The trend of wearing a skintight body suit complete with head-enveloping mask is a little strange to me ("Hey, it's a green faceless person in that college basketball crowd! Wow!"), but I suppose young people have to find new ways to have fun for me to find confusing. It's the way of the world.

Of course, some genius realized that these outfits need not be confined to simple monochromatic schemes and is rolling a line of Star Wars body suits, presumably for Halloween (or at least, I'd hope so). However, I will say, these costumes (available for Boba Fett, pictured above, Chewbacca, Darth Maul and Darth Vader) will probably show off a bit more lightsaber than is generally appropriate for most social situations.

Stephen Chbosky, author and director of Perks of Being a Wallflower, will host a reading, signing and Q&A from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Friday, April 26, at the Bookmans at Grant and Campbell.

After releasing the novel in 1999, Chbosky went on to write the screenplay and direct the film adaptation, which was released last October. The book had garnered a cult following by the time the film was released.

Though Chbosky began this project as an author, he also has an extensive background in film. A graduate of the University of Southern California's filmic writing program, his first film, The Four Corners of Nowhere, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995. Chbosky also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Rent, and helped create CBS's Jericho.

The signing is free and open to the public.

Most weeks, La Cocina runs an event called Tuesdays for Tucson. It's a really solid deal for non-profits in this town: You bring the people, La Cocina provides the place, and your charity gets 10% of the net profits for the night.

On April 30, the Loft Cinema is the non-profit of the night and they're pulling out all the stops to raise some money for their renovations and improvements, bringing a lineup of music, comedy and other stuff that's impressive for a Tuesday night somewhere with no cover. Howe Gelb, Al Perry and Pork Torta on one night? What a deal, plus you can feel like you're doing something positive while eating nachos and drinking a cocktail, which is always nice. See you there.

There are a ton of things to enjoy about Cleopatra Jones, showing at the Loft tonight at 8 p.m.

A partial list:

1. Shelly Winters as "Mommy," the head of a drug smuggling ring.
2. Tamara Dobson, over six feet tall, as the title character, a secret agent/karate expert
3. Jones' car, a bad-ass black Corvette
4. A great soundtrack with a few Millie Jackson tracks
5. Everything else.

Tickets are $3, a buck cheaper for Loft members.

Dubbed by many as one of the greatest stories in sports (as a long-time tennis player, I’m a bit biased) the lives and careers of sisters Venus and Serena Williams are now the subject of a new documentary.

Released on iTunes today, Venus and Serena follows the sisters during the 2011 season, as they publicly battled health concerns that threatened to end their success on the court (Serena was just returning from a year-long absence for blood clots while Venus was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease).

But exposing fans to a tumultuous time in their pro careers, now nearly two decades old, had its benefits. From USA Today:

• Courtesy of the Yuma Film Festival Facebook Page

If you have a film you might want to share with audiences of the Yuma’s 2nd Annual Independent Film, Art and Music Festival, now’s the time: the final deadline for submissions is Monday, April 1.

The festival returns on April 19 and 20, in a town with a significant amount of Hollywood history: True Lies, the original Star Wars trilogy and Road to Zanzibar (starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby) were all partially filmed there. An expected audience of 5,000 people, according to the fest’s website, will descend into Yuma to usher in a new age of Southern Arizona filmmaking.

This new age, though, won’t be lacking its fair share of nostalgia: all of the accepted films will be screened in the Historic Yuma Theatre, while the rest of the action will unfold on Main Street, where local artists and vendors will set up camp from 4 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 20. Short films will be screened both days of the festival with to-be-announced “feature films” playing at 8:15 p.m. both nights (the full schedule of the festival can be found here). A $5 entry fee buys you admission into a full day of screening and festival events.

If by the end of 2013 you still can’t get enough of watching humanity meet its untimely end for the price of an admission ticket, first, you really need to kick that morbid habit, and second, you can rejoice in the fact that Independence Day director Roland Emmerich has announced not one, but two follow-ups to his 1996 blockbuster.

To refresh your memory, Independence Day ended with an oh-so-patriotic victory over a hostile alien race, but not before they burned every major city on Earth to the ground and did some other unnecessary, totally un-American things, like shoot strippers with ray beams and try to kill Will Smith.

The sequels, ID Forever Part 1 and ID Forever Part 2 - passing on the clearly superior title Independence Day: Forever Ever (Forever Ever?!) - pick up 20 years after the first film, when alien reinforcements respond to a distress call conveniently sent by the first wave of attackers before they were exterminated.

Emmerich spared a few plot details to Entertainment Weekly:

Tower Theatres at Arizona Pavilions in Marana announced today, via its website, that it will be closing this week, Thursday, March 28.

From mytowertheatres.com:

We must humbly express our sadness that this Thursday, March 28th, 2013, we are closing Tower Theatres.

We have celebrated five years, three months and 21 days as your center for Hollywood entertainment. Our little 12 screen building has served the community not just movies but private screenings, birthday parties, high school events, lock-ins, summer kids clubs (TREEHOUSE!), movie premieres, local independent films and as the host of Cornerstone Church for over 4 years.

...

It has been a pleasure to serve your community while doing one of the most enjoyable of American pastimes; watching movies. It is this shared experience that swallows our hearts and minds and sets us free into other worlds. It is why movies will always be with us.

Please continue supporting movies and experience them as directors everywhere envision them: in the theatre.

Kent Edwards,
Managing Partner

From Inside Tucson Business:

"We'd been facing bankruptcy over the past three years," Edwards said in a phone interview, referencing a foreclosure notice and sale the theater faced in 2010.

"We thought we had worked our way out of it, but the landlord [Marana Cinemas Associates] decided to go a different direction and asked us to move."

According to Edwards, Phoenix-based Harkins Theatres is in talks with the landlord, and should be in the space by May.

"We're disappointed that it didn't work out, but we want to thank everyone who supported us," Edwards said. "We're still going to be operating Grant Cinemas at Crossroads and Oracle View, and we hope that people will continue to support us there."

I'm not going to lie: I'm a sucker for a good animated movie every now and then. One of my favorites over the past few years was Despicable Me, and this summer, the sequel is coming out.

The new trailer for Despicable Me 2 came out on Tuesday by Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment, where the adorable yellow minions with a language all their own are back!

The new film, coming to theaters July 3, takes places right where the first left off. Steve Carell's character, Gru, is taking on his new found responsibility as a father when he is called by the Anti-Villain League to help them take down a new villain, voiced by Al Pacino.

When cute little Agnes, played by Elsie Fisher, asks Gru "are you really gonna save the world?" He responds, "That's right, baby! Gru's back in the game with cool cars, gadgets, and weapons!"

The first Despicable Me, released three years ago on July 9, 2010, made more than $540 million, according to CBS.

Below are the other trailer and teaser previously released for Despicable Me 2.

I can't imagine "Thumbs and Ammo" sticks around for long (novelty blogs tend to burst into whatever passes for prominence online, then fade away quickly as the joke gets old), but if you're a fan of film and encouragement, take a moment to peruse the photoshopped images of people giving the thumbs-up signal instead of holding a gun.