Let's talk about sequels

You may have heard, you may have not, but 3 big sequels are on the horizon.


Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens on May 22, 2008. Wow. Karen Allen's back...and of course the Hollywood potato patch child, Shia Labeouf. He was constructed from body parts of lesser potato patch actors. In fact, both he and Dakota Fanning were constructed in the same manufacturing plant! Amazing! I'm just kidding...Fanning is a wonderful actor...I loved her in that one about the spider and the pig and the rat with the farm stuff...what was that movie...oh yeah, War of the Worlds.

The other 2 big ones are a Logan's Run remake, as well as a sequel for Tron...both to be headed by a new darling director, Joseph Kosinski. Apparently his awesome talent was recognized by David Fincher (Se7en, Alien³, Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac, and the adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama [which hasn't happened yet]).

I guess I'm a nerd if I say that these were 2 of my favorite movies when I was a kid. I remember seeing the last part of Logan's Run in the theater when my folks took me to see some other more age-appropriate film. I had to settle for VHS to see the whole film. Later, I got the book and read it in one night. How does one describe Logan's Run? The book and movie are different to be sure, but common elements are: Lifeclocks, Carousel, Sanctuary, sex, drugs, youth, freedom, and death at 30 (or 21 if you subscribe to the premise of the novel). Michael York and Jenny Agutter starred in the film, with a smaller role played by Farrah Fawcett. If that doesn't date the movie, then I don't know what does.

Tron was one of the first movies to make extensive use of computer assisted graphics, and for its time, one of most creative and avant-garde films ever. In case you're one of the 5 people who haven't seen the movie, here's the premise in a sentence: a scorned programmer gets digitized and sucked into a huge computing system where he allies himself with rebel programs and defeats the evil Master Control Program thereby liberating information necessary to put him back in the driver seat, aka the big CEO office where he was formerly employed.
Oh yeah...and this was the film that had the scene everyone talked about...lightcycle deathmatch.

The film was recorded in black and white, then the negatives were hand-painted. Additional scenes utilized prenatal CGI technology that was bleeding edge at the time. The writer-director, Steven Lisberger, of the first film is a co-producer for the sequel.

These could be good people. Then again...we could find ourselves waiting for DVD or worse viewing a pirate copy on ssupload.