I think the Doctor Who World Tour technically needs more than 7 cities to consider it a world tour, but they do manage to hit Europe, Asia, Australia, North America, and South America. So they did noticeably better than the Babymetal World Tour which only managed 6 cities in Europe, Asia, and North America as of the last time I checked. Thanks to BBC America for the heads up on this one.
They did an excellent job rebooting this franchise, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes looks pretty exciting. Of course, I enjoyed the original set of movies when they came out, so it should be no surprise I like the new set. The advances in cinematography and 3D modeling alone make them much more visually striking, and the increase in pacing over the years allows for a much denser story. This one should be hitting the theaters on July 11th.
The Rover goes into wide release this week, but as I commented before I will probably pass on that one. That appears to be it for genre this time around, but the film version of the musical Jersey Boys is also coming out. There is one violent but interesting film from South Korea called No Tears for the Dead that looks like the best choice. An abandoned child is raised by an organized crime family to be a cold-hearted killer, but when he accidentally kills an innocent young girl he learns about guilt and remorse. The breaking point is his next assigned job; the mother of the dead girl is now being targeted by his bosses to stop her from causing trouble. But the killer starts to fall in love and wants out of the organization. Interestingly enough, the trailer you will find at that link has mostly English as the spoken language with Korean subtitles. The one place they did slip in Korean dialog did not have English subtitles, hopefully it won’t be like that in the theaters.
The top choice in movies this week is pretty much a matter of what kind of mood you are into. On the one hand you have The Lego Movie, a boatload of cult silliness and geek goodness. It doesn’t actually have more superheroes in one film than any other production, but it begins to approach X-Men like numbers. If you prefer some serious (or at least less silly) live action type indi adventure, The Machine is another tale of our Evil Robot Overlords, or Evil Android Overlord, in this case. It has won a number of film fest awards, including 3 from BAFTA Cymru alone. Bottom line, I think these are both worthy of being in the permanent collection.
There is also a documentary called I Know That Voice all about the voice actors you know from many animated series like Futurama or The Simpsons I think might be quite entertaining. As someone who has taken a turn around the voice actor track myself, this one will absolutely be coming home with me. There are 2 other documentaries worth mentioning: Live from Space from the National Geographic Channel, and Adjust Your Tracking, about folks who collect VHS tapes. I find it interesting you can only get the extended version (20 extra minutes of documentary) on the combo VHS/DVD version; the DVD only version is missing the extra stuff.
I should also mention a re-release of a classic you may not be aware of. 1963’s Judex is a French film re-imagining the 1914 French movie serial of the same name. This was not the creation of Movie Serials (that was the also-French-made 1908 Nick Carter film series), which later became the basis of episodic TV series when they brought them to early TV in the 1940s. Judex may also be the earliest example of Superhero stories in any format, but I have to do some more research before I will know if that is the case or not. The story line, father murdered and ruined by evil banker, son adapts secret identity and hidden lair, gathering an arsenal of technology and a team of circus performers and criminals with special talents as his minions, has been redone many times since. It was the inspiration for things as diverse as Batman, Spiderman, and The Shadow from the US and a ton of others from Europe and Asia, including K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces. In fact, in 1940 the French publication Hurrah! started a comic book version of Judex, which was really a French translation of the American syndicated Shadow comic strip; so the inspiration came full circle.
In TV Teen Wolf: Season 3 Part 2 finishes off the season 3 story, and it looks like the best project MTV has been involved with for a while. If nothing else, it up-levels everything from season 2, where they didn’t seem to be really trying.
In Anime, Busou Shinki is a harem story, where the girls are female action figures with weapons… who happen to stand 6 inches tall each. Not exactly conducive to a rich social life if the male in question happens to be multiple feet in height. The other series this time around is Shiki, a horror story that now available in a S.A.V.E. version for a real good price. This one is also a commentary on the genre itself, showing off those tropes that that draw in the audience, and making every viewer pay attention and appreciate what is going on. I am not a horror fan, but this one was worth watching.
One show I have been waiting for is Red Data Girl: Complete Series, which is an absolutely brilliant TV program. A girl is raised in isolation in a shrine, and has trouble fitting in when she is finally allowed into a public school. It doesn’t help any that computers, cell phones, and other modern electronics all crash when she comes near them. Then she finds out she is the last vessel of the goddess Himegami, and that is when things start to get truly strange.
The first track is called Robot Roh Night by the band Shinsei Kamattechan, who seem to like graphics a lot and are using a Hatsune Miku kind of singer/ vocal processing, as near as I can tell. The second song is Front Memory, and also spends as much time putting together the graphics as creating the music. Nothing deeply intellectual here, just some good upbeat silly fun; until you translate the lyrics, at which point all bets are off. The band formed in 2007 and gained a following through streaming music videos, in part because of their tendency to stream live songs and mini-concerts using unusual and eccentric processes with no advanced warning. A lot like what Jack White does online with his music, come to think of it. They were indie for years, but signed up with Warner Music Japan once they got big. The final track is Whistling Flower Child, or at least I think that is what whistling yellow flower-chan means.
There are a number of shows I am enjoying this season, although because of time constraints there are only 3 I have been keeping up with each week. If you are a Premium Crunchyroll member, you can watch any of these and a double dozen more an hour after they air in Tokyo. If you are not, you can watch them for free starting one week later. The current season is at episode 9 as I write this, the Summer season starts around the first week in July.
Brynhildr in the Darkness: 10 years ago Murakami lost a girl he was infatuated with in a lethal accident while trying to get a glimpse of aliens. As he heals from the accident he vows to find the aliens in her memory, which means years later he is running the Astronomy Club, searching the skies. Now she seems to suddenly turn up at his school again, revived from the dead and turned into a human weapon, but she doesn’t remember anything earlier than a decade back. She is not the only one to escape from the lab that upgraded her combat capability, and the military is out to kill all the escapees before they can reveal their secrets to the world.
Nanana’s Buried Treasure: In life, Nanana started the Adventure Club, and ran around the world collecting powerful artifacts, Indiana Jones style. She and the other club members used the proceeds to create an artificial island, where they built a city and hid the treasures. Then she was murdered in her room, and haunts it to this day, unable to rest until her killer is captured. The young man who gets tricked into renting that room for a year doesn’t have enough money left to live anywhere else when he finds it comes with a ghost. His only option is to try to bring her killer to justice, and since the killer was trying to get the treasures, that’s what he will have to do to track him down. There are a LOT of potential suspects.
No Game No Life: Genius gamer siblings Sora and Shiro are both NEETs and Hikikomori, and absolutely unbeatable in the online gaming world. One day they are contacted by a kid who is a god of a different world, where games decide the outcome of everyone’s lives and the ten commandments are gaming rules. There are 16 races in this world, and the humans are on the verge of being wiped out by the others, unless the siblings can win them back a chance to survive.