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Something to Watch: Discs

TV has Heroes Reborn: The Complete Event Series, and I was thrilled to discover it has 13 episodes. Somehow my DVR only captured the first 12, when I got to the end of my binge watching session I thought they left it like that to try to get the fans to pressure NBC to do another season. It turns out it does have an actual ending, and I am going to get to see it after all. Movies has the DC direct to video animated Justice League vs. Teen Titans; I am afraid I am not a fan of the animation style, it is reminiscent of bad Saturday morning cartoons from the 70s and 80s. Someone is also releasing all of the Alien and Alien vs Predator movies in a single bundle; if you don’t already have them, now is your chance to get the entire collection at once.

In Anime, Gugure! Kokkuri-san is about a doll girl who summons a Kokkuri-san, or fox ghost, by accident. He decides to haunt her and cook for her, because all she eats are cup noodles, and he can’t stand it. Maken-Ki! 2 is the second season of this school for magical combat, done as comedy with a large helping of fan service. While it isn’t genre, Tonari no Seki-kun: Complete Collection are short, fun little episodes about the Master of Killing Time. Each day he sits at his desk in school and creates complex diversions to entertain himself, driving the girl at the next desk out of her mind from the distraction. While he never manages to get caught, her reactions pull plenty of attention from the teacher. It is pretty amazing how they manage to fit so much tension and humor into a show only 7 minutes long per episode.

Something to Watch: Discs

Movies brings us Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which would be enough for me if that was all there was, but we get a bit more. Identicals is a rather twisty little film about people who take over the lives of others, to the point where they lose track of their own identity. Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie closes out the Ghost In The Shell: Arise prequel, ending with the scenes that began the very first movie. I get to mention it here rather then in the Anime section because it actually did play on the big screen in US theaters.

TV has Doctor Who: Complete Series 9, which was a fun season that I wouldn’t have minded if it had had still more episodes. We also get The Expanse: Season 1, a first class interpretation of the books series, and I am happy to see they have signed off on creating the second season.

In Anime, Parasyte The Maxim: Collection 1 is a tale of a body snatching alien and the human he permanently attached to when he mistakenly ate and replaced his hand, instead of his head. Now the rest of the invaders want them both dead, so they have to work together to survive in this first half of the series. Rail Wars takes place in a parallel time line where the nationalized railway system was never privatized. While a lot of the story arc is involved with agitators and saboteurs trying to take control of the rail system away from the government, a good bit of it is slice-of-life tales of the day to day workings of the system as valid in this universe as in that one. We also have new stories for a few old favorites, with Lupin the Third: Jigen’s Gravestone, and Naruto Shippūden: Uncut Set 26.

Something to Watch: Discs

Humans, Season 1 is about Synths, near-human robots who may be more than they appear. It was shown on AMC (US), the BBC (UK), and ABC (AU) and is based on the Swedish science fiction program Real Humans, which has won a number of awards. Kudos Film and Television remade it for English speaking audiences with a somewhat changed plot line, and Acorn is releasing the uncut UK version on disc.

In Anime, the Utawarerumono OAV adds three new stories to this world of magic and combat, with just a bit of silliness thrown in. The other two new releases are about the genre rather than genre themselves; Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-Kun is a rom/com about a Manga artist, while Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend is a rom/com about a high school otaku who decides to build his own game about a girl in his class.

Something to Watch: Discs

Movies include The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, with a VR short of selected segments of the film also available, fully 3D and formatted for Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, and others. There is one more release that looks worth watching, the documentary/essay film Dreams Rewired, a look at movies of 100 years ago at the beginning of the Information Age, with Tilda Swinton doing the voice over. On the silly side, we also get Cowboys vs Dinosaurs, a really fun bad movie, and Roboshark from Syfy, about a shark that eats an alien space probe.

This is the Google Cardboard version of that Mockingjay VR:

In Anime, Celestial Method is about a city with a flying saucer parked over it, which began with fear but turned out to just make the place a tourist destination. Then two girls get together, and everything changes again. Date A Live II is the complete 2nd season of the alien invasion rom-com. Durarara!! x 2 (3) is part 3 of season 2 for entirely too much money; you can buy the Japanese import for about $30 less than the US release, in fact. I will just watch it on streaming until they put out a sanely priced edition. We also get the continuation of a couple of favorites, with Fairy Tail: Part 19 bringing episodes 213 through 226 home. Notice that is putting us at about 4 and a half years into the story at one episode per week. Streaming live from Japan this week is episode 278, if you were curious. One Piece: Collection 15 brings episodes 349 through 372 to the shelves, with episode 457 currently streaming. Which means you can buy about 7 years of it, but they are currently finishing up the 9th year.

Something to Watch: Discs

I didn’t see any movies, and TV has a single title, Game of Thrones: The Complete Fifth Season. In Anime, C³ as a complete series with an OVA tells the tale of a cursed object who morphs into human form, and wants to escape her condition. With her personality learning to do positive things (the way to break her curse) will be a real fight, though. When They Cry: Season 1 has a boy moving to a small town, where he makes four friends. Not long after, people start dying, and he needs to figure out why and how to stop it before it is his turn.

Something to Watch: Discs

This week has radical scientist Victor Frankenstein, who along with his lab assistant sidekick Igor breathes new life into an old classic. And that’s it for western TV and Movies as far as I can tell.

Anime has Psycho-Pass 2, the cutting edge police procedural that brings predictive paranoia to a whole new level. Note that this one is just in time for you to binge watch it and make it to the theaters in a week to see the season finale in the form of Psycho-Pass the Movie. The Chinese historical epic Kingdom: The Complete Second Season is the retelling of a classic series of wars as multiple kings and generals all fought each other to unite over a hundred countries under their own banners. The artwork and style on this is quite nicely done, and the history is as accurate as you usually get when talking about a war that covered an entire continent for 500 years. Season 2 is 39 episodes long on top of season 1’s 38 episodes; considering this portion of the war lasted about 30 years, the last nine of which were the Qin’s wars of unification which founded the Qin Dynasty ruling a unified China in 221 B.C., this portion of the story was every bit as realistic as the gap between now and then would allow it to be. Finally, Wolf Girl & Black Prince didn’t turn out to be a fantasy about royalty employing werewolves in their wars as I had been hoping, but if you are looking for a little lite RomCom you might find it enjoyable.