If you thought movies made from games had gotten silly enough, well, perhaps now they have.
Oh, wait, you didn’t think that was a real movie, did you?
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.
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.
This week we get the long-awaited Men In Black 3 for more sci-fi comedy fun. And this time around we get a bit of time travel to fix the world with, and I am definitely looking forward to it; I am thinking the 3D IMAX version may be the way to go.
This is Tiny’s from Second Life doing Star Wars, and it is a mighty impressive presentation. If you know anything about Machinima you will no doubt have recognized the incredible effort that went into this, from the costumes, the set building, the weapons and other props, the characters and their associated animations, the camera work, the editing… Just because it wasn’t filmed in the Real World doesn’t mean that it was some silly game. A lot of the same production hurdles are faced and overcome whichever world you are creating your film in.
This week it is Battleship on the big screen, and I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it is based on the Hasbro game Battleship, and games turned into movies are rarely any good. On the other hand, it is based on a Hasbro game, and they have already turned a cheap plastic toy from the 70’s into a movie franchise that was quite enjoyable with Transformers, so I am not willing to count this one out without seeing it first.