Two films hit the big screen this week. The award winning Valhalla Rising follows a viking with supernatural strength to a mysterious and violent place where war and religion collide; beware, the Christians are coming with sword and torch. It is being released both in theaters and on Video On Demand, so it should be accessible to just about everyone. Salt is very obviously pretty much every Philip K. Dick book ever written, even if he didn’t write this one, and so if worth mentioning here.
The top choice for this week is the UK hit Being Human: Season 1, seen on this side of the Atlantic on BBC America. The premise sounds like the set up for a bad joke; A Ghost, A Werewolf, and a Vampire get an apartment together. Do not be fooled, this is not a comedy, but a very well done drama exploring some serious questions. Season 2 starts next Saturday in the US, while the UK is gearing up for season 3.
There aren’t any genre movies of note this week unless something snuck by me, but The Runaways film will do nicely to take up the slack. Put another dime in the jukebox, baby.
There are a couple of new releases in the world of Anime, starting with Kurokami: The Animation Part 2. In the second half of the series the Tara Guardian Kuro and the Human Keita form a pact, and go to Okinawa to discover who murdered his mother. You can also watch this on Crunchyroll where they seem to be up to episode 10. The other new program worth noting is My Bride Is A Mermaid: Season 1 Part 1 in which a beautiful mermaid saves the life of the son of a visiting family. But the Mermaid’s dad is a yakuza who give the boy two choices; marry his daughter or sleep with the fishes, and the boys parents are just as dysfunctional if less homicidal. You can watch episodes on Hulu to get an idea of what this series is like.
Tron Legacy Director Joe Kosinski is to head up the sci-fi film ‘Archangels’, according to the folks at ScreenRant and also at First Showing. With Ridley and Tony Scott producing, it has a shot at becoming an excellent film. The main character belongs to an elite team tasked with tracking aliens who get past Earth’s defense system, set in the near future. Meanwhile Carl Erik Rinsch, who normally directs commercials, was supposed to have his movie debut when he directed the Aliens prequel. When that didn’t happen, he entered a short film competition Phillips held and produced the video below. Now a number of production houses, including Fox and Warner Bros. are in a bidding war to see who will buy the rights to turn it into a feature film, so Carl will get his movie after all, and this time it will be one who’s story he created as well. Thanks to the Hollywood Reporter for the heads up on that one.
Blastr is not a new web site. It is part of the Sci-Fi Channel stable of online properties, and has been known for years as Sci-Fi Wire, an old and honorable internet name going back to the early ’90s when it was owned by a couple of independent Sci-Fi fans. They made a ton of money selling it to the Sci-Fi Channel before the Dot Com crash, and the site has mostly held to their initial format ever since, right up until its renaming and re-imaging. The look and feel of it does fit more with their other corporate offerings now, like DVice and Fidgit, and they have carried over at least some portion of the decades long archive of great articles. But what got a grin out of me was their celebratory story in honor of their rebranding: The 10 most gorgeous blasters and ray guns in science fiction. What a hoot!
According to this story at Female First, the kids taking place in the Film Club in the UK will be building their own science fiction films over the next month or two. Where was this kind of organization when I was in school, besides England; I would have loved it! Particularly things like their Close Encounters initiative.
According to an article in the LA Times, both of the next two upcoming Marvel movies, Thor and Captain America, will be in 3D. I personally believe that, just like an IMAX film, you want to shoot in that media for optimal resolution, and then gracefully degrade the same source material for less robust presentation formats. Even though it results in an inferior product, there are simple ways to Upgrade 2D movies to 3D that any of us can do on our home computers. And all the new CGI software, including all the animation packages available for purchase for home use by us non-industry types, now fully supports 3D creation in all three standard formats. But isn’t the point of paying money to see a movie in the theater to get to enjoy something we don’t have the resources to create at home?
As near as I can tell from the LA Times report, it looks like the film makers of the two movies (Kenneth Branagh and Joe Johnston, respectively) don’t understand how the technology works, and don’t want to be bothered with learning the new filming techniques or even mastering the cameras. Still, if they have the right competent people on board to process the 2D footage they do film into pseudo-3D, and mix it with the 3D SFX output, and edit the combination into a coherent movie, they could end up with a watchable product. But it will never be as good as it would have been had they bothered to learn how to film a 3D movie in the first place.
Bottom line? I consider the Marvel stable of characters and story lines my friends, since I grew up with all of them. And I am exceedingly impressed by what Marvel Studios has done so far for the movies they have created, certainly much more impressed than I was with the films like Electra and others that were being outsourced before they built their own studio. So I will continue to attend each of the new films as they come out, and based on the evidence so far, continue to enjoy them.
I commented previously (in fact gave an entire review) about the new show streaming on Crunchyroll, Occult Academy, which is off to a wonderful start. If you are a premium Crunchyroll member, you get to legally watch new episodes one hour after they air in Tokyo; if a non-paying member, you can see them at slightly lower resolution a week later. Anyone who follows this blog knows I have become addicted to this service, and the annual fee has already paid for itself in terms of knowing which shows I do and don’t want to buy when they come out on DVD.
They have added a few new programs to the Summer Streaming Lineup that look pretty good on initial glance, although you might have to work for one of them. That one would be Tono to Issho, which is kind of the Anime equivalent of one-liners, or the 4 panel comic strip jokes everyone knows from newspapers (at least, those old enough to remember what non-interactive static media forms like newspapers were). You have to know a bit about the culture, history, current events, and popular opinion of Japan in order to get these jokes, but if you do they are delightful. Like all the best satire, it occasionally slips into Sci-Fi or Fantasy memes to make its points.
The third brand new program is Asobi ni Ikuyo: Bombshells from the Sky, an Alien Catgirls Romantic Comedy with a certain amount of Kawaii overdose (cuteness overload). We are still 13 hours out from the start of episode 1’s simulcast stream, but the trailer looks promising.
An old favorite come back for another round is Strike Witches season 2, the parallel timeline story of heavily armed propeller booted WWII flying girls versus alien invaders who seem to be related to cats. Check it out, and if you feel the need to catch up with season 1, it is available on DVD now in the US.