Thanks for the tip Lay, and for letting us use our powers for good.

Metal Tornado:
What more really needs to be said here, other than GIANT METAL TORNADOES! That's about 1,000 times cooler than regular tornadoes. Now, thanks to the Sci Fi Chronicles, we can finally upgrade our natural disasters. Here's the poster and official synopsis:

When astronomers discovered the phenomena of magnetic tornados on the planet Mercury, they were amazed by the destructive power of these gargantuan solar-fueled magnetic fields...but they never imagined witnessing the catastrophic forces in their own backyards.

Samuel Planck is head of the HELIOS PROJECT—a high tech facility tasked with storing and converting solar rays into an endless supply of renewable energy. After years of research and millions of dollars, it is now time to test the system out. The scientists cheer loudly as initially things go according to plan. But when the facility is unable to control the massive amount of energy coming in, the cheers turn to screams. The charged particles begin swirling around themselves, creating a massive magnetic vortex that quickly becomes the first magnetic tornado on earth!

Planck and his team try to abort the procedure but it's already too late—with a trillion watts of power to draw from, there is nowhere this monstrous force of nature can't go. The mega swirling tornados are soon ripping steel from buildings, cars off the street, and planes from the sky as they pulverize everything they touch!

Now Samuel Planck and his team must find a way to stop these metal tornados before they destroy all of us!

Love:
Angels And Airwaves, a band made up of some Blink 182 people and some other aged '90s rock stars have made a short film based on an astronaut who is all alone in space. Uh oh, looks like somebody saw Moon. I'm not really sure what to think about this... It look pretty, but my hatred of A&A is pretty steadfast. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Synopsis:

After losing contact with Earth, Astronaut Lee Miller becomes stranded in orbit alone aboard the International Space Station. As time passes and life support systems dwindle, Lee battles to maintain his sanity - and simply stay alive. His world is a claustrophobic and lonely existence, until he makes a strange discovery aboard the ship. Driven by the powerful music of Angels & Airwaves, Love explores the fundamental human need for connection and the limitless power of hope... A high-impact visual adventure, that resonates a common truth, that everyone has a story to tell and something even greater to leave behind.

All About Evil:
This strange little parody of a parody takes place when a young librarian inherits her father's movie house and starts showing horror pictures. Some way or another, she gets the "Shining" and becomes a murderer. Here are a collection of stills pointed out via Quiet Earth. It looks colorfully cute, and it appears to have the sassy character from American Pie in it. Let's keep our fingers crossed for actual comedy.

Shorts:
World Builder

And this week for shorts, check out this slightly oldie but goodie where a man creates a virtual world for the woman he loves. It's very sweet, and from the minds that made the short 405.

World Builder from BranitVFX on Vimeo.

Of course there's always this:

Serial and Parallel Monogamy

What it might look like:
A discovers sex and love at roughly the same time, among his group of friends. Some of them he's met at school; others are people he knows from social networks. He and his friends don't think of hooking up and dating and being friends as different things – it's hard to say where one ends and the other begins. As a result, A has sex which is as casual as meeting up over coffee, and friendships that are as intense as first love. And vice versa.

When he grows up and starts to think about settling down and having a family, his models for love and intimacy are based on what he experienced when he was younger. He considers love, friendship, and sex to be overlapping and interchangeable. For several years, he lives with three close friends. He has sex with two of them some of the time, and eventually one of them decides to get pregnant. The two of them decide to become a monogamous couple to raise the child, but remain living with their two other friends.

Years pass, and A and the mother of his child both fall in love with other friends. They decide to form a poly marriage, where they remain a couple but also have other long-term relationships too. Their two housemates have sex with each other once in a while, but start fighting. One of them moves out, and a new friend moves in. A winds up having sex with the new housemate one night when his two long-term lovers are off vacationing with their kids.

Where will this scenario come from?
In the west, changing norms around marriage have already made serial monogamy a reality for many people. They may be monogamous, but they will have several partners throughout their lives. Add to this the changing ideas about friendship and sex that is popularly associated with the social network generation, and you have a population of people who expect multiple partners drawn from extremely interconnected but casual friendship networks. As a result, long-term romantic relationships start to look more like friendships. The emotions are no less intense, but the structure of the relationships might take on the characteristics of friendships today: Constantly-changing groups of people whose feelings for each other range from talk-every-day closeness to casual meetups at the pub. Stability will be provided by the network, and by a few long-term close connections like A's monogamous relationship and later his two long-term lovers.

