So here’s a guy who’s made three films since 1997 and already he’s got a career retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York! Maybe it has something to do with the fact that his second film. the Seth Rogen cowritten/Judd Apatow produced raunchy teenaged comedy “Superbad” made over $120 million in the US alone and is now quoted by movie geeks everywhere.

Since there can be no Armageddon without the Antichrist, it’s a little unnerving that a new image from the mysterious Lars Von Trier project of the same name has just popped up. The film stars a still fit Willem Dafoe as a psychiatrist who retreats with his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsborough, to a cabin in the woods after the death of their child.

(I’m hoping that this item is not as error-riddled as the previous. My apologies to Adam Roffman, Bobcat Goldthwait and Abba.)

Now that I’ve got your attention about worthy local film happenings, you might want to head over to Waltham tomorrow to Brandeis University where Jewishfilm2009, the fine film festival annually organized by the National Center for Jewish Film, opens with the infuriating and frightening documentary “Waiting for Armageddon” by Franco Sacchi, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (all three of whom will attend the screening, introduced by Professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis).

I never really understood the films of Alexander Sokurov until last night at the Chlotrudis Awards ceremony when the Chlotrudis players performed a musical number backing a montage of the director’s film “Aleksandra” and set to the tune of Abba’s “Fernando.” The film was one of the group’s nominees for Best Buried Treasure, and although it didn’t win (Margaret Brown’s “The Order of Myths” won the “Trudy” in this category), it did, in my opinion, get the best introduction in this very entertaining evening.

The last awards ceremony of 2008, the Chlotrudis Awards this Sunday at the Brattle Theatre, is in many ways the best. And I say that only in part because I am participating in it (I’m giving out the Best Director Award).

For 15 years now The Chlotrudis Society, a bunch of local cinephiles tired of seeing crappy movies get center stage, have given out their awards to the best films and performances of the year.

Much of the following may be an exercise in irony. Or is it? I mean, when you talk about the band Rush and Lou Ferigno there’s got to be some irony involved, right? And a sitcom about catering? Actually, that sounds like it could be a funny idea. Finally, why John Hamburg is the Alfred Hitchcock of dumb comedies.

What better place to meet two legends than in the bowels of a third?

Actually, the prospect sounds kind of cramped and ill-smelling. However the Bleacher Bar, situated below that venerable Fenway Park seating area, proved atmospheric and pleasant and a cozy spot to interview Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, stars of the soon to be released “I Love You, Man,” and rising stars whom “Vanity Fair” recently included among their “New Comedy Legends.

All the attention has been focused on the azure CGI sceptre wielded by Dr. Manhattan in "Watchmen," but that's clearly not what Reese Witherspoon is impressed with. Here she accompanies B.O.B., her costar in the upcoming DreamWorks animated fantasy, "Monsters vs. Aliens." Fantasy, indeed. True, this a movie for kids, but come on.

Talk about nationalizing a corporation.

The above is an image from one of the more solid choices (number 15) in the recent “National Review” list of the 25 Best Conservative Movies — John Milius’s “Red Dawn” (1984), a paranoid Right Wing wet dream about a Soviet-Cuban invasion of the US that ends up in a vicious guerilla war fought by teenagers played by Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen and Lea Thompson.

Pop culture is the last resort of scoundrels and ideologues. I ought to know, having spent the last 8 years sifting through bad movies for a political subtext that made sense of it all. So even before the grand guignol lunacy of the CPAC convention exposed their bankrupt ideas, conservatives were trying to lay the blame for their misfortune on the usual suspect, the Liberal (or is it Socialist now?) Hollywood Establishment.