Our man IanBinMD suggested a while back that I do a movie-review segment on this blog called Rotten Tedmatoes, which I thought was pretty hilarious but never pursued. I see a ton of movies, but I’m never moved to write that much about them, in part because the way I feel about a movie often depends on the way the movie ends and it’s bad form to say how a movie ends in a movie review (SPOILER ALERT).

But since it’s a slow day around these parts and I’ve seen a bunch of movies that are currently in theaters, here are some very short reviews of those movies. I’ll do the ratings based on a five-star system, with no stars meaning they’re about as good as An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West and five stars meaning they’re about as good as The Big Lebowski.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. This movie had a plot about a madman trying to destroy the world and another madman trying to stop him. Tom Cruise is totally believable as the second madman, in part because Tom Cruise is now so transparently crazy that it would be impossible for him to play a sane person. Actually, I’m not even sure his character in the movie was supposed to be all that crazy, but it read that way and it worked, for all that it mattered.

It didn’t really matter. All that mattered was the ridiculous, over-the-top, utterly awesome action in this movie, a lot of which was set above the 100th floor of the Burj Khalifa — and felt like it, to director Brad Bird’s credit. I think I’ve now seen every Mission: Impossible movie and forgotten nearly all of them. Most of this one will probably fade, too, but it was pretty thrilling to watch for the entire 133-minute running time. Also, it has Sawyer from Lost in a small role. Gains 1/2 star because “Ghost Protocol” is hilarious. 3.5 stars.

Young Adult: I don’t know why I had such high hopes for this movie. I’ve been following Charlize Theron’s career since I was 16 and saw her in the Jeff Daniels/Kramer vehicle Trial and Error and thought she was about as beautiful as a human being could possibly be, and I read somewhere that this would be a breakout role for her (though I thought that came in Monster, but whatever).

In any case, this movie was not very good. It was like someone saw Garden State and decided it should have been slower paced and more self-indulgent, and featuring a less sympathetic lead character. It was at least vaguely interesting in that it wasn’t like most movies — from beginning to end, really — but too often it felt like it was trying to be quirky or artsy for the sake of quirky artsyness. Patton Oswalt is great in it, though. 1.5 stars.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: I don’t want to give too much away here so I’m going to tread lightly. And this movie was pretty gripping throughout regardless of its conclusion. But you might want to skip this next part if you intend to see this movie sometime soon (SPOILER ALERT, in other words).

When you’re watching a whodunit type movie and there’s one suspect who is either a) given way more screentime than the others or b) played by a much more prominent actor, the payoff’s going to be really disappointing either way. If that’s the bad guy, then, well, duh, of course that’s the bad guy. If that guy was just a red herring, then why’d you waste so much of my time when it turns out the bad guy is just some rando who’s also at the conference table?

More than anything, this movie made me suspect that the book version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was awesome and that I probably should have checked that out before seeing the movie. 3 stars.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, another movie based on a book I never read. And while watching it, you could kind of figure out which plot points were bigger deals in the book and which might be important in the sequel and which they probably could have left out of the movie and still kept the story cohesive.

In any case, this movie was sweet. The actual girl with the dragon tattoo turns out to be a total badass, and Daniel Craig is pretty cool also. There’s way more suspense than there is action, but the way the tension builds throughout the movie means by the time there is some action, your heart is pounding harder than it did when Tom Cruise was running down the side of the Burj Khalifa. Also, Trent Reznor’s score is perfectly Trent Reznory. You should probably see this movie. 4 stars.

Sometimes, when people lament the lack of decent new music on the radio, they assert there’s no decent new music being made anywhere and suggest some societal reason for the problem. But that’s silly. There’s always good stuff being produced somewhere, and if at times the national spotlight never focuses on that good stuff, it says more about the distribution and consumption of media than it does of any systematic creative failure.

The same is certainly true in standup comedy. Louis CK has been doing this for a long time, no? He has always been funny. He has even had TV shows before. So while certainly he has honed his art and improved with time, I’d guess the fact that he’s now blowing up toward superstardom says as much about us as it does about him. And that probably speaks pretty well of humanity.

If you missed it, Louis CK released his most recent standup special through his website a few weeks ago. He charged only five dollars for it, made it easy to purchase even though he understood that would make it easy to pirate, and asked people to pay for it even though he realized there were plenty of ways to avoid doing so. A couple weeks later, he had brought in over a million dollars in sales — over a quarter of which he donated to charity.

The DIY ethic, the straightforwardness and the deep-seated decency highlighted by the experiment and its outcome all fit with Louis/Louie’s on-screen and on-stage persona: He’s the most lovable of losers, ever-frustrated with b.s., smart but often overwhelmed. And he often buries beneath several layers of hilarious cynicism some real hope, love and wonderment.

