Please bear in mind that the person writing this is a BIG fan of Joss Whedon's earlier work in TV and movies. It's the fact that I really AM such a fan that made going to see "Avengers: Age of Ultron" so upsetting.

I managed to sit through the whole film, but just barely. Instead of the "Wow! Look at that!" I was supposed to feel, all I felt was sadness that one of the best storytellers of our age had sunk so low. "Ultron" was 141 minutes of Biff! Zap! Pow! Boom! Zoom! CGI madness, punctuated with a few lines that clearly were intended to be funny but only could have been considered so by pimply-faced 14-year-olds whose standards for comic one-liners had been set by Beavis and Butthead.

In other words, I hated it. I wish Joss would wake up from his comic book-induced stupor and remember how to write characters and plots again. "Buffy" used to cost $1.1 million per episode. "Firefly" used to cost $2 million per episode. And they were great.

"Ultron" cost over $2 million PER MINUTE of running time, and it's crap.

There is a lesson here. When Joss is working with his own ideas, it doesn't take huge amounts of money to create wonderful entertainment. When he is working with other people's comic book ideas, it doesn't matter how much money the producers throw at it -- it's comic book-mentality crap.

Stop making crap, Joss. Tell the guys at Marvel to keep their money and keep their mediocre plots and characters. Come back to making entertainment based on your own ideas.