with adaptations of children’s fantasy literature. Inkheart, the film, while not boring, feels old before it’s begun.

Our protagonist is a young girl, Meggie (like Ofelia from Guillermo del Toro’s exquisite 2006 fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth) who loves to read (like Ofelia and also Harry Potter) and has lost a parent (like Ofelia, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins of The Lord of the Rings). An everyday object—a book—transports her to a fantastical new world (like Ofelia (an insect), Harry (a letter), Frodo (a ring) and the Pevensie children in The Chronicles of Narnia (a wardrobe)!). In the name of all that is tragic and magic, how many European-dwelling young bookworm orphans is too many?

The central conceit of Inkheart is the permeability of the printed page—losing yourself in a good book, in Funke’s world, can be a permanent displacement. But Inkheart’s imaginary world is not rendered imaginatively—both the CGI (computer-generated imagery) cloud that is the villainous Shadow and the wooden clunk that is Brendan Fraser feel like outtakes from The Mummy.

As Meggie’s aunt says, “I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page, where it belongs.” The film’s producers should have taken that line of ink to heart.

Which means, in no particular order: young, attractive Caucasian lead actors (because it must sell in West Virginia); one token Black American supporting actor (because it must sell in West Harlem); loud noises, explosions and special effects (because it must sell to young men); unnecessary female nudity (ditto); fight scenes, sex scenes, chase scenes (ditto, ditto, ditto); catchphrases (because it must feel familiar); fancy camerawork and editing (because it must feel new); a foreign-sounding enemy (because Americans like to collect them); and the promise of a sequel (because Mercedes don’t buy themselves).

This blow-stuff-up, blow-up doll, shrink-wrapped form of entertainment short-circuits our synapses, and after a while we get used to the idea that we’re not supposed to think when we’re at the movies. This works very well for the major movie studios, run disproportionately by healthy, wealthy men from Los Angeles who understand, even though they’d never touch the stuff themselves, that ice cream will always sell because it feels good while you’re eating it. Never mind that it’s bad for us; we’ll eat it, anyway.

Hollywood makes the filmic equivalent of triple chocolate sundaes with sprinkles and syrup and two cherries on top—movies that are really, really bad for us, but feel so good while we’re watching that we keep coming back. As with ice cream, the damage is done a little bit at a time, so we can always justify one more indulgence.

Here’s the plot summary for Star Trek, if you need to know. James Kirk, from Iowa (ticket sales!), is a rebel whose father martyred himself in a battle (check!) against an evil race (double check!), the Romulans. (The bad guys in the original series, circa America’s Korean and Vietnamese invasions, looked Oriental; in this movie, unsurprisingly, they look vaguely Arabic.)  James gets talked into joining the Starfleet, where he flirts with a girl named Uhura, befriends a man named Leonard McCoy and outwits an alien named Spock. Either those names mean something to you, and you’ll get excited watching them spout ridiculous dialogue, or they don’t, and you won’t. And, yeah, James eventually fights the Romulans.

May now marks the beginning of the summer blockbuster season, which has crept earlier and earlier as studios fight to be first. Last week’s megamovie was Wolverine, or X-Men 4; this week is Star Trek 11, new and improvised; still to come are Transformers 2, Ice Age 3, Terminator 4, and Harry Potter 6. Oodles of ice cream.

It’s worth noting that there are filmmakers, with one foot inside and one foot outside the Hollywood dream factory, who try to make the audience engage their material and think about stuff. People like Quentin Tarantino (whose World War II flick, Inglourious Basterds [sic], opens in August), Woody Allen (Whatever Works, in June), Steven Soderbergh (The Informant, with Matt Damon, October), and Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road, hopefully coming soon).

Go see their movies, and skip all the star-filled dreck.