And Another

Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is out, ten years after the first flick debuted (to very little box office, but eventually a sizeable following on DVD). I spent about nine and a half of those years being told that I had to see it, and checked it out this past Saint Patrick’s Day, but found it pretty lacking, and certainly not up to nine and a half years of being told energetically that I gotta.

A new version of Chas Dickens’ Christmas Carol opens today; this barely counts as news, since A Christmas Carol must be one of the most adapted stories in history. This Wikipedia link isn’t even complete, since I don’t see the special Christmas episode of Alf.

Robert Zemeckis is back at the Polar Express trough with another Uncanny Valley motion-capture holiday extravaganza, looking like nothing so much as a rotoscoped Jim Carrey in his Count Olaf makeup from the Lemony Snicket flick.

Richard Kelly’s new flick The Box is based on a Richard Matheson short story, which was made into an episode (Button, Button) of the 1985 relaunch of The Twilight Zone.

It took me several times hearing the title (but not the plot) of the new Milla Jovovich alien-abduction thriller The Fourth Kind to realize it was referring to the alien-encounter classification system popularized by Close Encounters of the Third Kind. J. Allen Hynek’s 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry recognizes three kinds, and everything else is non-canon, but popular terminology seems to go up to nine Kinds, so there’s plenty of material for further films. I’m looking forward to 5a: Student exchange program.