In the opening song to the classic TV program All in the Family, Archie Bunker longs for a time in which “girls were girls and men were men”, and that was in the 1960s, back when only women wore earrings and used beauty creams, and when there was no overlap between the body parts that men shaved and the parts that women shaved. I can’t imagine the stream of curses and bigotry that would come out of his mouth if he were around to see modern society.

We may not have Archie Bunker, but we do have Morgan Spurlock, and he’s willing to talk to people about hard-hitting topics like facial hair and body hair and hair replacement. In fact, while the documentary is supposed to be an exploration of masculinity in the face of things like manscaping and metrosexuality, it doesn’t seem to stray all that far from hair. There’s a long discussion about moustaches, followed by an even longer discussion of beards. Many of the same people (Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla, Zach Galifianakis, and Isaiah Mustafa aka the Old Spice guy) are interviewed on both topics, but we get special moustache attention from director John Waters, and beard love from Jack Passion (winner of numerous beard competitions) and members of the band ZZ Top.

The film also takes an extended look at other topics like the hair that’s supposed to be on top of your head and what you can do if your body stops putting it there, and the hair that’s not supposed to be on your back and what you can do if your body keeps putting it there. It has a brief discussion of a cream intended to address a male affliction known as bat wings (consult Urban Dictionary at your peril), a professional wrestler of middle-eastern origin who feels the need to shave his entire body before each match, and another man of middle-eastern origin who is only about halfway through his own ten-step process of fine-tuning his appearance. And throughout the entire documentary, Jason Bateman and Will Arnett mock and trivialize all of the topics being discussed while they spend the day together relaxing at a spa.

The film doesn’t really take itself very seriously (and for good reason, because none of the topics has any degree of importance), but it seems kind of cruel to some of the subjects who clearly feel differently. Despite the heavy reliance on popular comedians, nothing really makes it past the point of mild amusement, although there are a couple of moments that devolve into the disgusting. But the vast majority of the 85-minute runtime is sheer boredom. There were only two other people in the theater for the screening I attended, and while all three of us (lone men, by the way) stayed until the credits started rolling, we also all left immediately, completely apathetic toward the remaining interviews playing during the credits.

The first two words Samantha Shane (played by Brooklyn Decker) says to Alex Hopper (played by Taylor Kitsch) are “I’m hungry.” By that right, the film could have just as easily been called “Hungry Hungry Hippos”, because that gives it about as much similarity to that game as it has to the other Hasbro board game for which it is actually named.

We quickly learn that Alex is a complete screw-up. His brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) is a commander in the Navy who has come to regret forcing his brother to enlist because he creates a lot of headaches. His latest infraction, a skirmish with a Japanese sailor during a soccer game, will likely net him a dishonorable discharge (from Liam Neeson’s character Admiral Shane, the father of Alex’s girlfriend Samantha), but before that happens, he’s to participate in a set of international war games off the coast of Hawaii. And despite his detestable personality and utter incompetence, he somehow managed to get command of one of the ships.

But the war games are interrupted when actual war breaks out. But this isn’t war with another country or independent rebels, but with aliens who come from a planet very similar to Earth and are now intent on taking over our planet as well. They’ve come in vehicles that work equally well in space, in the air, and in the water, and are armed with some pretty advanced weapons and defenses. One of the ships is able to serve as a kind of force field generator, and while its force field is able to keep out most of the world’s armed forces, it just so happens that the ships piloted by Alex and his Japanese soccer rival are inside it and may be humanity’s only hope.

Battleship is basically a naval version of Independence Day, complete with a Jeff Goldblum equivalent communications nerd in the form of Hamish Linklater, a Vivica A. Fox equivalent in the form of Rihanna, impenetrable energy fields, and a black man punching an alien in the face. But they also “borrowed” liberally from other sources, like giving the aliens a stupid and implausible weakness a la Signs and getting assistance from a bunch of over-the-hill veterans like Space Cowboys. They took the appearance of the alien suits from Halo, and the appearance of the aliens inside the suits from humans. They even managed to rip off Matt Damon’s face and put it on the body of Jesse Plemons.

