Just jotting down a few notes about upcoming movies of interest…

• The Raven (April 27) — John Cusack plays Edgar Allan Poe trying to stop a serial killer who’s using Poe’s own stories as inspiration. In what universe does that not sound cool?
• The Pirates! Band of Misfits (April 27) — Animated flick from Aardman Studios, the people behind Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit shorts. I love their stuff, and this one looks like more of the same old fun.
• The Avengers (May 4) — This ambitious multi-film/franchise crossover event had my box-office dollars from the moment Samuel L. Jackson appeared as Nick Fury in Iron Man. The fact that it’s starting to look as if it’s actually good is just icing on the cake.
• Dark Shadows (May 11) — Lots of folks seem to be down on Tim Burton these days, but I usually enjoy his films at least on the first viewing, and this reboot of the old supernatural soap opera of the 1970s looks really funny to me.
• Men in Black 3 (May 25) — The trailer looks like more of the same old MiB schtick we saw in the first two, but I liked them a lot, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And Josh Brolin’s impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones looks to be uncanny, and worth the price of admission itself.
• Prometheus (June 8) — Director Ridley Scott swears up and down this film is not a prequel to Alien, but I ain’t buying it, and so I’m pretty ambivalent about this one. Alien is one of my all-time favorite movies, in large part because so much of what happens in it remains a mystery at the end, and frankly I don’t want that to be ruined with unsatisfying (and unrequested) explanations. I don’t want to know where the aliens come from, or really anything at all about the wrecked spaceship that the good crew of the Nostromo will investigate someday. As far as I’m concerned, those things don’t matter. Nevertheless, there’s so much buzz growing around Prometheus, I imagine I’ll probably give in and see it anyhow. I suppose if anyone could return to the Alien universe and make anything worth watching, it’d be the guy who first took us there. (Of course, it would help if the late screenwriter Dan O’Bannon were involved, too…)
• Rock of Ages (June 15) — The Girlfriend loves musicals and has been trying for years to find one I’ll love too. Between Alec Baldwin as a sleazy nightclub owner, Catherine Zeta-Jones as, well, anything as long as she’s in it, and a soundtrack featuring all the lame old ’80s hard-rock music I love, this just may be the one she’s been looking for. I’m totally stoked for this one and I won’t apologize for it.
• Brave (June 22) — The latest animated film from Pixar, set in the 10th century Scottish Highlands. ‘Nuff said.
• The Dark Knight Rises (July 20) — Meh. I’ve decided I really don’t care for Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan’s take on Batman, but there’s a trilogy to be squared, and I know some of this one was shot just outside my friend Cranky Robert’s office in Pittsburgh, so I imagine I’ll see it eventually just out of curiosity.
• Total Recall (August 3) — I know, I know, it’s a remake, and I’m the dude who loathes remakes. But this looks like a somewhat different take on the original source material (a short story by Philip K. Dick) rather than a direct rip of the ’91 Schwarzenegger film, so with luck it’ll turn out like John Carpenter’s The Thing vs. Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World — both good films based on the same source, but not really very much like each other. Maybe I’m rationalizing because the trailer looked better than I expected.
• Looper (September 28) — A time-travel action thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt — yes, that’s the kid from the TV sitcom Third Rock from the Sun, now all grown up and playing a mob enforcer — and Bruce Willis as Gordon-Levitt’s future self. I hadn’t even heard of this until a couple weeks ago when a buddy sent me the trailer. It looks good!
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (December 14) — It could be a disaster, I know, trying to integrate a children’s book with the much darker and more sophisticated Lord of the Rings saga, and also splitting that relatively short volume across two movies… but what the hell. At the very least, it’ll be nice to see Ian McKellen as Gandalf again.