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.
David Hughes is a master at describing the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” that is the Hollywood movie mill. It takes a certain amount of skill to discuss a blockbuster that might have been in a way that leaves you wanting to find a way to buy the rights, get funding and shoot the damned thing yourself. The reality is people with a lot more experience, money and even enthusiasm have tried… and, in some cases, are still trying. Hughes, who also wrote Tales From Development Hell: Movie Making The Hard Way, does a masterful job of getting you right in the middle of all the fuss in his recently updated and re-released book The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made from Titan Books. 
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. 
Hey, in case you haven’t heard, the second “X-Files” movie, “I want to Believe”, which features the long-awaited reunion of Dana Scully and her paranoid partner Fox Mulder, opens today in theaters all across America. Now the question is, is this the sequel we’ve all been waiting for ever since 1998’s somewhat incomplete “Fight the Future”? Not so much, says the movie critics at 
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.)
Here’s a shocker: Jack O’Neill dies in the first few minutes of “Stargate: Continuum”. Now wait a minute, before you Stargate fans get all mad at me, let me say this: “Continuum” is a time travel story, so yes, Jack O’Neill dying, as well as Teal’C and Vala vanishing into thin air in a cloud of black smoke, is no cause for concern. If we’ve learned one thing about the Stargate universe, it’s that death is not absolute. Heck, it wasn’t absolute even when the episode of the week didn’t involve time travel, so why should it be even close when the entire episode hinges on the team time traveling back into the past to set things right? (And anyways, Jack shows back up as his bewildered, Homer-loving self at the 30-minute mark anyhow. Well, okay, maybe not quite his old self, but close enough.)
A satellite crashes down in Utah. With it comes a previously unknown virus which is dubbed “Andromeda” and, as the tagline for this updated version of Michael Crichton says: “It’s a bad day to be human”.
Jesse Johnson’s “Alien Agent” is less a sci-fi movie about invading aliens as it’s a martial arts movie with invading aliens. The film stars Mark Dacascos as the alien agent of the title, sent to Earth to stop an alien renegade military unit from creating a “gateway” that would connect Earth to their alien homeworld, after which they would use the portal to invade Earth. For you see, their homeworld is dying, and they need a replacement. While the good alien folks back home are willing to search for an uninhabited planet to start over again, Billy Zane and company are not so nice, and plans to invade Earth.
In recent years, Marvel has been giving DC a run for their money on the big screen. Besides a couple of exceptions, most notably the “Batman” franchise, Marvel’s comic book-to-movies have overwhelmed their DC rivals by a healthy margin. But that isn’t the case on the small screen, where DC still dominates. But what about on DVD? That is where the new battleground is between the two companies.
The 2008 TV movie “Knight Rider”, an update of the classic ’80s TV show starring David Hasselhoff and his super talking car, is considered a “back door pilot” — that is, NBC wants to see how its return to the airwaves is received before they commit to a potentially expensive TV series. The new series stars Justin Bruening as Mike Traceur, a former Army Ranger who kinda inherits the talking supercar, this time a Ford Shelby Mustang voiced by Val Kilmer, the replacement voice who infamously took over for Will Arnett after the latter was pulled because of his ties to GM, a rival of Ford’s.