About the only source material that appears to be largely safe from plagiarism is Battleship the board game. I know that the artillery fired by the alien ships is supposed to resemble the pegs players stick into the game board, but unless the filmmakers had a different version of the game than the one I played as a kid, they didn’t go out of their way to make them too similar. And only a couple of the movie’s 131 minutes involve targeting alien ships with grid coordinates, but even then they chose to obscure the reference by using words like “bravo” and “echo” instead of letters like “B” and “E”. And of course the one phrase that comes to everyone’s mind when thinking of the game is nowhere to be heard.

At no point does anything in Battleship approach the vicinity of a good movie. It’s possible that it could be fun with an audience that enjoys watching bad movies, but it’s completely out of place in its attempted position as one of the summer’s flagship films.

As an outsider, it’s hard to understand how people can get caught up in a cult. And yet, people are very impressionable. Under the reign of Kim Il-sung, North Koreans believed him to be a god and were dumbfounded by his mortality when he died in 1994, but nevertheless immediately assigned the same status to his son Kim Jong-il, only to be shocked again by his death last year. And yet this kind of thing happens (albeit on a much smaller scale) even in environments where people are allowed much more freedom and in a society that generally looks down on them as kooks and weirdos.

In the film, Peter (Christopher Denham) was all too familiar with this phenomenon. His mother had been in a cult when she got cancer, and was convinced to try to heal herself through faith rather than medicine. When she died, Peter was traumatized and developed a great hatred for cults, which only grew over the years. Now that he’s an adult, he wants to ensure that others aren’t suckered into making the same kind of mistake. When he and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius) learned of a cult in their area, they decided to try to infiltrate it and expose it (and its leader) as a fraud.

The process of infiltrating the cult wasn’t as easy as they’d hoped, because this particular cult was very secretive and very exclusive. But their diligence paid off, and eventually they found themselves face to face with Maggie (Brit Marling). Maggie claimed to have traveled back in time from the year 2054, after war had ravaged the nation and created a post-apocalyptic dystopia. But despite Peter’s intelligence and enlightenment, it’s hard to get past her charisma, and sometimes she even seems to make a little sense.

Sound of My Voice is a beautifully haunting film. Despite going in a kind of predictable direction (and having a trailer which unfortunately gives away more than I would have liked), it somehow manages to maintain a degree of tension and uncertainty. We’re not only concerned about the cult taking an unpleasant turn (e.g., a Jonestown-style mass suicide or a Waco-like militia), but also the possibility of Peter and Lorna getting discovered or sucked in too deep. Its 85-minute runtime and chapter-based progression keep it moving quickly, but it doesn’t feel rushed or like we’re getting short-changed.

I’ve actually seen the film twice now, and was surprised to find how well it holds up to multiple viewings. Even when I knew exactly what was coming, it still had a couple of riveting moments and a high degree of emotional impact. It’s not at all heavy or overpowering, but just like a couple of great moments in Jaws that can still make me jump no matter how many times I watch it, I suspect that Sound of My Voice is something that will have an effect each time you see it.

As with most games, Tetris has a lot of casual fans. It’s believed that two out of every three Americans have played the game at some point. But few are truly experts. If you’ve never reached the maximum possible score of 999,999 points, or if you’ve never reached level 29 (by clearing at least 290 lines, where the blocks are falling so fast that it’s believed to be impossible to maneuver them into place quickly enough), then you’re just like virtually everyone else on the planet. There are only a couple of people in the world who can claim those accomplishments, and not even some of the super-elite players have achieved those milestones.

Thor Aackerlund is one of the first people to be able to legitimately claim himself to be a Tetris master. He won the 1990 Nintendo World Championship (the same competition featured in the 1989 film The Wizard) where Tetris was the featured game, and he had made some pretty impressive claims about his abilities over the years. But Thor was something of a recluse and never submitted any kind of evidence to back up his statements, so many in the Tetris community were skeptical. Robin Mihara had played against (and lost to) Thor in that tournament, and had spent much of the two subsequent decades wondering who really is the best Tetris player in the nation.

The invitees were the cream of the crop in the Tetris world, many of whom held (at least at one time) some kind of record. This included Jonas Neubauer and Harry Hong, the only players to have confirmed scores of 999,999 points. It also included Ben Mullen and Jesse Kelkar, who had reached level 29. Other top players like Dana Wilcox and Chris Tang were offered slots. And Thor, despite his reluctance to provide evidence to back up his claims of recent exploits, was invited if for no other reason than curiosity among the others.

There are a lot of similarities between Ecstasy of Order and the great Donkey Kong documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. However, there are also a lot of differences. While both films focus on people vying for greatness in video games, it’s surprising to see the degree of camaraderie among the Tetris players in contrast to the animosity between the Donkey Kong combatants. While most people likely find themselves rooting against Billy Mitchell in King of Kong, I was surprised to find I was rooting for everyone in Ecstasy of Order. The players are absolutely focused on winning, and yet there is a great deal of civility and mutual admiration between them which makes the film a joy to watch.

There is a lot of great content in the interviews with and interactions between the players, but it’s also a lot of fun to just watch them play, and there’s plenty of that to enjoy. As I learned from the mini Tetris tournament held at the Alamo Drafthouse after the film ended, it’s fun to watch even awful players try their luck. It makes the achievements of the top players even more impressive when immediately followed by “regular people” who fail to score any points or complete any lines. It’s interesting to see the differences in skills and strategies of the best players in the game, and the differences in personalities and knowledge of the game.

It’s hard to say anything bad about Ecstasy of Order, unless perhaps you find yourself frustrated by not having ready access to a quality version of Tetris. But even that’s a problem that can be overcome without too much effort or expense.

I don’t usually get into war movies, but I usually really like Korean films. There’s kind of a dichotomy there, because there are a lot of Korean war movies (many of which are about the Korean War, but others are simply war movies created by Korean filmmakers). Some of them, like J.S.A. and Tae Guk Gi, are phenomenal, but others like The Front Line (which was inexplicably South Korea’s submission for best foreign film last year) are underwhelming. Fortunately, while I would have preferred My Way to be a little shorter, it turned out to be one of the good ones.

The film opens in the 1920s, at a time when Korea was a colony of the Japanese Empire rather than an independent nation, and certainly before it was split into two countries. The Japanese living there (primarily as representatives of the imperial government) saw the Koreans as a lesser class of people, but they still mostly got along. Jun-shik Kim (played by Dong-gun Jang, who was also in Tae Guk Gi) was just a boy at the time, and he loved running. He was the fastest around, and had aspirations of one day running in an Olympic marathon. But when Tetsuo Hasegawa moved into the village with his father, Jun-shik found that he had some real competition. Over the years while they were growing up, they kept running against each other, and each repeatedly lost and reclaimed the honor of the village running champion.

As the years passed and the risk of another world war began to rise, there was also a rise in tension between the Japanese and Koreans. In Jun-shik’s village, this tension came to a head when war was imminent and Jun-shik emerged the victor after a close race for Olympic eligibility, only to be unfairly disqualified by the Japanese race officials. The Koreans began to riot, and after the dust settled, all Korean men involved in the fight were ordered to fight alongside the Japanese in the war. This included Jun-shik, and he found himself assigned as a subordinate of Tetsuo, who quickly acquired a reputation as a merciless taskmaster with little regard for the well-being of his underlings.

Although it’s probably an unusual comparison, My Way reminds me a bit of War Horse. Clearly all the main characters are human rather than equine, but there are actually a number of similarities between plots. But where I strongly disliked War Horse (because of a protagonist that didn’t do anything beyond self-preservation, and nothing at all that would be considered heroic), it worked better in My Way because of the humanity of those involved and their ability to make choices beyond themselves. The lines of “good” and “bad” weren’t always clear, particularly from the perspective of an American, but that helps underscore the reality of war.

