Even though I was only 13 when the 1980s ended, I think that it is definitely the greatest decade for television, movies, and music. It seems like there are plenty of others who share that opinion, since there’s recently been a lot of 80s nostalgia. But people trying to cash in on that nostalgia have to be careful to get it right, because almost doesn’t cut it. And Rock of Ages doesn’t even achieve almost.

Even in the 1980s, Los Angeles was full of people who have come to seek their fortune in the entertainment industry, so when Sherrie (Julianne Hough) stepped off the bus from Oklahoma, she was hardly the first country girl to think she could make it in the big city. Her excitement was dampened a little when she got mugged and the thieves ran off with her record collection, but it recovered somewhat when she landed a job as a waitress at The Bourbon Room, a popular nightclub that always seems to book the biggest names in music. One of the most famous performers, Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) got his start as lead singer for Arsenal on that stage, and that’s where their last concert will be before he embarks on a solo career.

There are other aspiring musicians working at The Bourbon Room, and Sherrie is immediately drawn to Drew (Diego Boneta), who has a great voice but also suffers from stage fright. But when Arsenal’s opening act cancels at the last minute, Sherrie suggests Drew as a replacement, and he impresses club owner Dennis (Alec Baldwin) and his assistant Lonny (Russell Brand) enough for them to give him a shot. His performance also impressed Paul (Paul Giamatti), who manages Stacee Jaxx and is always looking for more talent, especially as Stacee continues to throw his life away with alcohol, women, and an intolerable personality. Of course if the mayor’s ultraconservative wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta Jones) has her way, then all of these filthy clubs will be shut down and the musicians will all be out of work.

Rock of Ages the movie is based on the musical of the same name and boasts a soundtrack featuring over twenty of the most well-known 80s rock anthems. Unfortunately, those songs are performed by the cast rather than the original artists, which means they’re autotuned, lip-synced, mashed up, given alternate lyrics, and otherwise destroyed. Occasionally, we only hear a couple of lines from a song, but in this case that’s more an act of mercy than one of heresy. I expected the music to be the only thing the film would have going for it, and while it’s true there wasn’t anything else of value in the movie, even the music was a letdown.

There are a lot of big names in the film, but they certainly don’t add anything to its quality, and I’m not sure I see the logic in casting a couple of relative unknowns as the lead characters, particularly when neither was alive at the time the events of the film were supposed to have taken place. The performances were universally bad (although sometimes intentionally so), and the decision to pair Tom Cruise with a costumed monkey named “Hey Man” probably would have been embarrassingly awful if the film hadn’t already been awful.

All of this comes together to result in a movie that is two hours of agony. The music is bad, but everything else is worse. Walking out of the theater, I felt like I might need a course of antibiotics to ward off any of the film’s nastiness that might have attached itself to me.

There are some films which are so surface-level and obvious that merely hearing the premise is enough for you to make a pretty good guess at what the film will be. The Intouchables is exactly one of those films, and although it is completely predictable, it also manages to be rather entertaining.

The film features Philippe as an extremely wealthy frenchman whose sense of adventure got him into an accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. He’s dependent upon others for just about everything, and when his current caretaker leaves, he must choose a replacement right away. Fortunately, there are lots of well-mannered and highly-qualified young men vying to be close to him and his money. And then there’s Driss. He’s not well-mannered, not qualified, and not at all interested in the job. He’s only there because the welfare office won’t keep paying him unless he can show that he’s going for interviews and at least making an attempt to get hired. He’s rude and pushy and just wants to get a signature and leave, but something about him strikes a chord with Philippe, and Driss ends up with a job offer.

There are a lot of aspects of the job which don’t appeal to Driss. Especially the part about taking care of a rich white guy to the point of having to do things like feed and bathe and dress him. But he’s also not particularly fond of being homeless, which is his current condition after his most recent episode of ticking off his family, and the new job comes with some pretty luxurious accommodations. So he reluctantly takes the job, but there’s absolutely no way he’s going to do the gross stuff.

