Skip to main content

I couldn’t actually find the Level E OP to embed here, but I did manage to find the full song used in that opening sequence, and it is kick ass; Cold Finger Girl as performed by Chiaki Kuriyama. If she looks familiar, it’s probably because she played killer girl Gogo Yubari in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and real fans should also know her from Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. The final video of the set is a very rare interview with Hiroya Oku, the creator of Gantz, and Chiaki Kuriyama wearing her Fangirl hat, talking about Anime, Manga, and (not a surprise) Gantz. As far as I know this is the only interview with Hiroya Oku, or at least the only one with English subtitles I have found so far, and until this I didn’t know that Chiaki was an Otaku, either.

Oops! Had to fix a bad video link; this one is from the Blender Foundation, so it should stay good. If you haven’t seen it before, Big Buck Bunny was made as a Blender project a few years back, more I think to prove that you could indeed get professional grade animation out of free open source software than any other reason. In the process they made a wonderful little video about a a friendly rabbit gone Rambo and the evil squirrels you will not soon forget. Grab your own free copy of Blender and start creating today!

We have several decent films to choose between this week, and silly person that I am I find myself leaning towards Wreck-It Ralph. This animation is about an arcade game villain who decides to be a hero instead, and all the chaos and destruction he creates in the process. But then again Vamps, a romantic comedy about a couple of female vampires in NYC, has an amazing cast and looks quite good as well. If I feel more action oriented when the weekend rolls around, The Man with the Iron Fists tells the tale of a bunch of bad guys who descend on a village in feudal China looking for gold, and the humble blacksmith who fights to defend his friends and family. No, it should not be hard to find at your local theater, considering Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu, and Eli Roth are all involved… and Quentin Tarantino got into the mix somehow as well.

I missed Safety Not Guaranteed in the theaters, a quirky little might-be time travel film based on a real add published in a major magazine a few decades ago, so I am quite happy it is making it to DVD this week. I really don’t care if it turns out not to be Sci-Fi, the trailer is strange and enjoyable and I want to see this film. And then there is Ruby Sparks, a romantic fantasy about an author who writes the woman of his dreams into a novel, only to have her come to life a week later, where he finds her sitting on his couch. The first is from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine, the second from the directors, and it is nice to see Indi films continue to flourish outside of film fests.

Copper: Season One also comes out, a very interesting series which is the first one produced by BBC America. It takes place in 1864 New York City, complete with a lot of historical social and political details that I never expected to see. I am expecting this series to pick up some awards, and even though it is not genre it is quite an amazing show which I recommend wholeheartedly.

For western animation, Fractured Fairy Tales: The Complete Collection brings all of those wonderful twisted stories from Rocky and Bullwinkle together in a single box set. You should share these with your kids or grand-kids, they are just as funny for any age group now as they were when first made. Also out, The Penguins of Madagascar, Operation: Antarctica continues that series for the younger crowd.

In Anime, Durarara!! is coming out with a Blue Ray Complete Set with a Lunch Box, but even with the collectable packaging I don’t understand why they would charge $190 list price for a 24 episode series (OK, 26 episodes when you add in the two bonus episodes). It is an amazing story with great animation, but pretty much every incarnation of it available is way overpriced, it seems, with the lunchbox set setting a new record. I will be keeping my eye out for sale prices as we rumble through the holiday buying season, but mostly I am glad I caught it streaming over at Crunchyroll, because it would have been a shame to miss so fine a program.

Also this week, A Certain Magical Index season 1 part 1, takes place in a universe where science was used to create magic, and a student with a strange negating power (he nullifies the magic of others) teams up with a nun named Index who has an entire huge library of magical knowledge stored in her head. This dozen episodes see the two of them meet and team up to survive the teams of scientists and sorcerers who want to capture and use them. The second half of the season will be coming out in December, and yes, this is from Kamachi Kazuma, who also wrote A Certain Scientific Railgun.

Fafner: Heaven and Earth is a feature film presentation which returns us to Tatsumiya Island for what may well be the final battle between the aliens and humans. If you missed the series leading up to the feature film, now would be a great time to go back and catch up on it; you can watch the first chunk of the series streaming for free at its official Funimation site. That should let you know if this program is for you, and if you enjoy watching streaming anime on your various devices (including Roku and most tablets or smartphones), just like Crunchyroll you can get a premium subscription and watch the entire series and a lot of others.

C-Control: The Money and Soul of Possibility takes place in a future where the government was rescued from poverty by a mysterious organization, but the population was not, and we follow a scholarship student who is suddenly offered a large sum of money only to have his life change in ways he didn’t foresee. Think Paprika meets Tron. Un-Go, the complete collection is about detective Shinjurou Yuuki, who always solves the crime but never gets the credit in this rather dark near-future Tokyo. We also get another block of One Piece with season 4 part 2, with the next 11 episodes bringing us up to #229.

In the the summer of 1970 some folks in Canada hired a private train so they could load some musicians into it and go from town to town putting on mini festivals everywhere they went. The tour and the film made from it was called Festival Express, and it was an instant classic of the rock world. The musicians included Buddy Guy, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Ten Years After, Traffic, and a whole lot of other incredible talent. A few Canadians managed to sneak on the train to play as well, and so the song Truckin Off Across The Sky was written. But after all this time, the group Historic Films has gotten the rights to it, and they are digitizing another 96 hours of the footage shot for this event, and adding it to their archives. The archives already contain something like 50,000 hours worth of incredible video, and I have to say a serious Thank You! to the team at Open Culture for the heads up on this one!