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Something to Watch: DVDs 11Dec12

If you are in the mood for twisted comedy, Ted has to be top of your list this week. If its action/adventure, The Bourne Legacy is a great choice (yes, it is genre, genetically engineering humans is still science fiction, although barely). If you enjoy quirky foreign sci-fi/horror/comedy, Doomsday Book is a Korean film about the end of the world, and includes a zombie apocalypse and a Robot Buddhist among the three tales that make up the film. No, it is not based on the award winning book of the same name written by Connie Willis, but it has won a number of awards itself, including the top prize at the Fantasia International Film Festival. If cheesy B movies with no understanding of basic science in their science fiction premiss is your favorite, then Collision Earth is the movie for you. Apparently the company that made Collision was too embarrassed to put up a web page for it, as well they should be. If you are looking for sexy spy spoofs then The Girl From B.I.K.I.N.I. may be for you, but be warned the rating on that one is somewhere between a hard R and soft porn.

TV this week seems to consist of Futurama: Volume 7, which is fine by me since it is a favorite show of mine. The other western animation choice is the feature film Ice Age: Continental Drift, the fourth in the Ice Age franchise.

A while back I posted the Level E OP song by Chiaki Kuriyama in its original live action music video format, and this week you can finally pick up Level E: The Complete Series for your own. Earth is home to a lot of aliens, and one boys life is turned upside down by an alien prince with amnesia and a bad attitude. Also new this week, Letter Bee: Collection 1 takes place on a dark world where a single artificial sun lights a small portion of the planet, and there are monsters waiting in the darkness. The Letter Bees keep the scattered human settlements in communication with each other, at great personal risk.

In returning series, Bleach – Season 15 is coming out in an uncut box set. Also, the classic Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi is being re-released, so if you have not already seen it, now is your chance. It is a wonderful little tour through the multiverse, all while staying inside a shopping mall that seems to be located in Tokyo, Texas.

Something to Watch: DVDs 2Dec12

Top movie spot this time obviously goes to The Dark Knight Rises, but if you don’t have any of the Nolan collection yet you can also pick up The Dark Knight Trilogy and save some money over getting them individually. While I can not recommend the other super hero movie coming out this week anywhere near as highly, Elf-Man should be good fun for families with small children. And for completeness on the super hero front I should also mention the Power Rangers Super Samurai: The Complete Season.

The only TV release worth mentioning this time is Mystery Science Theater 3000 XXV, with yet more silly commentary tracks overlaid on some of the worst movies ever made. I actually enjoy watching these with a group of friends, because everyone in the room starts making comments trying to out-do the ones on the DVD, which can get very entertaining.

The western animation selection this time is machinema, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn.

In anime, Bleach The Movie: Hell Verse is a rescue mission for Ichigo’s sisters, to get them out of Hell and back to Karakura town. Mashiroiro Symphony: The Color of Lovers complete collection is a war of the sexes anime TV series, in which two schools, one for girls and one coed, are merged. The amusing results are generated by the women at the exclusively feminine school who don’t want to see the boys invade there campus. As near as I can tell there are no ghosts, elves, aliens, robots (giant or otherwise), mutants, cat girls, trans-dimensional visitors, time travelers, or any other kind of genre characters in this series. But at least it is a comedy, and I happen to like comedies. Umineko: When They Cry is the third season of this anime franchise to make it to the US. If you liked the earlier ones, this should also be interesting. I should comment that the pictures on the web site bare no resemblance to the plot description, so I hope I got the link right.

Something to Watch: DVDs

Top of the movie list this week has to be Men In Black 3, one of the few franchises that have actually gotten better with each new movie. In fact, I might even be tempted to get a 4K 3D TV for this one after seeing it in the theater. Also this week, ParaNorman is an animated comedy about a kid who is just a bit different.

I could not find any new releases under TV, except for a mention of the 1993 made for TV version of Frankenstein possibly being released, but even there I could find no verification. Surprising, since we are deep into the Xmas buying frenzy, and I would expect them to be releasing lots of stuff to pry open our wallets.

