Former Star Wars producer Kaleb Lechowski wrote and directed the short film R’Ha, which you can watch below. He is now teaming up with Matthew Graham to turn it into a feature length film, according to SFX in one of their Link-A-Mania entries. Matt was the person who created two of the more interesting British TV shows, Life On Mars and Eternal Law. Not the first movie to start out as an independently produced short which was then shopped around in hopes of getting a backer, but with the state of modern desktop video production suites this kind of thing is getting better and better.
The obvious winner this week is Man of Steel, the latest in a long tradition of Superman movies. I have enjoyed many of them, and sat through the turkeys in the hopes they might get better, and I will be right back in the theater for this one. Strangely enough, the best trailer I have seen for it is from a cell phone company.
We have several choices this time around, beginning with the action comedy This Is the End, in which a bunch of celebrities try to survive the apocalypse. The Purge takes place in a future where all laws are suspended once a year for 12 hours, and follows one families attempt to survive the event. Also this week is the Joss Whedon version of Much Ado About Nothing with Nathan Fillion and Amy Acker.
This week we get the Smith family in After Earth, the second movie this summer to show planet Earth abandoned by humanity. These is another one that looks interesting this time around Now You See Me, about stage magicians who pull off robberies in the middle of their act and give the money to the audience. Not exactly genre, but the trailer makes it look like fun.
There are some moments you want to last forever, and some you don’t even want to live through once. The author of About Time was also a writer on Blackadder, and did a few other RomCom flicks like Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Love Actually. This appears to be his first venture into SF/F, but it could be quite amusing. The film is due out in November, and will hopefully get an actual web page before then.
The one that gets my vote this week is Epic, an animated fantasy from the folks who did Ice Age and Rio. They did pretty good on the voice actor department to, with a cast that includes Collin Farrell, Chris O’Dowd, and Beyonce to name a few. If you’re in the mood for something darker, the no budget film No Sanctuary will also be out in at least some theaters.