Let’s just go ahead and begin with the obvious: I loved The Avengers. I found it smartly written, well acted, and just plain…awesome. But I’ll also admit I’m a self-avowed Joss Whedon fan, and when I heard he was directing, I knew there was no way it could suck. It seems like with Whedon there’s a fine line: you either love him or hate him. And while I’ll go to the grave claiming that all one has to do to make the crossover from skeptic to disciple is hold a marathon viewing of Firefly and Serenity, I’ll leave that argument for another day. 

It’s curious to me that The Avengers, to the extent that has come under fire, is being criticized for having a lot of CGI effects and a predictable ending, as well as an “ill-defined threat from an unknown race.” As if this isn’t a superhero movie, and Disney was going to allow their beloved characters to walk off into the sunset while all of mankind is enslaved saying, “Well, hey, at least we tried?” As if nowadays having a ton of CGI effects is automatically a sign that a film is sub-par. (I don’t hear anyone complaining about Pixar!) And besides, Thor mentions halfway through Avengers that those baddies are Chitauris, a shape-shifting alien race that depend on high-tech cybernetic Ski-Doos to get around and are not to be confused with another shape-shifting alien race, the Skrulls. Try to keep up, people!

The Shrine is about an ambitious resourceful heroine who’s so focused on her journalism career that she doesn’t pay sufficient attention to her boyfriend, and she’s made to pay for this. She catches wind of a potential story of tourists who disappear in a remote Polish village and drags her photog-boyfriend there; they take along an intern—a younger, perkier version of herself—because they need a spare. They all determinedly do the opposite of whatever they should.

This begins as another xenophobic horror in post-commie Eastern Europe, touching on the atavistic fears of modern city folk when confronted with rural folk, and then turns frankly into a variation on The Exorcist. The boyfriend gets to hear her break down in tears and apologize (“It’s all my fault”) when things go south, but she won’t get off that easily. Women like her are clearly possessed by the devil, and the boyfriend must finally collude with the male society that fights evil. Thus do horror movies tap into social fears—in this case, the fears of insecure young men who feel threatened by go-getting women.

The woodsy locales are effective, and the highpoint is the lengthy wordless scene in the mist where the women discover a terrifying statue. That moment is creepy, well paced and visualized, with perhaps a nod to Lovecraft or Arthur Machen. I like that it’s never fully explained, except for one local who shrugs and says “It’s our curse.”

There are two reasons to watch this film: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. As in Hollywood Party (another recent release in the Warner Archive made-on-demand line), they drop by late in the proceedings and steal the show, not that the rest of the show isn’t perfectly enjoyable in its own light-headed way. There’s a brainless, unimportant heroine (Rosina Lawrence) who wins a beauty contest and wants to go to Hollywood to be a star. There’s her brainless boyfriend (Jack Haley) who tries to make it happen by working as a busboy. There’s a sassy gal-pal (top-billed Patsy Kelly) who’s around to make caustic comments, and there’s a stuck-up star (Mischa Auer) who pitches woo to the heroine but turns out to be all right for a sleazy masher.

And then there’s Laurel and Hardy, playing “themselves” while behaving exactly the same behind the scenes as in front of the cameras. In their first bit, they act in a bar fight sequence for a movie and then discuss the breakaway prop bottles. In their second and last scene, they’re sitting around behind the set in a sequence that might be called “duelling harmonicas”. Their mastery of timing and schtick in unquestionable; Hardy’s exasperated, complicit glances at the audience still feel modern. The entire movie is a loosely strung collection of genial absurdities from the small town to the big city, and it has no goal or function besides raising a few smiles and laughs. In that, it works.

There’s dumb, and then there’s brain dead. There’s a lack of entertainment sophistication, and then there’s Battleship. For someone like Peter Berg, whose made complicated mainstream experiences out of subjects such as high school football (Friday Night Lights) and the War on Terror (The Kingdom), this is a significant step down. Instead of applying his skills to something equally complex, he’s adopted the dopiest script since Michael Bay thought a movie about clones was a popcorn jackpot. Borrowing the worst elements from the various alien invasion/mechanical menace movies of the last two decades, this amalgamation of single IQ narrative threads want to have it jingoism and shove it down your throat as well. By the time the greatest/lamest generation arrives to save the day in Act Three, you just want this loud, obnoxious mess to be over.

The storyline borrows some basic elements from the Hasbro board game. No, no one shouts “You sunk my battleship,” though such a nod to the nonsensical source of this idiocy would have showed some small amount of cheek. Instead, the Earth decides to use a super satellite antenna to contact something known as a “G” planet (for Goldilocks, or ‘just right’ to sustain life). They actually find someone who’s listening, and the results are not good. The call brings a bunch of angry, waterlogged extraterrestrial vessels to a section of the Pacific ocean right off of Hawaii.

She’s the last remaining vestige of ‘80s pop culture preeminence. Michael Jackson is dead. So is Whitney Houston. Along with some one hit wonders and a few significant stragglers from previous decades (Bruce Springsteen, Prince), she defined what was cool, what was hip, and heaven help us, what was sexy. Her larger than life persona guided many a grrrl power wannabe through a narrow minded mall dynamic while her pushing of the envelope saw subjects like religion, teen pregnancy, and eros soar to the top of the charts. Today, she’s an amalgamation of leftovers, pieces of popularity and personal choices (she’s a twice married/divorced mother of four) toned and honed into a pre-senior citizen gristle. For most, she remains the Mighty Mad. For others, she’s simply Madonna.

If you weren’t alive then, if you didn’t know the publicity stink this dancer turned singer turned superstar could stir up with a simple straying from the mainstream, you’ll never fully appreciate her impact. Fashioned turned on her iconic fetishism. Pop would pirouette around her every sonic blast. For vague Valley Girls looking for life after Moon and Frank, the girl from Detroit turned holidays and lucky stars into runs past the borderline of Billboard chart dominance. By 1991, she was no longer ‘just’ a performer. She was royalty, a newsworthy headline doing everything she could to rewrite the role of women in rock ‘n’ roll. It was a process she had begun the year before with the release of the racy single “Justify My Love” and would end with the Blond Ambition tour, and the perverse picture book, Sex.