Wrap this baby up!

It's August, otherwise known as the end of the summer movie season, in which studios burn off stuff that might have been big summer box-office hits if they had been released in an alternate world where there were no comic books or movies made from them.

So that means we can review the summer movie season here -- well, I can. You can review it in the privacy of your own home, and you can read along for the ride here, I guess.

Most Pleasant Surprise -- Iron Man. I've most always been a DC Comics guy primarily and ol' Shell-Head was never one of the Marvel titles I favored. But surprise, surprise, director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey, Jr., along with a classy supporting cast, made a great super-hero movie. They found an almost perfect balance between taking their movie seriously and not taking it too seriously, and holy cow was Downey ever good. Much like Michael Keaton did better as Batman than anyone ever thought he would, Downey had the right mix of world-weary cynicism, idealism, conviction and humor and made me forget he was playing a guy who flew around in a suit of armor. Plus, the post-credits mini-scene made me actually pump my fist and go, "Yes!" out loud in the theater. Fortunately all the other nerds did, too.

Most Welcome Return -- This would be Indiana Jones in this movie with the too-long title. It's almost the second-best movie of the series, trailing Last Crusade because of going a little nuts with the CGI and the presence of Shia LaBoeuf, or however you spell it. But Harrison Ford put Indiana back on the heroic map, using his age as a new dimension of our all-too-flawed and breakable favorite not-so-scholarly archaeologist.

Biggest Disappointment -- The Dark Knight. In Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan seemed to find an anticoagulant for his tendency to overplot his movies and drew a solid performance out of Christian Bale to erase the evil Schumacherian legacy. But for TDK, he must have been off those meds, because we're back to the multiple story clotlines that mess up Insomnia and Prestige. The movie is just way long, and it seems longer because the people in it spend more time telling us the story than they do living it out. Not really bad, but just nowhere near what BB might have led us to hope it might be.

Coolest Other Stuff -- Hellboy: The Golden Army and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Hellboy's praises have been sung elsewhere on these pages, and the only additional cool thing I need to say about it is that it introduced us to actor Doug Jones (Abe Sapien), who gave this great interview about being a person of faith working in the movies. X-Files would have made a better fall movie, probably, but it was a definite good time. Watching Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny work together again was a treat, and watching Gillian Anderson was a good time in any way shape or form. The movie had some muddles, and a couple of tired Hollywood cliches (a pedophile priest? Again?), but it told a story, sparked some thought and did it all without anyone doing Hannibal Lecter's impression of Charlie Chaplin and being touted for an Oscar because of it.

Coolest Movie I Almost Forgot -- Wall-E. "Wall-E." "Eve-ah." The characters who used the fewest words said the most. St. Francis, please call your office.

Stupidest Movie -- Pineapple Express. What, you think that would change? And no, I haven't seen it. Sure I may have no life, but I'd rather stick with "no" than "less than no."

Vilest And Most Repugnant Thing I Saw On The Screen All Summer -- The trailer for this Halloween's Saw V. Triply disgusting: 1) They made the movie Saw. 2) They're making a fifth Saw movie. 3) The trailer pairs this decathlon of degradation with the hymn Be Thou My Vision. I rarely feel the need to rain down fire and brimstone in a sermon and get all "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" on anyone. But before I saw this trailer, I would have said "never" instead of "rarely" in that last sentence.

On to fall, where we see the movies the studios always claim they want to make all the time but seem to only have enough of to release a couple months before Oscar deadlines.