Actually, a lot of the comedy in The Intouchables is derived from Driss emphatically stating that he will absolutely not do something followed by a hard cut to him doing exactly that. It’s just about the most obvious and lazy form of humor out there, but for some reason the audience seemed to eat it up. There are other sources of comedy in the film, and some of them are reasonably funny on their own merits, but it’s definitely not a laugh riot that will have you rolling in the aisles. But it is nevertheless mostly enjoyable and works fairly well as a buddy comedy. Plus, it’s a lot less self-congratulatory and racially-motivated than The Blind Side.

The film is apparently based on a true story, which I find surprising not because the story was turned into a movie, but because someone someone found the story worth telling on a large scale. It really isn’t particularly significant beyond the characters of Philippe and Driss, and the significance to them isn’t much more than friendship. It is entertaining but shallow, and as a result has no real lasting effect.

It looks like the next 80 years will bring some furious innovation. We’re going to get faster-than-light travel, ultra-realistic androids, hibernation chambers, flying laser balls, and misogynistic surgical robots. All of these and more are aboard the spaceship Prometheus when it sets off in 2091 for its two-and-a-half year journey to a distant planet.

But it all starts with ancient cave paintings. You’re probably familiar with the crude artwork created by members of earlier cultures, but you probably didn’t know that a lot of them feature alien imagery, often including the same planetary formation. By studying this formation in combination with celestial maps, anthropologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green) were able to identify that formation in the universe, and they were able to convince the mega-rich and mega-old Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) to send them there, along with crew led by Captain Janek (Idris Elba) and overseen by Weyland representatives Meredith (Charlize Theron) and David (Michael Fassbender).

The Prometheus makes the trip without incident, and upon arrival they see evidence of intelligent life, but no creatures come to greet them (or attack them). They set the ship down near a large dome-shaped structure and send a team inside to investigate. There, they don’t find any living creatures, but they do find lots of dead ones, and some mysterious vase-shaped containers arranged in one of the rooms. But their exploration is cut short when they must quickly return to the ship in order to avoid a nasty storm moving in. And that’s when the real action starts.

The problem, though, is that the action is simply not good. The film is visually impressive but mentally lacking, with a number of elements that don’t make sense upon first watching the movie, and more flaws that continue to reveal themselves the more you reflect on the film. It’s hard to point out some of the more egregious logic problems without the risk of spoiling parts of the movie, but others (like some crew members seeming to meet each other for the first time after coming out of hypersleep) are evident within the opening moments.

Despite director Ridley Scott’s insistence to the contrary, Prometheus is absolutely a prequel to Alien. The films exist in the same universe, and Prometheus attempts not only to provide a glimpse into the origin of the creatures that we see in Alien, but into the beginning of human life as well. Along the way, it tries to get in a few potshots at a belief in God as a creator, although in a very “pot versus kettle” kind of way that only succeeds in highlighting its own logic problems while doing very little in the way of an effective attack against religion.

The big disappointment behind Prometheus is that it is simply unnecessary. It doesn’t add anything at all to the story that had been crafted in the previous Alien movies, nor is it able to stand on its own as an independent narrative. There are many problems with the film and it doesn’t provide anything of value that might cause us to overlook them.

Despite its name, Piranha 3DD did not include any three-breasted women. I’m pretty sure about that because most of the women in the film were topless and had their breasts exposed for all to see, and the others (naturally including all actresses you’re likely to recognize from classier movies) wore skimpy bikinis. But getting only two-thirds of the breasts we were promised is far from the biggest problem with the movie.

Chet (David Koechner) and his step-daughter Matty (Danielle Panabaker) are co-owners of a water park that is about to open for the summer. While Matty was away at college learning to be a marine biologist, Chet was busy getting the park ready for their grand opening with touches like the world’s first aquatic strip club. He didn’t really have a license to do that, but since he was already paying off the local police to overlook some building code violations, that wasn’t really a problem for him. Matty wasn’t thrilled about Chet’s contributions, but there’s no time to do anything about it.