The idea that humans will one day live in poly marriages is a popular one in science fiction, and can be found in novels by authors from Ursula Le Guin and Charles Stross, to Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, and Robert Heinlein.

The Female Minority

What it might look like:
B is always one of four girls in her classes at school. Everybody else is a boy. At first this seems normal, but then they all go through puberty and she starts to realize that she is the focus of intense attention from all those hormone-charged boys. In the country where she lives, girls are considered less valuable than boys, but you'd never know it based on how the young men treat her. In fact, B manages to grow up believing that girls are more special than boys, because after all she and other young women are the object of fascination and desire among their peers wherever they go.

In college, B falls in love for the first time after going on hundreds of dates and being told no less than two dozen times that she's broken some young man's heart. She's received gifts and plaintive love letters and weird homages but all of it made her feel weird and slightly guilty until at last she meets a man who shares her passion for puzzle games.

Of course, it's so hard for her to know what men are thinking. That's why B's romance almost didn't bloom. On their first date, she tells him all about her favorite kinds of word puzzles and her college classes and where she grew up and he just nods and smiles like all the other young man did. Occasionally she can pry some detail out of him about himself, but half the time when he's talking about himself he's really talking about his family or demurring that her opinions on most things are probably more informed than his. Finally, though, she challenges him to a game of chess and sees that they actually do have something in common.

Years later, he admits that he waited by the phone almost constantly waiting for her to call about a second date. She was busy with exams and didn't manage to get back to him for five days. While she finds having a steady boyfriend a relief – at least she isn't pressured by all the other men anymore – her female roommates in college are enjoying playing the field. They go to meetups and matchup balls and speed date events, amused by all the ways the men get gussied up and try to grab their attention. Her friends explain with bursts of giggles that some men prefer each other's company to these awkward competitions, and there are bars and clubs where no woman ever goes – she only hears rumors of them.

Where would this scenario come from?
In many parts of China, medical technology has merged with traditional beliefs and population control to leave some regions of the country with 150 men to every 100 women. This imbalance was produced after just one generation, and we may see repeats of this scenario in other nations where governments try to limit the birthrate. Many people still regard sons as the only way to continue the family line and ensure that elders will be cared for by a stable breadwinner.

The result of a skewed gender ratio, however, may wind up reversing gender roles. Men who want to get married will find themselves in the position that marriage-minded women were once in: Waiting by the phone, trying to please their dates by not speaking up too much and seeming too opinionated.

Ian McDonald has written about this in his short story collection about a future India, called Cyberabad Days. A twist on this scenario appears in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, where women are plentiful but fertile women are not. Women in Atwood's novel become the property of men, and there is no gender role-reversal.

Neo-Courtly Love

What it might look like:
C and D are raised in an affluent community where everyone goes to church, elders are respected, and a King rules the land. From a young age, C and D have known that they are promised to each other as husband and wife – it was arranged by the priest and the community's prominent families before they were born. All marriages are arranged, except among the poor, and C and D have only seen the favelas from a distance when they pass through the community gates in a tram to travel to a neighboring town or air station.

Nobody expects C and D to love each other, least of all C and D. They will certainly make a home together, raise children, and take care of each others' parents when the time comes. But they will seek love outside the bounds of marriage. They call it courtly love, after the medieval notion that marriage is for duty and romance happens in highly codified, covert ways that everybody knows about but politely pretends not to.

C and D are married when they turn 16, and their families buy them a small starter house in the heart of town, near the shopping mall. C works in her mother's hat shop and D is going to school to become a biotech entrepreneur like his father. Although C and D like each other, they cannot imagine a romantic spark growing between them. Passion has no place in an orderly home.

And so they both discover love a few years after they are married. C meets an intense young man from outside the community who aspires to one day own his own home. He works in the mall as a physician's apprentice, and C's effortless, money-bought beauty embodies everything he hopes to have for himself one day. He sends her secret poems via an encrypted channel; they meet in places nobody will ever find them. D knows she has a lover, but as long as it never interferes with family dinners and she leaves no clues anywhere, he is happy. D has a lover too, a waitress who works at the gentlemen's club where he goes with his father. She always serves him port with a salacious smile, and his liaison with her is looked upon as the sweet folly of a young man.

Where would this scenario come from?
Courtly love, historically, grew out of a society infused with traditions that were so old they felt more like window-dressings than true social mores. It was also associated with the ultra-rich aristocracy, who had time to engage in court intrigue and romance rather than having to work for a living. We can see certain trends like this in our world today, where ancient, devout societies pay lip service to tradition while indulging in decidedly modern activities with a wink.

