This week Snow White and the Huntsman is a much darker tale and closer to the original than the recent Mirror, Mirror comedy. With Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, and Chris Hemsworth anchoring the cast and some equally interesting choices on the production side, this one has the potential to be quite good indeed.
Terrestrial Human
For movies, The Woman in Black is a bit of a ghost story, and the made for TV version of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island is from the Syfy Channel. I am not terribly impressed by either, but I will at least watch the Verne story when it comes out on the streaming services.
We fare much better in TV, with True Blood: The Complete Fourth Season finally coming out on DVD. This is one of the few series that I think does much better in the TV incarnation than as a book series, with more believable characters and better stories and subplots all around. I have a friend who believes the books are far superior, and we generally argue with each other about for about an hour at a time, each of us bringing overwhelming examples of why our viewpoint is the correct one. We always seem to end up underwhelmed with the others debate points somehow, but it does lead to some pretty lively discussions which we both quite enjoy.
In western animation we have Wing Commander Academy: The Complete Series from 1996. It only lasted one season at 13 episodes, but the voice talent included Mark Hamill as Maverick and Malcolm McDowell as the commander.
Anime starts off this time with Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker, which is a feature length film set in the world of Dragon Age. If you are a fan of the franchise, you will not want to miss this one. There is another feature film called Gintama: The Movie, taking place in a historic Japan where aliens have taken over and Samuria have to run odd jobs to feed themselves. This whole series is quite funny, I am looking forward to seeing what kind of trouble they put the protagonists through this time.
In series, Shiki: Part 1 and Part 2 are being released as two box sets, but on the same day. This one is a bit of a thriller/horror story, and also a commentary on the genre and the folks that like to watch that kind of thing. People in the village are dieing at a rapid rate, but when the dead rise from their graves to drink the blood of the living the desire to survive can turn the living into some real monsters.
The other recent series is KenIchi the Mightiest Disciple – The Complete Second Season, previously released in 2 parts for the season, so this is more cost effective. Some folks have referred to this series as Anime’s answer to The Karate Kid, but it has a bit more fan service than that. Finally, Black Cat – The Complete Collection has been released in a S.A.V.E. edition, so if you shop around you can pick it up for around $20.
I don’t play games for more than 15 seconds at a time before my character is dead or disabled, but that doesn’t mean I cannot appreciate some good Mod Game footage. Thanks to the folks at Blastr for the heads up on this one.
Until midnight Sunday night central time there are some great anime titles streaming for free over at The Anime Network. Some of them give you a choice between Subbed and Dubbed, myself I prefer subbed, so I can hear the original actors emotional inflections. I have had some problems viewing some of these, where an hour and a half film ends 30 minutes into it, but I am not sure that isn’t a problem with my browser, rather than at the server end.
Some of these are recent productions, like Loups=Garous, where the members of J-Rock sweethearts Scandal are both the protagonists and laying down the killer soundtrack, while trying to break free of their imprisoning environment and track down the killer before they all die. Another recent choice is Five Numbers, a rather twisty locked room mystery that they need to solve to escape their fate. Asylum Session, ICE, Coicent, and Coffee Samurai round out the more recent productions, and every one of them is worth watching.
Some of these are classics, such as Appleseed, where the surviving members of humanity are equally divided between cyborgs and meatbags, or RahXephon The Motion Picture, a Giant Mecha Defends Against Alien Invasion story where music is the weapon set. The remaining classics go straight to the heart: Grave of the Fireflies and The Place Promised in Our Early Days are true masterpieces that would have won every award on the planet if they had been live action, and won awards enough for their anime versions.
If there is a single one of these you have missed, this is your limited opportunity to see it for free. If you haven’t seen any of them, you are in for a serious treat, and I recommend nuking the popcorn and settling in for a marathon. I would start with The Place Promised, and then alternate between the new and the classics until you have watched them all. It will be time well spent.
The Annular Eclipse that happened earlier this week was amazing, but those of us who saw it from North America only got a little tease of the event. If you got to see if from Japan, like Danny Choo, then perhaps you got to see it in its full glory. Here is a picture or two to put it in perspective for you. The first image is Danny in his Filter Facemask, which will hopefully protect him from having his retinas burned out by staring into the sun. To me, the scary bit is he reminds me of Friend from the movie trilogy 20th Century Boys, a wonderful Sci-Fi sequence based on the Manga. The second image is what he was staring at. If you missed it, don’t worry. You can either travel to the next event half way around the world in 50 years, or stay where you are and wait for it to happen there again, in 300 years.
The Art of Video Games is a new exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with a collection of 80 games, interviews with the creators, quite a bit of history and background, and a whole lot more. So I am sure not many will be surprised to learn that the folks from Think Geek are making a run to attend the event this weekend , and they are inviting everyone along for the fun. It works like this: meet up at the F Street lobby no later than 12 noon on Saturday, the 26th, to gather and be identified as part of the event. Of course, you might want to sign up ahead of time so if you are one of the winners they know where to send your prizes. At 12:30PM everyone will have been split up into teams of three and start cruising the exhibits, where you will want to pay plenty of attention. Finally, at 2PM, reconvene in the F street lobby to answer questions about the exhibit and the games for a shot at the prizes. This gathering should be a lot of fun, but if you already have plans this weekend the exhibit runs through September 30th, so you still have plenty of time to see it.