With an amazing cast, the Disney film Into The Woods twists together some of the Brothers Grimm tales in ways the original authors never envisioned. It will be hitting the big screen December 25th, and I intend to be in the theater for it on opening day.
This weekend they held the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Awards, and as part of that they gave the Lifetime Achievement Oscar to Hayao Miyazaki. I have ranted often enough about what an amazing craftsman, director, animator, writer, and on and on he is. I think this time I will let the presenter and the recipient speak for themselves.
There doesn’t seem to be much this weekend. Wolves is a Werewolf coming-of-age film that is part action, part horror. I am not a big horror fan myself, so I won’t be there. Sounds like a good weekend to read a book to me.
This is a good week, with several offerings in each category. Iceman has Donnie Yen as a Ming Dynasty palace guard, wrongly accused of a murder. When he and the three guards chasing him end up frozen, they get defrosted 400 years later, continuing their fight across modern China. The animation How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the second film of three in this series. I quite liked the first one, and am looking forward to this one since I missed it in the theater. The Movie category is rounded out with a documentary, James Cameron’s Deep Sea Challenge. This is the project he used to refine the development of his 3D camera system, just before he used it to make Avatar.
In TV we get True Blood: The Complete Seventh Season, which brings this series to a close. The camp classic Batman: The Complete Television Series starring Adam West and Burt Ward, are serious when they say complete. All 120 episodes and 3 hours of extras are included. Finally Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Lost Missions continues to detail the conflict between the Republic and the Separatists as the Jedi war grows closer.
In Anime, Patema Inverted appears to be an animated remake of Upside Down, and could be quite interesting. Sailor Moon: Season 1 Part 1 is being re-released in North America with a brand new English translation, making it almost like a whole different series. Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3 is a typical story about the school club the protagonist joins. But in this case, the school club is a serious survivalist team out drilling in the woods, and friendly fire may be their most dangerous enemy; this is the complete series.
My mental choices are completely interfering with my school romantic comedy takes place in the kind of universe where a game premise suddenly takes over our hero’s life, and seems to be designed as a curse more than anything else. Finally, High School DxD: New Season 2 is filled with still more zombie stomping action as the Archangel Michael joins the Occult Research Club in the battle to protect the living.
More and more of what I watch is streaming video, and less and less is based on some kind of physical media. I guess the reason these weekly entries focus on the discs is there is too much streaming Sci-Fi and Fantasy, especially out of Japan, that no single person could possibly cover it all. I think a team of three people, all doing it full time, could do it the way it should be done. But one person, doing one entry a week? No chance. I will probably start mentioning my favorites again, though, in case anyone missed hearing about them.
A couple of classic tunes put together in minimal time to tie them to an animation, created in iClone. The minimal time factor explains why the lip sync is so bad, and the crudeness of some of the other animation aspects. But while as a viewer I can critique these as not being as perfect as the music videos from world class productions like Frozen, as a creator I am in awe that a single person working from an extremely tight deadline managed to put out anything at all, let alone anything as tightly animated and choreographed as this. I mean, compare the budget, timeline, and production staff between the two projects and see if you don’t understand what I am referring to. Kudo’s to Jay for creating such amazing product under this kind of constraint. And he did it using a couple of my all time favorite tunes, always a bonus!
The folks at the British Film Institute has recently made available an interesting collection of the best global cinema on-demand, some on a pay-per-view basis, some for free, most of it amazing, and a few things you just won’t find anywhere else. Movies like Only Lovers Left Alive, Under The Skin, and most of the things presented at the most recent BFI London Film Festival. They even have a Days of Fear and Wonder science fiction collection. While I prefer most streaming services monthly fees, rather than the pricier per-viewing charges, I am going to have to sign up with them to at least see some movies I have heard of that have yet to be released here. Plus, the payments support the BFI, an organization as worthy of support as the AFI.