The series Rin-Ne is about Sakura, a girl who accidentally crossed into the spirit world as a young child, and ever since she sees all the ghosts around her. It is about Rinne Rokudo, who is one quarter Shinigami, a group of Japanese supernatural creatures occupying the same spiritual niche as the Grim Reaper. Some of them help lost spirits pass on to be reincarnated, while others try to lure people to their deaths. And the show is mostly about all the trouble those two get into any time they are hanging out together. The show started last season, and Crunchyroll is currently simulcasting episode 18, with new episodes airing each Wednesday at 3AM EDT. It is based on the Manga of the same name written and drawn by Rumiko Takahashi, the hardest working, richest and most famous female Mangaka in Japan. Pretty much everything she has ever done has sold millions of copies and been turned into iconic Anime classics. One last detail; the closing theme for the series is the song TOKINOWA by Passepied, one of my favorite art-rock bands from Japan.
American Ultra is another one of those movies I am excited about this August. It tells the story of a brainwiped goofball who doesn’t know he is a secret agent, or possibly an assassin. This one will be on the big screen on August 21st.
Apparently, they decided to post the Deadpool trailer just before midnight last night. The first one is the Green Band Trailer, the second is the NSFW red band version. I am definitely looking forward to seeing this next year.
According to yesterday’s Deadpool Trailer Trailer, the Deadpool trailer will be here today. So far, I haven’t found it anywhere, but this one is worth a grin.
August has some movie releases I have been waiting for, and this week we get Marvel’s reboot of the Fantastic Four. This is the origin story, where Reed Richards and company enter an alternate universe which changes them in ways they never anticipated. They are also bringing Victor Von Doom to the big screen with this one, and I have hopes that this release will rekindle the franchise. The series was always a favorite of mine because scientists were the superheros rather than the villains.
It isn’t the only choice this week as we also get the animated silliness of the Shaun the Sheep Movie. Built by the same Claymation specialists who bring us Wallace and Grommet, the stories are always packed with a lot of visual humor and very little in the way of dialog. Frankly, you don’t need words when you can tell a story with images this well, and I have to think that boosts their profit margin tremendously with international distribution. To translate the spoken part of one of these can’t take more than 3 people in the studio for one afternoon to lay down the recording, and maybe 10 hours of editing, mostly to mix the voices with the music and sound effects.
There is another animation also worth looking into this weekend for entirely different reasons; Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. This is a group project, with many award winning animators and animation directors from around the world contributing different “chapters”, and some world class actors doing the voice overs. It has already won a number of awards on the Festival circuit including Cannes, and sadly like most truly independent movies it isn’t going to be in a lot of theaters; only New York and LA this weekend, and while it will be hitting around 40 cities in North America during the following weeks, it generally is in a single theater per city. I have already posted trailers for the first two films (scroll down and back through my blog, they are obvious), now here is one for this wonderful creation.
In movies we get The Divergent Series: Insurgent, based on book two of the trilogy written be Veronica Roth. Again, why it is called a trilogy when it is 4 books long escapes me, but that worked just fine for Douglas Adams and it seems to work here as well. Epic fantasy at its finest, Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal is about Zhong Kui, a legendary warrior who is forced to conquer Heaven and Hell to save his people and the woman he loves… Literally. I am including a trailer at the end of the post for those who missed hearing about this when it was in the theaters last February. There is also the first Maori fantasy film I have heard of, The Dead Lands, presented in Maori with English subtitles. There is also one non-genre movie that looks interesting, Black & White: The Dawn of Assault!, a prequel to the popular Taiwan TV show Black & White. A cop and a criminal are forced to work together to save their city from something far worse than themselves.
In TV Orphan Black: Season 3 brings in the boy clones with a vengeance, and quite a bit of violence. I appreciate this shows ability to constantly hand us new twists we didn’t see coming, but I would be perfectly happy if they toned down the gore a bit. Even though it isn’t genre itself, I have to also mention The Casual Vacancy because it is J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults.
In Anime, Space Brothers: Collection 4 brings episodes 39 through 51 of this epic near-future adventure. One brother has barely survived crashing on the Moon with no rescue in sight and limited oxygen, while the other is fighting to make it through accelerated survival training on Earth alive. Meanwhile Turn A Gundam: Part 2 has episodes 26 through 50, and also takes place on both the Earth and Moon; but this time, it is the entire human race who’s survival is at risk. Finally, The Troubled Life of Miss Kotoura – Complete Collection is about a girl who has the ability to read minds, and the boy who gets her the help of the ESP Research Society, so she can start leading a less stressful life.