The water park is situated right on the edge of Cross Lake, which appears to be separated from Lake Victoria (where the events of Piranha 3D went down), except that they’re connected underground. The piranha have discovered this connection, much to the dismay of those who wander into the lake. A farmer was the first to encounter the piranha, but he didn’t live long enough to warn anyone else. Neither did the kids whose sexual activities caused their van to roll into the water. But surely there’s no way that piranha can get into the water park’s swimming pools, right?

As you would expect, Piranha 3DD is simply ridiculous. The plot is stupid, which you probably knew going in, but it also fails at the elements that are supposed to make it enjoyable. There’s a lot of nudity, but most of the women on display are so skanky that the piranha that bite them are probably worse off than their victims, and not even the attempts at gross-out comedy are properly executed. The only semblance of horror comes in the form of jump scares and poorly-rendered gore, and the funniest moments come when the movie is making fun of itself or its predecessor.

I only had the option to see the film in 3D, and there I was also disappointed. While it seems to have been shot that way rather than post-converted, the 3D adds absolutely nothing to it. It’s really only noticeable when something goes wrong like when you see ghosting of the characters at certain depths, or when a lens flare provides an artificial flat plane in front of you. There aren’t any moments when you feel the need to dodge anything coming at you, nor are there breasts so large and three-dimensional that they appear to be poking out of the screen.

There are some things to enjoy from the movie. If you liked Piranha 3D (and why would you see the sequel if you didn’t like at least something about the first one?), then you’ll probably appreciate the returning characters, and even if you’re going in completely blind, there are a couple of fun new cameos. There are a couple of moments of decent comedy, and if you’re the kind of person who likes bad movies then there are things about this one that may work for you. But ultimately, unless you’re one of those weirdos that actually likes 3D, there’s no reason to see this one in the theater when it’s also already available through video on demand (and probably for quite a bit less than the price of a theater ticket, especially if you’re going to see it with multiple people).

Americans love to watch television, but there’s rarely anything worth watching. The 24-hour news channels like to say how much they love America but seem to hate most Americans. Reality TV is frequently a showcase of the worst our culture has to offer, from spoiled rich kids claiming their lives are over because their parents bought them a luxury car in the wrong color, to people falling over themselves to do repulsive acts for money, to “performers” who are either too stupid to know or too shameless to care that they have to talent. Like people who watch auto racing just for the crashes, people clamoring for the worst of our society are contributing to its destruction. And if that’s not bad enough, not only do people lap up whatever television serves up to them, but they also feel the need to talk incessantly about what they’ve seen whenever there’s no screen around.

Frank (Joel Murray) is living in this hell. He’s been having headaches that have been keeping him up at night, and watching TV to help pass the time only seems to make things worse. He rarely gets to see his daughter since his divorce, but he has enough contact with her to know that she’s turning into just the kind of spoiled brat that he has come to hate on television. He hates his neighbors and his coworkers are idiots, but this latter problem is solved for him when he finds himself out of a job. And the hits just keep coming when his doctor informs him that his headaches are being caused by a brain tumor, for which the surgery to remove it is just as likely to kill him as the tumor itself.

And with that, he can’t take it anymore. He can’t stand the world he lives in, but also can’t bring himself to commit suicide. So the only logical choice that remains is for him to kill everyone that’s making the world a miserable place. He “borrows” a neighbor’s car and drives across the country to kill a whiny bitch in the wrong car her parents bought for her. And it feels good.

God Bless America certainly isn’t the first film to decry the fall of civilization and plead for change, and it has more than a little in common with other films like Network, Falling Down, and Idiocracy (although it doesn’t quite match the first two in quality or the third in comedy). However, it also feels the most authentic of them because it’s exactly a product of our times. When I saw this film at the Alamo Drafthouse, the real TV clips included in the pre-show entertainment are virtually indistinguishable from those featured in the movie itself, which helped give it a greater impact. This probably also means that God Bless America will quickly become outdated as the world progresses to ever lower forms of debauchery and stupidity, just like the kinds of things that caused women to faint at the beginning of the twentieth century are humorously tame by today’s standards.

