In the last ten years, two humor outlets have established themselves as the dominant forces in their respective media. On TV, it’s The Daily Show; in print and online, it’s The Onion. It is hugely significant (and rarely noted) that both are based on the banality, triviality, and utter absurdity of the media.

Of the two, The Onion is the most insidious, because its attack on the form is so comprehensive. You can read Poynter study after Poynter study and never get the insight into the decline of daily print journalism you do in one classic issue of The Onion. The critique works two ways. First, there’s the tone; the vapid, get-both-sides-of-the-story balance and the hokey clichés. But then there’s the subjects: The Onion on the one hand takes the banality of most metro dailies to its logical conclusion, focusing on the truly trivial (”Area Man Confused by Buffet Procedure”) but on the other demonstrates vividly what the papers don’t provide, generally a sharp depiction of unspoken truths (”Barry Bonds Took Steroids, Reports Everyone Who Has Ever Watched Baseball”)—and in both cases manages to shed a more profound light on society than its subject.

Anyway, all that said, The Onion is not what it used to be, and it’s possible that a “Has The Onion jumped the shark?” story is overdue; to me, the operation has lost a lot of its originality and essentialness in recent years.

The Onion Movie, which was supposed to carry the franchise into new areas, is not going to help its image. The movie was finished four or five years ago, but never got released. Rumors came and went, and then, with an utter minimum of advance publicity, it finally came out, surreptitiously, on DVD only, this week.

I don’t know anything about its troubled history, but I do know why it didn’t get released, and that’s because it may be the most unfunny 90 or so minutes of filmed human activity since, Oh, I don’t know, Sophie’s Choice. The tragic thing is that they couldn’t even take the Onion brand off of it; what (lame-ass) story there is is set up around the set of an Onion nightly newscast.

In that framing story, the anchor of the show, played by Broadway star Len Cariou with no apparent humor sprachgefuhl, gets increasingly upset about corporate product-placement in his newscast. This is all done with such heavyhandeness and poor execution that any potential for satire is lost. The product in question is a movie called Cockpuncher, starring Steven Seagall, who appears here laboriously trying to send himself up. It doesn’t work because … well, basically because Steven Seagall, he’s kinda … fat now. And his face is such a fleshy mass of uncomprehending self-regard that it doesn’t work as a self-send-up. (And Cockpuncher in any event actually doesn’t look as bad as his recent movies.)

This wholly unengrossing story is told amid an inconsistent melange of news reports, spoof commercials, some free-floating sketches, and a few bits of bootless extra-cinematic foofara. (In one sketch, there’s a pointless appearance by a well-dressed polite black guy who asks where the local library is. The scene cuts to the inside of a movie theater where a row of what are supposed to be Nation of Islam types watch approvingly. It’s not that amusing, and the cheap set makes it worse. This movie makes Mad TV look like Woody Allen.)

Outside of not being funny, having crappy production values, lacking focus or consistency, being boring, and the fact that none of the people who star in it are watchable comic actors, The Onion Movie bears the marks of two disastrous decisions on the part of its makers. First, and most pathetically, the movie could not figure out how to transfer the Zen of the paper to the screen. The logical thing would have been to devise a way to transfer the daily journalism satire to TV news, and just do 90 minutes of fake newscast, but The Daily Show and The Colbert Report do that a lot better. The movie compromises by having the newscaster read 15- or 30-second snippets of some of The Onion’s greatest hits. Because these are newspaper spoofs, they invariably fall flat, and earns the movie exactly none of the carryover goodwill of the digital version’s audience.

And that leads to the second big problem, which is that all of that leaves no real substance to the framing story. Since “The Onion Nightly News” is made up of dumb news stories, there’s no tension in its being debauched by corporate overseers. All the paper and digital operations can do to protect their brand is hope that the DVD release flies under the radar of public perception.

Why anyone bothers making a smart superhero movie is an interesting question. The many millions who troop dutifully to see Spider-man or Transformers know what they want, and get it, and it has little to do with smart movie-making. International audiences, who get a big say, don’t want or need clever scripts.

The new Iron Man fetishes the original Marvel comics in a precise and, to my memory, unique way. The Spider-man movies, with their unrelieved freneticism and crayon-drawn scripts, bludgeon audiences with their plots; Alfred Molina stands in a chamber and gets eight steel arms welded to his torso and onlookers barely find it unusual.

In Iron Man, most of the movie is devoted to explaining the process by which our hero, played by Robert Downey Jr., creates his steely persona. It is a formula (Spidey had to learn to web-sling, too), but within that context the movie’s deep interest in this process bespeaks a love of the subject and a respect for audiences generally absent in the typical super-hero foolishness.

Jon Favreau, who directed, steps up dazzlingly in a massive undertaking whose technical trappings are both nuanced and assured. The Swingers writer and star-turned-director, whose weight had ballooned along with his filmography (most recently Elf), has a small role here, showing off a svelter physique. He refuses to make Iron Man frenetic and made sure it was written by adults—smart and funny ones—who understand story arcs and understand their lead actor. Again, it’s all formula, right down to the Iron Man-on-Iron Man climax, but it is so handsomely done, so lovingly and amusingly presented, that that you fall into the same mindset, and wind up enjoying yourself immensely.

