There’s just something about “Star Wars” that brings out the geek in people. When I recently attended an advanced screening of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” I kept seeing a blue light flashing out of the corner of my eye. Turning to look, I was surprised to see the source – a $119 light saber (available from Toys R Us. It was so cool I had to check it out). But the biggest surprise was yet to come. The person wielding the “toy” was a man, probably in his mid-40s, dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ah, yes, I was with my people.
When David Lynch’s quirky and often surreal “Twin Peaks” ended after just two seasons in 1991, I didn’t think anything could take its place. But I was wrong. In 1993, Chris Carter unleashed “The X-Files” upon the world. It was the answer to my, and million of others’, prayers. Inspired by the 1970s TV series “The Night Stalker,” Carter placed two very different FBI agents at the center of his creation: Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a believer in little green men and things that live under the stairs, because he had witnessed the abduction of his younger sister Samantha by aliens; Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a skeptic and a woman of science. In the stand-alone episodes, they took on fat, flesh and brain-eating humans, vampires, firestarters, parasitic twins, mutant children, serial killers, and much, much more. In the interconnected stories – these provided the show with its mythology – they confronted government conspiracies and cover-ups, orchestrated and overseen by the Cigarette Smoking Man, the Well-Manicured Man, and Alex Krycek. They were assisted in their search for truth by FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, Deep Throat, the Lone Gunmen, and Mr. X. 
A quick search on the Internet Movie Database shows that Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” has been adapted for the screen (big and small) at least 10 times. There’s even a Filipino version! By Hollywood standards, this must not seem like overkill, because guess what? If you go to your local cinema, you can see the 11th version. But wait. The news gets better. If you’re lucky enough yours is one of the 954 cinemas showing it in 3-D. (The remaining 1,857 are not.)