While the film mostly takes the high road, there are a few gags that seem beneath it. For example, a late-night advertisement for a farting pig app seems more like the lowbrow fare of Idiocracy than a lot of the other TV clips that we’re shown, and the next-door neighbors exhibit a level of stupidity that’s not entirely realistic. These elements just don’t seem as funny as the more realistic scenes, and they drag the film down a little. But these are minor nits about an otherwise hilarious yet too-close-to-home movie that is another feather in Bobcat Goldthwait’s directorial cap.

In one of my favorite episodes of Pinky and the Brain, the plan to take over the world involves staging an accident involving a microwave and non-dairy creamer, because nobody really knows how they work. It’s funny because the audience is in on the gag and isn’t supposed to take it seriously. In Chernobyl Diaries, radioactivity is treated in kind of the same way, but this time it doesn’t have the same effect, in part because they’re trying to be serious but are treating us in the audience like we’re idiots.

Chris (played by Jesse McCartney) hasn’t seen his brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) in a couple of years, ever since Paul moved to Russia. But they’re going to remedy that with a Eurasian vacation on a trek from London to Moscow. Chris brought along his long-time girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Dudley), who in turn brought her recently-single friend Amanda (Devin Kelley). Things are going well and they’re having a great time, but when they reach Kiev, Paul learns of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make their trip even more special. He met a man named Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) who’s offering them the chance to explore the site of the Chernobyl reactor, infamous its 1986 meltdown. The area is still contaminated and isn’t exactly open to the public, but Uri can get them in, and if they only stay for a couple of hours they won’t have enough exposure to cause any damage.

Although Chris is understandably hesitant to go, the allure is too great for Paul, Amanda, and Natalie, and Uri provides stereotypically Russian overly-masculine assurances that everything will be fine, so Chris is outvoted. They meet up with Michael and Zoe (Nathan Phillips and Ingrid Berdal), a couple of other tourists lured in by Uri, and head off for Pripyat, the name of the city that housed the reactor. When the disaster struck, residents had only minutes to gather their belongings and evacuate, so Pripyat is like a ghost town. There aren’t really even any animals around during the day, so they have the whole place to themselves. But there are creatures that come out at night, and when Uri can’t get the van started when it’s time to leave, they’re going to have much more contact with those creatures than they’d like.

On the surface, Chernobyl Diaries is a lot like the horror classic The Hills Have Eyes set in Ukraine. But the differences make all the difference. In The Hills Have Eyes, we get to know and understand the creatures, we learn how they came to be, and we can even empathize with them. But in Chernobyl Diaries, we don’t really even get a good look at the creatures, much less form any kind of bond with them. We don’t know anything about them, and the film unnecessarily muddies the water about how they came to exist in the first place.

The film also fails on an artistic level. In addition to an excess of darkness, we also get a lot of annoying 360-degree shots in which a camera makes a tight circle around a character from low to the ground so we see a lot of empty sky. There are also some strange audio choices, with once scene drowning out the characters’ dialogue with music, and another featuring the faint and completely out of place sound of a heartbeat. Since we don’t really ever get to see the creatures, sound is often the only way we know they’re around, but nothing we hear is really all that ominous.

But the biggest problem with the movie is that it is not believable. The characters make too many obviously-bad choices, and the climax (if you can call it that, since there’s no anxiety or sense of urgency) relies on a mistake that I simply can’t imagine anyone making, even in the dark in an unfamiliar place and when being chased by unknown beings. The film has no respect for the intelligence of its audience, but perhaps the most intelligent ones are the people who don’t see it at all.

