As we slide into a more Seattle-like weekend of gray, rain and generally snuggle-up-on-the-couch-with-a-movie weather, we have a fine batch of entertainment choices for you. Take a peek and see for yourself:

Anime’ fans might find something to love with The Big O volumes 1, 2 and 4, The Big O II volumes 1 and 2, Angel Links volumes 1 and 2, Burn Up Excess, Tenamonya Voyagers, Wrath of the Ninja: The Yotoden Movie and Weather Report Girl: In For Nasty Weather.

We also have Lupin The Third: Strange Psychokinetic Strategy, a 1974 live-action movie based on the popular manga (Japanese comics). Lupin III is a third-generation master thief who, along with his sexy sidekick Fujiko and gun-slinging Jigen, must acquire a fabulous national treasure before the Maccherrone crime famly can get their hands on it, all the while avoiding assassins and the relentless Inspector Zenigata. I may actually need to see this myself after typing up this description. If it’s even half as cool as it sounds, it’s gotta be pretty awesome.

Other notable titles include Field Of Dreams, Kids, The Notebook, The Pink Panther (the original with Peter Sellers and David Niven), Christine (one of the better Stephen King adaptations, this one by John Carpenter), Broken Arrow with Christian Slater, John Travolta and a stolen nuclear warhead or two, Samuel L. Jackson as a teacher on the edge in 187, Misery (another great Stephen King adaptation from Rob Reiner) and two of the greatest spy spoofs ever made (and at least partial inspiration for the Austin Powers series): Our Man Flint and In Like Flint starring James Coburn as the original international man of mystery: Derick Flint. Plenty of gags and gadgets and feats of daring and beautiful women and the expected plots to take over the world and, in the case of In Like Flint, beautiful women plotting to take over the world! I personally own both of these movies and can’t recommend them highly enough.

We’ve also got some newish releases in stock for you, including Michael Jackson’s This Is It, Whip It, Surrogates and Saw VI. Get ‘em while they’re hot and fresh!

“I heard of you… I heard you were dead.”

I read today there’s a planned remake of one of my favorite 80’s sci-fi action flicks: Escape From New York. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about this news. On the one hand, it sounds kinda cool to get a chance to see this movie with current special effects and such, and on the other hand I want to quote Han Solo: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

According to the article I saw, there are some changes to the setting and story:

“…the Big Apple that the as-yet-uncast Snake Plissken is dropped into will be geographically undesirable, but intact: This Manhattan was evacuated and turned into a privately run penal colony after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city. “It is not a disaster movie,” says a source close to the project. “It is an exposé of an ecosystem, if you put a huge wall around Manhattan and then dropped in the most fucked-up, dangerous criminals on Earth.” This means New York will still be recognizable to audiences, à la I Am Legend, rather than an entirely new Armageddon Island.”

Which doesn’t really sound all that terrible to me, you know? I mean, other than they made a comparison to I Am Legend, which I hated very, very much. And that’s the thing about remakes and re-imaginings… often, the filmmakers had a really good reason for wanting to make their own version of a movie that held some kind of significance for them (and probably for many of us). And often they fail to acheieve the same significance.  I love The Omega Man, and though I’ve only seen it once as a kid, I remember thinking The Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price, was really cool. I also really like Will Smith, so I was pretty jazzed to see  I Am Legend, and was thoroughly disappointed.

Anyhow, the point of all that is that I’m on the fence here. I love Escape From New York (I’m also one of the 6 people who liked Escape From L.A., so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about) and am excited about an updated version of it, and at the same time my gut tells me it’s going to be a ginormous disappointing waste of time.

This bit makes me feel a little less uneasy about it, but only just a little:

“…New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken “must be called ‘Snake’”; “must wear an eye patch”; and that he would — and we’re not making this up — “always be a ‘bad-ass.’”"

For now I’m taking a wait-and-see approach, since nothing like this is ever chiseled in stone.

(You can see the whole article here: http://moviecycle.com/ip9)