It is the 25th anniversary of Spaceballs, and in honor of that it is getting time on the big screen at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland (D.C burbs). The folks over at Think Geek are also from the D.C. burbs, and they will be making the showing on Saturday the 4th (yes, that is tomorrow), and they are planning to hold a raffle. Prizes may include a pre-release copy of Spaceballs on Blu-ray, and/or two Force FX lightsabers, and maybe some edible stuff. Although if you are hungry the theater has its own cafe, and has a dozen excellent restaurants within the block it lives on.
They have broken loose with another Skyfall trailer, even better than the last one. I would have thought they would have gotten predictable by now, but after 50 years of James Bond movies they just keep getting more creative. And personally I think this new Bond is my favorite since Sean Connery, I almost get the feeling they are the only two out of the crowd who actually read the Ian Flemming books and understand the character.
It is finally time to see whether the new version of Total Recall does either the Philip K. Dick book or the original version of the film justice. The trailers have looked very promising indeed.
On October 26th, one of the potentially best movies of the year will hit the big screen: Cloud Atlas. The 2004 book by David Mitchell was amazing, the cast and directors are amazing (many of the actors playing multiple rolls), this trailer makes it look like the finished product could just possibly live up to the promise that the component elements bring to the table. I can not wait to find out if they manage to pull it off; I will see you in the popcorn line as we go to find out.
They changed the name, but The Watch is about a neighborhood watch team that is out to protect their town from aliens from outer space… whether they are a danger to anyone or not. Somehow this one doesn’t really appeal to me, probably because I don’t find either Stiller or Vaughn more than boring. The plot seems to be an Americanized remake of Attack The Block except without the inter-character relationships that made the original film interesting. But it does have Richard Ayoade and Billy Crudup, and I suppose they might manage to save the movie.
It doesn’t look like we get any genre movies this week, so I thought I would mention the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about the award winning ten seat sushi restaurant in a subway station in Tokyo and the man that runs it.
We do a little better in TV this time, with both Touched By An Angel: The Complete Fifth Season and Touched By An Angel: Seasons 1 through 5. The show ran 9 seasons, so the latter set brings you to just past the halfway point. If you missed it when it originally aired it was quite a well done fantasy about helpful spirits. The other TV release is Sheena: The Complete Second Season, which completes the series which ran from 2000 to 2002. The original Sheena TV series ran in the 1950s, and both series were based on the comic book which ran from 1937 to 1953, the very first comic book series with a female protagonist. Wil Eisner and Jerry Iger created the character, which they based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1886 book She.
The anime release for this week is Golgo 13: The Professional, and that is more spy thriller than sci-fi or fantasy. It is also a re-release, the original feature length film came out in 1983. And yes, this is the movie, not the OVA.