If I only had enough money to go to one movie this year, I would be a very poor man indeed, but this would be the movie.

On a side note related to the summer movie preview post, there is now a trailer for The World’s End which looks super awesome and is easily in contention for the 2nd movie I would see if I only had enough money to go to 2 movies.

In reading the Redeye Summer Movie Preview, I noticed that SciFi movies are kind of taking over. Now, granted, I filtered the two page spread by movies that I actually want to see, which means that the list is obviously going to be skewed toward sf-nal stuff… but if you look at the entire list, I think you’ll agree that I’ve got most of the movies that will be worth seeing in the following list:

The Great Gatsby
Much Ado About Nothing
The Lone Ranger
The East
Star Trek Into Darkness
After Earth
Man of Steel
World War Z
Pacific Rim
The Wolverine
Elysium
The World’s End

The first four are certainly not Scifi (though I’m not entirely sure about The East, hence my putting it right before the SF part of the list starts). Let me clear the decks a bit by just saying that I think this is one of the most packed summers in terms of movies that I really, really want to see. There’s 12 right there. And I’m having a hard time deciding which of those I want to see most.

So, as much as I love Joss Whedon, and while Baz Luhrmann is cool and fun, and Johnny Depp will probably make The Lone Ranger worth seeing… The movie I’ll be most excited to see will almost certainly come from the last 75% of the above list. And while the title of the post makes it seem like it’s going to be about how Scifi is taking over (and maybe it still will be), I am really just going to attempt to decide for myself which one I am most psyched to see… Starting with…

The East
I am psyched for this one because Brit Marling is awesome. Another Earth and The Sound of My Voice were both incredible Scifi stories, amazing because of the complexity within their simplicity. Both of them basically have 2 or 3 actors with some extras, both have fairly ambiguous endings, but they both make you think because of the ambiguity of those endings. Obviously nothing will ever top Inception for an awesome movie with an ambiguous ending, but considering Marling’s two movies were probably made for what a single scene of Nolan’s movie cost, they are impressive.

Star Trek Into Darkness
I really like the last one, and I will certainly watch anything JJ Abrams puts in front of me, but I’ve never been a Star Trek fanboy or anything, so this is not #1, simply because it’s kind of like “Well, no shit I’ll see it.”

After Earth
I’m a little worried that this one won’t have any more depth behind it than just the father-son relationship thing. Especially with Mr. Night Shyamalan directing. It looks cool, and certainly could be worth seeing in the theater for all the effects, but probably not #1.

Man of Steel
This one looks to be a bit deeper than After Earth, but I have always been more of a Marvel loyalist and only Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies got me to like a DC character as much (or more) than my X-Men. See also: The Wolverine (below), Joss Whedon’s Avengers, Iron Man, Deadpool from the other Wolverine movie (and unfortunately it looks like also from a movie with Ryan Reynolds), Thor (mostly because of the lead actress there), and hopefully soon an X-Men movie with more of Psylocke.

World War Z
Honestly, from the preview, this looks like a lot of Brad Pitt flying around in a helicopter taking out zombie hordes. It seems this project of finding my #1 might be easier than I’d initially thought. I’ll see it because it’s zombies and because Brad Pitt still reminds me of 12 Monkeys, but it’s definitely not my Most Excited To See.

Pacific Rim
If it wasn’t Guillermo Del Toro, I’d probably laugh this one off after watching the trailer, but since he’s done Pan’s Labyrinth, and the Hellboy movies (though I haven’t seen any of them, I’ve heard they’re actually pretty good), there’s definitely potential in those big huge robots fighting Godzilla, er, big monsters in the Pacific who destroy cities. There are some hints that it could be a new, perhaps darker, Independence Day.

The Wolverine
Okay, who am I kidding? This is #1. After writing out my thoughts on the other movies (and watching several of the trailers a second time), this is it. I’ve already mentioned my love for Marvel’s superheroes, but I’m only one of scores of thousands of people who grew up reading and watching Wolverine tear shit up. Lots of action with a core of an identity crisis, plus there’s a hint of some woman peeling her face apart. What’s that about? I don’t know, but I want to find out. (Okay, I just looked at IMDB and saw that her name is Viper, so the face peeling is probably just some shedding of her skin – kind of lame, but oh well. And now I feel like a bit of a fraud for saying how much I like Marvel because I have no idea who Viper is. But I did also notice that Famke Janssen aka Jean Grey is in this, and since I’m one of the only people [of the aforementioned thousands] who actually liked X-Men III, I’m interested/excited to see what’s going on there) The East is still definitely a #1a just because I think it will be unique, especially compared to all these scifi movies. And evidently the consensus is general non-excitement as evidenced by a search for 2013 summer movie preview images, none of which featured the incredibly handsome Hugh Jackman. Hmmmmm…

