THE SMURFS 2

Upon returning from my screening of The Smurfs 2, a buddy asked what I thought of the film, and I told him that Hank Azaria - the comic genius who plays the nefarious, Smurf-loathing wizard Gargamel - was awfully funny in it. My friend asked, "When isn't he?", and beyond the TV-movie tearjerker Tuesdays with Morrie, I couldn't provide an example. (And in truth, at appropriate moments in his Emmy-winning dramatic turn, the actor is awfully funny in Tuesdays with Morrie.) Consequently, as he's nearly always this inspired on-screen, Azaria's hilariously outlandish performance probably isn't reason enough to see director Raja Gosnell's blue-hued sequel, at least if you don't have small children pressuring you to do so.

If, however, you're a childless adult who chooses to attend The Smurfs 2 anyway, your secret's totally safe with me, because Azaria actually does make this kiddie comedy worth sitting through - though perhaps only if you catch it during bargain-matinée hours, or have a cineplex gift card that you were just gonna throw out otherwise.

FRUITVALE STATION

Marvel Studios' recent spate of superhero movies has trained us - or tried to train us, at any rate - to stick around for at least the first few minutes of the end credits, offering the promise of a bonus scene designed to build excitement for comic-book adventures yet to come. (Not to give the details away, but Marvel's new The Wolverine features a happy doozy of one promoting 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past.) Yet while they couldn't possibly have been expecting this same sort of credit cookie at the independent drama Fruitvale Station, the audience members with whom I saw the film stayed similarly glued to their seats, almost as though none of them was quite ready for the experience to be over. Given how haunting and emotionally overpowering writer/director Ryan Coogler's debut feature is, it would be impossible to blame them.

He's performed alongside such talents as Wynton Marsalis and Mel Tormé, and worked as personal assistant to jazz great Dick Hyman. He's toured nationally and internationally, landing everywhere from Paris' Bilboquet Jazz Club to Los Angeles' Playboy Mansion. He's been featured on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, and the soundtracks for The Aviator, Ghost World, and Boardwalk Empire.

But in the early 1980s, says jazz aficionado Dan Levinson, he couldn't even convince friends to listen to the music he loved.

"I was taking records out of a library in Santa Monica," says the 48-year-old Levinson, "and landed on a record that RCA Victor had put out called The Best of Dixieland, and the last track on it was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's recording of 'Livery Stable Blues.' It was the first so-called 'jazz record' ever issued, in 1917, and I was absolutely blown away by it. I couldn't get enough of it. And I just assumed that when I played it for all my friends, they would feel the same way I did.

"So I played it. I said, 'Listen to them! Listen to that sound!' And I remember them saying, 'Oh, God, turn that off. What is that screeching noise?' And I said, 'That's the clarinet ... .'

"These were the same people who went to rock concerts and had music blasting in their ears, but they couldn't listen to 1917 jazz. They just looked at me. 'What happened to Dan?'"

Quad City Music Guild's Thursday-night preview performance of Peter Pan - which, it should be stressed, was still technically a rehearsal - clocked in at roughly an hour and 55 minutes, making director Beth Marsoun's presentation at least a half-hour shorter than any of the four other Peter Pans I've thus far seen on stage. This proved, at alternating times, to be both a very good thing and a rather unfortunate thing. But let's start with the good.