The one that looks the most interesting to me this week is The Book of Life, an animated presentation about being torn between fulfilling the expectations of your family and following your heart. I also find the animation style itself to be conductive to telling this particular story, and can’t wait to see how it all fits together. The other film worth checking out is Men, Women & Children, a story about how the internet has totally changed how we all deal with each other, and grow closer (or farther) together/apart.
In movies, X-Men: Days of Future Past was the best film of the franchise so far, and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet. The other feature length offering is the recent Mr. Peabody and Sherman, the heartwarming story of a dog and his boy, and a rather abused time machine that may spell the end of the world.
To take full advantage of the film release, they are also making available The Complete Mr. Peabody & Sherman Collection, 450 minutes comprising all 91 of the original episodes. One of the more interesting shows to come along recently is Penny Dreadful: The Complete First Season, a rather twisted new take on some old stories and characters, including Dorian Grey, Frankenstein, and Dracula, all in a single story. If you need still more Victorian Gothic Fantasy, Dracula: Season One also comes out this week; enjoy it while you can, it didn’t get a season 2. And the final TV release for this round is Star Wars Rebels: Spark of Rebellion, bringing us back to the realm of animation.
In Anime, A Certain Magical Index II: Part One will be hitting the shelves, as will Holy Knight, a twisted tale of a Vampire Slayer and the Vampire that wants to have his baby… just before she kills him. There is also Naruto Shippūden: DVD Box20, as well as Naruto Triple Feature, which compiles the movies Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow, Legend of the Stone of Gele, and Guardians of the Crescent Moon Kingdom.
In the Strangely Entertaining category we get Kill Me Baby, a story of what may have been the most dangerous childhood ever lived, and Meganebu, a tale of the man who founded the Glasses Club, and got all the guys to join it on the promise of developing working X-Ray spectacles. Finally, there is also a S.A.V.E. version of Princess Jellyfish, making the ultimate nerd-girl a bit more affordable.
This is the first new release from Fungus in 3 years, entitled Dishwasher and Punk, or Punk and Wash depending on who is doing the translating. It just came out this past week, released on Space Shower Music, and this first track sounds pretty good in a Ska kind of way. There are 13 tracks altogether on the disc, so far this is the only one that has been posted online.
Knoppix 7.4.2 is a security and bug-fix update which corrects the Shellshock vulnerability in Bash among a number of other vulnerabilities according to the good folks over at Distrowatch. Plus it has the latest and greatest versions of Firefox, Chromium, GIMP, LibreOffice, and a lot more. And since it is a Live Disk, you don’t have to install it on your computer; just pop it in your DVD drive, reboot your computer, and watch it load and run. Enjoy all the software, and when you are done and shut it down it ejects the disc; if you take it out of the DVD tray, the next time you boot your computer you go back to whatever operating system you have on your hard drive. It defaults to the KDE desktop, but you can select others during the boot process, including GNOME. I am going to download the .ISO file tonight and burn that image to disc so I can check it out!
Just in case you wondered how this should all work together… Big Hero 6 from the Anime Con I enjoyed this past weekend!
The live action version of Black Butler was released in January in Japan, June 14th in Canada, and comes out next week in the UK. Unfortunately it is not scheduled for movie theaters in the US that I could find, but it has been released on all-region DVD here. Originally set in the England of Queen Victoria, the new movie is set in 2020 to give the mingling of the cultures a more realistic environment. When a girl’s parents are killed, she sells her soul to a demon, in return for which he becomes her butler and serves her in all things… including tracking down her parent’s killers. The Manga was excellent, the Anime was quite good as well, I am looking forward to seeing how well they did with the live action version.