Bestriding the film is a satisfying and mischievous performance by Robert Downey Jr., whose ragged psyche and roguish countenance illuminate the character every which way but loose, and that too, come to think of it. The very idea of Tobey McGuire as Spider-Man is preposterous; where Superman’s Clark Kent persona was a masterpiece of misdirection, McGuire’s Peter Parker has simply no sign of a superhero’s soul, and neither the actor nor the director, Sam Raimi, try to give him one. Downey, by contrast, has the natural arrogance of the breed and the monomaniacal glare as well; and Iron Man’s methodical pace gives him the time to re-create himself persuasively, making the film’s last line reverberate.

The supporting cast—Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard, in descending order of how much they are given to do—is so high-level none manages to get steamrolled by Downey, who plainly has something to prove and is, delightedly, given a script packed with self-referential lines. (“I should be dead right now” etc. etc. etc.) Again, as the makers of The Hulk found, a few years back, there’s not a huge upside in making a superhero movie for adults; I don’t know why the Fav & Co. did, but the result is a lot of fun.

I want to say Todd Haynes’ ballyhooed Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is disappointing, but what, really, did we expect? A test for films like this is whether, in the end, there is something in the result that the subject would dislike or be offended by, and it’s hard to think of anything here that Dylan, a master controller of his image, or his longtime manager, Albert Grossman, would have blanched at. And there’s many things, too, he would definitely appreciate, much of the result tracking thematically with the images of himself he presented in the PBS film No Direction Home.

Here, Haynes responds to the songwriter’s manifold career with a cubist trope—having Dylan represented not just by different people at different stages of his career, but by entirely different heavily fictionalized characters in what in effect are separate movies, all wound together in a shattered but tangentially chronological order, stretching from his first days on the road to, roughly, the gospel period in the early 1980s. In one, for example, Heath Ledger plays a film star, come to prominence by playing a Dylan-like pop icon in a biopic, who meets, marries, raises a family with, and then splits from a French artist, in what is supposed to represent Dylan’s relationship with his first wife; in another, a campy Cate Blanchett plays the Dylan we know best, the combative press conference jouster and suddenly electric showman.

But in the end, almost all are disappointing. In the most ambitious segments, for example, Richard Gere plays a Billy the Kid-like figure adrift in a frontier town where everyone’s in costume. The scenes conflate Dylan’s work on the Pat Garrett sound track and his Gethsemane with the Band at Woodstock, but in the end it seems as if all Haynes could do with the Basement Tapes was play off the menagerie on the inside cover. The Dylan suckup industry is so huge these days it’s hard not be a little exasperated at the A-list folks lining up just to get a little reflected glory. I mean, you’d think Martin Scorsese or Haynes would at least find it interesting that Dylan married a former Playboy bunny named Shirley Noznisky. But no—she has be made into a famous artist, and be played by Charlotte Gainsborough. Speaking of which, save in those segments in which American piggishness must be portrayed by grotesques, a lot of the supporting players here have suspiciously high cheekbones. That, the hipster appearances (like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in an entirely cuttable segment), the uneven performances, and some jarring moments (like actual footage of Dylan playing, which intrudes, to no purpose, at the end), make this a largely unsuccessful film. Beyond that there’s an air of … not self-indulgence, exactly, but the feel of someone whose ambitions far outstripped his abilities, or whose intentions were never fully formed. The result feels more like a desperate, unfocused tribute to Dylan than an organic (and aesthetically independent) work of art.

All that said, there’s fun to be had here for Dylan fans who don’t care that much about the truth: there are the scraps of Dylan lyrics in magazine ads, passing references to characters in his songs, and some carefully schematized nods to key bits of Dylaniana. (For example, in keeping with the redolence of the film’s title, a heretofore unreleased Dylan bootleg track, Haynes includes not only a careful recitation of a key Rimbaud line, “Je est un autre,” but also the most reverberating Dylan mot from Dont Look Back, the 1966 Pennebaker documentary: “I’m sure glad I’m not me.”) In the Pat Garrett segment, Gere puts on a clear plastic mask similar to the one Dylan sports in some of the more compelling live footage from his Renaldo and Clara movie, which I think was the film’s one reference to the Rolling Thunder era. And I can’t swear to it but I also think Haynes in a couple of the Blanchett scenes took the time to re-create moments from Dont Look Back or other Dylan footage from the time.

p.s. The controversies over Dylan’s epochal switch to electric are I think overplayed, both here and in No Direction Home, which is credited to Martin Scorsese. Haynes has a comic interlude in which Dylan and his band turn machine guns onto the crowd; Scorsese makes the issue the frame of his four-hour film, plainly suggesting the controversy drove him into seclusion. The complaints of a few priggish folk aficionados have now created an image of “Rite of Spring”-like riots. In fact, “Highway 61″’s first single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” became an immediate huge hit; the war was essentially over before he played Forest Hills, a month after Newport. (The best by-the-minute contemporary reportage on this remains Robert Shelton’s biography, also called No Direction Home.) It doesn’t fit into the rock mythos very well, but in large part Dylan stopped touring to lower his fame quotient and raise a family in (relative) peace. It can’t have been easy to be married to Bob Dylan, but Sara (née Shirley) Lownds (née Noznisky) did have her husband around during those years–Dylan didn’t make regular concert appearances again until 1974.

p.p.s. The film No Direction Home really isn’t a documentary. It’s an assemblage, by Scorsese, of a lot of promotional material that the Dylan organization had generated. (The highly unusual sight of Dylan speaking, coherently and at length, about his influences and career, was the product of the simple expedient of the interviewer’s being his manager.) The film, while engrossing, isn’t journalism or a true documentary. That it was awarded a Peabody is a minor scandal.