Will Smith’s new superhero movie, Hancock, may be receiving terrible reviews, but it’s sure to make a lot of money. It is a Will Smith movie, after all. The fact that it’s an original superhero title (meaning not adapted from a comic book or other source material), however, means that if it is a success, it will be the rare movie of its kind to be such. Superhero movies may be huge right now, but really only the pre-sold properties, those with a build-in audience, make the big bucks.

A number of original superhero movies are just as worthy of your attention as the Spider-Mans, the Iron Mans, the Batmans and the X-Mens. Sure, much of the time, non-adapted superheroes are lame, as in the cases of Blankman and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. But just check out any of the following ten titles and see why it sometimes pays off to put your trust in an unfamiliar hero.

1. The Incredibles - This one did it all: won an Oscar; received favorable reviews across the board; did blockbuster business in theaters and ancillaries (its the sole original superhero movie to break $100 million, domestically, a feat it far surpassed by actually grossing more than $260 million); and featured the single greatest superhero gag (above) ever seen. So there’s proof that a superhero movie can be good and do well without being based on another property. …Read more

When I first saw the trailer for Wanted, I figured it was just another Matrix ripoff. And I’m sure there are many other people who thought the same thing. Of course, some Matrix ripoffs aren’t bad — I absolutely love Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium, for example — but most are. Even worse, though, are the parodies of the Matrix’s “bullet time” sequences. Do we really need to see another movie character bend over backwards to avoid a bullet (or milk)? Or another movie character suspended in motion while the camera tracks around him or her?

It’s no wonder that until yesterday, I had pretty much dismissed Wanted, because of that Matrix-like bullet time sequence in which Morgan Freeman shoots around a slab of meat to hit an unseen target. Yet as of yesterday, the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes rating was 100% (Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review, posted today, is the first “rotten” one, taking it down to 92%). Now I’m more intrigued. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that that bullet time sequence is there, reminding me of the worst that The Matrix has inspired in the past decade. To remind you, too, I’ve compiled a bunch of clips that should provide you with similar doubt.

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The internet is an evil construct that’s causing us to submissively open our arms to totalitarianism! No, this isn’t another one of my posts about how our society is entering the world of The Matrix. This is the belief and fear of Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of Men in Black, Men in Black II and Wild Wild West, clearly a fan of lighter sci-fi than of the Orwellian sort. Speaking this week at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Vegas, he lashed out against the internet, because of how it’s threatening democracy:

Sonnenfeld fears that children today will grow up with “no concept of the right to privacy and in fact not understand the need for it. Because the Facebook generation is not concerned with what people know about them . . . they will have no problem with additional governmental supervision, spying and intervention. They will be thrilled that the Internet will be able to follow their every move.

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I still don’t get the deal with these “virtual worlds” the kids are all into today, but apparently someone at Paramount Pictures is hip enough to exploit get involved. The studio is opening its film vault and supplying both There.com and vMTV (which like Paramount is owned by Viacom) with thousands of very short “PG-13-or-tamer” video clips of parts of its movies (examples given are Footloose and Clueless). Unlike the full-length versions of The Matrix and Gattaca that are available in the “world” of Gaia Online, these clips are not as much for entertainment purposes as they are a sort of virtual way to “speak” in movie quotes.

There.com and vMTV members will be able to express themselves with seconds-long video clips of movie one liners — say, Danny Zucko’s “Be cool, huh?” from “Grease” — with the service called VooZoo. The application from Los Angeles-based developer FanRocket was introduced on social-networking site Facebook last month and on mobile devices Tuesday.

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Cloverfield has the honor of being the latest movie that I disliked watching but love thinking, reading, writing and talking about. It’s not so much that it’s the kind of movie that’s better in concept than execution (as I was bored, millions of others were thrilled), but it is the kind of movie that — intentional or not — has much more depth off-screen than on. Originally I was going to devote a whole week to discussing all the different things Cloverfield has been said to be about, but the monster flick has been out for more than a week and its attendance has diminished so much that instead I’ve decided to put all the theories into a single post. I hope it gives you enough to ponder on its own.

Specifically, I present you with different perspectives on what the Cloverfield monster is. Even if the movie isn’t necessarily about the monster, these thoughts on what the monster represents carries over into what the movie is as a whole. First, though, I’d like to relate a story about my experience seeing the film. I saw Cloverfield with an audience that included some of its stars, including T.J. Miller, who plays the obnoxious cameraman character “Hud”. At the end of the movie, he thanked everyone for coming and invited a question from the audience. A number of people shouted, “What is it?” Miller replied, “We have no fucking idea!” What may have seemed like a cop out or even an invitation for viewers to come up with their own answer was in fact one of the many explanations. Find out what I mean after the jump.

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Remember that episode of Growing Pains when little Ben decides he should carry all his possessions around with him so that burglars won’t get them? (If not, watch it here). Well, more than twenty years later, Ben is probably carrying a lot of his possessions around with him, at least his music and some of his movies, via his iPod. But if you know anyone who has been mugged in New York City, you know that it’s now easier to be robbed of all your possessions. Unless you’re still holding on to your CDs or have your iTunes purchases backed up on your hard drive, once you lose that iPod you’ve lost everything.

But now, following yesterday’s announcement that iTunes is renting movies, there’s nothing to worry about. We can do away with possessions altogether (as Carol suggests — hair dryer excluded, of course). And we can begin by throwing out all our DVDs and VHS tapes (you still have VHS tapes?). Who needs to own when you can rent whatever movie you’re interested in watching whenever you want to watch it? And you don’t even have to travel around looking for a local video store (if you even still have a local video store). Some people may have even already given up on possessing movies when Netflix came out. I, for one, stopped buying movies when I first subscribed, though I still haven’t thrown out the few DVDs I already own. Within the year, I may very well clear off those movie shelves and replace the DVDs with books.

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Forget about simply watching movies inside the matrix internet. You can now make one there, too. For the first time ever, the 48 Hour Film Project and Second Life have teamed up to offer inter-nerds and cyberpunks with the chance to compete in a weekend-long filmmaking contest … online, in the popular virtual world of SL.

As usual in 48HFP events, teams will be given a genre, a character, a prop and one line of dialogue that must be used in the shooting of a short film, which must be completed in (clearly) 48 hours. The Second Life competition begins Friday, January 11th at 4:00 p.m. SLT (Second Life Time, of course) and ends Sunday, January 13 at 4:30 p.m. SLT. When the films are completed, they will be screened inside the virtual world of Second Life on January 16 and 17.

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I’m always fascinated with how far technology will go to make people less and less social. Yet as far away from each other as we get, with our home entertainment and our personal computers, we keep wanting to be interactive, though on a much more artificial level.

That’s why we need this new special feature on the HD DVD for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Thanks to the ethernet capability of HD DVD players, you can now watch the movie at home while your friends watch it in-synch with you via their own HD DVD players. And I guess you can chat with them through your remote control. Or you can talk on a party line like we did when I was in high school and jointly watching MTV with my friends.

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For their latest appropriation, The Wachowski Brothers have attempted to replicate the candilicious sense of J-Pop as only a Western, green-screen-happy directing duo can. Courtesy of AOL, here is the first trailer for their Speed Racer, technically the first movie from them as directors since The Matrix trilogy, and it looks like the boys might be trying too hard. From the blurred-background pans to the shot of Spritle and Chim-Chim in the trunk, this looks like a perfect live-action take on the classic anime series. But it also looks like a wannabe cartoon, and with so much CGI, it’s difficult to take seriously.

Nonetheless, my eyeballs are begging for me to take them to see this the first chance I get.

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