As strong religious cultures from the Middle East slowly blend with the secular and religious cultures of the West, it's possible we might see the emergence of a neo-courtly love tradition. Especially among the wealthy elites. People who value the old ways, but want to experience Hollywood-style romance, may find themselves in a marriage very much like C and D's.

Authors like Robert Charles Wilson (Julian Comstock) and Elizabeth Bear (Carnival), who have written about neo-traditional cultures, often touch on this idea of people who lead hidden, unconventional lives in conventional society. Steampunk novels and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age have a touch of neo-courtly love in them, as do many modern fantasy novels like Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series.

"Beijing Opera Bride," "Sakura Bride," and "Green Tea Bride" via Kimiko Yoshida.

• Luke and Leia: When you first saw Star Wars, weren't you rooting for the young, rebellious teenager from Tatooine to actually score with the girl? You had the feeling that Han had been around the block a few times and didn't need another notch on his blaster-belt, royalty or not. Luke was the entire wish-fulfillment part of the movie: who wouldn't want to get whisked off their world and into an interstellar struggle along with magic and laser swords? You not only wanted him to destroy the Death Star, but to get the girl as well. Well, at least he got to make out with his sister first few minutes of Empire, hinting that there might have been some other episodes of that going on.
• Han Solo and Chewbacca: They say dogs are a man's best friend, and there's probably an even closer relationship when your dog is over seven feet tall, walks uprights, talks you to in his own language that only you understand, and can fly your ship for you. Plus you know exactly where to scratch him when he needs a bit of a reward for doign something good. The flea baths and upkeep on that glossy fur must be fairly expensive, and who knows what you have to feed the guy. Although there's a slight undertone of jealousy when Chewie chuckles at Han when he gets dissed by Leia, he just calls him a fuzzball and everything is right again.
• Darth Vader and Boba Fett: Think about it, they both spend most of their lives encased in armor, had their parent (singular, in both cases) taken away from them at an early age, and they both enjoy killing things for fun. It's just natural that they'd be attracted to each other, and who's the first person Darth calls when he needs to have someone hunted down? Also, Darth has his own little private torture chamber, and Boba's ship is called the Slave I, so they must have some sort of bondage fetish going on.
• R2D2 and C3P0: Nothing says "I can't quit you" like two droids who stick with each other through thick and thin. Plus the sheer amount of concern that Threepio shows for R2 whenever anything happens to him betrays his feelings, and the Emperor would say. If that golden whiner could have burst into tears when Luke says "I've lost R2!" over the radio in Star Wars, he sure would have. Traipsing around the galaxy together might have been hard on their droid bodies, what with R2 not being able to fly anymore, and Threepio getting blasted to bits in Empire, but just think about the stories they'll be able to tell their grandtoasters.
• Jabba the Hutt and Leia: Running an evil organization that operates on the underbelly of the law can be taxing. Just check out Jabba's body: he's fat, smells, eats live reptiles, and he has to chain women to himself just to keep them around. Once he spotted Leia trying to make off with Han's frozen body, he quickly forced her into a tiny metal bikini and turned her into his newest slave girl, much to the delight of horny basement-dwellers around the world. She wouldn't even reciprocate his proffered tongue kisses, but repays him with some erotic asphyxiation. We swear he enjoyed being choked out.
• Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar: If you thought a smuggler and a walking carpet were an odd couple, consider a woman and her giant fish. It's probably hard to serve as the leader of the Rebellion and to coordinate efforts to overthrow the Empire when you have to worry that your partner is getting enough water, and do you have a good supply of krill on hand. Still, she manages to pull it off with grace and spotless flowing white robes, while Ackbar looks paunchy and happy, like someone who has just downed a few beers before the big game. We just hope he doesn't slap her around when those Rebels aren't around.
• Lando Calrissian and Nien Nunb: Once Lando accepts his guilt for the freezing of Han, he starts flying the Millennium Falcon around, dresses like Han, and even takes on Chewie as his co-pilot. However, that all changes when the Battle of Endor erupts. Lando ditches Chewie and makes room for Nien Nunb, who likes to gasp and nod. Plus, he speaks his own secret language with Lando, and they spend a lot of time in that cockpit together. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
• Tusken Raiders and their Banthas: Tusken Raiders spend their lives wrapped head to toe in mummy bandages, and the only thing they have to keep them company are other Tusken Raiders, and Banthas. According to Star Wars lore, when a Tusken receives a Bantha, they form a life-long bond; when one of the two dies, the other is exiled to the desert to die. Which would really suck if Banthas are known to have a short lifespan. Still, nothing says love like a bond that requires an exile after the breakup.
• Han Solo and Leia: Darth Vader's daughter sure gets around. During the course of three different films, she makes out with her brother, gets flirted with by scoundrels, wriggles around almost nude for fat gangsters, tickles a furry Ewok silly, and then ends up with Han. However, didn't it feel like she chose him because she found out she was related to Luke? Decisions of the heart are a lot easier when you find out you might have offspring with giant foreheads and genetic problems.

