Ghostbusters is the obvious movie choice this weekend, but not the only one. Phantom Boy is a French animated feature film noir presentation in which a boy with superpowers trapped in a wheelchair helps a policeman (also trapped in a wheelchair) attempt to bring down a mob boss. This is from the folks who made A Cat In Paris, a truly amazing animation; you can expect that same level of quality here.
Just a reminder that Kubo And The Two Strings will be on the big screen in August. It is an epic action/adventure fantasy story set in an alternate timeline in Japan, where Kubo and his magic Shamisen have to save himself and his village.
I enjoyed the Jason Statham remake of The Mechanic, and unlike the original, this one got a sequel: Mechanic: Resurrection. It will be in the theaters on August 26th, and I have no idea why the only official web site I could find for it was in Japan and didn’t even include a trailer. Perhaps the fact that it was predominately filmed in Bangkok might have something to do with that. I did find a movie studio publicity page over at Lions Gate, again not a very exciting page. Which is strange, because the movie itself look like the kind of edge-of-your-seat film that one expects when Jason is the protagonist.
The choices are Silly Fun and Scary Fun this time around. The silly is supplied by The Secret Life of Pets, an animated fantasy all abut what the pets get up to when the humans aren’t home, which seems to include a Lost Pet Army out to take revenge. The scary comes courtesy of the latest Steven King book to be turned into a movie, Cell. Myself, I am going for the silly this week.
The Legend of Tarzan will be on the big screen in a matter of hours, and I am looking forward to seeing how they did with this iteration of the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs franchise. I have noticed that VR has broken out into two separate camps, the passive (it plays and you watch it, turning your head to get your preferred viewpoint) and the interactive, where you get to make choices that change the experience by clicking on things as you go along. All the movie 360 modules I have seen fall into the passive camp, which makes sense since almost all of the movies I have seen have also been passive experiences. There are a few rare exceptions like Rocky Horror, where you attend the film with the dialog memorized and a bag full of props including toast and squirt guns and newspapers, but the mind boggles when trying to imagine how you would program those choices into a VR environment. Here are the first two passive Tarzan 360 segments, strap on your headsets and enjoy; and remember, it is early days yet for the film industries VR experimentation. I fully expect them to get interactive in no more than a decade, as they slowly figure out just what you can do in this kind of a story telling environment.
In one of the Japanese trailers for X-Men: Apocalypse they included commentary after the trailer from Ryan Reynolds, AKA Deadpool. The reason was cross promotion; unlike the US, in Japan the two movies came out very closely together. They only made this trailer version available online a few days ago, so now I get to include it here; enjoy.