It’s brainless action/adventure movie week.

I went to see Iron Man tonight, a great summer action flick. Robert Downey Jr. is excellent in the lead role, and there is just enough humour, story and character development to raise the movie above the mediocre swamp in which most summer action movies lurk.

To contrast, and speaking of lurking in mediocrity, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Plastic and Saran Wrap Skull was a big disappointment. I guess I should have known just from the awkward title. Admittedly there were a few classic Indy moments (can I get a shout out for the giant ants?), but overall it was uninspired and outlandishly derivative. Then again, a movie directed by Steven Spielberg with a story by George Lucas can’t really help being derivative, can it? It’s just that they usually steal from other people’s work. I can imagine Spielberg and Lucas deciding that, hey, they’ve had some good moments in their various movies, so why not put them all together in one? Mix in equal measures of the first three Indy movies, add a little Close Encounters, a pinch of Return of the Jedi, and then maybe throw in a bit of American Graffiti. But mash-ups are for 300 pixel YouTube video, not gigantor multiplex movie screens. Also, I reserve special cat calls for the animated gophers and swinging Ewo—er, monkeys. And Happy Days called and it wants its 1950s diner back.

After the disappointment, I decided I needed to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark again just to make sure I didn’t just have a case of ’80s child nostalgia. But no, Raiders is still an excellent movie. A genre-defining classic, really: clever, self-deprecating (without veering into satire), and out and out funny, all at breakneck action speed. The story perched just on the edge of swallowable, without completely falling off the cliff into utter fantasy. Also, unlike Iron Man and every other action movie of recent memory, there are no big explosions. Definitely worth watching again if it’s been a few years.

Finally, a couple of random notes:

• I went to see Indy at a suburban Toronto cineplex. I know I’ve been out of Canada for a few years, but when did the price of movies get halved? Our tickets were $6.50 on a Friday night. (Admittedly we did appear to be the only people over 15 there.)

• Apple has added movies for Canada and the UK to the ever-increasingly-misnamed iTunes Store. I note that for Canada, it says “Movies”, but for the UK, it says “Films”. I was really rooting for “The Pictures” or “Talkies” as an alternate British euphemism, but I’ve lived here three years and I’m pretty sure Britons are like Americans and Canadians — they only say “films” when they want to sound all posh-like and intellectual.