And I suspect Louis CK’s recent run of success implies that a lot of us identify with him these days. It’s a tough time to be a loser because it’s always a tough time to be a loser — that’s what being a loser means, after all.

But maybe all that has been done to expose the plight of the loser, plus the forums now available to all of us and the way Charlie Sheen has forever stigmatized “winning” combine to provide hope that we can overcome the various factors that keep us losers and harness our talents and the current zeitgeist to establish some sort of hour of the losers. It seems to be working for Louis CK, after all.

OK, a little Bono-fueled schadenfreude, a sentiment that probably deserves its own term.

I saw an early preview of the (similarly Bono-fueled) Spiderman musical near the end of 2010. The performance I saw was one of the least eventful in the show’s original run. At one point Spiderman got stuck in mid-air over some balcony seats and we had to wait a few awkward minutes as a stagehand reeled him back in, but there were no obvious incidents or accidents — which at that point was notable.

Actually, the production itself was quite awesome — you could see where the millions upon millions of dollars in budget went. With the massive, glowing sets and spectacular costumes and thrilling aerial displays, Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark sure was something to look at.

But whenever it came time to focus on anything besides the visual spectacle — namely the music or plot or dialogue — holy hell. For one thing, there were multiple times during the show that the entire audience laughed out loud at lines that weren’t supposed to be funny.

Most of all, though, it became clear that Bono got involved because he has some sort of Peter Parker complex. You could just imagine him watching the Spiderman movie at home being all like, “‘With great power comes great responsibility!’ That’s like my whole thing! I’m going to show the world the great burden that comes with all these talents I have, and I’m going to do it by making this into a Broadway musical! Get The Edge on the phone!”

And then Bono and The Edge — assuming they weren’t watching Spiderman together — discus the ways they could make the plot of Spiderman deeper and darker by incorporating a love affair between Spiderman and the Greek spider-godess Arachne because how badass is that, bro? Then The Edge is all, “oh hey Bono you know that one guitar sound I make all the time, like, ‘changety chang chang chang!’? Whaddaya say I put that on all the songs in the Broadway musical, and then in case that doesn’t make it obvious enough that it’s an awesome rock musical, we stand some dudes randomly on the corner of the stage playing the guitar like, ‘changety chang chang chang!'”

Then The Edge says, “My name is ‘The Edge.’ Isn’t that cool?”

And in the end they — with the help of Julie Taymor — wind up with an impossibly convoluted play notorious for injuring cast members with a bunch of songs that sound like U2 b-sides, except “Vertigo,” which is randomly played in the middle at some point. The show ran in previews for months before it was finally shut down for a re-write.

Anyway, the failures of Bono and the Edge on Broadway in 2011 were emphasized by the successes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, them of South Park and BASEketball and Team America: World Police and not in any way “Stuck in a Moment,” who won about a million Tonys for The Book of Mormon. I haven’t seen that yet so I can’t say much about it except that it’s not by Bono and it is by the South Park guys, both of which seem like pretty ringing endorsements.

There’s nothing particularly unique about the story of Beavis and Butthead. I can’t speak for the way women interact amongst themselves but I know that when you grow up a dude in the ol’ U.S. of A., you’re most likely going to spend countless hours of your time with some other dude, keeping a running narrative of the things that are awesome and the things that suck, vaguely searching for girls and stuff to blow up. So we have Wayne and Garth, and Bill and Ted, and Magic and Bird, of course, Beavis and Butthead.

Theirs is not an explosive, fly-by-night Paul Rudd bromance. It’s more akin to something shared by an old married couple, not overwhelmingly thrilled by the arrangement but long-since resigned to the understand that they’re not going to do any better. And it’s hilarious, of course.

Beavis and Butthead was funny the first time around, but what makes it sing in 2011 is the protagonists’ takes on contemporary MTV “reality” fare. In the show’s initial run, Beavis and Butthead watching music videos made for an entertaining diversion from the episodes. They still watch some music videos now but mostly they tune to Teen Mom, Jersey Shore, True Life and the like. iIt feels like their take on pop-culture is the highlight of the show, and almost as if sometime in the past couple of years Mike Judge stopped on MTV while flipping through channels, watched for an hour and said, “Something needs to be done!”

That something, in this entirely fantasized sequence, was the return of Beavis and Butthead to skewer the programming. They’re entertained by it, of course — they’re laughing and cringing at Jersey Shore in the same way most others who watch the show do. But Judge does a pretty amazing job allowing Beavis and Butthead to present some pretty smart observations in a manner that seems sort of stupid, and, well, it plays. It’s like their straightforward teenage focus on boobs and explosions provides some form of clear-headedness.

