• Greta Gerwig in "Lola Versus."

For those of you who read Colin Boyd's review of Lola Versus (here) and want to see the film, please note it will no longer be opening at Century El Con 20 on Friday, June 29. Please check back here, The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch, for updates.

The movie looks amazing, and Anna Karenina is my favorite novel ever, so I'm pretty much in the tank for this movie already, but:

1. The "screenplay by Tom Stoppard" bit scares me. While he did write a number of great plays and the screenplay for Brazil, he was also responsible for Shakespeare in Love.

2. Aaron Johnson, at age 22, seems a bit young to play Vronsky, who I always thought was at least in his thirties. I might be totally wrong about this, however. Either way, his mustache creeps me out.

3. I don't know, do we need another adaption of Anna Karenina? I think I might have been the only person to see the 1997 version, which opened in five theaters, including the Scottsdale Camelview, for some reason, but it was quite good. Also, there was a BBC miniseries a few years ago, and British television producers do opulence and misery better than anyone.

Mostly, I'm just bothered by the mustache, but I guess I should be glad Baz Luhrmann's not involved and that Kitty Shcherbatskaya isn't singing a song by The Police in the trailer.

We interviewed Tucson author Adam Rex, earlier this year ahead of Free Comic Book Day, and now his book The True Meaning of Smekday is going to be the source material for a major motion picture coming out in 2014. This cannot be a coincidence.

DreamWorks Animation today announced that Emmy and Golden Globe winner Jim Parsons ("Harvey on Broadway" and "The Big Bang Theory") and international superstar Rihanna (Battleship) will star in the leading roles in Happy Smekday!, a feature film based on the critically acclaimed book "The True Meaning of Smekday" by Adam Rex. The studio plans to release Happy Smekday! during the fourth quarter of 2014.

Tim Johnson (Over the Hedge, Antz) will serve as the film's director. Chris Jenkins (Rio, Surf's Up) and Suzanne Buirgy (Kung Fu Panda 2) are serving as producers and DreamWorks Animation's Head of Development Gregg Taylor is overseeing the project. Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (Get Smart) are currently writing the screenplay.

"Adam's hilarious book is the perfect recipe for a compelling animated feature and we are ecstatic that Jim Parsons and Rihanna will contribute their immense talents to the production," said Bill Damaschke, DreamWorks Animation's Chief Creative Officer. "We're also thrilled that Tim Johnson is back to direct another DreamWorks Animation feature film and show the world just how fun an alien invasion can be!"

This will be difficult for some of you to believe, but the forthcoming Quentin Tarentino film is a star-studded ultra-violent, yet strangely witty affair. Still, if anyone makes a film with a James Brown song in the soundtrack involving a slave getting his revenge against early American racism, I'm in.

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" is without a doubt in my top five list of favorite books read in high school. It spread like wildfire among my group of friends, and I'm pretty sure it's the only novel (besides the Harry Potter series) that I've read more than three times.

Usually I get scared when I find out great books are being adapted for the big screen, but I have high hopes for this movie. For starters, the author of the book, Stephen Chbosky, was a filmmaker before writing "Perks" and directed the film. Also, Emma Watson is in it. So it can't be that bad.

While I don't think I've enjoyed an Adam Sandler movie since The Wedding Singer (I also liked Funny People and Punch Drunk Love, but those don't really seem like they count, since they lacked the David Spade cameos I generally expect from Sandler films), so I'm admittedly not the target audience for That's My Boy, but the NSFW red-band trailer for the movie coming to theatres on June 15th is particularly horrifying. Not because of the content, which seems like the same exercise in idiocy and terribly cameos Sandler considers his oeuvre, but because Andy Samberg is also involved.

Samberg, best known for his work on Saturday Night Live's Digital Shorts like "Dick in a Box" and "I'm on a Boat", isn't some sort of auteur, but he did star in one of my favorite movies of all time, Hot Rod, which no one saw likely dooming Samberg's chances of creating his own films for awhile, hence That's My Boy and next year's film that will make you say "They're making a sequel to that?", Grownups 2. Samberg also stars in this year's Celeste and Jesse Forever, which seems like it might be good, so there's still hope, but it might take the collective will of everyone who ever shared a YouTube link to "Jizz in my Pants" to keep Samberg from traveling down a road that turns him into another Adam Sandler sidekick.

There's some technological innovation to TimeScapes, a film available for purchase as a download or on DVD and Blu-ray now, that I don't understand, but it seems like a solid buy you enjoy appreciating nature from your couch (the best way to enjoy such things, as far as I'm concerned). The trailer is quite impressive, at very least.

I understand that Baz Luhrmann is the artsy type, but I think this might be just a bit too much of a re-imagination of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel.

[Jezebel]

Where this came from, I don't know, but I did thoroughly enjoy last year's reboot of the Muppets franchise, so more of that same sort of thing is certainly welcome.

Somehow I've managed to miss the two previous James Bond films with Daniel Craig in the title role, not because I dislike Craig (I don't) or because I don't like the premise (I do), but they just haven't been a priority, I suppose. However, I might have to get back in the swing of things with Skyfall, at least based on the trailer. Spooky espionage antics, stuff blowing up...yes and yes.