Without truly looking back at the entirety of the 2011 Summer Movie Season, it’s easy to dismiss this quarter-year as a basic bust. Just look at all the junk that’s out there - Friends with Benefits, Cowboys and Aliens, The Green Lantern, The Change-Up - and tell us if the last four months were worth it. However, such a conclusion comes from a real lack of perspective. Sure, you’d have to sit through dozens of movies to get to the good stuff, but May through August also gave us Thor, Captain America, Winnie the Pooh, The Help, and the last Harry Potter movie ever…or until they find a way to rebook/reimagine the franchise. While such a compare and contrast leads to a margin of mediocrity, this Summer was actually significantly better than it seems. There’s just some weird movie mojo suggesting otherwise.

Granted, Horrible Bosses was just that, and Cars 2 was all merchandising and no magic, but there was also the indie intrigue of Another Earth, and the big bang boom spectacle of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Priest may have wasted its vampire apocalypse premise, but the Fright Night remake found a way to make the neckbiter scary again. Once again, the family film failed to be anything other than atrocious - with a couple of very rare exceptions - while horror hovered around the barely above average mark. As a result, picking five good and five bad examples of the annual box office money grab was harder than one imagines. It’s all personal opinion and quantitative determination, but the final figuring is still a crap shoot. Even with the lists right in front of us, 2011 still seemed like a disappointment…and maybe it was…maybe?

Both Zee Avi and Mike Doughty dealt with the alarm beeping in the J&R store by making jokes at the customer leaving inadvertently with active merchandise security tags. Each artist was doing a free in-store solo performance to promote their respective new albums, ghostbird and Yes and Also Yes. Each took some time to shake hands with fans and sign autographs as well.

Avi is a young singer-songwriter originally from Malaysia and has one previous released album, Zee Avi, under her belt. Doughty became famous in the ‘90s with his band Soul Coughing but he’s put out at least six solo albums since then—the last of which was Sad Man Happy Man.

The Jezabels is an anthemic pop band that creates soaring, hook-filled tunes that feel grandiose and aimed for large stages. Indeed, the band is focused on producing big tunes that can accentuate the aspect of melancholy and drama in musical performance. Leader singer Hayley Mary says, “I was always obsessed with that whole Brontë-esque gothic melodramatic thing Kate Bush did… I love the performance aspect of people like Freddie Mercury, David Bowie and Cyndi Lauper.” The group debuted with a series of three EPs and are now set to release their full-length, With Prisoner, on September 16 in Australia.

Today we present the US online video premiere of “Endless Summer”, a highlight from the new album. Mary says of the song, “‘Endless Summer’ is an ideal, a fantasy, the kind you can impose onto another person when you are lonely or when reality is dark and cold, like the boy in the film clip.” Check out the tune and catch the band on their European and North American tour (dates after the jump).

This week G. Christopher Williams and Nick Dinicola form a dynamic duo of flash game playin’, flash game analyzin’, and flash game discussin’ excitement.

We take a look at three of 2011’s more interesting releases, Jonas Kyratzes’s Alphaland, Thomas Brush’s Skinny, and Sarah Northway’s Rebuild.  Two of the titles are platformers and one is a turn-based strategy game, and they feature anxious video game worlds in progress, scary mommy AIs, and, of course, the hungry zombie hordes.

A found location can be a low budget filmmaker’s salvation. Production value is a tough commodity when you’ve got limited funds. Legend has it that producer/director Herk Harvey stumbled across the abandoned Saltair Pavilion in Salt Lake City, Utah and was inspired to create the terror classic Carnival of Souls. Session 9 benefited from the spooky setting of the Danvers State Mental Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts while other homemade horror films have used decaying spaces as the foundation of their fear. From old theaters to desiccated homes, the unintentional set can offer the epic where only the average existed before.

In the case of the new frightfest Closed for the Season, it is the Chippewa Lake Amusement Park, long out of business and falling apart, that writer/director Jay Woelfel uses as a means of telling his urban legend ghost story. Like many of these places all over the world, time and lack of interest have turned the once vital playground into a cemetery of forgotten fun. Unfortunately, no matter the level of ambience achieved by the stunning backdrop, the movie’s mediocre message constantly countermands it. And thus we have the found location’s Achilles Heel. No matter how stunning it is, the crappy crew exploiting it can render the mood mute.