I only see two new releases in Anime, both of them involving mercenaries wandering through historic epoch war zones. In Berserk: The Golden Age Arc; The Egg of the King the war zone is the Midland Kingdom, which based on the armor and outfits looks a lot like late Roman period England. For Intrigue in the Bakumatsu: Irohanihoheto, Collection 2 it appears to be the Shogunate era of Japan. In both series everything is in continual flux, just like any real war zone, as alliances break and shift, and the battle continues.

Something to Watch: DVDs

While I didn’t find any Fantasy or Sci-Fi movies this week, The Expendables 2 is almost genre when you consider both its close approach to fantasy and the amazing cast.

Just in time for the gift giving season, Dr. Who: Limited Edition Collection contains the new series seasons 1 through 6, and all the specials of that time frame from both the BBC and BBC America, crammed onto 41 disks. They also threw in some other goodies, like an 11th Doctor sonic screwdriver, some art cards, and a comic book. There are over 70 hours just in the actual episodes themselves, and more hours still for the extras. If you know someone who loves the Doctor but doesn’t own anything more recent than Sylvester McCoy, this is the perfect gift for them. I have seen it priced from $150 to $240, so you do want to shop around to find the best deal on it. Somehow I don’t believe Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Complete Series is going to draw the same kind of loyal fan interest or numbers, but it is also becoming available this week.

In western animation we have Dragons: Riders of Berk, a TV series based on the award winning How To Train Your Dragon from Dreamworks. At least, I think it is western animation. With most major animation houses having studios in both California and China it is getting harder to tell these days.

In Anime, there are two special edition boxed sets that seem way overpriced to me for the contents included. Bakemonogatari has as its protagonist a boy who is saved from being turned into a vampire, only to consequently discover all his female friends are suffering from apparition induced afflictions. The central character in Garden of Sinners spent two years in a coma, to awake and discover she can see the lines of mortality tying together the living and the dead. One is a set of 7 feature length film, the other a series of fifteen 25 minute episodes, but with an SRP of just over $180 each that comes to between 34 to 55 cents PER MINUTE. Even the best sale price I could find only reduced them to $150 before taxes and shipping, and even with the extra booklets and art cards I don’t really see enough additional value to justify that kind of price.

The much more realistically priced Cluster Edge: Collection 2 continues the story of transfer student Agate and his friends at the elite school Cluster E.A., as the artificial soldiers and the tapestry of history threaten to come crashing down on everyone. The long running classic InuYasha may finally be coming to a conclusion with InuYasha: The Final Act Set 1. The powerful jewel is almost reassembled but in the hands of the enemy, and the race is on to gather the final fragments. The release of Soul Eater: The Complete Series puts the whole thing in a single box set for the first time. This gives a much better price point than when your only option was to buy it as four separate box sets, so if you have been waiting to pick it up, now might be the time. And finally, Bobobo-Bo Bo-Bobo: Part 2 continues the silliness begun in part one.

Something to Watch: DVDs

The Watch is a comedy about neighborhood patrol types out to protect themselves from an alien invasion, much as we saw in Attack The Block. It does have one particularly good comedic actor, who you will no doubt recognize from IT Crowd. The other live action film this week is Snowmageddon, and it also has a few actors you will recognize.

In TV, Doctor Who: Series Seven, Part One brings us the first half of the latest season, 7 episodes long. The Christmas special and the episodes in 2013 will comprise the second half, but they will have a special treat among them: Neil Gaiman is writing another episode, and after what he did with The Doctors Wife I can’t wait to see it!

The other TV series this time is Lost Girl: The Complete Second Season, and if you haven’t been following it, you really should start soon. This is a very well done series with a bit of a supernatural twist. Pretty much everything else coming out this week is a re-release of a classic or recent series, with the possible exception of Variable Geo Neo. That OVA set was made back in 2004, but I do not know if it was previously released in North America or not.

There are several quality selections in Western Animation this week from Pixar, including their wonderful feature film Brave. If you missed it in the theaters, now is the time to correct that error, and if you didn’t you already know how good it is. They are also releasing the Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 2, with still more amazing and intelligent animations for the whole family. A motion comic rather than an animation, Marvel Knights Astonishing X-Men: Unstoppable is the fourth installation in this story arc, with Joss Whedon and John Cassaday bringing impeccable storytelling and quality graphics to the table once again.

