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Something to Do: Movies 2011

2011 has some quality movies coming up, so many that I would get overwhelmed trying to list them all here, or even all from just my own country, the US. But I can list at least a few of the ones I am most looking forward to for the first half of the year, in the hopes you might find them interesting enough to keep an eye out for.

In January 2011, the first release is Season of the Witch on the 7th (that’s this Friday). Nick Cage and Ron Perlman battle the forces of 15th century evil. The Green Hornet looks to be the movie of choice for January, coming up on the 14th. They are sticking to the attitude of the original TV show, which had Bruce Lee as Kato (the series was known as The Kato Show in China, Japan, Korea, and most other Asian countries), and no one these days can remember who the white guy was. Hollywood’s next TV series that Bruce Lee developed (called “Kung-Fu”) didn’t have a single Asian in a staring role, even though Bruce was supposed to be the star. They hired somebody named Carridine for that role. There are also 2 limited run J-Movies this month; the live action version of Gantz on the 20th (see my review and trailer here), and Evangerion shin gekijôban: Ha on the 21st.

In February there are several choices, a few of which are a bit out there.
Sanctum on February 4th sounds prosaic with the whole deep-sea diving stuff, but this is a James Cameron work in 3D and IMAX. Gnomeo and Juliet is a Shakespeare variation set in the world of warring indoor and outdoor gnomes, which should launch around the 11th. I Am Number Four on February 18th sounds like a quote from The Prisoner, but is actually an identification from one of 8 aliens who landed on Earth by accident. The previous three have already been hunted down and murdered, and he is next. Drive Angry on February 25th is about a soul who escapes from Hell to avenge his daughter and protect his granddaughter. Note that Drive is the second Nick Cage movie in as many months for this year.

March starts off with The Adjustment Bureau on the 4th, with a conspiracy theory story of truly epic proportions that will remind you of Inception. Also on the 4th, the animated feature Rango gets released, to teach us all abut the nature of courage. And then we have Apollo 18, which is a covert mission to the moon revealing an entire collection of aliens. Which is a nice warm up for the 11th, when a whole group of films get released, starting with the animated Mars Needs Moms!. It continues through Battle: Los Angeles where the story follows one Marine platoon’s encounter in the battle against an alien invasion on the streets of Los Angeles. It doesn’t end there, since also on the 11th we see Red Riding Hood, where a young woman is in a medieval village which is being terrorized by a werewolf. The final pick on the 11th is Suing the Devil, where Satan (played by Malcolm McDowell) shows up to defend himself in court. When the calendar turns to March 18th Beastly tells the story of a beautiful person turned hideous with only love to save him and turn him back, while Limitless is the story of a writer who tries a drug which allows him to use 100% of his brain instead of the usual 10%. The final entry for March will probably be the masterwork for the month; Sucker Punch the 25th may be the most interesting movie of the year, or at least have a serious shot at that title.

And that is just the first 3 months; there is a lot more after that! HOP is the animated tale to beat on April 1st (from the team that brought us Despicable Me), or perhaps Rio on April 8th from the Ice Age team; I plan to be at both. Source Code is a recursive time travel story worthy of Philip K. Dick, and Super is the story of an ordinary guy wearing superhero tights and armed with a wrench, both on the big screen April 1st. The other April 8th film, Your Highness, is a comedy about the guy that tried to avoid slaying the dragon but still ended up on the quest (Natalie is the Warrior Princess while Zooey is the Damsel in Distress).

In May, the top movies are Thor from Marvel, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the Tim Powers book by way of Johnny Depp, and the animated Kung Fu Panda 2 (the Tree of Life is an also ran). Come June, X-Men: First Class gives some background (but doesn’t appear to be from Marvel studios), Super 8 tells the story of aliens gone AWOL, and The Green Lantern brings another classic comic book hero to the screen, this one a variant of the Grey Lensman. Rise of the Apes is the origin story also ran for the month.

That covers the first half of the year; the remainder will include titles like Transformers: the Dark of the Moon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Captain America: the First Avenger, Cowboys & Aliens, Conan 3D, The Thing, Immortals, the Shrek spinoff Puss in Boots, and Sherlock Holmes 2. All in all, 2011 looks to be a great year for films, with more than one goody every month.

Something to Do: Movies and TV

A project with a reasonable budget hits the broadcast TV screens on January 9th: The Cape. This one looks like it will be a lot of fun, as you can probably tell by looking at the trailer. And it has Summer Glau in it, always a draw for me, and I think this time she even gets to play a normal human… sort of. Also, on the first BBC America kicks off season 4 of Primeval: Back from Extinction. This is their second attempt to turn the series in a whole new direction, and the tag line is in part a play on words both from the plot line (since two of the characters, Abby and Connor, return from the prehistoric to rejoin the rest of the cast) and the fact that they had been canceled at the end of season 3. With season four, they also bring Alexander Siddig to the party.

This months major hits have already hit the big screen, but you would think there would be one left for the final weekend. As it turns out, there is: No Sanctuary is the tale of a group of strangers pinned down in a church, trying to protect a girl with incredible powers from an army of the undead. I don’t hold out much hope or even interest in this one; you would probably do better to catch up with a movie you had previously missed this week.

Something to Do: Movies

The 800 pound gorilla in the theater for this weekend is Gulliver’s Travels, towering over the competition by orders of magnitude. The Jonathan Swift classic political satire gets remade as a TV show or a movie every three to ten years, with greater or lesser degrees of adherence to the core attitude of the original story. But this time around they have an amazing cast, which includes Jack Black, Emily Blunt, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, and Catherine Tate, to name just a few. And since they are bringing the same Special FX technology to the table they used for Night At The Museum, you know it is going to be visually amazing as well. So it just remains to be seen if they will faithfully deliver the scathing commentary on the nature of man when ensconced in the halls of power, or play it strictly for laughs and box office returns. Previous versions have been divided fairly evenly between the two approaches, but I have my hopes up for the former considering the attitudes of many of the actors.

According to IMDB, it is not the only film of interest being released this week; the documentary Trek Nation should also be coming out, with should being the operative word. They are apparently still seeking a distributor, per their home page. I hope they find one soon, or consider releasing Direct To Disk so we can have access to it.


GANTZ live action

They have made a live action version of GANTZ, which all by itself is amazing news. It is going to play in a limited number of theaters in the US for one night only as part of its world premier on January 20th, 2011, as yet another Fathom Events Original. And yes, if you click on that last link and enter your zip code, you will get to see just how close to you this show will be, and grab tickets if you are so inclined.

If you haven’t read the manga or watched the anime, the basic premise is simple. An alien sphere with a cybernetically integrated dead body manifests in a vacant apartment in Tokyo, and begins gathering other dead people. It does not communicate verbally or even directly with them, but makes a small handful of rules known to them by physical example. The quicker a given person picks up on the rules and figures out how to abide by/exploit them, the higher the odds get that they might survive the current situation, even though a prerequisite to being chosen was being dead.

It uses a Trek-like beaming technology to grab them a split second before they actually die, and makes it known that if they complete a certain number of missions for it, they will be released unharmed and alive. If they fail, they will be beamed back to a fraction of a second before the moment of their death to suffer their original fate.

If they are damaged, no matter how seriously, during the mission, but are still alive when beamed back to the apartment, the beaming process will rebuild them whole and well, by integrating the recording of their physical bodies it stored of their molecular state when it first appropriated them, but with their updated current memory gestalt. If they die before being beamed back, they have died the final death.

While they are on their missions for the sphere, no one in the normal physical world will be able to perceive them on any level, although their mission targets will have no problem observing them. Which makes it a bit difficult to get help from your friends and family to escape, or even flag down a passing police car, but makes it very simple for your targets to target you in return.

And the final detail; your mission is to kill your targets, with no way of knowing if they are monsters worthy of death, out to kill off humanity, or victims the sphere has decided would be amusing to watch die. Each and every mission, the clock is ticking; how will you choose this time?

Something to Do: Movies

This weekend hasn’t been in doubt since half way through 2009; TRON: The Legacy is the hands-down winner. Many of us have been waiting decades for the continuation of this story, an archetype tale of the computer age that changed movies forever. It wasn’t just the use of computer graphics (real and simulated), although that was a precursor of movie production processes to come. It was also the first time computer processes were personified, with each subprogram taking on the personalty its function set would require; the first time the kind of Artificial Intelligence we had known for years from books was portrayed on any screen.

There had been previous attempts to personify AIs on screen, such as 1967’s Colossus: The Forbin Project, which in my mind was the inspiration for the original Skynet from 1984’s Terminator movie, much as the original 1982 TRON was the inspiration for the animated masterpiece ReBoot in 2001. The most notable AI film after them was 1999’s The Matrix, which again completely changed the rules.

None of them led to War Games in 1983, because that box was a real computer and the logic of the plot line adhered to actual parsing rules any programmer of today understands. There was no touch of AI in that story, just the massive paranoia of the time combined with a lack of understanding on the majority of the audiences part of how computers worked. Just saying…

Interestingly enough, the other movie coming out this weekend is a spiritual descendant of TRON by way of William Gibson’s Neuromancer on several levels; the protagonist in Spark Riders invents a way for people to place their soul on the internet. When her idea is stolen by a power hungry psycho and a greedy spy, people begin to become trapped online. With a total budget much less than TRON spent on catering the location shoots, this film could still potentially be worth checking out; after all, they made Dark Star on 10% of Spark Riders budget, and Hollywood promptly threw a ton of money at Dan Obannon and John Carpenter (who then created the Alien and Halloween franchises respectively) because of it.

And one final note; for all of those who, like me, have been frustrated in their efforts to acquire ReBoot for their personal collections, an agreement was reached a few months age between Rainmaker Entertainment, Inc. (the direct descendant of Mainframe Entertainment) and Shout! Factory to release ReBoot in the US in some format or another, most probably a DVD Box Set version. ReBoot really is a direct descendant of Tron; what a treat if we could finally access the original of the former with the the next volume of the later within a year or less of each other! Here is the latest peek at the cover art for the complete series DVD.

Thor trailer

The new trailer for Thor finally came out this weekend, and looks quite tasty. This film gets released on May 6th 2011, and is the next movie to hit the big screen from Marvel studios in their continuing build towards The Avengers. Following that will be Captain America: The First Avenger in July of 2011, which to my mind will be the most difficult origin story to transition elegantly to modern times. I really like the way they have been building this franchise since they took the production in-house, a few of the previous works (such as Daredevil and Electra) just didn’t work the way they should have when in the hands of outsiders.