Film by Shane “Keep Your Text Life To Yourself” Hnetka

I completely forgot to mention Fan Expo last column. On April 23 and 24, Sean Astin, James and Oliver Phelps (the Harry Potter Weasley Twins), Dirk Benedict, Verne Troyer and Matt Frewer all made media appearances. If you missed out, don’t be too sad — the Saskatoon Entertainment Expo is only four months away.

Hero Planet

It’s reached a point where mainstream movie news is mostly about superheroes. Despite the thinly veiled hopes of naysayers like Steven Spielberg, the genre hasn’t “[gone] the way of the western.” Whether it’s Disney/Marvel, Fox, or Warner/DC, all the major studios will keep making superhero films and cinematic universes for the foreseeable future.

But North America isn’t the only continent filling the screens with heroes. Russia has jumped into the super-game.

There’s an upcoming Russian movie called Guardians — a big-budget film following a team of superheroes created during the Soviet era. My Russian is a little rusty, but it looks like there’s a guy who can levitate stuff, a woman with water powers or something, a fast guy with a sword who can cut vehicles in half, and a man-bear (not a man-bear-pig, just a man-bear: half man, half bear). It looks damn entertaining.

Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t understand Russian.

Text Fiends

The new boss of AMC Theatres (a major U.S. theatre chain), foolishly hinted during an interview that AMC was thinking of letting people text during movies. They weren’t, and CEO Adam Aron was quick to deny it when the inevitable super shit-storm hit.

Aron says he was merely speculating about ways to get young people back into theatres. I know attention spans are shorter than ever, but if “young people” can’t sit and watch a movie for two hours without being distracted by their phones, “young people” probably shouldn’t being going to movies. The rest of us don’t want the distraction.

Shane Hnetka is a crabby old nerd who wants kids to get off his lawn.