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Something to Watch: Discs

Movies brings us What We Do in the Shadows, a horror comedy that has been winning awards all over the film festival circuit. A documentary crew follows around four vampire roommates as they make their nightly rounds of harassing werewolves, cruising clubs, and fighting about household chores. Kung Fu Killer starts Donnie Yen as an imprisoned martial arts master who is released by the police so he can stop someone who is going around beating martial arts masters to death. That counts as fantasy in my book so I’m posting it here. I didn’t see much in the way of genre TV shows this time, except in Anime.

In Anime, Blazblue: Alter Memory – Season One has the game characters come to life, with Ragna using a combination of magic and technology to battle it out with the Librarium to decide the future of mankind. Guardian Ninja Mamoru is about a family of Ninjas that has been protecting another family for the last 400 years. The current generation of both families are now in high school together, and things are getting exciting. Soul Eater Not! continues the story of the living weapons and their wielders with the new generation getting trained for supernatural combat. The gang from the previous series is around as well, and it is just as filled with outrageous comedy as the original.

TO – Elliptical Orbit & Symbiotic Planet is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you can pick up both award winning short features for a really good price. There are also a few re-releases worth grabbing if you missed them the first time around, including Mamoru Oshii’s classic Patlabor 2: The Movie and Persona 4 the Golden Animation.

Supergirl

Three things come to mind when I hear the word Supergirl these days; one TV show, and two variations on the same song. The new iteration on the Supergirl TV show from CBS looks kick ass, as you can tell from the first video. Kara Zor-El looks to be in full control, except for when she isn’t. They certainly don’t need any encouragement from me, but how can I keep quiet when they are setting up for such an amazing start?

When we drop into the music, I have loved the Reamonn song for a few decades now, definitely one of my favorites. If you don’t know them, Reamonn was a German pop rock band headed up by Irishman Rea Garvey. His hit off the first album was Supergirl, which made the top 10 in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. For the most part, people in North America (or much of anywhere else outside of central Europe centered on Germany) only heard the track as an import, and it didn’t receive much air play. But it should have; it was amazing!

Just recently it has been covered and re-released by Anna Naklab featuring Alle Farben & YOUNOTUS. This version is every bit as intense as the original; enjoy them all! Alle Farben, Anna Naklab, and You Not Us are all German artists, singing this world-class song in English. Which is pretty much how it started off, after all.

Something to Watch: Streams: Gate

The summer season has just started, with most shows only having 1 or two episodes streamed so far, but I have already become addicted to one of them: Gate. When I saw the first episode, and a portal between parallel universes opened up, I was certain it had to be based on the Hell’s Gate series by David Weber and Linda Evans. The first book in 2006 saw two Parallel Universe crossing civilizations, one based on magic with dragons, gryphons, spells, and wizards, and one based on advanced steampunk science and technology, stumble across each other. During that first encounter, where neither side understood the others language or customs, a series of mistakes and misunderstandings led to a massacre, with subsequent encounters leading to all out war between the two cultures.

It turns out I was wrong. It was actually based on Takumi Yanai’s Gate: Jieitai Kanochi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri, a 2006 Japanese Fantasy Novel series later turned into an assortment of Manga, and finally the Anime. In it, a portal between universes opens up in Ginza, and an invading hoard of dragons, elves, ogres and wizards attack Tokyo. They get beaten back by the JSDF, who go on to secure a foothold on the other side of the gate. Tanks, missals, and other modern weapons give the Self Defense Forces a noticeable edge in the combat theater, although the fighting is anything but one sided. The protagonist is Yōji Itami, a serious Otaku who is promoted because his quick thinking saved a lot of lives during the initial battle. He gets put in charge of a squad sent to do reconnaissance and see if they can find a way to get the other side to the peace talks table. This seems appropriate, since the author is also a serious Otaku (he has to be to write this kind of story) who is a former member of the JSDF.

You can watch the stream on Crunchyroll, the third episode just went live this afternoon for Premium members. If you are a free member (yes, membership is free, but the paid service doesn’t have commercials, comes in HD, and you can watch the shows the same day they air in Japan) you can watch the first two episodes right now, and today’s episode next Friday.

Win a walk-on role in Star Trek Beyond by supporting charity!

This isn’t a joke, and it is amazing. You really could win a walk-on role in Star Trek Beyond. Want in? Then go hit This Button and fill out some forms! If you are a Trekkie like me, you will hate yourself if you don’t even take a shot at it! Plus, even if you don’t win (and the majority of us won’t) you will have helped improved the lives of more people than you have ever shared a major sports stadium with. Assuming that, unlike me, you have actually been to a sports stadium.

Suicide Squad – Comic-Con First Look

When the Suicide Squad movie comes out next year it should put quite a different spin on the whole Superhero film experience. After all, these are the bad guys. Sort of. We had a video taste of this team in Arrow, with a limited collection of the powered, and it looks like they expanded on the theme quite nicely for the big screen. While they are quite recent to video production, the print version made its first appearance in 1959, and transmuted into its current form and structure in 1987, finally becoming the modern version of itself on 2011. I will be in the theater for this one when it gets released in August of 2016.