The dialog-free feature animation The Red Turtle was created by teams from France Belgium, and Japan. As the trailer makes obvious, the Japanese partner on the project was Studio Ghibli, nice to know I can see a new film by them this long after the studio closed. Also this week, the Lost in London LIVE experiment, where Woody Harrelson will create a movie live and stream it into theaters in real time. That one is on Thursday the 19th, and I might have to go see it just to find out it he succeeds.
Terrestrial Human
The one western program I am excited about this week is 12 Monkeys: Season Two, the Syfy channel show with a great cast and story line. Roger Cormen is still making workmanlike films on shoestring budgets, and his Death Race 2050 is the latest to be released direct to disc. The animation Long Way North has been winning awards on the Film Festival circuit for the last year or better, but it never got a wide theatrical release, and also comes out direct to disc this week. And then there is Surf’s Up 2: Wave Mania, which I have also found no theatrical release for, but it might have been on TV at some point. This is a joint project between Sony Pictures and the WWE, with a number of their star wrestlers doing the voice actor work for the surfing penguins.
We don’t have much in Anime this week either. Nothing new, and just the latest box set each for two returning favorites. Naruto Shippūden Set 29 has episodes 362 through 374, while Fairy Tail: Collection 6 gives us episodes 121 through 142. Both of these long running shows are well worth following.
New York group Phantogram played on the first of Triple-J’s Like A Version segments for 2017 this week, and they sounded sweet so I had to share them here. If you are not already watching them every week, in Like A Version a great Alt Rock band comes into the broadcast studio at Triple-J and plays two tracks, first one of their original songs, and then a cover by someone else. This time around, Phantogram played their song Cruel World, and followed it up with a cover of Radio Head’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi. And then a studio track from them with amazing video construction, Fall in Love. Triple-J has been my favorite alternative rock radio station out of Australia since I first heard them in 2006, if you like that musical format they would be worth adding to your streaming collection.
Another good Jackie Chan film coming out later this year is Kung Fu Yoga, and the trailer looks quite amusing. This Bollywood/Chinese hybrid film should be the second in a series, since Jackie previously played an archeologist running all over the place while hunting a treasure down. That was in The Myth in 2005, with Stanly Tong directing both films. He was also supposed to be an Archeologist in the Jackie Chan Adventures animated series. Bollywood has a serious hand in this release, and it looks like he gets at least one choreographed song-and-dance sequence with his beautiful archeologist costar, Amyra Dastur. Being a big fan of Bollywood films, I am keeping my fingers crossed they get multiple songs in. This will be hitting US theaters on Friday, January 27th, only two weeks from now, and I will be there to see it!
Jackie Chan is at it again, telling a serious story by way of comedy, this time a tale of a retired railroad worker who uses his deep knowledge of the train network to steal supplies to feed his starving neighbors during World War II. This film is in the theaters now, if you are lucky enough to live by one of the ones that shows Bollywood and Chinese films, which most AMCs with more than a dozen screens do these days.
I completely missed the release of MONKEY KING 2 on Blue Ray on January 3rd, and only found out about it when a friend called to tell me they found it in a store. Good thing this isn’t my day job. So, a bit late, but here is the trailer for this fun little movie.