A production of Hasbro (in collaboration with Universal Studios), "Battleship" is a $200 million military-hardware science-fiction action epic inspired by a board game played with tiny plastic pegs and miniature toy boats.

Can "Frisbee," in which flying discs from outer space vaporize Manhattan, and "Operation," a horror movie in which a mad scientist tortures his victim's "funny bone" and "bread basket," be far behind?

In "When Panthers Roamed in Arkansas," a 1997 recording, folk singer Kate Campbell croons: "Every afternoon I'd watch 'Dark Shadows' on TV/ Scared to death that Barnabas would take a bite of me."

She wasn't the only one. Like the pointed teeth of Barnabas Collins, the program's undead antihero, "Dark Shadows" left a mark on the innocents who fell under its spell.

Thanks to Carnival Memphis for including me among the honorees Wednesday during its annual "Business and Industry" awards banquet, which this year focused on the "Movie and Film Industry."

You can read James Dowd's story about the event here.

A fundraiser for Carnival's Children's Charity Initiative, the luncheon was fun, though humbling on several levels. I've never been admired for my fashion sense, but Wednesday, as the above photo by Savannah Bearden illustrates, even the strawberries were better dressed than I was.

English actor Tom Hiddleston appears in two movies that open in Memphis today. In "The Avengers," which apparently everybody in the world is destined to see, probably at least twice, he is Loki, evil trickster god of Asgard. And in "The Deep Blue Sea," which will attract an audience with little of the immensity of its title, he is Freddie Page, a physically intact but emotionally incomplete former Royal Air Force pilot who longs for the dangers of the Battle of Britain, when he was distracted by the  "excitement and fear" of combat, and not "tangled up in other people's emotions."

"The Avengers" registers in the red on the Nerdgasmatron. That's the gist of the simplistic message delivered by many of the mostly positive advance reviews of this Marvel Comics all-star assembly, which gathers a cast of literal heavy hitters that includes Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and Captain America, plus the more vulnerable Hawkeye and Black Widow. True, the so-called fanboy may blow smoke from his ears like a cartoon steam whistle when he sees Scarlett Johansson in skintight leather put the hurt on a computer-generated space alien; but when a movie sells close to $160 million worth of tickets in the U.S. in advance of its opening date, it's time to stop suggesting that "nerds" and "geeks" and "fanboys" are responsible for the supremacy of the superhero at the multiplex.

In what likely represents its movie debut, the word "homeoteleuton" -- referring to a specific type of copyist's error that occurs during the transcribing of a text -- appears in "Footnote."

I tell you this because the word gives an indication of the playfully pretentious intelligence at work in this Israeli film about a rivalry of almost biblical intensity between father and son academics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At the same time, I'm worried the word will scare you off, especially when I add that it appears in a subtitle.

Don't let it. Winner of the Best Screenplay Award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and a nominee this year for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, "Footnote" manages to be very funny and very suspenseful. The latter aspect is especially notable, because "Footnote" is inhabited by thinkers rather than doers: men who work up a sweat, as far as we can tell, only when very nervous or on a racquetball court. (The women in the story are treated as mere adjuncts to their self-centered "brilliant" lifemates.)

To enliven his cunning if esoteric narrative, writer-director Joseph Cedar uses an active, very "mainstream" music score, in conjunction with the digital editing tricks of commercial cinema; the slick technique is the sweet that dilutes the story's sour. The movie might have had more emotional impact and less (relative) popular appeal if it had been more somber, but "Footnote" is as much a comedy as a drama, albeit a dark one; the premise enables Cedar to spoof academic infighting and professorial egomania even as he dissects a love-hate blood connection that has been fraught with tension and mistrust ever since Abraham was willing to slay Isaac.

A golden if grimy age of independent Memphis rock and roll will be resurrected in all its low-definition, high-decibel glory tonight (Tuesday, May 1) when a veteran videographer and former TV news cameraman hosts "Memphis Punk Videos: An Evening with Nick Canterucci" at The Blue Monkey pub in Midtown.

Part 1, titled "Aperture," is a program of 1990s Memphis club and concert footage featuring such local legends as The Reatards, the Simpletones, '68 Comeback, the Doll Rods, Impala, Tav Falco's Panther Burns and on and on. Part 2, "Oblivian," features a complete Oblivians concert, shot Dec. 17, 1994, at the legendary Antenna club. The material was captured by fan and trained photographer Nick Canterucci, using a then state-of-the-art video camera, equipped with his own personally designed lenses and other trick devices.

Admission is free. For more about Canterucci and his invaluable documentary footage of an influential Memphis scene, look here.

I'm a diehard Stooges fan, but it took me days to finally catch up with 'The Three Stooges.' I don't have time to do a full review, so here's my mini-review, which will appear in the Go Memphis section in Friday's edition of The Commercial Appeal:

"The Three Stooges" (PG, 92 min.) Two stars. Knucklehead impersonators Sean Hayes (Larry), Will Sasso (Curly) and Chris Diamantopoulos (Moe) are impressive, but this episodic, years-in-development, supposed labor of love from the  Farrelly Brothers is a blandly shot disappointment that sentimentalizes the trio for kids (at one point, the Stooges are referred to as "BFF's forever") but lacks the knowing references that might have amused diehard adult fans. Unlike Moe's slaps and eye pokes, the attempts to update the slapstick miss as often as they hit: Sparks fly humorously when Moe scrapes a buzzing chainsaw rather than the traditional handsaw across Curly's scalp, but there's more yuck than nyuk-nyuk-nyuk in a nursery scene in which the Stooges use urine-spraying infants as human water pistols. A subplot that lands Moe on "Jersey Shore" will date faster than the Tojo references in "The Yoke's on Me" (1944), and the use of Talking Heads and Allman Brothers music to score several bits of Stoogery is distracting and inexplicable. The funniest performer is Larry David, in penguin drag as the meanest nun at the convent/orphanage that is the setting for a Stooges origin story that may be the movie's most amusing sequence, thanks to the talented youngsters who play the kid nitwits with arresting haircuts and arrested personalities already in place.

"Bully" is a heartbreaking documentary about the cruelty some children inflict on those they perceive to be weak or "different." More crucially, perhaps, the film also reveals the almost criminal ineptitude of an adult establishment that insists on defining peer torment as a form of "boys will be boys" horseplay.

"Blue Like Jazz" soft-pedals its Christian theme, but not the message of hope it offers to would-be filmmakers: Publicists proudly point out that the movie was launched with $345,000 in contributions raised in 30 days on Kickstarter, the crowd-funding website. The response was so impressive that an investor matched the amount and then some, for a shooting and post-production budget of about $1.25 million.