There’s an odd lack of tension in the news today. Oh, sure, Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” kicked all kinds of ass at the BAFTAs — and picked up a WGA award to go with its PGA, DGA and SAG prizes — but now that it’s gone from underdog to overdog, is anyone really surprised?

The box-office numbers are similarly just sort of there: The mega-sized chick flick “He’s Just Not That Into You” opened in first place, knocking last week’s champ, “Taken”, to second; the encouraging news is that Henry Selick’s “Coraline” placed third, ahead of presumptive hits “The Pink Panther 2” and “Push”.

One wonders how many small children woke up screaming from Other Mother nightmares over the weekend, but not having children myself, it’s a price I’m more than willing to pay.

I love lists — I crank ’em out for Sympatico/MSN on a fairly regular basis — and if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ll have seen plenty of Onion AV Club inventories and suchlike. Today’s required reading comes from Topless Robot, by way of Cinematical: Ten Helpful Suggestions for Killing John Connor, the future messiah of the “Terminator” movies.

Make sure you read the comments. They’re filled with geeky goodness.

And yes, I know, Christian Bale jokes are so four days ago. But, y’know, having covered the industry as long as I have, it comes as no surprise that intense actors might have something of a hair-trigger on the set — especially on the sets of big effects movies where said actors are reminded, over and over again, that they’re just a cog in a much larger machine. (The same rule applies on television shows.)

Bale needs to do some indie projects right quick, is what I’m saying. Get his head straight. And then he can go be Batman again, shouting to his heart’s content.

It’s a bigger week for movie openings than usual — and the first week of the year to debut a brand-new movie that’s as good or better as the festival holdovers trickling out for Oscar season. Let’s get right to it:

“Cassandra’s Dream“: I’ve never seen an audience work harder to turn a thriller into a comedy as I did at the TIFF press and industry screening for Woody Allen’s 2007 dud. And when they gave up and started to walk out, you could feel the sadness. I stayed, but then I’m an idiot.

“Coraline“: Now, here’s a movie that knows precisely what it’s doing. Indeed, other than some pacing problems in the midsection, Henry Selick’s stop-motion delight is just about perfect. And see if you aren’t thoroughly creeped out by how much Other Wybie looks and moves like Heath Ledger’s Joker in the last act. It’s total coincidence … but man, is it disturbing.

“He’s Just Not That Into You”: That pop-culture catchphrase book from that “Sex and the City” writer becomes a multicharacter romantic dramedy … that’s 129 minutes long. Scarred by such efforts as “Playing by Heart”, I will wait for the DVD. But Susan liked it.

“Nurse. Fighter. Boy.”: I wasn’t able to catch Charles Officer’s directorial debut at TIFF, and it’s managed to elude me since. But it features actor-director Clark Johnson, who doesn’t spend nearly enough time in front of the camera, in my opinion, and the reviews are interesting — particularly Rad’s, which has generated a thread of comments that are much more civil than the one’s I’m used to — so I plan to check it out.

“The Pink Panther 2“: Sitting through the first one was torture, but the sequel has some surprisingly clever moments mixed in with the dopey slapstick, and much more interesting casting (John Cleese, Lily Tomlin, Alfred Molina). When the DVD comes out, you can rent it with your head held high.

“Push“: Is it a low-rent “X-Men” or a low-rent “Heroes”? I’m going with the former, since the whole point of “Heroes” was that ordinary characters were trying to cope with the sudden manifestation of super-powers, whereas the mutants here are already comfortable with their (exclusively psychic) gifts. The first half is pretty good; the second half, not at all. My review should be on the NOW site later today. UPDATE: There we go!

“Wendy and Lucy“: I’ve been talking this one up for nine months now, so the small-scale, minor-key intimacy of Kelly Reichardt’s shattering American drama — see? I did it again — may come as a disappointment to some of you. But not too many of you, I don’t think. Seek it out. Take the ride into the city. It’s really that good.

