The Amazing, Despicable Iron Star Age of Resident Steel Avengers Rises...2

I think it's about time to get out to the movie theater again. Between Big Life Stuff and a general lack of interest in most new movies, the last movie I immediately remember seeing in theaters was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull--back in 2008, when I was still going to the movies about once a month or so. Given a few more moments, I'll think of Star Trek in 2009, Alice in Wonderland in 2010, J. Edgar in 2011, and The Secret World of Arrietty earlier this year, among others...but the memories are few and far between, and most of the movies I've seen in theaters the last few years have been because someone else was already planning on going.

With any luck, that'll change this year.

Provided we can procure a copy of Thor within the next few weeks, my wife and I will be headed out to see The Avengers, and I, at least, will be going for The Amazing Spider-Man not long after that. My wife really dislikes everything about Spider-Man, and the Tobey Maguire movies are still too fresh in my mind to even consider watching a reboot, but I've learned my lesson about the Marvel Cinematic Universe: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the individual films are more interesting because of their connections to the others. I skipped Thor because I didn't care, and I didn't find out about Captain America until everybody else had already seen it, and it's been a struggle to watch these films without starting a DVD collection I'm not willing to invest in before The Avengers disassemble.

There's a new Ice Age movie coming up. I've liked the series well enough so far, and would certainly be willing to give it a shot if someone else wanted to go. Then there's The Dark Knight Rises, which I pretty much have to see if I'm going to continue co-writing this blog with Alex. Nothing I've seen so far has triggered my "wow, awesome" fanboy reflexes, and though I deeply respect how well-executed The Dark Knight was, it was simply not my kind of movie--and Batman Begins was a rollercoaster of liking and disliking the film for me. So, it's almost entirely curiosity driving me to eventually see this one.

I can imagine one of my friends taking me along for The Bourne Legacy, and I can imagine one of my family members taking me along for the Total Recall remake, but The Expendables 2 is the next one on my radar--despite the running joke that my wife and I now have that any given movie explosion is better than anything we saw in the first Expendables. Again, curiosity, but I'd like to think that Stallone is pretty perceptive about the quality of his films, and learns from experience.

The last one on the list for this year is Resident Evil: Retribution. I am expressly not a fan of horror movies (the Alien films being the sole exception), but I'm familiar enough with the video games to be interested in the film "adaptations," regardless of how wildly they veer away from anything resembling the video games. I've seen the first four now, and despite all of their flaws and shortcomings, they're still mindless fun.

Looking ahead to 2013, I'm completely on board with Iron Man 3 despite having heard nothing about it, and I may be curious enough to see Man of Steel (yet another reboot!) if there's any indication there's plans for a DC Cinematic Universe. Despicable Me was the best laugh I've had with a movie in a long time, so the sequel is on my list, too. I might consider breaking my boycott of movies re-released in 3D to see Jurassic Park on the big screen one more time, and Smurfs 2 is a no-brainer.

Wait, how did Smurfs 2 get in here?

Now I'm just looking through Wikipedia's "2013 in film" article and discovering all sorts of things I didn't know were going to be made, and I'm genuinely interested, or at least curious, in much of what's ahead.

Curious enough to start looking at rumors and spoilers for one movie in particular. I am about as anti-spoiler as they come. A half-paragraph synopsis or a movie trailer is all I want to know before I see a film.

Unless that film is Star Trek 2: Khan You Feel the Love Tonight.

A post for another day: predicting the plot of J.J. Abrams' upcoming sequel, and then laughing about it in a year when my patently absurd plotline is proven to be not too far off from the truth. I'm counting on the film to be every bit as much of a fun visual spectacle as the last one, but I'm also counting on it to completely fall apart both as a film and as a Star Trek film when put under the microscope. Maybe a few spoilers here and there are good for the soul--let out all that inevitable disappointment in little bursts, rather than one big one.

Either way, I see movies in my future.