The Anime feature film this week is Children Who Chase Lost Voices, another excellent story by award winning Makoto Shinkai, who’s previous works include 5 Centimeters Per Second and Voices of a Distant Star. His animations have a haunting beauty about them, and his stories always go right for the heart. Pretty much everything else is a re-release of some form, such as Linebarrels of Iron: Complete Series, which is coming out in a S.A.V.E. version (Super Amazing Value Edition). That means if you shop around, you can probably find it for around $20 or so.

Something to Watch: DVDs

Topping the movie list this week is The Amazing Spider-Man, the world class reboot of the movie side of the franchise. A related documentary, With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, is also being released this week. I find that a bit confusing, because I watched the documentary several weeks ago on Netflix, usually the DVD comes first. Eleven Samurai was the 1966 martial arts masterpiece the more recent 13 Samurai got a lot of its chops from, although some have said they felt Thirteen Assassins was one of the models for Eleven Samurai itself. Whatever the relationships, this one has some amazing fight scene choreography and is a classic of the genre.

In TV, Wolf Lake is being released about a small town of Werewolves just outside of Seattle. This was made for CBS, who canceled the series 5 episodes into the first season. So while the 9 episodes in the box are the complete series, you can’t even say it was the first season, since that was supposed to have 13 episodes all together. While it isn’t exactly TV, the original movie house serials from the 30s and 40s became instant episodic programming presented on TV in the 1950s, usually on Saturday mornings to keep the kids entertained. So this would be the place to mention Dick Tracy: The Complete Serial Collection is coming out this week, a total of 4 different serials made by Republic Pictures fro 1937 to 1941, along wit a collection of special features. Why mention a cop show on this web page? He was originally a comic book character, and most of the criminals he was out to get looked just like the criminals from Batman, which is close enough for me.

We have a couple of entries in western animation this week. Arthur Christmas is from Aardman, the animation team that do Wallace and Gromit, as well as Sean the Sheep. We are also getting Red vs. Blue: Season 10, the finest Machinima Combat Comedy series ever made. If you haven’t been following this from day one, you can pick up 10 Years of Red vs. Blue and get all 10 seasons in a single box set. Since season 10 completes the story, once I get my hands on it I am going on a serious marathon, starting at the beginning of season 1 and watching the entire thing to the end. You can also watch it online at that link since it was originally Webisodes.

Kung Fu Panda: Holiday kind of falls between western and eastern animation, since it is a joint effort between the US and Chinese branches
of Dreamworks and Disney. This new short feature is 25 minutes of amazing animation and wonderful story telling. I hope they keep this production quality when they crank out the Kung Fu Panda TV series for Nick, and not hand it off to second string animation teams like the Penguins of Madagascar franchise did.

Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere starts off the Anime section for this week, with the complete first season. Humans came to Earth from the skies, and in order to return they have to follow the path in The Testament. But now only Japan is inhabitable, the other countries surviving armies have each taken over a piece of it, and the Testament ends this year and with it possibly the world. Psychic Squad – Collection 4 brings episodes 40 through 52 of the series, and more insanity from the Pre-teen psychics that have every security agency in the world scared to death.

Maria Watches Over Us continues with season 2, but while the audio is Japanese, it has an interesting set of English subtitles. One is standard English usage, the other retains all of the original Japanese honorifics, especially useful for those trying to learn polite Nihongo. Although there are some sites that claim this one will come out next week, rather than this. I should also mention Ristorante Paradiso, because even though neither of these is really genre, they are both worth checking out.

Sengoku Basara: The Last Party brings the final conclusion to the battleground series that began as a game and expanded into an Anime series. This is a historical epic full of gun-toting mechanized samurai and mystical ninja that stepped sideways through time to get to us.

There is a re-release worth noting this week: Golden Boy, in a complete series package. This started life as an OVA about a law school dropout who went to study what school couldn’t teach, and ended up being a nice little series about the various disciplines necessary to create a Manga/Anime. If you haven’t seen this one before, I think you will find it worth your time.