The Big Summer Movie Preview

If you didn't know the date and you saw that a big Tom Cruise Sci-Fi Action/Adventure movie was opening this weekend wouldn't you assume it was the middle of summer? What about a Michael Bay Oblivion and Pain & Gain (both of which are good, by the way) are serving as great reminders that the Summer movie season is coming up fast. What does the Summer of 2013 look like? Here is all you need to know:
movie starring Mark Wahlberg and The Rock? Well, we are still very much in April but

The Summer Of The Geek Part 3*

Iron Man 3 May 3rd

Can Tony Stark beat The Avengers all by himself (all due respect Roady and Pepper)? No, probably not. The Avengers was not only a terrifically fun movie it also had the advantage of coming out on the heels of the worst April for movies perhaps of all time. We were, as a movie going public, starving for something to see and that helped fuel The Avengers to shatter all sorts of records. Then The Avengers took advantage of one of the worst May movie line-ups in recent memory to keep on going. Iron Man 3 is following one of the best April's in recent memory and a May slate that seems loaded. Having said that this is still Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark and that means Iron Man 3 will almost certainly be the biggest movie of the summer and the year (unless Catching Fire can build upon The Hunger Games and at this point it is scary to bet against Jennifer Lawrence). So, we can expect a box office behemoth that is a lot of fun and will remind us why sits atop the geek world now and for the foreseeable future.

Opening March 15th: Not As Good As You Hope...

Bot Not As Bad As You Fear

Eleven movie open today and frankly I do not have the time to go through all of them. It's a pity too since at least two of them, the Japanese animated feature From Up on Poppy Hill and from Italy Matteo Garrone's follow up to the very good Gomorrah titled Reality, are both supposed to be quite excellent. The rest of the smaller movies are pretty standard art house fare, things like a comedy set entirely in a kitchen titled The Kitchen, Snoop Dog going to Jamaica to immerse himself in Rastafarian culture (how has that not happened before) in the documentary Reincarnated, another doc that follows a boy band I have never heard of around the world called, quite creatively, Mindless Behavior: Around the World and Kristen's Stewart's mom directed a movie about a transvestite run prison called K-11. Like I said, pretty standard indie/art house stuff. As for the bigger name movies, well, as the title of this post says, they are not as good as you might hope but generally aren't as bad as you fear they will be either. Here, I'll show you what I mean...

Netflix Top 10: TV Action & Adventure Series

The truth is that Netflix streaming service has built it's popularity on tv shows more than it has on movies. In many ways Netflix seems to have been built for tv, particularly for shows that are good for "binge" watching (like all of the shows on the list you are about to read). Before getting to the best of the shows Netflix lists as "Action & Adventure" there are three points I have to make.

• Their catalog of Action & Adventure shows was so deep that I had to leave off a number that may have had single seasons as good or better than any on this list. Shows like Lost (seasons 1 & 2 are amazing), Alias (agin, the first and second seasons are phenomenal) and Heroes (season 1 is great, it goes down hill after that) all hit tremendous highs but were not able to maintain that level for as long as the shows that made the cut.
• There were still too many good shows so I had to cheat (you'll see what I mean)
• As always, there were a few shows that I thought Netflix should have included in this category that they did not. In this case mostly Magnum P.I. which would have definitely been on my list.

So, without further ado, here it is, the ten best Action & Adventure tv shows available on Netflix Instant...

This Is The End

By April 1st (or sooner) These Titles Will No Longer Be Available On Netflix Streaming

There is a lot of interesting stuff expiring from Netflix streaming service over the next month. Nothing earth shattering but some interesting stuff none the less. Things like James Coburn's Academy Award winning turn in 1998's Affliction, a young Sean Penn in Bad Boys (from 1983, not the Will Smith movie of the same name) and two movies that were part of my Top 10 Dramas Based On Real Life (which is why I have not included them below) Anastasia and Searching For Bobby Fisher. The silver lining to what is leaving come April is that Xanadu will no longer be available, and we can all be quite thankful for that.

So, without further ado, here's the best of what is leaving. Catch them now or loose them forever.

note: you can see the complete list of what is expiring by going to the Last Chance page. 

