By Jason Adams, MyNewPlaidPants

I hope you all have seen Iron Man and Iron Man 2 and Captain America and Thor and Hulk and The Incredible Hulk by now, because if you don’t remember every single minute detail each and every one of those movies presented then you’re never going to be able to follow this weekend’s big movie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. I can’t wait to see Dame Maggie and Loki go head to head! She wants to decorate the sitting room with dusty pink throws but he’s having none of it! It’s a battle for the ages!

Also out this weekend, strangely with a lot of similarities, is Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Joss Whedon, if you don’t know the name, or if the name sounds familiar like maybe some geek standing in line behind you at Best Buy was rambling something about a “Buffyverse” and you were all “That sounds itchy,” is a writer director producer jack of all trades entertainment guru who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other genre-bending television shows. He is lord of a certain sub-set of nerds (myself very much included), and Marvel inexplicably handed lil’ ol’ him the keys to their biggest movie yet, wherein all of their superheroes (and one super-villain) bounce off the walls of Manhattan like an asylum splits its seams. And by all accounts he made a movie that is at the very least very very much fun. Some people are calling it the “best superhero movie ever made” the commercials tell me! I’m out of my mind with want. The film stars Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo (and naked Mark Ruffalo, I hear) and Jeremy Renner and Samuel L. Jackson and Colbie Smuthers (which is apparently a thing) and I’m sure there’s somebody I’m forgetting but perhaps that’s for the best. Next!

Joking aside, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an actual movie that’s out today as well; it’s the only other movie besides The Avengers that’s opening on more than a couple of screens. That’s called counter-programming – unless your nana is stenciling Iron Man on her Depends, this is probably the movie for her this weekend. Dench and Smith take over a hotel in India, with whimsical - but not too whimsical! These are frail-boned seniors! – results. Everyone smiles and sits in the golden-toned East Asian sunlight and perhaps swats at a fly now and then. Tis lovely.

In limited release, there’s LOL, a Miley Cyrus movie of all things – she’s getting all arty! This is a remake of a French film even! La di dah, miss teenybopper. It’s about troubled teens and troubled romance and texting, so much texting. A remake of the 1980 horror movie Mother’s Day finds Saw II director Darren Lynn Bousman putting Rebecca De Mornay front and center as the matriarch of a less than friendly clan of folks who show up to reclaim their home from its new tenants. And speaking of blond actresses that we’ve missed, Kathleen Turner has a movie out! It’s called The Perfect Family and it kind of sounds like Serial Mom meets The Virgin Suicides – Turner’s trying to present the perfect familial front to her church after winning an award, which inevitably goes awry. Not sure anybody will be sticking their heads in ovens or beating someone to death for wearing white shoes after Labor Day, but one can dream.

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