Elysium
This is my dark horse candidate… Simply being written and directed by Neill Bloomkamp (District 9) would be enough to get it to #2 and giving the others a run for their money, but it’s got to be good if Matt Damon and Jodie Foster thought it was worth it. (Sure, Damon loves action movies, so he probably wasn’t a hard sell, and Foster has a couple SF credits, but they both have pretty high standards for the movies they’re in) Of course, this also brings up: When is that Halo movie going to get made? (Neill says he’s still interested) They could make an 8-hour version that basically walks through the entire first game and if Neill brought the District 9 pathos to it, it would be Legen… wait for it…

The World’s End
I’m not actually really sure what this is even about beyond what’s on the Wikipedia page, but since it is supposedly the third part of a trilogy that started with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, that’s enough for me. I’m not going to rank all the movies after #1 (and #1a), but if I did, this would definitely be close to the top.

…dary.

After one episode, I had some complaints about NBC’s Revolution (and yes, I tried another episode after that and it was just as hard to watch). But so far, the only thing I really don’t like Defiance is that it’s only available on the web version of Hulu, which makes it much harder for me to find time to watch it. Luckily, Syfy took my advice (in the second to last paragraph of that post) and (according to Wikipedia) are only having 12 episodes in the first season.

The show starts off in kind of a typical way: Hero and his sidekick run from danger and stumble onto a secure community of survivors. From there they introduce a lot of characters and a lot of potential conflicts between them. For a show that hints at 8 alien races inhabiting Earth alongside humans, I was impressed and pleased with the lack of explanation and “As you know, Bob” going on. Clearly Syfy knows that this isn’t their audience’s first time watching a show with aliens. It also gives them a lot of room to expand on conflicts between the aliens and the humans (since each alien race could have a different issue with Earth’s natives) and also between the aliens themselves. I’m actually more interested to see how that all plays out more than the overarching plot of “Who’s trying to destroy Defiance and why” …

Also, they totally got me with the “Come As You Are” cover at the end of the second episode. I generally love popular music when used well in TV shows, and this was a cool cover of a great song which fit the idea of the montage it encompassed (almost a little too “hit you over the head with the theme” well).

These are the reasons to update Flash?

• The top 10 Facebook games use the Flash Player.
• Most of the top video sites on the web use Flash Player
• Flash Player is installed on over 1.3 billion connected PCs

That first one is most definitely a reason why I would not want Flash on my computer… The second one… well, as someone who knows about “the web” I know that the top video site has started converting a lot of their videos to HMTL5 compatible in addition to showing them in Flash. (I also know this because I can’t get Flash installed correctly for Firefox on my Linux box at work so I have to open up Chrome any time I want to watch a YouTube video that hasn’t been converted yet; but sometimes they just play and I’m like “thank you HTML5″)

Finally, the last one… If I wasn’t someone who knew about “the web” I might be scared that Flash is going to connect my computer to 1.3 billion other PCs… Am I going to get hacked because of that? Is this one of those grids? Or does it have to do with the “cloud” I keep hearing about? Facetiousness aside, you would think they could have said “1.3 billion Internet connected PCs” … or “1.3 billion PCs just like yours” …

Does anyone else feel like Flash is a character in a Game Of Thrones? You may love it, or you may not, but it’s there and it’s a major character… Still you can’t help but wonder if it’s going to be the next person to get beheaded or burned alive…

First time I remember seeing that.

In their post on advanced robotics, Last.fm explains how their using “robot ears” to identify music and make recommendations based on that. You can get in on the action by classifying the music yourself using their Robot Ears app and then comparing to what their algorithms came up with. I like the idea because I think (I hope?) I tend to be more interested in the style of music and want to hear more from artists who sound similar rather than just taking socially implied similarities between artists. Though sometimes I do like to put on “Bush” in Pandora and relive the 90′s alternative scene, I think most times I’m actually looking for a new artist that sounds similar to the ones I like, and it will be interesting to see if actual sonic analysis yields better results.