With its unbelievable worldwide box office take over the last 19-plus days, Joss Whedon’s version of The Avengers has joined an exclusive club of mega-hits. While Tinseltown used to gauge success via the magical $100 million ceiling, the recent revision toward a more international approach has produced something far more significant. Now, boffo is measured in billions, with a ‘B,’ and with only 11 other entries in that elite company, it’s clear that a nerve of sorts has been hit. The Avengers is obviously more than just a comic book driven action film. From its proposed feminist perspective to its amazing hero moments (especially those given to the otherwise underserved Hulk), it’s the very definition of a phenomenon…

...except, it isn’t really. Oh sure, any time you can proclaim an amount ten times the original reflection of cinematic triumph, you are breathing rarified air. Similarly, Whedon’s ability to meet both fan expectations and the needs of the novice suggest something far more potent. Yet it’s clear, considering the wealth of new markets being lumped in as part of the total, that the movies that don’t make a billion are true question marks. While everyone argues that movies like this translate across the obvious language barriers, there are still cultural divides to overcome. No, there is another reason why The Avengers has crossed that mighty money threshold, and it’s sitting right under your hands.

Two old ladies own a boarding house populated by other pensioners like themselves, a somewhat dotty crew of faded dreamers who look with fear and hopefulness upon the world that’s passed them by. One spinster (the great Zasu Pitts of fluttery hands and quavery voice) convinces herself that mashers follow her through the streets, and she can’t wait to tell everybody how frightened she feels by the attention. A stiffly proud old magician (Felix Bressart), attended only by his dog, will have his feelings hurt at any slight in the respect he deserves. One man (Grant Mitchell) can be persuaded to recite his wretched poetry, while another (Brandon Tynan), with a touch of dementia, lives in the past and forgets that the lady who owned the house no longer lives. It now belongs to the other two women, one a dreamer (Jessie Busley) and the other a carping Irish housekeeper (the great sharp-nosed Una O’Connor) who must deal with reality as best she can. They owe back taxes and the bank is about to foreclose.

Suddenly, the dreamer’s son Tommy (Jeffrey Lynn) and the housekeeper’s sassy daughter Sarah Jane (Ann Sheridan, a pistol but “a good girl” and not “a hussy”) come home after not having made any great success in their different paths to show biz. Tommy brings his boss, gangster Chips Morgan (Humphrey Bogart), who’s blackmailing Tommy into hiding him in the boarding house after a murder. As unlikely as it seems, the stir-crazy Chips, putting the make on Mary Ann, takes it into his head to turn the joint into an old-fashioned nightclub called the Roaring 90s (there must be no zoning issues), and they put on an elaborate floor show that looks like they could never make their money back.

Throughout the history of film, there have been several successful actor/director collaborations - Jimmy Stewart/Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock, Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorsese…even Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin. From John Ford and his western icon muse, John Wayne to Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon, the results usually remind viewers of the special bond between cast and crew. Nowhere is this more true than in the work of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. While he has also used his wife Helena Bonham Carter in his last seven films, the eight this filmmakers has made with the former teen idol stand as an important linking verb to today’s Hollywood. After the ultra-high concept days of the ‘80s, Burton and Depp have managed to make material otherwise deemed weird or eclectic into a brazen box office bonanza. They haven’t always succeeded wholly, but their attempts consistently borderline art.

So how does one rank such a divergent collection? How do you place a noble adaptation of a time honored Broadway masterwork alongside a silly slice of fairy tale reinterpretation. Oddly enough, quality overwhelms many of the more mundane reasons. While he is often criticized for his storytelling skills and lack of a successful third act, Burton can bring out the best in his partners. As seen in the determination below, the eight efforts (with, one assumes, more to come) guided by the duo defy easy explanation or examination. Like the men who made them, they are complicated, easily misunderstood, and often dismissed without a desire to dig deeper. When viewed through a less arch aesthetic, we discover that, overall, Burton and Depp have triumphed. Not always in the ways viewers might want, but definitely within the designs that keep their teamwork tantalizing. Let’s begin with their most recent revision:

4 May, 2012 is a date that deserves to go down in entertainment history as the culmination of one of the greatest marketing offensives ever witnessed. Starting in the summer of 2008, when Marvel Studios released the first Iron Man, audiences have been treated to a succession of supercharged superhero flicks like Iron Man and Thor. For all their respective merits and defects, those films can now be seen as little more than the initial building-blocks for the box office smasheroo that was to follow. By the time that The Avengers came to the United States on May 4, with its market-tested heroes and cash in the bank – opening a week and a half early in foreign markets, it had practically already earned back its gargantuan production budget well before the ritualistic midnight fanboy screenings – it was a preordained success. That the film would be a hit with audiences was almost as assured as Disney’s other big spring release, John Carter, was doomed to failure.

There’s not a little genius to this. Remember, this is an age when most of the totems of big Hollywood filmmaking have become less than trustworthy. We’re not quite at the level of panic that afflicted the studios in the Easy Rider era when all their old genres and stars had so suddenly stopped working, but the lack of certainty in the industry right now feels endemic. But the Avengers films are something else. Even the installments seen as being less successful, like The Incredible Hulk (the Edward Norton one) and Captain America, each took in well over a quarter-billion dollars worldwide. For Marvel and Disney to spend years confidently engineering an entire series of hit films with a broad diversity of stars and characters and directors (Kenneth Branagh to Jon Favreau?) to then bring all those personalities together in a titanic conclusion that can play as well in Karachi as it does in Indianapolis, is nothing less than astonishing.

Director Valie Export and writer Peter Weibel come from Germany’s post-1960s avant-garde generation of confrontational performance and video artists. PopMatters reviewed Export’s first two features here and we’re tempted to summarize this 1980 effort as “third verse, same as the first”, though it’s not that simple.

This is a highly dialectical film on the topic of the relations between sexes, or more specifically women trying to reconcile motherhood with “personhood.” The point of the title is that women/wives (frauen) must be allowed to be human beings (menschen). A central conflict for each woman involves her status as a mother or would-be mother; it’s notable that all four women in the film want to have children or keep the ones they have, and the prospect of going childless isn’t desirable for any of them.