This movie will surely be a blast from the past. Coming Soon Movies present to you the creation of Japan ’s God of Manga, Astro Boy 2009. Astro boy is once a television series that was first broadcasted in Japan from 1963 to 1966. The story revolves around the adventures of a robot boy. The former name of Astro boy was Shin Tetsuwan Atomu and later translated into Astroboy.

It tells the story of a young robot that is created by a brilliant scientist with the image of his lost son. Astroboy’s journey is to find acceptance in the human world and along the way discovers true friendship.

Watch the new teaser trailer for the upcoming movie Twilight. For a teen action-horror, it looks pretty good… then again, it still comes off as teen action-horror. The line, “I’m only afraid of losing you,” while not bad, does not exactly escalate the film above teen drama.

A coworker sent me this YouTube video today. It’s been online for two years, but that doesn’t make it any less funny. Can you name all of the films shown in here, which depict some pretty ridiculous death scenes? I sure as hell can’t.

I particularly like the one with the hook through the guy’s eye, though I wouldn’t call that the funniest of the bunch. Some of the shark deaths are pretty classic, although I think the throwing star one gets me chuckling the most.

In anticipation of The Dark Knight this Thursday, I rented the direct-to-DVD movie Batman: Gotham Knights, which hit stores this last Tuesday. Thankfully, I used my Netflix account, because the movie certainly wasn’t worth the money.

Batman: Gotham Knights is meant to bridge the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, so I assumed there would be something about the Joker, so on and so forth. Hell, I thought there’d at least be a plot.

Instead, this Batman movie is six stories pieced together to create a feature-length, 75-minute action-drama. The first story, about a group of kids who all see Batman from a different perspective (one sees him as a shadow monster, another as an invincible robot, so on and so forth), is completely inane. Actually, it’s downright terrible, and does nothing to move the film along.

The other stories aren’t nearly as terrible, as they delve more into some known but little-used villains such as Killer Croc and Deadshot (oh, and Scarecrow, but after Batman Begins I wouldn’t call him “little-used” anymore). Still, short stories aren’t very exciting as it’s impossible to get into the stories with any emotional committment, and then there’s the fact that this movie is meant to bridge the gap between the two Christopher Nolan movies - yet it doesn’t. Maybe I should never have expected much, but I did.

Oh, and just for a record, I am a fan of the original Batman cartoon, so I’m not anti-cartoon. In fact, the visuals are pretty impressive, as the artwork used in the film are much more advanced than anything I used to watch on TV back in the day. The visuals are the only saving grace.

Batman: Gotham Knights has potential and some of its stories are better than others, but its lack of a single story or connection to the films make it a throwaway film.

Watch the new movie trailer for Ghost Town, which stars Ricky Gervais (from the British version of “The Office”) as a man who, after dying for only seven minutes, discovers that he can see ghosts. Greg Kinnear plays one of those ghosts, who enlists the man to hit on his wife (Tea Leoni), who in turn is dating a creep of a dentist.

Ghost Town looks OK, but not particularly funny. The marketing department will have to do more to make this one look appealing.

77 hours. 77 hours until the lights will fade, the previews will begin, and the theater will roar as The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger and all, rolls onto the screen. Anticipation is high… in fact, amazingly high. In order to subdue my hype, however, I went searching for bad reviews, and, of course, went straight over to RottenTomatoes.

The reviews did not help in crushing my hopes. The movie only has an 88% fresh rating based on 20 reviews, and the snippets from the bad reviews include:

This movie is grim and jammed together. The narrative isn’t shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax. The Dark Knight is constant climax; it’s always in a frenzy, and it goes on forever. -David Denby, New Yorker

Why do comic-book movies want to be serious literature? That’s the problem with this movie the same way it was with 2006’s “Superman Returns.” Instead of being exciting pop-culture entertainment that forces the viewer to take it seriously, the movie takes itself too seriously – and misses the fun in the process. - Marshall Fine, Star Magazine

But then the novelty wears off and the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag. The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic. Even its most wondrous vision—Batman’s plunges from skyscrapers, bat-wings snapping open as he glides through the night like a human kite—can’t keep the movie airborne. There’s an anvil attached to that cape. - David Edelstein, New York Magazine

Actually, those are all of the rotten reviews thus far, and the first two don’t strike much confidence in me. Denby’s review is scathing, to say the least, but he loses me when he bashes Bale, Batman Begins and everything else I know I’ll like. I can’t pre-judge someone else’s movie review until I see The Dark Knight myself, but when someone hates a movie for being “perverse” and sounds like they hated the first one, too, credibility goes right out the window. After all, Batman Begins is the best comic book movie made, and so it’s unlikely I’m going to agree with him here.

Fine, who still gives the movie 2.5 stars, complains that the movie isn’t fun enough, and points out that comic book movies shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. That’s fine, but one gets the sense he doesn’t like realistic comic book movies, and again, we have a severe difference of opinion. I feel most comic book franchises, from Spider-Man to X-Men, would be best served by being grittier and adult-oriented.

The Dark Knight movie review by Edelstein is the most sobering, as he seems the most unbiased by Christopher Nolan’s approach. If I were to end up being disappointed by The Dark Knight, his review is what I’d write. He complains there’s too much dialogue and that the movie is too smart for its own good; could Nolan have gotten too caught up in the drama of it all that he forgot to make an exciting action movie? I doubt it, but we shall see.

More dampening are the fresh movie reviews that fall short of calling the movie a classic; they liked it but didn’t love it. I didn’t go on to read the movie reviews beyond the snippets in RottenTomatoes, but if The Dark Knight isn’t everything I wanted and more, it will probably fall in line with these reviews. After all, if you hype a movie up so much, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Of course, most of the Dark Knight movie reviews rave about the film; some call it a masterpiece; others a classic. At the very least, they say it’s an excellent film. Damn. My hype has not gone away.