The Sorcerer and the White Snake starring Jet Li is sadly in limited release this week. Although since China bought AMC last year, the larger AMC theaters (anything with 12 or more screens) are now showing Chinese movies along with the Bollywood films they have always carried, so you could find it nearby. This is not the first movie based on the Chinese legend of the White Snake, which was first written down during the Ming Dynasty. In fact, there have been TV shows, operas, and stage plays, as well as movies based on this story, coming from Japan, China, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. I am looking forward to seeing how this interpretation goes, since some of them have been quite surreal.
There seems to be a distinct lack of live action genre releases this week, either Movies or TV. And the western animation is a re-release, Peter Pan, Diamond Edition, which brings this classic out in Blue Ray format for the first time.
We do a little better with Anime, but not by a lot. Toriko: Part 2 continues the combat gourmet epic as our hero attempts to assemble his Full Course Menu of Life. The rule for including a dish seems to be it has to be made from something that kills most of the people that hunt it. While I can’t vouch for Toriko’s sanity, you have to admire his style. Also this week, Casshern Sins: Complete Series is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means if you shop around you can pick it up for under $20. Robot redemption in the wasteland he created is a unique premise for a series, and this one is done quire well.
There are, of course, many other DVDs coming out this week, both live action and animated, but they do not seem to be genre or even genre related. Hopefully we will do better next week.
There are several films I am looking forward to that will apparently be running new TV spots during Superbowl. Star Trek Into Darkness is reported to have a new one, and I find it entertaining that J.J.Abrams is going to be in charge of that franchise and the new Star Wars films at the same time. World War Z, the Brad Pitt Zombie film, will also be getting a new trailer, although the sneak peak I saw of that mostly looked like a cut-down version of the longer one already released. Tom Cruse’s Oblivion should have a new trailer out as well, but I suspect some folks might get confused between that movie and After Earth, the new Will and Jaden Smith production. While the back stories and plot lines of those two films are completely different, the components that make up the action on the screen look a lot alike; crash onto the Earth, where humans no longer live, and discover things are nothing like you were expecting.
Disney will be going for not one, but three new movie trailers, and all three are on my must see list. Oz: The Great and Powerful rolls out March 8th and looks pretty amazing, telling a bit more about L. Frank Baum’s Universe, this time from the Wizard’s point of view. Of course Iron Man 3 hits the big screen on May 3rd, and that one has to be a no-brainer. As kick ass as Disney has been doing with the Marvel franchise, there is no way I would miss a single one of those. Finally, The Lone Ranger is going to be out come July 3rd, just in time for the quintessential American holiday weekend, and I could not imagine anyone better to channel Tonto than Johnny Depp. If you are thinking the last entry isn’t Genre, remember that one of the Lone Ranger spinoffs was a series about his nephew Dan’s son, The Green Hornet.
The bad news, of course, is that commercial time during the Superbowl is so outrageously expensive that these spots will only be 30 seconds long, or maybe a whole minute if the ad exec in question is feeling particularly brave. They all deserve to be two or three minutes long, to give us a good feel for the project on the screen at the moment. But at least these will be going before the public eye and get some awareness.
Not that that promises success; Disney spent this kind of money promoting John Carter during the last Superbowl, but they dropped the Of Mars from the title, leaving you with a generic name that didn’t give you a grasp of the hundred year old epic fantasy that spanned decades of books and multiple worlds. They also didn’t seem to care about telling you anything of the plot and subplots, the themes, the background of Earth (or Mars) at that time, the political, racial, or scientific environment the story took place in, or the motivations driving the various characters. They didn’t even hint at the love story at the core of this classic, or package the visuals for the core Steampunk/Gothic/Victorian fan group, with the only clue being Our World Is Dying. I admit I may be a bit bitter on this topic; the movie itself was true to the books in a way that few films are, a Steampunk masterpiece that should have been followed with the next 9 entries into the series. But because the marketing department dropped the ball on this one, I will probably not live long enough to see the entire thing on the big screen. I hope this years presentations are treated better.
If you saw Wreck-It Ralph in a movie theater, this was the short feature that prefaced that film. If you haven’t seen it, this one is up for an Academy Award in the Short Film, Animated category. It is a wonderful bit of storytelling, made even more amazing by the fact they didn’t even need many words to make you fully understand it.