I missed seeing it in the theaters, and it hasn’t been streaming anywhere that I could find (not even on Funimation who have the North American rights), but now it is finally available on Disc: Your Name. Featuring music by the Radwimps, it pretty much broke every theater record in Japan, and won multiple awards. Another winner this week is Westworld: The Complete First Season, an excellent reboot of the original franchise. You can stream at least some of the episodes at that SYFY link, if you haven’t seen it yet you should check it out. Project Itoh: Genocidal Organ is the latest Sci-Fi story in the Project Itoh series, dealing with some fairly current topics. Taken together, the series of feature films covers about 150 years of a parallel history, like yet unlike our own. Finally there is Trollhunters: Season One, with Season 2 available to stream beginning on December 15th.
Continuing the reboot of the franchise, War for the Planet of the Apes could be a modern retelling of the period in history when the Cro-Magnon committed genocide by wiping out the Neanderthals. Teen Wolf: The Complete Series is not quite as epic but still has its moments. The Emoji Movie is just silly animated fun, or maybe just silly. There is a documentary worth checking out this week as well: Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World has won a ton of awards, and it is nominated for more.
In Anime, Alderamin on the Sky: The Complete Series is a brilliant story that has only begun with these 13 episodes. I hope they mean “the complete series so far”, and they continue making new episodes and season, because it was one of the top 5 shows to come out of Japan in 2016. Fairy Tail: Collection Ten brings episodes 213 through 239 home, nearly 11 hours of non-stop collateral damage during magical comedy combat. Then there is Flying Witch and Servamp Season 1, should you be in the mood for additional supernatural entertainment.
The obvious genre release this week is Geostorm, with weather used as a weapon of mass destruction, controlled from a huge orbital facility like the IIS on steroids. But the trailer reminds me all too much of the disaster films of the 1960s through the 1980s, which I tend to consider formulaic and boring. The live action Tokyo Ghoul hit theaters today and will run until Sunday the 22nd, that one I am really looking forward to. Wonderstruck looks very interesting, but is only in New York and LA this week; it will be out everywhere on the 10th. If you feel like streaming your entertainment this weekend, Red Dwarf Season 12 is currently playing, and BritBox just got it.
TV has iZombie: The Complete Third Season while movies bring us Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which seem like the best selections of the week to me. A Ghost Story may have some possibilities although it doesn’t seem quite genre to me, and while Fabricated City is more about gaming than anything else it looks like quite an entertaining film. I didn’t see anything interesting in new Anime this time around.
Transformers: The Last Knight looks like the best of the action films this week, but 2:22 may give it a pretty good run for its money. For those looking for a western animation, Mune: Guardian of the Moon looks like your best option this time around. We will do our best to pretend no one even mentioned Cyborg 2087, because ouch! The only anime option this time around is HYOUKA – Part 2, and it might just be tasty.
The best movie from the DC Cinematic Universe to date, Wonder Woman is riveting, and it looks like they filled the disc version with a TON of features. Up until this movie I have much preferred their television presentations, and we get one of them as well in the form of Arrow: The Complete Fifth Season. Less exciting is the movie The Bad Batch, but it does have some excellent actors so might be better than it appears. Then there is Starship Troopers: Traitors of Mars which was on the big screen for a single day and is machinema, a cinema presentation recorded from a game platform. Anime brings us Matoi the Sacred Slayer, about a Shrine Maiden who becomes a powerful god who can slay demons through no fault of her own. Finally we get One Piece – Collection 20, a series that has been airing forever now.