Once upon a time, most video games were created by individuals. Even the first console games were more likely to be written by one or two people than big groups. It’s true that not just anyone could get their game onto a cartridge that would show up on store shelves, but it was much more possible for people developing for home computers. And now that the major game consoles are connected to the Internet and can play downloaded content, anyone with the right skills and enough determination can get their games into the hands of the masses.

Jonathan Blow knows a little something about that, because he created Braid, which was the first of the truly successful “indie” games. At the time of its release, it was the top-rated game on the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), and one of the most highly-rated Xbox games period. Even if its revenue didn’t match that of even a flop from a major game studio, it also didn’t have to be split up amongst many developers, executives, and investors, and was therefore quite a profitable endeavor for him. Since then, others have tried to recreate that success, and although most are unabashed commercial failures, others have achieved great things in their own right.

Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes hoped to be one of the success stories with their Super Meat Boy, a platform game featuring a main character with no skin who must avoid all kinds of peril while trying to save his bandage-covered girlfriend from an evil fetus in a jar. Phil Fish had similar aspirations for his game Fez, in which a 2D character must learn to navigate through a 3D world. And Jonathan Blow hopes lightning will strike twice with his next game, The Witness.

The documentary primarily follows Edmund and Tommy as they work to finish Super Meat Boy in time for a promotional launch that could give them prominent placement in the XBLA where they’ve got the best chance of attracting buyers, and also Phil as he works to get Fez ready for the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) gaming showcase and tries to make peace with a former business partner who could create legal trouble for him if he tries to release the game. For both games, the developers are anxious to see what may come of the sleep, sanity, and social lives they’ve invested over the last few years of their lives. There’s potentially a lot of money on the line if things go well, while failure could strike a blow to their reputations and psyches from which recovery may be impossible. And it probably doesn’t help much that it’s all being filmed so that their ultimate success or failure (not to mention the ups and downs along the way) will be put on display for potentially millions of people to see.

What you’re not going to see in the film is a lot of encouragement for someone looking to break into the business. Making it easier for indie game developers to make their content accessible doesn’t make it easier for them to create good games, and Indie Game does a pretty good job of showing just how much work really goes into creating even a relatively simple game. We’re long past the days of Pac Man and Donkey Kong, so unless you’ve got a truly innovative concept that’s easy to learn and doesn’t require a lot of flashy graphics and expansive levels (think Tetris), you’re not going throw together something great after only a few days of working on it in your spare time. And I think that’s a good thing, because it thins the herd while highlighting the talent. If only the indie music scene had the same kind of hurdles, the world might be a better-sounding place.

It’s been a decade since the disappointing Men in Black 2 was released, and I can’t imagine anyone was clamoring for a third installment except the people with the potential to make money from it. Hopefully not even those people will have any aspirations of making a fourth.

Boris (a role played by and making me lose respect for Jermaine Clement) is a particularly nasty alien who looks mostly human except that he has hand vaginas capable of shooting out darts. Fortunately, he’s securely locked up in a moon prison where there’s no way he can possibly escape, unless they’re stupid enough to allow his girlfriend to visit and bring him a cake with something hidden in it. Unfortunately, they’re stupid enough to allow his girlfriend to visit and bring him a cake with something hidden in it. Boris escapes and vows to kill the man who locked him up in the first place, who just happens to be MiB Agent K. But he’s not going after K in the present (as played by Tommy Lee Jones). He’s planning to go back in time to 1969, so he can kill the much younger Agent K (as played by Josh Brolin) before he had a chance to make the arrest.

Boris’ plan works, because one day Agent K is there constantly being annoyed by his partner Agent J (Will Smith), and the next it’s like he was just erased from existence and no one can remember him except for J. Only old-timer Agent O (Emma Thompson) seems to have any memory of him, but that’s only because she was around when he was killed in 1969 (when O was played by Alice Eve). But J manages to convince O that something is amiss, and she recommends that he talk to Jeff (Michael Chernus), a time travel specialist,who just happens to be the one who helped send Boris back to kill K. And J convinces Jeff to also send him back so that he can kill Boris before Boris kills K.

