There are no actual genre films that I could find coming out this week, although there is at least one cult favorite coming back with a final film: A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. I don’t even need to describe it; you already either love or hate this series of films, so nothing I say is going to sway you one way or the other to attend this. There were a number of good ones from last week still in the theaters you might want to check out, such as RA.One, the latest Bollywood Sci-Fi romp. This takes the crown from last year’s Robot as the most expensive Bollywood movie ever made, and also like Robot the protagonist is not quite human, and more of a bad guy than otherwise. Interestingly enough, they actually made the game this movie is about, and folks were able to play it before seeing the film. And there is still time to see In Time, a twisted successor to Logan’s Run.
This is one of those rare weekends with multiple genre films being released together, starting with In Time. This story explores what might happen if the gene responsible for aging (telemerase is the enzyme that governs its expression, and therefore the switch) was turned off. Obviously, the world would be overpopulated pretty damn quick, so to keep everything in balance you have to pay with your days, weeks, and years to purchase anything. Pretty much the talking heads quote goes here, Same As It Ever Was. Now there is a temporal Robin Hood, and he could ruin everything for the folks in power by giving time away to the poor.
Also out this week, Anonymous, the tale of what happens when someone hands Shakespeare his plays and demands he perform them on stage. A historical epic fantasy, this one explores some possibilities a number of scholars would prefer you avoid.
On a completely different note, Sleeping Beauty is a romantic fantasy that goes back to the original story you remember, but only if you remember the adult version of it.
Finally, there are 2 rather strange movies this week, but still genre. Johnny English 2 tells us what would happen if James Bond were really Rowan Atkinson, and The Rum Diary returns Johnny Depp to the roll of renowned journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Either of these would be silly. Both of them together pushes us to the realm of the absurd.
There is not the slightest doubt that Three Musketeers is THE movie to beat this weekend! Not only is it a classic, an epic fantasy, and visually amazing all at the same time, especially if you go to one of the 3D showings. But on top of that it is a Steampunk precursor, showing the kind of lighter-than-air craft that France pioneered in the 1600’s. But taken to the next level, to true airships that would have created the kind of parallel timeline that actual Steampunk would have evolved from a hundred or two years later when we hit the Victorian era. This movie will hopefully be something special; I have been waiting for it for quite a while.
I am not a big horror fan, but this story was never really horror at its core. And depending on how true to the book they stay (remember Who Goes There by John W Campbell?) this second re-release of 1951’s The Thing could be quite enjoyable. Most folks today tend to remember the 1982 John Carpenter remake, which was better done than most. What both movie versions had in common with the best Hitchcock thrillers or modern Japanese horror is that neither film showed you any blood and gore; the scary bits were all off screen, but they were implied so well that your imagination ran away with you filling in all the details. Of course, this meant you would be imaging the scene in the way that would be most terrifying TO YOU, so while no two people ever watched the same movie, every one who saw it found it one of the scariest things they had ever seen. It is rare when a film captures the essence of a book, but having the audience visualize the missing bits like that brought the movie experience a lot closer to the process the human brain goes through while reading, and trust me when I say this is a technique more films should make use of. It remains to be seen how well this latest incarnation of the story is done, but this is one of the true classics of science fiction.
No doubt about it, this week the movie to beat is Real Steel, in which Hugh Jackman is an ex-boxer making a comeback by way of his own rock-em sock-em robot.
They have released a new trailer for Immortals, which will be in theaters on 11/11/11.