Here’s a surprisingly interesting week for this late in the summer. Two “art” films of note — Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky and The Killer Inside Me — open at the Fine Arts and the Carolina respectively. And at least two of the mainstream releases — Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Eat Love Pray — hold potential interest, while the third — The Expendables — has undeniable curio value.

A few weeks ago Universal put out a pretty nice set of Bob Hope movies. This Sunday (August 8) TCM offers a truly perplexing mix of some of the best and a lot of the absolute worst of Bob Hope. Maybe that’s fair, though, since perhaps no one ever put so much energy into creating an iconic public persona and then so tenaciously destroyed that image by not knowing when to quit.

This is one of those “thank goodness for the other movies” weeks. There are a grand total of two mainstream titles coming to town this week — The Other Guys and StepUp 3D — both of which would come under the heading of “You couldn’t pay me to watch this,” if I hadn’t given up my right to say that by proving that, yeah, you can pay me to sit through just about anything.

Not so long ago I was taking some of my contemporaries to task for holding to their youthful dislike of Tod Browning’s Mark of the Vampire (1935) for being a “gyp” with its lack of “real” vampires, and I wondered at the time if this kind of youthful prejudice held true outside of the horror genre. I got my answer about two weeks ago without leaving the comfort of my own head. I had been guilty of it myself.

This is the week that the much-praised and locally anticipated The Kids Are All Right makes it into town (Fine Arts and the Carolina)—along with less enticing titles Dinner for Schmucks, Charlie St. Cloud and, gods save us, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. I suppose this is what is known as “something for everyone.” Whether or not that’s a good thing is a separate issue altogether.