"One reason I started this site was to debunk the notion that movies objectively “are” anything.  They are assembled and processed inside the brain of each individual person who watches them, filtered through a lifetime of experience, a kaleidoscope of personal passions, and a host of environmental factors that make even the same individual’s viewing of the same movie vary wildly at different times and places in their life.  I, for instance, as a child purchased a copy of The Mighty Avengers #161 in which Earth’s Mightiest Heroes did battle with one of many arch-nemeses, the indestructible robot Ultron, and was immediately hooked, reading and re-reading that issue until the cover fell off.  Somewhere on my attic is a box filled with several hundred issues of various Avengers series, and while I don’t really read comics anymore, my love for characters like Iron Man, Captain America and Hawkeye has continued to burn bright and been reinvigorated by the recent run of Marvel movies based on their adventures.  Then I remember a night in college when I rented a movie called Buffy the Vampire Slayer and by the same time the next day, I had seen it 5 times.  Writer Joss Whedon’s creation would carry me through seven seasons of a TV series version that is challenged only by Lost as my all-time favorite, and make me a lifetime fan of the brilliant writer/director whose creations ranging from Toy Story to The Cabin in the Woods are among the most innovative and imaginative of their time.  All of which is to say I do not come to Whedon’s film version of the Avengers comic series as a blank slate:  rather, in many ways I am its ideal viewer.  And so when I tell you that The Avengers is simply the best time I have ever had at the movies, take it with a grain of salt, but know this:  Whedon has created as pure an engine of action, laughs and superheroic awesomeness as I can imagine, and he did it with my favorite comic book characters.  Pretty much everything else between now and the end of cinema is gravy... The Avengers is the culmination of Marvel’s four-year campaign to create a cinematic universe like the one that has long prospered in its comic books, where heroes exist in the same world at the same time and can come and go from each other’s adventures the same way we might run into our co-workers at the grocery store.  Five previous films in the series were good to great in and of themselves, but also played vital roles setting up more exposition, character development and relationship information than any one film could possibly contain, and like a good TV series that’s been running long enough to use its own history as fuel for new plotlines, The Avengers is pretty much always either delivering amazing action or riffing brilliantly on what we already know about the characters that populate it because we’ve seen their previous adventures."