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.