And if this long, oppressive winter has put you in a particularly grim frame of mind, Cinematheque Ontario’s comprehensive Carl Theodor Dreyer retrospective might be just the thing to reawaken your faith in cinema. When will you next get the chance to see “The Passion of Joan of Arc” with live piano accompaniment?

Okay, they’re screening it again on Thursday. But when after that?

The latest issue of NOW features my long-delayed interview with Kelly Reichardt, whose exquisite American drama “Wendy and Lucy” is finally opening tomorrow. Please give her a moment. There are a lot of movies coming out this weekend, but “Wendy and Lucy” is head and furry shoulders above them all.

Earlier this week, I spoke to Neil Gaiman; that interview is online now, too. No audio clips, regrettably; the recording was marred by someone’s Blackberry, which left stuttering blips on the track. (If you know a journalist, ask him or her about Blackberry audio interference sometime. Expect some tears.)

And finally, here’s a fine bit of news: Several months after leaving A Voce, my very talented friend Andrew Carmellini has finally found a new home … and a rather well-placed benefactor.

I expect they’ll tie the opening to the start of the Tribeca Film Festival in April … time to book another trip to New York!

Over to the Onion AV Club, Noel Murray takes a moment to wonder whether the comeback of 3D is all that necessary — and whether the cinematic medium really needs the enhancement.

It’s got me thinking. I’ve been skeptical of the recent 3D revolution. The digital projectors produced a less than vivid image, smaller and duller than a 35mm print would have provided; the glasses gave me a headache if I wasn’t sitting in precisely the right section of the auditorium, so I’d have to take them off and watch the movie in Flat-And-Blurryvision; the IMAX versions of “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf” turned flawed films into flawed films with distracting stunt sequences.

But at a recent 3D screening of “Coraline”, finally, it all came together. Digital projection technology has evolved, so the picture was crisp and screen-fillingly large, and the Real 3D glasses stayed on my face for the full 100-minute running time with no ill effects.

More to the point, “Coraline” isn’t a stunt. It employs the 3D process as one tool among many — as an illustrative technique. Henry Selick doesn’t need to throw crap at the screen; there’s just one pop-out moment that I remember, and it’s entirely appropriate to the action on the screen. Otherwise, 3D tech is employed to let us marvel at the depth and complexity of the movie’s elaborate sets and backdrops, and maybe see a couple of things from slightly different angles than would have been possible in a 2D version. It’s there to draw us in, not shake us up.

And unlike the recent spate of 3D-enhanced CG features, “Coraline” was produced through traditional stop-motion animation, meaning that everything existed in three dimensions to begin with. Maybe that helps, though that should mean that live-action 3D productions would be less headache-inducing, and they aren’t, yet.

Still, further refinements are ongoing, and at the end of the year, when James Cameron releases “Avatar”, I’ll be very curious to see what the state of the art looks like. I’ll bring a couple of Excederin along, but I’m hoping I won’t have to use them.

Have you heard? “The Pink Panther 2” opens this Friday, and it’s probably going to make a whole lot of money. The last one did, after all.

To be fair, the new film offers a few improvements on its nigh-unwatchable predecessor. (We’ll discuss it further on Friday.) But even so, I prefer to remember Steve Martin as the comic genius he used to be, before he settled into his current rhythm of phoning in his movie performances so as to save his mind-grapes for his literary pursuits.

Anyway, here’s my Sympatico/MSN bonus gallery of great Martin performances. Feel free to take exception with any of them, but be warned: If you knock his snotty waiter in “The Muppet Movie”, I will have no choice but to cut you.

Dispatches from the department of small victories: Danny Boyle just won this year’s DGA award for “Slumdog Millionaire” (result!) and the efficient little Liam Neeson actioner “Taken” dethroned “Paul Blart, Mall Cop” at the box-office over the weekend.

Also good news: Renee Zellweger’s romantic comedy “New in Town” barely registered at all, coming in a distant eighth. So maybe we can finally throttle down on the adorable squinkling, and get back to real acting soon, huh?

