Photo of the Day: Why Is This Man Smiling?

Because it’s Times Square on the sunny mid-afternoon of the day when the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree was lit. Because like any of Santa's conscientious helpers, this green fellow is offering an automatic response to a tourist (well, someone he thinks, mistakenly, is a tourist—me). Because this is Shrek, folks, and with all the monstrous trouble he’s seen, if he doesn’t deserve to smile once in a blue moon, not to mention find his Princess Fiona—well, I don’t know who does.

Quote of the Day (Mike Myers, on Hearing the Title “Shrek” for the First Time)

“I thought it was the worst title in the world. It sounded like the sound I make after drinking 12 Molson Canadian beers.”—Mike Myers, on his reaction to hearing the title of the script that would become his huge hit Shrek, quoted in David Karger, “ ‘Shrek Forever After’: Ogre and Out,” Entertainment Weekly, May 28, 2010

Have you seen the latest—and, one hopes, last—in the Shrek series, faithful reader? I haven’t (though I admit to being sorely tempted this past weekend, simply to escape our way-too-early heat wave). I fear that the energy has seeped out of this massively successful franchise, the way it had out of Myers’ third try at Austin Powers.

If that’s the case with the Shrek Forever After, I don’t want to be in any theater where every person in the audience sounds like he’s had 12 Molson Canadian beers. The noise—and olfactory—pollution this would cause would be beyond description.

Movie Quote of the Day (“Shrek,” with Miraculous Powers in the Animal Kingdom)

“You might have seen a housefly, maybe even a superfly, but I bet you ain't never seen a donkey fly.”—Donkey (voice of Eddie Murphy), in Shrek (2001), written by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, and Robert S.H. Schulman, with additional dialogue by Cody Cameron, Chris Miller, and Conrad Vernon, based on William Steig’s book Shrek! , directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson