The genre film this week is Pandemic, but I would rather seem Miles Ahead. The first is about a plague that threatens to wipe out all life on Earth and turn us all into Zombies, and I have already seen that movie twenty times too often, each time with a different cast. Miles Ahead is an indiegogo funded film about musical genius Miles Davis at a critical point in his life that I think has a lot of promise. So this time around I will be listening to the music.
Movies include The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, with a VR short of selected segments of the film also available, fully 3D and formatted for Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, and others. There is one more release that looks worth watching, the documentary/essay film Dreams Rewired, a look at movies of 100 years ago at the beginning of the Information Age, with Tilda Swinton doing the voice over. On the silly side, we also get Cowboys vs Dinosaurs, a really fun bad movie, and Roboshark from Syfy, about a shark that eats an alien space probe.
This is the Google Cardboard version of that Mockingjay VR:
In Anime, Celestial Method is about a city with a flying saucer parked over it, which began with fear but turned out to just make the place a tourist destination. Then two girls get together, and everything changes again. Date A Live II is the complete 2nd season of the alien invasion rom-com. Durarara!! x 2 (3) is part 3 of season 2 for entirely too much money; you can buy the Japanese import for about $30 less than the US release, in fact. I will just watch it on streaming until they put out a sanely priced edition. We also get the continuation of a couple of favorites, with Fairy Tail: Part 19 bringing episodes 213 through 226 home. Notice that is putting us at about 4 and a half years into the story at one episode per week. Streaming live from Japan this week is episode 278, if you were curious. One Piece: Collection 15 brings episodes 349 through 372 to the shelves, with episode 457 currently streaming. Which means you can buy about 7 years of it, but they are currently finishing up the 9th year.
On Wednesday we get Victor Frankenstein as told from Igor’s perspective, and The Good Dinosaur, an animated Disney/Pixar presentation. Both films are obviously taking advantage of the holiday weekend to pack in a couple of extra days worth of box office receipts to bolster their opening weekend take, but there are a few good things coming out on Friday as well. Tamasha is a Bollywood/French fantasy tale about two people wandering about an island trying to fit themselves into a society they do not belong to, while Janis: Little Girl Blue is a documentary about Janis Joplin’s rise to stardom traced through her correspondence with her family, friends, and collaborators.
I didn’t spot any new genre movies this week, but TV brings us both Arrow: The Complete 3rd Season and The Flash: The Complete 1st Season, just in time to binge watch them before they both kick into their next seasons on October 6th and 7th. And if you want a feature length film, the documentary The Great Museum tells the story of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, which is one of the most important art repositories on the planet. If your tastes are a bit different, perhaps Rammstein In Amerika will suit you better, also coming out this week.
In Anime, Sword Art Online II has another small, overpriced segment hitting the shelves, but as much as I love the series I won’t be picking it up. I will be waiting for a complete season, or better yet series, at a realistic price. Space Dandy Season 2 continues the strange adventures of the most sharply dressed alien hunter going. It is great to see the creative team that brought us Cowboy Bebop reassembled for another unique project like this. Speaking of strange, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Season 1 has Jonathan Joestar fighting for his life and his sanity against the vampire his adopted brother has become.
Selector Infected WIXOSS: The Complete Series is a combat card game that has some special cards that can take you to a dark plane of existence. If you win, your hearts desire is granted; but if you lose, things could get very dark indeed. Even though this says it is the complete series, in Japan a series is a season, and there is a second season to follow. Also dark this week is Tokyo Ghoul: Complete Season, about a book worm who finds himself turned into a monster by a Ghoul attack. Now he must learn everything he can about his new powers before they overwhelm him.
Hamatora the Animation is about a detective agency in a Yokohama Cafe tat is staffed by people who each have unique powers and abilities. Now someone is systematically killing people with powers, and it is up to Hamatora to solve the murders and stop the perpetrators before those with powers become extinct. Finally, Sabagebu!: Survival Game Club! may not quite be genre (although having an attack platypus argues that it may be), but it is definitely silly fun. I particularly like the way the narrator breaks the fourth wall with his commentary pretty much non-stop.
Some amazing short animations have been collected up in Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection, which I incorrectly identified as being available last week. Most of them are fantasy, and one or two are sci-fi. Non-genre but no less surreal for that, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a strange and wonderful Swedish film that everyone ought to see at least once. For the musically inclined, the docudrama LAMBERT & STAMP is about a couple of guys out to make a movie about a rock band who ended up being the managers of The Who. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing, but somehow wound up helping to shape one of the iconic rock bands of the last century. Finally the Western animation feature Batman Unlimited: Monster Mayhem has a subset of the Justice League trying to deal with a consortium of criminals in Gotham on Halloween.
TV has Once Upon a Time: Season 4, a show that gets better with each story. The release date gives you a month or so to binge your way through it before season 5 kicks of on September 27th. The week also brings the UK series Atlantis: Season Two Part Two, also a fantasy although not quite as imaginative.
Anime this week is represented by Future Diary: Complete Series, in which a dozen combatants receive a cell phone app which shows them their death three or four minutes before it happens. If they are very quick and very lucky they might live through it, surviving to face the next challenge which will come along much too quickly. If you are a fan of the manga this is based on, you might also enjoy watching the Live Action version, streaming now from Japan.
The clear winner this week is the reboot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., bringing the 1960s best Spy TV series back to life again. The premise is slightly different from the original, or perhaps this is an origin story, since Napoleon Solo is a CIA agent while Illya Kuryakin is a KGB operative rather than both of them working as spies for the UN. It has been quite a while since we have had a new U.N.C.L.E. story to watch, so I am looking forward to it. Also in limited release this week is Walt Before Mickey, the story of the young Walt Disney and how he got started.