Art via the excellent Joel Watson.

What Women Want. Mel Gibson is an immature ad exec who doesn't understand female consumers and is mean to rising exec Helen Hunt. Until one day, he learns to understand the women's point of view.
Scifi element: Gibson gets struck by lightning while wearing pantyhose, and gains selective telepathy: he can "hear" women's thoughts, but not men's. It's not ever really explained what happened.
Creepy subtext: Gibson steals Hunt's ideas, undermines her, and uses his new awareness of women's feelings to become the ultimate slick marketing weenie.
How bad is it? It's hideously painful and awful. The part where Mel Gibson narrates a Nike ad and everyone swoons made me queasy. Here's the trailer:

Shallow Hal. Jack Black is an immature lout who only values women based on their appearance, until a self-help guru puts a whammy on him to make him see women's inner beauty.
Scifi element: It's really not clear. "Life coach" Tony Robbins has some kind of telepathic abilities in this movie, and he's able to restructure Jack Black's brain significantly. It could just be hypnosis, but seems to go a lot further, since afterwards Hal can see people's "inner beauty." It's almost as if Tony Robbins is a telepath who imbues Jack Black with a mild form of telepathy of his own.
Creepy subtext: Well, Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit is sort of hard to take. But also she just "happens" to be the boss' daughter, which makes Hal's attraction to her awfully convenient.
How bad is it? It's pretty terrible, what with the fatsuitage and the whole "Tony Robbins has mental powers" stuff. It's the only unbearable Jack Black movie.

I.Q. Tim Robbins is an immature garage mechanic who falls for Meg Ryan... who's the niece of Albert Einstein (Walter Matthau). Even though Meg is engaged to Stephen Fry from Wooster & Jeeves, Einstein decides to get Tim Robbins together with his niece. This involves lots of Einstein riding on Robbins' motorcycle and screaming "wahooo!"
Scifi element: Well, Einstein's plan to help Robbins and Ryan get together involves inventing a fusion-powered nuclear spaceship and giving Robbins the credit for it. That way, Ryan will realize Robbins really has a good heart. Which makes total sense!
Creepy subtext: It's yet another movie about Meg Ryan being engaged to a smart guy, when you know she should really be with the dumb guy instead. That's, like, Meg Ryan's whole career.
How bad is it? I saw it in the theater (why?!) and had managed to repress it totally until just now. One whole side of my body is now having shooting pains reliving the trauma of watching this movie.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Luke Wilson is an immature guy who starts dating Uma Thurman, not realizing she's a superhero and a psycho. He really likes Anna Faris, and when he hooks up with her, Uma goes nutso on him.
Scifi element: Uma Thurman is a superhero, who gets her powers from a chunk of meteorite. And a supervillain played by Eddie Izzard somehow knows that the same meteorite can take away her powers as well.
Creepy subtext: Luke helps Izzard to remove Uma's superpowers, even though this will allow Izzard to take over the world and stuff. Because there's nothing more important than getting your ex off your back.
How bad is it? It has a Rotten Tomatoes score of like -1,000.

My Stepmother Is An Alien. Dan Akroyd is an immature scientist who falls in love with a woman and marries her in like two hours, not realizing Kim Basinger is really from another planet! But she may have to leave him and go back to her planet. Can true love triumph? And what about Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green? Will those kids ever get together?
Scifi element: Akroyd somehow zaps another galaxy with his super space telescope. Don't ask me how. And Basinger's mission is to get him to zap her galaxy again, before some ill-explained disaster happens.
Creepy subtext: In her quest to be the perfect wife, Basinger learns about sex from her purse, and then cooks a few dozen dinners at once for Akroyd and his daughter, Hannigan.
How bad is it? It's definitely one of the lower rungs on Akroyd's climbdown into the scary dark place of his career. Not quite Blues Brothers 2000, but close. Here's a clip:

Earth Girls Are Easy. A spaceship crashes in Geena Davis' swimming pool, and out come Jim Carrey, Jeff Goldblum and Damon Wayans. An entire movie based on a comedy song by Julie Brown.
Scifi element: Carrey, Goldblum and Wayans are furry aliens, who turn out to be shockingly handsome once you shave off all their fur.
Creepy subtext: Davis' character is sort of a loser until Jeff Goldblum swoops into her life.
How bad is it? It's pretty cheesy, but it's pretty much just an MTV-esque musical.