The episodes themselves are still pretty great, too. In one, Beavis and Butthead think they’ve survived the apocalypse and decide to go live in the nicest place they know: Stuart’s house. In another, Beavis suffers an obvious existential meltdown after trapping a rat. They succumb to and provide fodder for the histrionic displays of a local broadcaster. They crash a car and get mistaken for meth dealers. Beavis becomes the leader of a religious cult.

It’s all funny, in part because at this point just looking at Beavis and Butthead is pretty funny. I think the animation might get undercut in the show because there’s so much else going on, but it’s really pretty awesome. If you watch the show, think about Beavis and/or Butthead dancing — just picture that in your head — and try not to giggle. They’re silly looking: Everyone else in their world is drawn close to reasonable human proportions, and they’re tremendously awkward, with giant heads and skinny limbs and huge hair.

Point is, I’m glad the show is back, so it’s the No. 8 best thing that happened in 2011.

Not all of the TedQuarters Top Ten Things of 2011 will apply to everyone. I tried to skew them so that the top things most likely to be universally appreciated by readers of this site fall near the top, but the site’s called TedQuarters so you probably realize that these are all just my Top Ten Things of 2011. And I may have missed some, at that. Long year, long last couple of weeks, lots of holiday-shopping still to do.

Anyway, I suspect most of you did not move back to New York City in the last couple of months, so this one might not resonate like Pascucci homering off Hamels or the forthcoming Taco Bell item.

But New York City is awesome, which is easy to forget sometimes. My wife and I moved to Manhattan in November, forgoing the comforts of the suburbs for the convenience and excitement of urban living.

On a sunny day a couple weeks later, I found myself walking around downtown — in pursuit of a sandwich, incidentally. I passed City Hall and snapped a few photos for an effusive couple that had either just gotten married or just obtained the requisite paperwork. Their joy was transparent, unburdened and contagious: Passersby in starchy business attire smoking cigarettes smiled and waited out the short digital-camera delay, forgoing the photobombing opportunity as the couple tried to time their gleeful jumps to the shutter.

A few blocks north, I walked past the Tombs, the city’s longstanding detention complex. From a door on the building, with little hoopla, stepped a man in a black bandana, a well-worn black leather jacket, tight black jeans and black combat boots. I try not to judge people based on their attire and I have no idea how the getting-out-of-jail process really goes, but this guy’s whole look — combined with my inclination to make up stories in my head about strangers, combined with the fact that I actually saw him walking out of a jail — made me suspect I was watching a man leave jail. He looked left, then right, inhaled deeply through his nose, then jammed his fists in his pockets and started walking. Perfectly cinematic, really.

You see stuff like that all the time in the city: The major plot points of other people’s biographies. And everywhere you look there are acts of human decency large and small, and then, of course, people treating each other like crap for no discernible reason. It’s a great place for voyeurism, at the very least.

All that stuff happens elsewhere, obviously, but the way it is compressed by the city’s boundaries amplifies the spectacle. On any given day you can walk around any reasonably bustling neighborhood of the five boroughs and make several new observations about humanity, or at least confirm some old ones.

Plus there’s tons of stuff to do and see, and basically every type of delicious food to eat. So for that, you deal with dodging the occasional pile of dog crap on the sidewalk and the knowledge that at some point you’ll forget to close your blinds before you change and catch some weirdo across the street checking out your balls. Worth it.

UPDATE, 12:00 PM: OK, hold on. I meant to keep politics out of this list entirely (as I normally do on this blog) but upon further consideration I want to include one of my favorite images of the year here, in part because it fits with the whole “New York amplifies people’s peoplehood” theme of the above post and in part because I hate that the long-overdue legalization of gay marriage should even qualify as “politics.” On July 24, 2011, the first day same-sex couples could legally marry in New York, some protesters holding all sorts of hateful signs predictably showed up to demonstrate across from marriage sites. So some smart-thinking, decent people showed up with umbrellas to shield the grooms and brides-to-be from the protests and help the couples enjoy at least a part of their wedding day free of bigotry:

We have to pay off this story, we have to service all of these character relationships, and when we started mapping all that out it just went beyond 110 pages. The studio said, ‘You can’t fit all that story in one damn movie!’

– Vin Diesel.

That’s right: The sixth and seventh installment of the Fast and Furious series will shoot back to back because there was just no way to contain all the awesome in one feature-length film. Suck it, Citizen Kane. FilmDrunk has more.

Slow day here today. Got busy trying to wrap things up before I take off for the year. The TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2011 start rolling out tomorrow.