So popular was last week’s microrants column, and so populous are my niggling little quibbles about pop culture, that I have prepared a Part Two.

One of my daughter’s favorite movies is “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale.” It is a movie about a dog, and it stars an actual dog. It is also a movie about the actual reasons that people love actual dogs.

Movies like these are few and far between nowadays.

Instead we get “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” which opened Friday.

It is an espionage comedy in which dog-like objects can be seen doing things that second-rate humans do in B movies, things like committing bad karate and garbling one-liners.

Conventional wisdom in Hollywood has it that kids like nothing better than a movie where animals – through the arguable miracles of computer animation – are made to walk and talk and sing and dance and tumble and joke just as badly as the worst human singers, dancers, acrobats and stand-up comics.

But the animation is almost always terrible.

The animators tend to get the physics and physiognomy all wrong.

For example, there’s Wilbur’s back flip in “Charlotte’s Web,” a scene so awful that it had E.B. White and the inventor of the back flip back flipping in their respective graves.

I don’t think I am in the minority when I say that a computer animator has yet to improve on a dog …

Speaking of bad CGI, it is time for the retirement of a recently minted but already overused horror cliché: the mouth that opens too wide.

Since CGI became prevalent, we have seen seemingly hundreds of scenes in which a man appears to be normal at first (if a little pale) and then he opens his mouth too wide, thus revealing his true self, be it vampire, ghost, zombie, demon, angel or genetic mutation resulting from an unholy combination of raccoon, manatee, trade rat and buffet chef DNA. This special effect was fairly special at first and then we saw it too many times.

Its effect might also have been dulled by the competitive eating craze …

A branch of a bookstore chain is not generally a place to go if you want to be surprised.

And yet there I was, just the other day, being surprised.

What surprised me was a huge display of Swedish crime novelists.

If I’d seen something like that in 2007, I would have been even more surprised.

But that would have been before the late Stieg Larsson made the scene with the first book in his best-selling Millennium trilogy, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Now Swedish crime novelists are all the rage.

I don’t want to imply that Swedish crime novelists aren’t excellent and worthy of display, but the American publishing industry has a poor record of acknowledging (meaning translating and promoting) the work of living authors who are popular in countries where English is not the primary language.

It has a fine record, however, of jumping on bandwagons.

This is one heck of an unlikely bandwagon, and it makes predicting the next bandwagon more difficult.

I am pulling for one of my favorite unsung genres, which include Amish Science Fiction, Calvinist Erotica and Metrosexual Westerns …

It was bad enough when visionary director Guillermo del Toro withdrew from the “Hobbit” movies.

One hundred years from now, movie buffs will still be wondering what del Toro would have done with Tolkien’s book.

Now news has emerged about del Toro’s next project.

It’s a reboot of a "Haunted Mansion" franchise that moviegoers gave the boot, leaving Disney feeling disenfranchised.

These days, remakes don’t just happen because a movie was a hit 30 years ago. They also happen because a movie failed to be a hit seven years ago.

The 2003 Eddie Murphy comedy called “The Haunted Mansion” failed to turn into a string of similarly titled Eddie Murphy comedies, so Disney has commissioned a reboot that it hopes will turn into a string of Del Toro-directed horror films.

This is all happening because of the unlikely success of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise.

Since the first of those movies made more than $300 million at the box office, Disney has been scouring its theme parks and archives for movie ideas.

The studio isn’t looking for plots or even plot synopses so much as universally recognized phrases like “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (expect a reboot of that in a few years).

The Haunted Mansion ride originally opened at Disneyland in 1969, but plans for it go back as far as the mid-1950s.

It seems to have been very much inspired by such vintage horror comedies such as “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken,” “Hold That Ghost” and “Ghost Breakers.”

There’s a heaping helping of vaudeville cheese, in other words, and the ghosts all seem to have died while playing the Borscht Belt.

A movie that was truly based on this ride might actually be interesting.

And del Toro’s interpretation will no doubt be interesting, although it will probably appall Disney as much as Spike Jonze’s rough cut of “Where the Wild Things Are” allegedly appalled Warner Bros.

Truth be told, it will probably appall Disney just as much as Johnny Depp’s performance as Jack Sparrow initially did.

I think Disney’s search for ideas might be too narrow.

I, for one, would pay good money to see a movie based on that giant turkey leg they sell in Frontierland …

When fan boys objected to the title of the “Karate Kid” remake (its star is Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan, who is a practitioner of kung fu), I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself and it quickly conflagrated into a maniacal cackling that sent a chill down the spines of every living thing within a 500-yard radius.

I think most of the fans who turned up their noses at the title would be hard-pressed to describe the differences between karate and kung fu.

For a long time there (say, the ’60s through the early ’80s), karate was a catchall word in Hollywood referring to any sort of exotic self-defense system.

Every British secret agent, no matter how doughy and slow-moving, possessed a “black belt in karate.”

Essentially, this meant that he could deliver a chop to the back of a bad guy’s neck and knock him out.

This made about as much sense as the Vulcan neck pinch, but moviegoers didn’t seem to mind.

Pat Morita, who played the guru role in the original “Karate Kid,” didn’t even know any karate when he was signed to star in that film.

Considering the popularity these days of such actor/brawlers as Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Randy Couture, the complainers should be grateful that Columbia Pictures didn’t call the movie “The Mixed Martial Arts Kid.”