Opening March 8th: All Of Hollywood's Eggs In One Basket

Hollywood's Box Office Hopes And Dreams All Seem To Be Riding On Oz, But Will It Be Great Or Powerful Enough?

January and February effectively kill the box office. This is true most every year. The post-holiday hangover that is January isn't made for going to a movie, its made for watching movies at home while you ask yourself "how did we spend THAT much on Christmas, I thought we were being good this year?"And February, well February is cold and dreary and no one wants to go outside. So the box office dies, or to quote Billy Crystal from The Princess Bride it's "mostly dead". You'd think because this near death experience happens annually that no one in hollywood would panic and there wouldn't be a slew of articles written about the calamitous performance of movies like Snitch or Bullet to the Head, but every year those articles are written and you can almost feel the desperation oozing from the left coast. So what happens next? How do the fine folks who put out movies revive their dying patient? Well, there isn't one answer to those two questions. The answer to the second question is simply we need a mega hit. Huge hits work like electrical shocks to the heart, time it right and it can start the thing right up again. As to the first question, what will happen next, the answer is one of two things.

Scenario #1: Hollywood puts out a would be box office juggernaut that actually becomes a box office juggernaut and suddenly all is right with the world (that is what happened last year with The Hunger Games and in 2010 with Alice in Wonderland and in 2007 with 300 and plenty of other times over the years)

Scenario #2: Hollywood's would be juggernaut proves to be a so-so blockbuster, big enough to keep things alive but nowhere near big enough to get things rolling again. Hollywood continues to struggle through spring and prays that the summer blockbusters will perform well enough to make up for four months of pathetic performance (this is what happened in 2011 when Rango was the closest thing to a hit until Fast Five saved the day the last weekend on April or in 2008 when Horton Hears A Who was all they had until Iron Man changed the world)

So you see, in either scenario everything rides on the would be juggernaut and the same is true this year. If Oz the Great and Powerful is everything hollywood hopes it will be then look for G.I. Joe Retaliation and Oblivion to keep the momentum going all the way up until Iron Man 3 keeps Marvel's ridiculous hot streak going. However, if Oz is neither great nor powerful, well than G.I. Joe will have to try to do something it wasn't meant to do, be the jolt that makes everything right again.

Opening March 1st: Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum I Smell The Blood Of... Blah

In A Week Filled With Mild Promise We Apparently Get A Lot Of The Forgettable

Of the seven movies opening today do you know how many have been "certified fresh" by RottenTomatoes.com? One. Now in and of itself that isn't really that surprising, in fact of the top 10 movies at the box office last week only three received the "fresh" designation (Silver Linings Playbook,  Warm Bodies and Side Effects) and one of those is a classic "the critics liked it but everyone I know who saw it was bored out of their minds" movie (sorry Mr. Soderberg, I have yet to meet or speak to someone who actually enjoyed Side Effects). What is noteworthy about this week's releases is that they are almost universally blah, for lack of a better term. No one is screaming that these are the worst movies ever made or that only a fool would willingly sit through any of them. What people are saying is that they are harmless but devoid of any movie magic. It is too bad because I think we are all getting a little antsy waiting for movies to be good again. I guess we always have next week.

So, given the general apathy that this slate of movies apparently deserves I wont waste any more effort on any of them other than to list them and attach the trailers:

March Movie Preview: Will You Be Seeing The Wizard?

Oz, Giants, Cartoons Come To Life, The Birth Of Man and The Fall Of The White House...

Who Will Take The Hunger Games Mantle?

Obviously it isn't likely that any movie will be what The Hunger Games was last year, but the truth is March always brings at least one (and often two) big hits that will dominate the Spring movie season. Before The Hunger Games we had Rango in 2011 (it did almost $250 million worldwide and a solid $130 million domestically), Alice in Wonderland in 2010 (over $1 billion worldwide and nearly $350 million domestically), Monsters vs. Aliens in 2009, Horton Hears a Who in 2008, 300 in 2007, well, you get the picture. So who will it be this year? In descending order here are the likely candidates: