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Today we finally got to see the second teaser trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, based on the groundbreaking graphic novel Valerian & Laureline. This is the second major motion picture taking place fully in this universe (Fifth Element was the first), but you have seen scenes inspired by the series in other movies (including Star Wars, which took the cantina scene, Chewbacca, The Death Star, the Slave Leia outfit, and a whole lot more from it) and TV shows. It also had its own TV show in 2007 and 2008, but that is difficult to come by in North America. The new film will be on the big screen on July 21st, and I WILL be in the theater to see it!

We get several interesting options this weekend, and while Power Rangers looks pretty campy just like it should, it also looks like they might take a more serious shot at the franchise. Leaning to the Horror side, Life has six astronauts vs. a single celled organism returned from Mars that can out-think them. In the Bollywood fantasy Phillauri, a man must marry a tree to break a curse, but the spirit of that tree has her own agenda.

This week is the Disney live-action remake of Beauty And The Beast, more specifically the live action remake of the 1991 Disney animated version of Beauty and the Beast. Just last year we had the French remake La Belle et la Bête, but of course that one was the remake of the 1946 masterpiece La Belle et la Bête by visionary filmmaker and poet Jean Cocteau. That one was a direct adaptation of the 1757 story of the same name, written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and published in an anthology of fairy tales. The other option this week is Atomica from Syfy Films, which seems to be a mid-future thriller with the potential to become a slasher movie, although I do like a couple of the actors involved.