I’m assuming that by now everyone more or less knows the concept but, briefly, it starts from the most level playing field possible with participants being given a line of dialogue, a character name and a prop that all have to be used. That part is the same for everyone. What differs — and really evens things out — is that each team is assigned a genre to work in, so if you’ve spent all year dreaming up a horror picture and you draw “musical/Western,” you’re in trouble.

While last week offered very little, this week perhaps offers almost too much. Neither mainstream offering—Despicable Me or Predators—is without potential interest, and on the non-mainstream front we get the new Jean-Pierre Jeunet film Micmacs, the glowingly reviewed indie film Winter’s Bone and let’s not overlook The Human Centipede.

This was originally going to be a column about great opening scenes in movies, but the more I played with that idea the more I found myself thinking about the fact that any such list of mine was going to include at least four openings from Ken Russell pictures (I’ll save what those are for the column in question). And since today Ken Russell turns 83—making him longest-lived enfant terrible in the history of cinema—I’ve opted for this instead.

In the immortal words of the immortal Groucho Marx when faced with Chico’s piano solo in the immortal Horse Feathers (1932), “I’ve got to stay here, but there’s no reason you folks shouldn’t go out into the lobby till this thing blows over.” If it weren’t for Harry Brown opening, that would be exactly how I would feel about this week’s movies.

Tim Burton’s Ed Wood climaxes with a packed premiere of Plan 9 from Outer Space at Pantages Theatre. The sequence is brilliantly constructed and wonderfully moving. It makes for a great ending to a fine film. The only thing is—well, you see, it never happened.