Live. Die. Repeat. Edge of Tomorrow looks quite tasty, with an excellent combat by time loop premise that is familiar to everyone who ever played any one of hundreds of MMO War Games. Although watching Tom Cruise do a series of science fiction movies is about as disconcerting as watching Keanu Reeves do a series of Asian Martial Arts films.
I do enjoy Augmented Reality Apps, and wanted to mention one from the new movie Walking With Dinosaurs that is both educational and silly fun, and carries my favorite price tag: Free. It allows you to embed and position whichever dinosaur you select into the photographs you take and teaches you a bit about them in the process. The Walking With Dinosaurs App comes in both iPad and Android flavors.
I don’t know if I appreciate this more for the amazing cosplay or the quality video production, but this footage put together from this years Katsucon is just fun to watch. Congrats to Beat Down Boogie for an excellent job, and if you like this, check out their channel for a lot more of the same.
The Wachowski’s are at it again, and Jupiter Ascending has the potential to be as impressive as their first Matrix movie. Jupiter Jones cleans peoples houses for a living, but when a genetically engineered super soldier arrives on Earth to kill her and ends up saving her and taking her to her destiny, she begins to see her future is stranger than she had ever imagined. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this one is as good as this first glimpse would lead us to believe.
The obvious mention this time goes to J.R.R. Tolkien’s prequel The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, a single book dragged out into three complete films. I thought I should also mention Saving Mr. Banks, a movie about making the movie Mary Poppins, which almost never got made at all. It will be in limited release this week, and wide release next week.
I usually hit movies first, but Day Of The Doctor gets the number one spot this time around. This is after all the 50th Anniversary Doctor Who Special, and definitely had more Doctors than any other episode. While we are on the topic of TV, I should mention Futurama: Volume 8 and Futurama: The Complete Series will both be hitting the shelves this week.
Another break from my normal structure; I usually do live action movies first, but Despicable Me 2 has to start out the movie presentations this week. It was way too much fun, and you just can’t have too many minions. The other movies worth mentioning have either Cantonese or Mandarin as their primary sound track, including Man of Tai Chi. Note that that is the second Asian-centric film Keanu Reeves has starred in this year, and the first one he has directed. Saving General Yang takes place in 986 AD, and involves the famous Yang Family Generals. For something different, The Rooftop seems to be a Taiwan gangland musical with lots of singing, dancing, and fighting. It looks like a fun film to check out.
In Anime, Bleach: Season 19 brings us up to episode 279. To put that in perspective, they are up to episode 366 streaming from Japan, so the DVDs are finally starting to catch up with the streaming sources. Another returning favorite is Fairy Tail: Part 7, bringing episodes 73 through 84, and they are also releasing Fairy Tale: The Movie this week, so you get a double dose.
Btooom!: The Complete Series is about a combat game which suddenly changed when the 7 best players in the world were kidnapped, and woke up on an island with a bag of bombs each and holes in their memories; now they have to kill each other off and be the last one standing to escape, or so they are lead to believe. Finally, in the main series, a bunch of friends had their bodies repeatedly swapped so they never knew who they were going to be next, had their ages change at random, and had their desires overwhelm them and take control, all being done to them by an outside force. Now, in Kokoro Connect: OVA Collection, their inner emotional state is suddenly being projected into one of their friends, including phobias and suppressed desires, sometimes with near lethal results.