Still, people do like their fish-out-of-water romances. So much so that I’ve devoted a whole Sympatico/MSN gallery to ’em this week. I really wanted to do a “Give Me Back My Family!” gallery to tie in with “Taken”, but my editor thought it would be unbalanced by all the Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford movies, and I can’t say she was wrong.

You know how January is. It’s a time of quiet contemplation and naked Oscar-baiting, when a Kevin James movie can lay waste to the box-office like the Cloverfield monster. And “Wendy and Lucy” just got bumped again, dammit.

So what’s opening? Not a hell of a lot.

“Know Your Mushrooms”: In which Ron Mann continues in his inexhaustible bid to canonize every last aspect of hippie culture, and good for him! Susan liked it; Jason did too, with a few reservations.

“New in Town”: Efficiency expert Renee Zellweger gets all Northern Exposure-y when she’s dispatched to deepest Minnesota to close down a branch, or something. Neither Susan nor Kate Carraway are particularly impressed.

“Taken”: In a nice twist on the Givemebackmyfamily!!! popularized by Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson back in the ’90s, former covert operative Liam Neeson goes on a rampage through Paris when his daughter is abducted. Neeson’s blunt, potent competence, aided by a straightforward script and efficient direction from Pierre Morel, makes for a much better actioner than the ad campaign would have you believe. Barrett thinks so, too.

“The Uninvited”: David Straithairn and Elizabeth Banks in an American remake of “A Tale of Two Sisters” that turns Kim Jee-Woon’s fragmented Korean nightmare into a linear horror film with a really big twist at the end? Um, okay. Didn’t see it, but word coming out of the preview screening has not been good.

Also opening this week: Lee Demarbre’s documentary “Vampiro: Angel, Devil, Hero” screens tonight and tomorrow at the Royal , and Terence Davies’ Liverpool oratorio “Of Time and the City” rolls into the Bloor on Sunday after its limited Cinematheque engagement. You know, if you’re into the whole reality thing.

Sometimes the universe just can’t help itself.

Two days ago, Marina Zenovich’s “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” came out on DVD, just days after the latest flurry of activity in the exiled director’s ongoing attempt to get himself cleared to return to the United States without being thrown into jail on that whole skipping-town thing.

And today, over at the Onion AV Club, Scott Tobias confronts one of Polanski’s thorniest, weirdest pictures, “Bitter Moon“, in his latest column exploring The New Cult Canon.

Now, at first blush, I would have gone with “The Ninth Gate” as Polanski’s key cult venture, myself. (It has the robes and everything!) But despite a nicely twitchy performance from Johnny Depp and a swell supporting turn from Frank Langella, “The Ninth Gate” doesn’t stick in the mind the way “Bitter Moon” does.

Also, “Bitter Moon” has Kristin Scott-Thomas and Hugh Grant as the unsuspecting couple sucked into Peter Coyote and Emmanuelle Seigner’s twisted world, and there’s something perverse and discomfiting about seeing Grant and Scott-Thomas as a couple, despite their obvious comfort with each other (and the echoes of their non-pairing in “Four Weddings and a Funeral”).

Also also, the movie is deeply weird. Like, weirder than you remember. Even if you’ve just seen it recently.

So, you know, if you find yourself snowed in this weekend … well, why not revisit the freaks? Not every movie has to be “The Pianist”, y’know.

Sorry for the lateness of today’s post; I’ve been waiting for my Sympatico/MSN DVD column to go online, but obviously something’s holding it back this afternoon.

Instead, I’ll throw to another of the site’s columnists: Sean Francis Condon, who writes the surprisingly cheerful “Random Sampling of Things I Hate” column … and who, it turns out, has my back on the whole state-of-Canadian-film thing.

With the big party for Canada’s Top Ten just a couple of days away, and “Passchendaele” and “Blindness” set to hit DVD stores in the next couple of weeks, it seems like something people ought to read.