On Friday, the 28th, IP Man 2 hits the screens, more of a historical martial arts film than anything else, but with amazing action sequences. Scream of the Banshee is also released that day, a horror flic with a hot archeologist digging up supernatural beings best left undisturbed. And
Kaboom claims it is Sci-Fi when you check it out at IMDB, but this American movie’s web site lives in France, and the trailers it shows have no science fiction in them, not even a flying saucer. Bottom line is I do not see any actual Science Fiction or Fantasy movies being released this week but there is one coming next week; The Adjustment Bureau, written by Philip K. Dick…
The movie Red Riding Hood trailer makes me think the tag line should be “it’s The Company Of Wolves meets Twilight“, and it’s directed by the original Twilight movie’s Catherine Hardwicke. Hopefully that does NOT mean this one is as bad as that series of films, because it does have a lot of good story potential. There are some more pictures here, and the film itself will hit the big screen in just a few weeks, on March 11th.
The movie Love looks amazing based on this trailer supplied by Angels and Airwaves and former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge. Release date is set for 14 February 2011, according to Geeks of Doom, as a combined CD and DVD.
ANGELS & AIRWAVES presents “LOVE” MOVIE TRAILER from Mark Eaton on Vimeo.
The live action version of Gantz will be on the big screen for one night only this Thursday, January 20th. It will only be at about 340 theaters around the US, so if you want to see if it is near enough for you to make the show, go to Fathom Events and enter your zip code. It will display a list of the closest sites and set you up to buy tickets. If you are not sure if this is a movie you want to see, check out my previously published review and then just buy the damn tickets anyways. The following day, also under limited release, the anime re-imaging of the second quarter of the story in the classic series Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance hits a select assortment of theaters across the country.
Battle: Los Angeles will be in the theaters in March, and they have released another trailer now that it is getting close. In the trailer you can see Michelle Rodriguez playing a heavily armed Sargent, somewhat reminiscent of her recent roll in Avatar. Like Skyline and many others, this is another film that has learned from the Battlestar Galactica camera work, and looks like it just might be a winner.When I was at Green Hornet today they had a trailer for this, Sucker Punch, and Thor, and they all looked great. I should also mention the 3D didn’t work so well in Green Hornet, with only one hunting-the-Hornet scene (which was heavily video processed) and the credits at the end even looking like they were 3D, so I recommend saving the 3 bucks and seeing the 2D version.
This Friday, January 14th, the movie to attend is The Green Hornet, a tribute to the 1960’s TV show starring Bruce Lee, and referred to as The Kato Show all throughout Asia during that time period. This version is NOT directed by Stephen Chow, who brought us such masterpieces as Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, as I previously reported. He had been involved with the project, but walked away from the Director spot in 2008, and the Kato roll in 2009; I really need to check web pages more carefully for story dates so I am not reporting expired information. This has come a long way since 1940, when it was produced as a movie theater serial of 13 episodes or so, itself based on the original Radio Plays of the early 1930s. Unlike most of its contemporaries The Green Hornet was a radio play first, not a pulp or comics series, and every episode ended with the newspaper boy hawking his wares by shouting out the headlines for that story (bad guys in jail) ending with the phrase The Green Hornet Still at Large!!
Joe Hisaishi has built some interesting music for some quality Anime productions, most notably for Hayao Miyazaki’s incredible animated stories. Miyazaki is the world famous co-founder of Studio Ghibli,, and some of the wonderful stories that Joe built the scores for include Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. From which list you will no doubt have figured out that Disney Distributes Ghibli in the US, because their quality for amazing animation is on a par. And Joe has been doing some of the best musical scores for Ghibli, which is a bit more complex than it might at first seem.
We all know that every good Movie and TV show, whether live action or animation, has an opening and closing theme that ideally sets the tone and expectations for the program as a whole. And we all realize (even if we don’t notice it on any specific show) that within any good program there are variations of one or both of those theme songs that enhance scenes emotionally and make it obvious that we are in a chase, or combat, or romance, or one of the other standard kinds of situations. The ones that become easiest to miss are also the ones that stitch together the presentation at the most basic level; the interstitial music, the tones or brief riffs that introduce a transition from one kind of scene to the next. Trust me when I say Joe Hisaishi has mastered all of those musical flavors, and built some of the most complete and inspiring sound tracks for each of the projects he has taken on. Just in case you still think you don’t already know who he is, this short selection of tracks should prove otherwise to you.
And for those in the audience that thought if it wasn’t Rock-N-Roll I wasn’t interested, you were mostly right. But I haven’t heard orchestral music twisted around and tied tight to a story line like this since I sat in the audience and had Leonard Bernstein play Peter and the Wolf for me live one day; that kind of experience really does change your perspective.