This summer has been a big one for the fanboy (and girl) nation. Geeks have rejoiced as their favorite icons have come to grace the silver screen either once again or for the first time -- Tony Stark, Indiana Jones, Bruce Wayne, Bruce Banner, Kit Kittredge -- with each film accompanied by its own modest fan frenzy (yes, a $155 million opening weekend equals modest 'round these parts).

But naturally, as if so often the case with the potent combo of radical fanaticism and internet anonymity, the nastier trolls have not seen fit to shirk their responsibility of maintaining the sacred Tomatometer with a crudely constructed death threat or two (or two hundred). For them, this is personal. They can't possibly enjoy their long-awaited flick should some goateed snob decide to feel any degree of lukewarm or otherwise before the public gets their peek.

This is blood for blood, and by the comment. These are the new days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days. They're back.

At risk of sounding like a lame comedian circa 1985, I will now offer some very basic rules of moviegoing that I hope we can all agree with. Because really -- if we ALL agree on them, then every one of my complaints should be remedied by this time tomorrow. And that would be great.

A. Young children in movie theaters. OK, for G or PG-rated flicks we non-breeders simply have to deal with it. That's cool. (Forget that I still can't see WALL*E in peace, but OK.) For PG-13 movies, you're kind of pushing it. I seriously doubt that your four-year-old will be disappointed if he has to wait for Return of the King on DVD. So please just drop the extra $15 on a babysitter. For R-rated movies? Nothing personal, but if your child is too young to understand the phrase "Please be silent for the next 103 minutes, except if you have to pee or you rrrreally want a soda," then that child must be left at home. I've seen three-year-olds at 300, rugrats roaming The Ruins, toddlers' troubles with 28 Days Later, daughters dazed by Doomsday, sons stunned by Sunshine, minors mucking through The Mist and babies babbling In Bruges. Seriously, cut it out.

B. When dealing with "talkage" during a screening, we should of course give the talker a brief grace period. He / she could be saying something that's actually important (like the house is on fire) or maybe they just need a quick catch-up on why Spy Assassin B just turned stoolie on Government Agent C. That person gets a handful of seconds (depending on the mood of the offended party), but once a brief exchange of words becomes anything close to an actual conversation, then SHUSHING simply must occur.

Let's take a moment to talk about the internet and the people who use it.

As someone who writes for a fairly prominent blog and who, from time to time, gets a fact wrong or overlooks something (when you do several posts a day, it's hard to be perfect), I am familiar with the wrath that internet commenters can unleash. But I am quickly coming to realize that you, gentle readers, have indeed been gentle. If you have a moment, take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Dark Knight, and click through some of the comments that users have left for the critics who have dared give the film a negative review. Or, to save time, take a look at this piece by Hollywood Bitchslap's Rob Gonsalves, which discusses some of the worst (best?) examples. If you're not inclined to click, suffice it to say that the likes of The New Yorker's David Denby have been told that they "do not deserve to live," that they should "contract AIDS," that they "rode the short bus to school," that "I should go over to your house and beat the living ***** out of you low life son of a b!tch," and so forth.

It's funny: there's been a long, ongoing discussion about RT user comments in the internal forums of the RT-hosted Online Film Critics Society. Some of the critics, outraged by the insulting, often racist missives that appear on the review pages (a Brazilian critic writing in Portuguese is often informed that he should go back to Mexico, etc.), have called for comments to be deleted and for users to be disciplined or banned. I've resisted and discouraged that impulse: it's always preferable to laugh at people like this than to censor them.

I was recently enjoying a fast-food lunch with my old friend Josh, and we were discussing the film we'd just seen. (A little something called The Dark Knight.) And in the middle of my ramblings I accidentally said something slightly insightful. It went a little something like this: "The thing about superheroes is that, on the outside, what with the costumes and the nifty gizmos and all the punching, they're kids stuff, which is great. But once you scratch the surface just a little bit, you're dealing with acres of subtext that kids can barely comprehend."

And then Josh asked me what my point was. It's this: We finally have some filmmakers who aren't afraid to handle superhero movies for grown-ups. I'd hardly call Hancock a family-type flick, both of the recent Marvel movies (Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk) managed to treat their "older" audiences with respect, last weekend's Hellboy 2 is chock-full of dazzling ideas, and now this: The Dark Knight. Dang. My review will arrive later this week, but I won't be the only one calling it the Godfather 2 of superhero movies. (In a lot of ways it's also a bit like The Empire Strikes Back! Tonally, anyway.) Best of all, the movie is a big meaty DRAMA, and I don't mean "drama" as in "masterpiece theater."

With his notoriously prickly behavior and a streak of lowbrow, artistically bankrupt movies, Eddie Murphy isn't exactly the most beloved man in Hollywood these days. And you know what doesn't help? Not showing up to the premiere of your own damn movie.

Meet Dave, in which Murphy plays the tiny alien captain of a human-sized, Murphy-shaped spaceship, had its gala opening in Hollywood on Tuesday, and Murphy was a no-show. That's right: Murphy, who plays two characters, whose face is plastered everywhere, who is the single reason anyone would want to see the movie, didn't attend his own premiere.

One of the producers told the press that it's because he was busy shooting his next film, A Thousand Words. The only problem with that explanation is that A Thousand Words is being directed by Brian Robbins ... and Brian Robbins spent Tuesday evening at -- you guessed it -- the Meet Dave premiere. (He directed it, too.) Don't you hate when your alibi was at the same place you were supposed to be?

