MOVIE REVIEW Still up: Summer Movie Preview "Splice"  by Mike Smith
RETRORAMA Forgotten Horrors: Island of Terror  by ED Tucker
THE AUDIO PHILES More May Albums!  by Terence Nuzum
FANGRRL Summer 2010 Book Preview  by Lisa Scherer
THE ASIAN APERTURE John Woo’s "Hard Boiled" (1992)  by Jason Fetters
SPORTS TALK I’m Back!!!! .... Super Bowl In The Meadowlands? .... Officially Blind .... Favre Watch .... Can’t Keep Big Ben In The Pants .... Storm Season .... Cleveland, Say Goodbye! .... ’  by Chris Munger
MIKE'S RANT R.i.p. Little Man .... Movie Notes .... Passing On .... .... .... .... .... .... Mike's Record Shelf .  by Mike Smith

Summer 2010 Book Preview

What's a literature lover to do this summer? Most of the movies coming to the local megamovieplex during the next three months are based on TV shows/characters (MacGruber, Sex and the City 2, The A-Team, The Last Airbender) or videogames (Prince of Persia) or comic strips (Marmaduke), or are remakes/spin-offs of other films (The Karate Kid, Get Him to the Greek, Dinner For Schmucks, The Sorcerer's Apprentice) or sequels (Shrek Forever After, Toy Story 3, Life During Wartime, Predators, Step Up 3D, Nanny McPhee 2).

There are, however, a few literary adaptations appearing on the silver screen this summer: Julia Roberts stars as a writer embarking on a year-long, worldwide search for rest and rejuvenation after a painful divorce in Eat, Pray, Love (in theaters August 4), based on Elizabeth Gilbert's novel of the same name...The Twilight Saga:Eclipse (opening June 30) is of course based on Stephanie Meyer's vampire-romance Twilight series...Comic book fans, having sampled the lighter fare of Iron Man 2, can dip into darker worlds with Jonah Hex (opening June 18) and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (in theaters August 13). In the DC-comic based Jonah Hex, "Josh Brolin stars as a hideously scarred, hard-living bounty hunter who goes head-to-head with a crazy terrorist (John Malkovich) in the wake of the Civil War" (Entertainment Weekly). Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright returns to the director's chair with Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, a superpowered, martial artsy rom-com based on Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel series...Based on Nick McDonell's popular and unsettling novel, Twelve (in theaters July 2) tells the story of a petty drug dealer and his spoiled, self-destructive New York prep school pals...Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Terence Stamp star in The Adjustment Bureau (opening July 30), a sci-fi/fantasy/romance/political thriller very loosely based on a Philip K. Dick short story...The sperm donor switcharoo rom-com The Switch, starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman, is based on the short story "Baster" by Jeffrey Eugenides (in theaters August 20).

Happily, bibliophiles and bookworms know how to crack open a book and/or charge a Kindle. Silver Borne, the fifth installment of Patricia Brigg's werewolf series, is out now, along with the horror-history mash-up Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith and Christopher Moore's latest paranormal-with-a-punch novel Bite Me:A Love Story.

For non-fiction fans, actor Michael J. Fox offers up humorous life lessons for new graduates in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future, while Chelsea Handler gives hilarious, bitchy non-life lessons in Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang.

In June we'll have the first installment of Justin Cronin's ambitious horror-fi/suspense post-apocalyptic vampire trilogy The Passage, which Stephen King described as "enthralling" and for which the movie rights have already been sold...Stories:All-New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman (in stores June 15) is a collection of never-before-published "fantastic fiction" short stories of various genres and styles from Joyce Carol Oates, Roddy Doyle, Chuck Palahniuk and others...Dean Koontz continues his Frankenstein series with Frankenstein:Lost Souls, available June 15. It's Mary Shelley meets William Gibson by way of Dean Koontz.

July will bring Kiss Me Deadly:13 Tales of Paranormal Love, an anthology for those fangrrls -- who shall remain nameless -- who are too fanboy-ish to read Harlequin romance novels but still girlie-girl enough to crave a good love story every once in a while...plus Gary Shteyngart's satirical sci-fi novel Super Sad True Love Story.

August is full of yummy anthologies, like the crime fiction collection Florida Heat Wave and Sympathy for the Devil, an anthology of short stories about Satan by authors such as Stephen King and Michael Chabon.

Obviously, this list barely skims the surface of this summer's publishing pool. So many books (and movies...and TV shows...and conventions...), so little time. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some reading to do.