A day or so ago, one of my oldest friends—we’ll call him Jackson, since he has a mania for anonymity that transcends my understanding—asked me to come up with a list of movies that his daughter (14 going on 15) should see. Now, I’m the last person on earth I’d ask such a thing. (Let’s face it, I’m the guy who had a four-year-old daughter who could sing “Sweet Transvestite” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) But then I’ve never rated Jackson’s judgment all that high. After all, he’s been friends with me for 38 years. That tells you something.

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.

We’re all familiar with the break-out quote—you know those little bits of excerpted reviews that festoon trailers, posters, newspaper ads, DVD cases and nowadays the internet. They always assure the viewers—usually in fewer words than found in the average Twitter tweet—of the untold delights awaiting them if they’ll plop those spondulicks down at the box office. Problem is they aren’t always exactly honest.

There’s nothing as exciting to look forward to this week as there was last week with Inception, though the opening of the Tilda Swinton picture I Am Love at the Carolina on Friday is good news for the art-film crowd. Reviews for both Inception and I Am Love will appear in this week’s issue of the Xpress—and, in fact, the quality of both films caused me to make the unprecedented step of having two weekly picks rather than one.

The year is a little more than half over. The last of the really highly anticipated summer films, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, has arrived. (OK, there’s some interesting small scale stuff slated to filter in through the rest of the summer, but the theoretically exciting part is winding down to wait for award season.) So I guess it’s time to look at the year to date and see where I’d be if I had to come up with a Ten Best list right now—and if such a thing is even possible.

Last week gave us at least two winners: Micmacs and Winter’s Bone, both of which scored with Asheville audiences even more highly than the national average. This week we look toward The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Cyrus and one of the most highly anticipated films of the summer, Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

So here we are at the halfway mark in the second month of the existence of the Asheville Film Society. So far we’ve run Blood Simple, Rushmore, The Times of Harvey Milk, Manhattan, Twentieth Century, Tetro, Blue Velvet and The City of Lost Children. This week we’ve got Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.  That’s a pretty solid list and the response has been generally gratifying.

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.

Readers who rely on the print edition of the Xpress for their information about upcoming films are apt to think there are only three films opening this week when, in truth, there are five. News of two titles—Solitary Man and The Good, the Bad and the Weird—came in too late to make it into this week’s print issue. This is particularly unfortunate, because Solitary Man has the appearance of a solid offering and I know that The Good, the Bad and the Weird is irresistible fun.

I was 18 years old when I got my first dose of Betty Boop. It was at a three day film festival at the University of South Florida where cartoons and shorts had been programmed to screen between the movies. I remember the first encounter was Betty Boop, M.D. (1932)—and let me tell you, it was your proverbial love at first sight.

It’s a week that has something for just about every taste I can think of: You’ve got toys, zombies, art-house fare (for those who don’t think zombies are) and a comic-book movie that hopes to be the next franchise. What more could you want?

How do you gauge an audience? By this I mean, how do you determine what people will and won’t go to see? I have tussled with this question for a while now—but more so recently because of being involved with the programming for both the Thursday Horror Picture Show and the Asheville Film Society. I have listened to advice. I have taken advice. I have ignored advice. I have gone with my instincts and I’ve gone against my instincts. The results have led me to conclude there’s no earthly way of making an accurate determination.