Virtual Sexuality. Justine is tired of being a virgin, so she goes to a virtual-reality salon... only to bring her ideal man into existence in the real world.
Scifi element: Justine enters the "Narcissus machine" at the VR salon, which is supposed to reshape your face and body into your ideal appearance, but she decides to create her ideal man instead. But there's a gas explosion while she's in there, and her fantasy of the ideal man comes to life. (As a hologram?) The inventors of the Narcissus machine want to capture this embodiment of women's fantasies, but he's too busy being a studmuffin.
Creepy subtext: Because the "ideal man" is created from Justine's fantasies, when he comes to life he's freaky and effeminate.
How bad is it? It has an average critic score of D. But it's sort of charming, judging from this fan music video:

Mork And Mindy Famous TV show about Robin Williams' alien who comes to Earth and falls in love with Pam Dawber, along with everyone at home. How long before this becomes a hideous movie starring Will Ferrell?
Scifi element: Mork is an alien. He can drink with his finger. After Mork and Mindy get married, they have a kid... who's born as an old guy, Andrew Sean Greer-style, and then ages backwards.
Creepy subtext: Well, Robin Williams' whole cute innocent man-boy schtick gets a little weird.
How bad is it? Parts of it are great, but it went downhill fast.

Groundhog Day. Bill Murray is an immature wretch of a weatherman who finds himself living through the same day over and over. I wouldn't have considered this a romcom, but it appears on several lists of the genre. He does fall in love and end up with Andie MacDowell.
Scifi element: Time travel, although it's never explained and may actually involve magic or karma or whatever.
Creepy subtext: Well, Murray tries to kill himself several times, and acts like a total asswipe to people once he realizes everything will be undone at the end of the day.
How bad is it? It's actually pretty great. Either this is the exception, or it's just not a romcom.

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Apollo's Song was originally serialized in a weekly comic magazine back in 1970. This was during the transition phase of Tezuka's career—his production company had just tanked, and he was skeptical of the anime industry, which insisted on censoring his work. It was the same year that he wrote Alabaster, a story about a homicidal, partly invisible ex-athlete intent on destroying all the beauty in the world.

For Tezuka, science fiction was never a goal; it was the medium through which he chose to explore complex, often taboo issues of his time, like love and hate and promiscuous sex. By addressing these issues via animated fictional characters living in a surreal future, he avoided controversy and criticism in the real world.

Apollo's Song is a coming-of-age story that starts in the present and warps back and forth into the past and future. The ambiguous protagonist is a boy named Shogo, who learned to despise the idea of love during a childhood mired in his mom's promiscuous affairs with his many papas. He hates it so much that he obsessively murders any living thing showing even the slightest hint of passion. These killing sprees land him in a mental hospital, where a mysterious doctor puts him through electroshock therapy and transports him into different roles, each in extreme imagined environments—an island where dozens of zoo animals procreate, an isolated house in the mountains, and Nazi Germany. Through his adventures, Shogo finally learns to love. Hypnosis takes him to his final destination—Tokyo in the year 2030, where super-humanoid clones called Synthians rule a cold, heartless world. There, Shogo is caught between two tasks he's been ordered to perform—to kill the Synthian queen, but also to teach her how to love.

The inner lives of animals, reproduction, twisted sexuality, reincarnation, and the inevitable war between humans and their creations—clones and robots—are themes that arise repeatedly in Tezuka's manga. Even today, a lot of Japanese people don't talk that openly about love and sex. Manga is often a prime medium for understanding these issues—sex ed is often taught in comic strips, and almost every male magazine has pornographic graphic novels tacked into its end pages.

Nearly 20 years after his death and over half a century past his heyday, only twelve of Tezuka's titles have been published in English. But with the Asian Art Museum's recent exhibit on Tezuka and other titles being worked on by publishers like Vertical and Viz, we should be seeing a greater rollout in the years to come. If you're going to start somewhere with Tezuka's science fiction works, Apollo is the place to go.