The titles that stand out are as follow:

‘The Rite’ (January 28)
‘Captain America’ (July 22)
‘The Adjustment Bureau’ (March 4)
‘Thor’ (May 6)
‘X-Men: First Class’ (June 3)
‘Green Lantern’ (June 17)
‘Cowboys and Aliens’ (July 29)
‘Immortals’ (November 11)

Trailers are available on the Nerd Blerp site.

The coolest thing about the film is the hooded coat that Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) wears in the film’s third act after he leaves his remote hideaway beyond the edges of “the grid” and returns to digital society to confront Clu (a digitally de-aged Jeff Bridges) and what Clu’s desire for perfection has wrought in the system Flynn asked him to construct.  Black as the darkest night on the outside yet glowing with pure light from within, this garment is the perfect metaphor for the movie’s themes, and also the perfect representation of one of the things wrong with ‘Tron: Legacy:’  The film tries to do too much.

Beginning with a backstory meant to catch the audience up on the 18 years since the first film, ‘Legacy’ opens in 1989 with Kevin Flynn putting his 7 year-old son Sam (Owen Best) to bed before he heads off to work.  Senior Flynn’s stories of the digital world he’s creating with Clu and with Tron entrance young Sam even as his father promises to show him that world some time soon.  Quickly we learn not only of Flynn’s disappearance but also, in a compressed, news-reel montage fashion, of all the things that have happened since the first film, including what must be the shortest courtship and quickest pregnancy in history leading to Sam’s birth and Kevin’s widower status; Kevin’s takeover of video game corporation Encom, and how the board plans to handle his disappearance.

Jump forward 20 or so years to now as Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), pays his annual visit to the Encom tower, breaks in, hacks the company’s servers, uploads the new version of Encom’s operating system to the Internet making it available for free just before the company’s stock is to premiere on the Nikkei Index, and base jumps off the tower.  After his release from jail, Sam gets a visit from Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), Tron’s original programmer and the only person currently on the Encom board to raise objections to the company’s direction.  Why, Bradley wants to know, if Sam cares so much about information being free doesn’t he take an active role in the company as its largest stockholder?  He’s not ready he tells Alan, and are they really going to do the surrogate father thing again?

Yes, hacking, base jumping, and living in a storage container with a view of the multi-billion dollar company in which he holds a controlling share but can’t be bothered to actually run is Disney’s ham-handed way of telling us that Sam Flynn is an anti-hero.

A page Alan received from Flynn’s Arcade from a phone number that has been disconnected for 20 years leads Sam to his father’s private office where he’s sucked into the digital world of “the grid” after reawakening his father’s still running computer system.

In revealing that he isn’t a program but a user, and a user named Flynn, Sam learns that things are not all as his dad described in the digital world.  Far from the utopia he envisioned, the grid is a world of savage games and neo-fascist order which Clu keeps a hold of with help from his enforcer Rinzler. The conflict between Clu and “the creator,” Kevin Flynn, becomes quickly apparent as Sam is rescued from the game grid, his life saved by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), his father’s protege.

Kevin Flynn, meanwhile, has withdrawn to the badlands beyond the grid in an effort to frustrate Clu and keep him locked inside the digital world.   In his withdrawal from the world he’s created, Flynn has embraced several concepts key to Eastern religions chief among them the idea that sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing, an idea that escapes Sam.

It is in this clash of concepts, action vs. inaction (doing vs. not-doing), as well as in the exploration the nature of identity, the value and meaning of life, the definition of perfection and whether or not we should strive for it, and how strength can be expressed that ‘Legacy’ gets bogged down in its themes as the writers try to jam too many concepts into the tech/action film wrapper that they’ve chosen slowing down the action just enough to be noticeable and open that exploration up for derision.  This is very bold type handling of what could have been an interesting discussion is the second of the films two biggest failings.

It’s biggest failing is a combination of authorial hubris and poor casting.  When making a sequel, particularly for a cult film like ‘Tron,’ it is vital that the writers of the succeeding film pay attention to theoriginal text — the original film.  Even though Kevin Flynn was a carefree, unattached bachelor in the 1982 world of the first ‘Tron’ movie, I could almost forgive compressing the time line presented by the first film to allow for Sam Flynn’s existence (Sam would have to have been born in 1982 to be 7 in 1989 when the film opens which is a pretty quick courtship, marriage, and pregnancy).

What I can’t forgive is the casting mistake that presents a 13 year-old actor as a 7 year-old character.  The cognitive dissonance created in the first 10 minutes of the film was enough to make it difficult to immerse myself in the story which is really a shame considering that the ‘Tron’ films are all about immersion in another world.