Maybe Murphy was off doing some extra credit homework on A Thousand Words, without the director. Or maybe that producer got it mixed up and Murphy was working on something else equally important.

Or maybe the simplest explanation is the correct one: Maybe he's an inconsiderate jerk.

After rumors bubbled up about a possible end to Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan, her rep told People: "the production of all three films is moving forward with Rose to star." I'd question that since all the double R seems to be doing lately is acquiring projects that don't seem to go anywhere. Yes, there's a chance that they might be on hold while he films Shorts, but that production is where the new hub-ub is coming from (via Defamer).

I highly doubt there's any truth to the matter, but it's worth a glance into the rumor that Rodriguez is now canoodling his new young star, Kat Dennings. She's the girl who got her start on Sex and the City as the "f**king fabulous" rich girl having a bat mitzvah, and has since got a stepdad in a 40-year-old Virgin, and impressed audiences with her time with Charlie Bartlett.

Anyone who watches a considerable amount of movies has a tendency to champion the occasional gem, a title bound - nay, fated - to be overlooked by the masses. As you may have noticed, we here at Cinematical are not immune to such behavior.

On other occasions, fans of films that are being remade will find themselves violently, vocally opposed to the idea of a tainted classic or fave, whereas cooler minds step in and point out that their precious original will exist no less in its wake.

With that said, I'm about to spout off on why I think American remake Quarantine is primed to squander the considerable merits of its source material, [REC].

(Now, what nitpicks I have are about to wander off into moderate spoiler territory, which is actually my greater concern. Ergo, any of you planning to catch either film in the near future might be best served by directing their browsers elsewhere, including away from the newly released trailer for Quarantine.)

As for the twelve of you who I know have either managed to see [REC] or who just plain don't care -- come on in, the water's whine...

Back at this year's Sundance Film Festival, a bunch of folks were "losing it" over Jonathan Levine's The Wackness -- saying, to a certain extent, that it was the dopest flick of the fest. And that's cool. Support those films you love, right? Well, not long after the film premiered at Sundance, it was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics. Wonderful! A film a lot of people loved was picked up and would hit theaters at some point later in the year. Ah, but all was not well in blogger land -- see, a few bloggers were disgusted that SPC picked it up, going so far as to send an email around trying to get other people to either join their cause and/or write about it. Their reasoning was that SPC had a poor track record when it came to promoting indie films, and were afraid The Wackness would become yet another casualty. That it would disappear in limited release ... and be eaten by a Cabbage Patch Kid, or whatever.

And so it was. Some folks agreed with their cause, while others couldn't understand why they'd be upset when, in reality, their favorite film WOULD eventually hit theaters. You can't say that about every Sundance film, or festival film for that matter, and so the simple act of being picked up for distribution is, well, kind of a big deal. After a flurry of posts from a few different blogs which attacked the deal, attacked the teaser poster and then attacked the first teaser trailer, it all seemed to fizzle out. From that point on, SPC continued to poor on the Wackness marketing: We got roughly four or five different trailers, a poster, a viral campaign, a dope website, TV spots and a slick soundtrack.

Was SPC botching it all up? Hardly ... but then came the film's box office debut this past weekend ...

"If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment."

I apologize to my colleagues and readers, because most film critics, reviewers and cinephiles have been known, at least at one point in his or her life, to call a movie "fun." I certainly am guilty of it somewhere, in some review or blog post or whatever. But I'm here to finally set the record straight, even though David Mamet clearly already informed us via the quote above, which is spoken by his wife, actress Rebecca Pidgeon, in his 2000 film State and Main. A movie can not be fun, it can only be entertaining. That is, if we're merely watching it on the screen and had no involvement in its production. Actually, even if we make a film ourself, watching it afterwards should technically still be considered entertaining rather than fun.

Of course, a movie experience can be fun. I have fun at a lot of movies I attend, but not because of the movie I'm watching. Like in the case of my recent experience with The Strangers, the movie was not what was fun, not even my observance of the audience was officially fun. But for me, the ticket buying, the popcorn eating, the sitting in the dark is all fun. And the movie was entertaining, as was the crowd. I guess that the experience of watching a movie at home or on your iPod can also be fun, but still in any scenario, the actual movie itself is never fun; it's only entertaining.

"If a film fell in the multiplex, and no one was there to see it..."

Limited release: such a simple phrase, and yet two words that all but indicate to a majority of moviegoers that whatever it is they want to see may or may not escape the confines of a NY/LA run before the film in question comes to them by way of Netflix mere months later.

Meanwhile, screens upon screens across the nation are filled by the likes of the same stars and the same stories, with the same special effects and the same happy endings, leaving the smaller films, the different films, the better films to slip through the distribution cracks, as it were.

Among their number falls The Promotion, a film which we've admittedly supported ad nauseum to the oh-so-ironic tune of $365,928 on a grand total of 81 screens. It opened just this past weekend in my market, Orlando, Fla., on a single screen, for a whopping four days, with a grand total of eight showings, before being shuffled off to make room for that other Jason Bateman co-starring comedy-drama hybrid.

It was the first day of July, and the last night for the film. Having enjoyed it twice before and driven by - I don't know - a sense of romantic futility, I turned out for that final showing. Lo and behold, I wasn't alone...