There are a lot of things to hate about Men in Black 3. Nearly all the scenes set in the present day verge on intolerable. The prison break is absurd, and the interactions between J and K and aliens are always annoying (way beyond anything we saw from Tony Shalhoub in either of the first two movies) and occasionally racist. J and the aliens are often pretty unlikeable in the past too, but usually not to the same degree. And a scene with Andy Warhol (played by Bill Hader) is supposed to be funny but fails miserably.

But there are three things that save the film from being a complete disaster. The first is Josh Brolin, who really does cease to be Josh Brolin and instead becomes a young Tommy Lee Jones. The voice and mannerisms are spot on, and it also doesn’t hurt that he’s playing a more upbeat and less jaded version of the character. The second is the inclusion of Griffin (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), an alien who is able to experience five-dimensional spacetime and can see all possible versions of the future. He was used just infrequently enough to avoid overexposure and evoked pleasant thoughts of the improbability drive from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And the third positive is the film’s ending, which manages to take a break from mediocrity long enough to form a truly touching moment that changes your perspective on other elements of the film.

Unfortunately, the positive elements of the film aren’t enough to excuse the negatives. There are certainly things to like about it, but there are also enough things to hate to keep from being a good movie.

Prior to The Turin Horse, I’d never before seen a film by Hungarian director Béla Tarr, but I was familiar with his reputation for dark, slow-paced films, was aware of his highly-praised film Satantango (primarily because of its 7.5 hour runtime), and knew that he’d said The Turin Horse (a mere 2.5 hours long) is to be his last feature.

The film opens with Hungarian dialogue over a black screen (save for the English subtitles) which explains that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went mad after seeing a man beating a horse, but nothing is known of the man who owned that horse. It then proceeds to depict one possible account of his life, starting shortly after his encounter with Nietzsche. The man arrives home, puts away the horse and cart, and goes inside to his daughter. Dinner that night, and every other meal depicted in the film, consists of a single boiled potato, eaten with bare hands while it’s still so scalding hot that they have to blow on their fingers while pulling off the peel. The man’s job is hindered by the fact that he’s had a stroke and is unable to use his right arm, and despite his impatience at tearing into his potato, he never seems to eat more than half of it. Entertainment is primarily limited to staring out the house’s lone window watching the constantly-raging wind blow leaves and dirt about the yard, and conversation is at a premium.

When every day is usually the same as the one before it, differences are generally welcome. But the second day of the film shows that’s not always the case. On this day, and the several that follow, the horse refuses to pull the cart. It also refuses to eat or drink. And so the man can’t do whatever it is he usually does during the day, so it’s just more staring out the window and drinking palinka while the wind howls outside.

The Turin Horse is one of the most deliberate and pensive films I’ve seen in quite a while. There are only about 30 shots in the entire movie, so there’s no fast cutting or back-and-forth exchanges like in most films. It doesn’t try to fool the audience into thinking it’s one long, seamless shot — the cuts are obvious, and often the camera lingers when the action has ceased as if forcing you to reflect on what you’ve just seen. And what you’ve seen will have been a bleak, low-budget, minimalist representation of daily life for these people that’s hard to call beautiful but is nonetheless raw and effective. The soundtrack has a similar single-minded focus to it. Most of the time, you hear the wind, but occasionally that’s replaced with a simple and repetitive cello score, and on the rarest of occasions we may hear someone speak. But none of these seems to happen at the same time, so when there is something to be said, the other sounds are diminished.

The lack of color, the scant visuals and sounds, and minimalist plot all work together to ensure that you suffer along with the man and his daughter. Further, there are elements of the story which seem to have been left intentionally vague as yet another way of torturing the audience. It may blur the line between art and boredom more than any film I’ve seen in recent years, but it also somehow manages to have a powerful lasting effect on the viewer.