Too, it’s a bit disappointing that the film’s producers chose to take a jab at Microsoft by presenting Encom as a greedy company (Alan Bradley questions the release of the new operating system by asking “With what we charge schools and students, how is the new software any different?” to which Encom’s CEO replies “We put a 12 on the box.”) committed to closed source, proprietary systems without actually fully exploring the question of whether not information, and access, should be free, a debate that is raging all over the world even as this film is released.  It’s also a touch disappointing how they handled the idea of a Dillinger-related antagonist (Cillian Murphy in an uncredited role as Edward Dillinger, presumably the son of disgraced former Encom CEO Ed Dillinger (David Warner from ‘Tron’)).

Is ‘Tron: Legacy’ worth seeing?  For the visuals alone I’d say yes but don’t expect to be fully satisfied.

A note on IMAX and 3D

I chose to see this film in IMAX 3D having never seen a non-documentary release in IMAX before with 3D being the rider to that.  In IMAX this film’s presentation is super impressive.  The visuals are sharp and stunning as is the sound design.  The use of 3D is moderately well executed but over all it’s not necessary to see it in 3D.  Save a little bit of cash and see it in regular, 2D projection unless you’re real computer or film geek.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

‘Captain America: The First Avenger‘ (2011) • IMDb link

This one’s a bit contentious — Joe Johnston, who directed The Rocketeer way, way back in 1991 should have been a good choice to direct a period piece about Marvel’s Captain America set during WWII. But then, Johnston turned in the pointless and unnecessary Wolfman remake this past year, and then cast Chris Evans (Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm) as Steve Rogers, rather than  Mark Valley, (‘Human Target’) an actor born for the role.

Understandably, Marvel and Disney are reaching for a younger actor for the role, but I really dobt that those 18-49 women should be the marketing department’s target. Rather, the target audience ought to be 4 generations of American men aged 7 to 70 that Marvel ought to be aiming for. That, and the fact that 25 year-old Evans will have to go up against 46 year old Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth and Samuel Jackson in ‘The Avengers‘ (2012) and make it somehow appear that they are peers.

‘Excalibur‘ (2012) • IMDb links 1, 2

Here’s one that I could not have anticipated, short of calling it sacrilige — an anticipated remake of John Boorman’s 1981 ‘Excalibur.’ I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it here, but it turns out that therre may be TWO competing projects, BOTH set up at Warner Bros., one helmed by Bryan Singer (X-Men’) and the other from Guy Ritchie (‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’) written by comic book author Warren Ellis (‘Red’). One is said to center upon Guinnivere and Lancelot, the other a straight remake of the Boorman film.

I’m curious to see Ellis’ take on the legend, yet I can’t besmirch Singer. Release dates for the competing films have yet to be released. IF Warners does it right, they’ll separate the releases. I the meantime, who would have guessed that Arthur would be the new Superman?

‘The Ring 3D‘ (2012) • IMDb link

3D is a current fad, but horror lost something special when director Gore Verbinski abandoned the Ring franchise to make Pirates of the Carribbean for Disney. DreamWorks may have only had good intentions when they invited the original Japanese director, Hideo Nakata, to direct Ring 2, but the producers dropped the ball, by giving him a weak script. (FWIW, I’ve heard that Scott Frank’s uncredited contribution to ‘The Ring’ is what made it work and not the solo credit that the MPAA gave to Ehren Kruger.)

The franchise had legs, but rather than keep the memory of the first movie fresh in people’s heads by releasing a straight-to-video third film, they let it die. Starship Troopers got 3 sequels, The Grudge (2004) got 2 sequels and Jeepers Creepers (2001) got 2 sequels all within spans of 1-6 years for the immediate sequel and third films. It’s madness that DreamWorks and Paramount sat on this franchise for so long, especially given that the fans — both Americans and foreign J-Horror adherents were waiting — no, begging for the opportunity to be exploited.

In Asia, Ringu spun off into both film and television franchises in Japan and SE Asia. It is not as though there is a shortage of story ideas for an American franchise to poach or improve upon, it’s just that producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald stopped making product and abandoned the franchise.

We can’t expect to see another Ring film until 2012, muck less another featuring Naomi Watts or David Dorfman, so this one’s entirely up in the air.. The Ring was made in 2002 — that’s a decade ago, so it’s only possible to presumed that DreamWorks SKG has walked away from tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, especially if the inferior Grudge and Final Destination frnachises were able to make any money.