What really sold the film to me was the way that it ended. Because of the way the story is told, you’ve got an idea how things are going to turn out, but it’s the way the pieces are put together, along with additional revelations, that really make things come together. Some may consider the ending to be a little too mainstream, but it worked for me. And since it’s based on a true story, it’s hard to call it out on something that actually happened.

I’ve often complained about films that use gimmicks as a means of trying to make up for weaknesses in other areas, and it rarely works. Introducing elements like 3D and found footage rarely do anything to make a film better, and usually make it a lot worse. But I’ve got to say that I’m completely dumbfounded by the Whit Stillman gimmick, which is apparently to remove any semblance of a plot and fill it to overflowing with kitschy and unrealistic dialogue. I know that some people love this about his films, but I knew within a couple of minutes that I was going to hate Damsels in Distress.

Although it’s not really about anything, the film focuses on students at the Ivy League-ish Seven Oaks University. It’s the beginning of the school year, and Violet, Rose, and Heather (played by Greta Gerwig, Megalyn Megalyn Echikunwoke, and Carrie MacLemore, respectively) are returning students who have decided to bestow the gift of their accumulated wisdom upon a new arrival. They choose Lily (Analeigh Tipton), only to find that she’s not a freshman but has just transferred from another school. Nevertheless, their offer stands, and they quickly form a bond. And because the school has a housing shortage, they also become roommates.

The girls make a conscious effort to be helpful around campus. The university has a number of fraternities (which are identified with Roman letters rather than Greek, presumably because it’s more pretentious), and the girls see frat parties as a kind of youth outreach program in which they can help save the idiots from themselves. They also staff a campus suicide clinic, where their preferred therapy is dance, and Violet’s dream in life is to create a dance craze that can serve as a kind of global therapy.

It’s really difficult to concisely summarize what happens in Damsels in Distress because there really isn’t any kind of a plot. There is no challenge to be overcome or goal they’re trying to achieve (Violet’s dance craze idea kind of counts, I guess, but that idea isn’t even introduced until fairly late in the movie). It’s really just a collection of scenes that happen around a college campus and involve some of the most shallow and vapid people you’ll ever meet.

A big source of the appeal or frustration of the film lies in its quirky, unnatural dialogue. It seems the movie’s entire point is to be smug and pseudo-sophisticated with a holier-than-thou attitude, but without any real substance behind the quirky dialogue. It’s much like Juno or Clueless, except they managed to have some actual humor and a real story. The closest Damsels in Distress comes to comedy lies in a plot point in which a frat boy skipped kindergarten and never learned his colors. I didn’t find anything in the movie very funny, and there wasn’t much of to hold my interest at all.

This was the first Whit Stillman movie that I’ve seen, and I’ve heard the others generally have the same “weird dialogue and no plot” style. If you’ve seen and enjoyed other Whit Stillman films, then perhaps you’ll enjoy Damsels in Distress. I don’t feel a need to see any of his other films to learn whether I like them any better.

Shirley MacLaine has one of the greatest filmographies of any living actresses. She’s worked for directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Hal Ashby, and starred opposite men like Jack Lemon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Michael Caine, and John Forsythe. She’s been making great films since the 1950s, and while no one is going to claim that it’s on the same level as The Apartment or Irma la Douce or Gambit, her work in Bernie shows that she’s still got it.

Carthage is known as the best small town in Texas, and Bernie (played by Jack Black) is widely regarded as its most popular and beloved resident. He sings in the church choir, participates in most of the local plays, and he gets along well with everyone. But he gets along best with the little old ladies of the town. His day job as an assistant funeral director puts him in the lives of people under the worst of circumstances, where his skills as a people person help make the grief easier to bear. And his kindness doesn’t stop when he funeral is over, because he often visits recent widows to bring flowers or gift baskets to show he’s still thinking of them. People may occasionally question his sexual orientation, but never his standing as a genuinely nice person.

If Carthage has an anti-Bernie, then it would have to be Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine). She’s about as selfish as they come, running the town bank with an iron fist and a cold heart, and even her own family members have stopped talking to her after a lawsuit between her and her children. About the only one who could stand to be around her (and the only one that she could stand) was her husband, but when he died, she was all alone with her extraordinary wealth. She probably would have preferred it that way, but Bernie’s personality and post-funeral persistence somehow managed to break through her shell. They quickly became casual friends and then travel companions, and were soon inseparable. But Marjorie’s selfish bossyness quickly overpowered Bernie’s kindhearted serving nature, and she began to take advantage of him. He was too nice to stand up to her, but even the nicest man in the world has a breaking point.

The film is based on a true story, and is shot in a style that is half narrative and half pseudo-documentary. Interspersed with scenes in which the story plays out, we see interviews with the townspeople praising Bernie, disparaging Marjorie, and sharing small-town gossip. It’s very funny and thoroughly enjoyable, although there were a couple of times that the interview scenes felt like they were starting to become a little repetitive. There are a lot of opportunities for Jack Black to showcase his singing abilities, often in the form of hymns in church or at funerals, or showtunes in town plays, and this adds both to the comedy and authenticity of the film, but it also lends to its absurdity. The movie is not subtle in any way, and often goes over the top in everything that it does, but most of the time it has the intended effect of creating a charming witticism that avoids disaster and ends up with just the right degree of funny.

I hate movies that are fundamentally flawed. There are some films whose entire foundation can be completely destroyed by a single intelligent thought. For example, I was at least a little disappointed when I realized that all of Star Wars could have been avoided if the rebels had merely found some other way to transmit the Death Star plans than having to physically carry them from one place to another, but I’m willing to overlook that because it’s a great film despite its (admittedly numerous) flaws. But The Five-Year Engagement provides nothing to recover from its tragically senseless premise.

Tom (Jason Segel) first met Violet (Emily Blunt) at a New Year’s Eve costume party, where he was dressed as a bunny and she as Princess Diana. There was an instant connection and their romance grew over the year, and the next New Year’s Eve found them engaged. As they began planning their wedding, Violet was disappointed to learn that she did not get into the post-doctorate research program she’d applied to at UC Berkeley, but she was accepted into a similar program at the University of Michigan. Although he was horrified at the prospect of giving up his job as a chef at a prestigious San Francisco restaurant, he was outwardly supportive and didn’t show a moment’s hesitation at moving halfway across the country to support his soon-to-be wife.

For some reason that goes completely unexplained in the film, Tom and Violet are unable to get married before they leave, and they apparently don’t realize that people can also get married in Michigan. So they put on their mopey faces and put off their wedding for two years, until Violet’s program has ended and they can return to civilization. Because it seems that all Michiganians are completely devoid of culture, the best job Tom can find is making sandwiches at a deli, but he’ll hold out for two years for his beloved. But when Violet’s program is extended for another couple of years, the strength of their relationship begins to be tested.

The trailer for this movie made it seem like Tom and Violet would be separated for the duration of the engagement. If that had been the case, then their angst would have been justified and understandable, but because they are together the whole time, the entire premise of the film is completely demolished. There is absolutely no explanation for why they couldn’t just get married in Michigan (or in San Francisco before they left, or over any of the summers between the spring and fall semesters), and because they’re living together anyway and doing the kinds of things that married people do there’s no explanation for the sense of urgency they feel to tie the knot.

The movie is over two hours long and very slowly paced, so it feels almost as if you’re experiencing their five year engagement in real time. What little comedy there is has been spoiled by the trailer, so you’re left with a couple of hours of two whiny people who are frustrated with each other and the “horrible” circumstances in which they find themselves. The filmmakers even managed to completely waste their casting of Alison Brie as Violet’s sister and Jacki Weaver as her mother, and the bit parts for Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, Chris Parnell, and Molly Shannon are similarly squandered. Only Brian Posehn (in the role of Tom’s coworker at the deli) brings any degree of fun to the film outside of the main characters, but that’s far from enough to keep the film interesting.

Of all the films leading up to The Avengers, I loved Iron Man and Captain America, tolerated Iron Man 2, disliked The Incredible Hulk, and hated Thor. My problems with Thor stem both from the source of his power and his lack of heroism. I can buy into Iron Man because Tony Stark is a billionaire genius who’s been designing weapons all his life, and I can accept Captain America and The Hulk because both Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner were transformed by medical experiments intended to create super soldiers. But Thor is a god from another planet (who just happens to look human and speaks English with a British accent despite being a Norse god), which is illogical and doesn’t fit with the others. Further, while Iron Man and Captain America actively desire to protect others, The Hulk and Thor aren’t at all heroic and only fight when they themselves are attacked. I was truly disappointed to find that The Avengers not only focused heavily on the supernatural storyline initiated in Thor, but that it also dragged the others further into its absurdity.

The film opens in S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, where the mysterious Tesseract cube (which had been recovered by Howard Stark after Captain America sent it into the ocean during a battle with Red Skull) resides. The usually well-behaved cube has recently been acting up, and that’s because Loki (Thor’s adopted brother turned nemesis) is trying to use it to open an intergalactic portal so that he can invade with a newly-acquired alien army. Loki’s attempts are successful, and not only does he steal the Tesseract from S.H.I.E.L.D., but he even manages to use mind control to turn a couple of them (including Hawkeye and Dr. Selvig) against the others. If he succeeds in using the Tesseract to create a portal for the alien invaders, then Earth is done for.

Fortunately, Earth is not without protection. Captain America is more powerful than ever after having been thawed out of his arctic coma, and Iron Man is his normal arrogant self, but with the technology to back it up. The Black Widow also gets in on the action and helps to track down Bruce Banner. They don’t really want The Hulk, but Banner’s expertise in gamma radiation may be the only way they can find the Tesseract and the bad guys who have it. And of course Thor isn’t quite as stranded on his home planet as everyone (except of course for the audience) seemed to think. But even with their combined resources, along with the old standbys like Nick Fury and Agent Coulson, it’s not going to be an easy fight.

The Avengers isn’t a bad movie, and it does some things well. The Hulk is much more well represented in The Avengers than he was even in the whole movie dedicated to him, and although they can’t manage to find someone who wants that role for more than one movie, Mark Ruffalo gave a great performance. Similarly, Black Widow has a much bigger role, and her fighting style has become much more fun than the “strike a pose” approach taken in Iron Man 2, although it seemed out of character for her to appear terrified of The Hulk when nothing else seemed to rattle her at all. It’s also fun to see the characters working together and overcoming their differences to fight a common enemy, but it’s unfortunately also the case that they spent far too much time quarreling amongst themselves.

But there are also a number of disappointments in the film. There are times that it feels too much like The Transformers, with a race of alien robots heading toward Earth in search of a cube of unlimited power, and the technology they use in their fighting (and for everything else) is pretty unimpressive. Natalie Portman’s Jane character (sadly one of the best parts of Thor) is completely nonexistent, except for a single mention of how she’s been stashed away to be kept safe. Hawkeye apparently has the bow-and-arrow equivalent of an old west six-shooter that never runs out of ammo, until it does. Nick Fury is still almost completely worthless, as we sadly realize that he is basically middle management and not someone likely to do awesome things, and even see him mislead and lie to others in order to manipulate them. Similarly, the newly-introduced Agent Hill (played by Cobie Smulders) is pretty but completely inconsequential. Some of the action and dialogue is quite predictable, and if you know what’s about to come then seeing it happen just isn’t nearly as much fun. And while there are a number of very illogical elements in the film’s plot, they’re in areas of the film that I can’t really discuss without getting into spoilers.

Ultimately, my disappointment stems just as much from the film not living up to my expectations as from it being a weak movie. I had extremely high hopes for the film based on Joss Whedon’s involvement (with my excitement even higher after his recent The Cabin in the Woods), and based on the over-the-top excitement from those who’d already seen it. It would have been hard for any film to meet the expectations I had set for it, but I think that The Avengers has enough legitimate flaws to justify my mediocre-to-decent perception of it.