Joss Whedon: The Avengers

Four superheroes for the price of one (plus the charge for 3D glasses, can we please stop this nonsense?), so what could go wrong? Indeed, this is a very amusing movie, even if you aren't a raving comic fan. It has a lot of Joss Whedon dialogue, so if you are a fan of Buffy and Firefly, you should have a good time on that count alone, although I found the characters unbelievably precious at some points. But it is genuinely funny, and they stopped the thing that made Ironman 2 nearly unbearable, where two characters are chattering away at the same time, so you needed to be a schizophrenic to get both parts of the dialogue.

The backstories and involvement of the heroes (Aryan Viking, Snide Toasterman, Green Butt-Naked Giant and Clean-Cut Protestant Guy, supported by the lesser heroes Sultry Temptress and Lotso Arrows, if you have been living under a stone) are deftly handled, meaning that I wasn't waiting for the big action pay-off, but really enjoying the slow bits of the movie. At 140 minutes this is a rather longish movie, but it does not feel that way.

And the action pay-off is grand, absolutely fantastic, I really think I won't see anything like it for the rest of the year. This includes the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. No shaky cam here, but a clear sense of who is doing what where and why. I don't know if you should stay through the credits, because I didn't. If there is a "surprise", it will be on YouTube anyway.

4 of 5 chair fights

Like this

Your co-worker the next cubicle over will go on a shooting spree any day now? Jörg Sprave has you covered, but please note that all these weapons take a few minutes to construct. Be prepared - build them now. Right now. Via io9.

High speed shenanigans

Sundry buffoonery recorded via a Phantom Flex highspeed camera .Via panzer's telemetry feed.

The big Paranoia LARP "London 2012" takes up steam

The term of today is "bespoke legislation". Via the guardian.

With a view of Paris

That's what you can look at in your living room on a big screen, in your own sweet vault, complete with hydroponic garden and classroom. It may only be a refurbished missile base, but the whole setup has a distinctive Vault-Tec feeling to it. I wonder what kind of sociological experiments they have dreamed up this time.

Timo Vuorensola: Iron Sky

If you are on the web more than an hour a week, you probably have heard about this film: Nazis have hidden on the dark side of the moon in a massive, swastika-shaped moon base, and now they are returning to conquer the Earth in space zeppelins and UFOs. This is played as a comedy, and the film is very amusing, although uneven in its execution. Sarah Palin is a fitness-obsessed US president, an iPad controls the Nazi invasion fleet and Führer Kortzfleisch drives a VW bug on the moon: There are tons of brilliant ideas, but sometimes the comedic timing is off, or the idea overstays its welcome or is sabotaged by atrocious acting. There are a few changes in tone which mar the overall impression. A few scenes made me wince. But at other times, there is great comedic pay-off, and like me, most of the other moviegoers seemed to have a very good time.

I find it notable that this film exists at all. Please imagine pitching a comedy about Nazis from the moon to a big-studio executive: That sucking sound you just heard in your mind were his balls retracting into his body, to about the height of his liver and you'd be out of his office before you could say Reichsflugscheibe. Instead, a lot of funding came from the net. Now I am able to watch such an utterly crazy idea realized as a full feature movie with quite reasonable special effects on the big screen, and this gives me hope that we will one day have an R-rated film about Lovecraft's mythos worthy of the name. You know, real Shoggoths ripping up real mad cultists, stuff that is to weird for the normal film industry, but would look infinitely better with a big budget. Normally, I would give this film a 3.5 of 5, but it gets a small bonus for showing that crowdfunding can lead to results that leave the standard, safe blockbuster fodder in the dust.

4 of 5 laughably long German composite words

China Miéville: London's Overthrow

China Miéville (author of the delightful Kraken) has written a long, insightful essay on London, garnished with cell-phone photography.