‘Runaways‘ (2012) • IMDb link

Runaways is a Whedonesuque take on superheroes that even Joss Whedon failed at. Runaways is the fruit of scribe extraordinaire Brian K. Vaughan, who has conquered comics (Marvel and DC) , television (‘Lost’) and film (‘Runaways’, ‘Y: The Last Man’ and ‘Ex-Machina’),  during the 13 years that he’s been working professionally.

Runaways, first published in 2003,is part of  the 3rd Generation of comics creators that began with Alan Moore publishing Watchmen back in 1987. The premise here is that there super-villains with children who are unaware that their parents are super-villains. But then one day the veil drops and the kids of time-traveling villains, evil robots, mad scientists and mafiosi determine that they want to get away from their mobbed-up parents and do the right thing. They are all also teenagers.

The good here is that BKV has written the screenplay and is likely to be credited as a producer on this film because he served as co-producer on “Lost.” Word has it that Peter Sollett (‘Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist’) has been tapped to direct for Marvel Studios, now a subsidiary of Disney. Marvel’s control over the project should see that the project doesn’t turn into another camped-out version of the original idea (cf. ‘Wanted’, ‘Red’, The Fantastic Four’, etc.)

‘I Am Legend 2′ (2011) • IMDb link

Fact of the matter is that this could be good in ways that the former film didn’t deliver. Will Smith was never appropriate for this role and they got the book almost entirely wrong by turning it into a Will Smith action vehicle.

The implication in the novel is that our Neville has passed through the looking-glass and become the monster and the vampire/zombies that rove the world are the status quo, now afraid of him. A prequel could do some interesting things in the realm of Charleton Heston’s Omega Man flashback sequences, which are very Andromeda Strain-like. A ‘prequel’ of Legend could, possibly redeem both Legend and the 2008 remake of Andromeda Strain, given that it would be the same type of bio-apocalyptic scenario. The writers of this thing just have to be able to sell Smith as a scientist, as Neville was before he became a rugged, gun-toting survivalist.

To summarize Parts, a group of young people are born, grow up and live in carefully controlled environment, wherein their every desire is indulged, yet their every behavior is monitored by the powers-that-be until such time they receive a call and it’s time for them to emigrate to the utopia of “America.”

Of course,  America is just a lie and all of these bright, young, ambitious kids are just the spare-parts clone-farm of an aging, wealthy, politically-connected elite that created the desert haven of Clonus as an organ-bank to extend their own lives. But the kids are aware of none of this — they are simply caught up in the celebration of their young lives, until the day that they are summoned to ‘America’.

Elements the Clonus plot turn up in John Byrne’s Next Men comic book (1991-1995) and Michael Bay’s ‘The Island‘ (2005). But only Bay’s $100 million dollar studio picture got a copyright infringement lawsuit against it. After a short spell of closed-door negotiation, Fiveson and his crew got the attention and compensation for the $251K movie they’d made 27 years before.

Finally, the Clonus premise  has inhabited the prose of British-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro and his 1995 novel, ‘Never Let Me Go‘, later adapted for the screen by Alex Garland and directed by director Mark Romanek.

Anyone familiar with Ishiguro also knows that he is responsible for The Remains of the Day (1989) another novel  adapted into a splashy multi-award nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Because Remains seems to have been a metaphor for the lack of social mobility in post-War Japan and wartime Britain. it’s not a reach to suggest that the controlled environment of Let Me Go is a metamorphosis of Day‘s unrequited arrangement into a romantic triangle. She can’t have him, because he’s with someone else.

Thematically, there’s plenty of ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) in Never Let Me Go, but director Romanek has chosen to sublimate most of the hard sci-fi of Ishiguro’s alternate-reality. Like the Replicants, the ‘children’ of Never Let Me Go exist to serve their fully human masters, if only via organ donations. Like the Replicants, Ishiguro’s children may have a limited life-expectancy, but Gardner and Romanek play down the the science-fiction elements of IShiguro’s novel almost entirely.

Beautifully shot and convincingly performed, Never Let Me Go fails because writer Gardner and director Romanek are incapable of selling the romantic triangle. Garland created something similar in ‘The Beach‘ (2000), but that was Garland’s novel and not his screenplay. The necessary cross-fertilizing friendship just doesn’t develop in front of the camera.

The crisis that Kathy H. endures after Ruth and Tommy pair off is mostly one of isolation. In the Garland-Romanek adaptation of Never Let Me Go, I only saw that Kathy H. (Carey Mulligan) and Tommy (Andrew MacDonald) as friends while the relationship between Tommy and Ruth (Keira Knightley) just seemed to be almost entirely carnal.

All said and done, it was only Clonus‘ Richard that managed to make his way out of Plato’s Cave into the ‘real’ world, while Kathy H. was just left in the donation clinic pining for her lost friends.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

So begins Case 39, a horror-thriller vehicle for Renee Zellweger that’s sat on a shelf for 4 years. Wikipedia says, that the film was completed in “late 2006″ and rescheduled three more times before landing on American screens, this Friday, October 1.

Case 39 is not a bad movie, but it is a movie we’ve seen many times before (see Orphan (2009) and  Joshua (2007)). RZ plays the hard-working, well-maening social worker, Emily Jenkins who prevails upon her to add one more child protective case to her already-overburdened caseload. Vocation turns into affection and Jenkins adopts the child and brings her into her home, and then… things start to go wrong.

I won’t trouble you with any more details, as it is the interpretation of form that prevails is the real subject of interest here. Case 39 is a bad seed flick and moves fairly predictably, save for the contributions of actor Callum Keith Rennie during the first half hour or so. Though it’s billed as a Zellweger movie, it really belongs to Rennie and actress Jodelle Ferland, the troubled girl, Lily, whom Zellweger’s Jenkins rescues from a troubled home.

Fans of the recent Battlestar Galactica television show take note: Leoben is much more dynamic here. Ian McShane, Bradley Cooper, Cynthia Stevenson and Adrian Lester are wasted here. A better director would have figured out a better way of using their talents, once they were booked.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Listen up — Turner and Harron have carefully constructed a four-dimensional portrait of a woman who was, initially, a rather innocent studio model. She was good at what she did, attractive and at ease with her body in a way that made nudity easy. She was many things to many people, even as those fantasies and figments overlapped and contradicted on another.The modelling was so easy, that distortions such as S&M, Fetishism and role-playing were a bit of a joke to her, even as she posed for pictures by the notorious Irving and Paula Klaw.

The Klaws, of course, were a brother-sister team, that ran a mail-order photograpy business, whereby people would send away for stylized ‘artistic’ pictures of  costumed models. The Klaws were *not*. pornographers. But their collaboration was an odd one, with Irving serving as the product manager requesting certain kinds of pictures from his sister Paula, who actually posed and photographed the models.

Finally, this would also seem to be the break-out film that Gretchen Mol was unable to deliver during the 90′s. The girl has serious chops, convincingly becoming the Nashville-born Page as she leaves Tennesee and arrives in NYC, where she becomes “The Pin-Up Queen of the Universe.” One of the film’s most striking story arcs is Bettie’s transformation from Southern Girl to Shakespearian Thesp. The Connecticut-born Mol (b. 1972) convincingly sells us Page’s humble roots, before deconstructing both herself and Page. Looking back, it’s remarkable that the entire thing clocks in at 90 minutes.

See it.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The series is only about 35 issues long (#0-#30, plus the graphic novel 2112), but Byrne does a very good job of turning it from a Clonus Horror tribute comic into a story that eats time-travel, holodeck incidents and alternate-reality tropes alive. In fact, it’s elegant in a way that I wish ‘Inception’ (2010) had been.

Unlike every other comic book property out there, I doubt that Next Men will be made into a movie anytime soon. That, because the studios have utterly failed to get past the Superman idea of comic book heroes in capes and tights to bother with the concept of character-driven, often literary aspects of Bronze Age and Modern Age comic books.  The reason that Alan Moore’s masterpieces, Watchmen (published 1987) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (published 1999) failed as movies is that both were part of a period of postmodern thinking in American comic books that the movies have yet to catch up with.

JBNM is like one of those wtf?! moments in Season 4 of Farscape where the bottom keep falling out and the rabbit-hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

For those  interested, Next Men is supposed to be revived as an ongoing title this Fall.

If anyone is thinking of trying to do a catch-up with the Next Men, IDW sells them both as a pair of bande-dessiné style black-and-white books ($18/per) and a 3-volume color edition ($33/per) that I presume is printed on better paper with a nice semi-gloss finish. There are at least 6 trade paperback volumes of the original run, but those cost about $16/per and the trades above are the better value. If you hunt them out, you can probably find the b&w volumes for as little as $11.25/per+shipping on Ebay or Amazon, slightly used.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

If you aren’t aware of the plot, it’s a late, experimental variation on noir, about 2 grifters in the Hustler-Older Woman game. For reasons that seem to make no amount of sense, real life con-artists/lovers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez posed as brother and sister during their scams, their schemes allowing the 200-lb. Beck to accompany Hernandez and their target on ‘dates’ as a chaperone up to and after the ‘wedding’.

It’s an odd film, with primitive camera movements, clumsy direction and stilted dialogue. Conversation and character interaction seem to be second-thought here — almost every line is exposition. describing things that are going on off-screen.

The big question is whether the director, Leonard Kastle intended that the performers ‘externalize’ the performances the way they did. In 1969, it might have been seen as revolutionary, but in 2010 it just seems mannered in an unproductive way. If he had done 10 more films like this, it might have amounted to an interesting style, like a Pinter play or Mamet film. But this was Kastle’s only screen credit and this Kastle can’t boast any relation to the other Castle of B-movie fame.

The story of Beck and Hernandez has been remade twice as ‘Deep Crimson‘ (1996) and ‘Lonely Hearts (2006).

Recommended for fans of David Lynch and John Cassavettes

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′
4. ‘A Scanner Darkly’
5. ‘Avatar’
6. ‘Donnie Darko’
7. ‘Star Trek’
8. ‘Minority Report’
9. ‘Cloverfield’
10. ‘Serenity’

CoM, check; Moon, looked good, but it didn’t keep me awake; District 9, not — why South Africa? — and on and on. I am just incapable of becoming excited by most of these titles. Minority Report was interesting because of it’s Philip K. Dick cachet (and the fact that it was made during Bush II) , but very few of those movies had the **umph** of the movies I grew up on. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I feel as though I’ve lived a charmed life, given that the following came out during the period that sanned 1979-1989:

‘Alien’ (1979)
‘Altered States’ (1980) ‘The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
‘The Thing’ (1982)
‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983)
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984)
‘Dune’ (1980) ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) ‘Brazil’ (1985)
‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
‘Aliens’ (1986)
‘The Fly’ (1986)
‘Robocop’ (1987)
‘Near Dark (1987)
‘They Live’ (1988)

And I’m still unable to think of a good sf movie for 1989.

Since some of the best sci-fi of the passing decade has occurred on the small screen, I couldn’t resist listing a few television shows, if only because their effect on our pop-culture was indelible. In no particular order:

‘The Man from Earth’ (2007)
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
“Firefly”
“Battlestar Galactica”
‘Night Watch’ (2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_%282004_film%29
‘Day Watch’ (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_%28film%29
‘Iron Man’ (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28film%29
‘X-Men 2′ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_2_%28movie%29
“Farscape” (1999-2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Many of these moives and shows, I’ve already written about on this site.
Now, none of these entertainments as groundbreaking as any of those eighties movies, but I just needed a place to start this thing.

During the week, I’ll make an attempt to justify my choices, but in the meantime, I’ll ask readers in the audience to recommend their own science-fiction favorites or offer their own recommendations from a faded

The problem with both previous Predator flicks were that there was very little high-concept. In both preceding entries (Predator and Predator 2), the Predators and the humans were on Earth.

In the first film, the Predators interrupted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hunt for something or other, and in the sequel, they appeared in a very hot L.A. summer, getting in the way of a police investigation of some sort. In each, it is strictly humans vs. Predators.

In this new Robert Rodriguez film, things have gone 3 paces further, as the protagonists have been kidnapped to an off-world hunting preserve and there is no ‘team’ of humans working against the Predators. Rather, the 7 humans *aren’t* working together. After a short spell they recognize that the 7 of them each represent the worst kind of murderous criminal on Earth and that they have each been selected as quarry for some yet-to-be-determined agent on this new, Earth-like planet.

Rodriguez wrote an original script for Predators back in 1994, long before the AvP franchise was even conceived. To Rodriguez’s credit,Predators (1995) was conceived as a direct sequel to Predator 2.

Most interestingly, this really isn’t a Predator movie until well into the 4th reel, when the Predators finally appear. Until then, the film simply plays as a particularly good episode of The Twilight Zone, where the  hunters  of The Most Dangerous Game size each other up, before trying to do one another in. Rodriguez does a nice job here by prepending a human story to all of the glitchy, gooey and messy effects, remembering that the story should drive the effects and not vice-versa.

The most interesting aspect of this film is the ‘hands-off’ approach that Fox studio chief Tom Rothman has taken with this franchise, after his direct involvement with the ‘AvP‘ franchise. Here, Rothman has handed Rodriguez the entire Predator franchise to shoot, not in some Hollywood backlot, but on Rodriguez’s own Troublemaker Studios, out in Austin, TX. The most interesting thing is that the film works as a late addition to entire concept of Auteur filmmaking.

And a great big hats off to Adrien Brody for playing against type and to Topher Grace for making another, great, unaticipated career move.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars