I will so be in the theater for the first showing of this one!
We have two choices this holiday weekend, both film treatments for classic books, and I may need to hit both. The Edgar Rice Burroughs classic The Legend of Tarzan is the first new movie from that franchise in quite a while, and I will definitely be in the audience for the reboot. Hopefully it won’t get killed off by active studio suppression the way John Carter (of Mars) was. Then Roald Dahl’s The BFG is brought to life by Disney Studios, geared to a more family friendly audience. The only real question in my mind is whether I do them back to back with a dinner break in between, or hit Tarzan on Saturday, The BFG on Sunday, and the fireworks on Monday.
Kung Fu Panda 3 almost had this week’s western Movie and TV section to itself, and is coming out both as a stand alone film and bundled either with the first two films, or with them and three other discs filled with all the KFP Short Films they have spun off, depending on where you shop. I consider the Kung Fu Panda trilogy one of the finest animation series ever made, an excellent story self contained in each movie forming an arc that ties them all together, combined with some of the most beautiful animation work I have ever seen. It is in multiple styles, each one used to tell a different aspect of the story, and it was created by teams of animators working in both China and the US. The really exciting part? We are only half way through the project, there are a total of 6 films planned to tell the complete story. The other film coming out this week is Elstree 1976, a behind the scenes look at the teams who have worked on Star Wars.
In Anime, Den-noh Coil: Collection 1 i the first 13 episodes of a story about young people who have spent their whole lives wearing augmented reality glasses, tying them into layers of the world not available to the un-enhanced. But when they end up in Daikoku City, the e-space turns sinister, and some people may have already died trying to figure out what is going on there. Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom: Wild Dance of Kyoto takes place in historic Kyoto, where the Shinsengumi battle for control of the country with the vampire-like Ronin, and a woman may hold the key to victory in the form of an elixir that grants superhuman speed, strength, and healing. Selector Spread Wixoss is the next dozen episodes of the Selector series, as Ruko fights for answers and to rescue her friends inside the game. Yurikuma Arashi: Complete Series is a story of love, loss, and bear attacks featuring the heavily armed women who attack them. It takes place in a parallel time line where humans share the planet with sentient bears with a taste for human flesh. Finally we get One Piece: Collection 16, bringing us episodes 373 through 396 of the continuing pirate saga.
The Anthem of the Heart at JICC, Independence Day: Resurgence, The Neon Demon, and The Call Up gives us a wide range of cinematic goodies to select between this week.
Topping the list from a box office perspective is Independence Day: Resurgence, taking place 2 decades after the original film. Based on the trailer, it looks like the aliens once more manage to wipe out a sizable percentage of the Earth’s population during their attack, but you know I will be in the theater for this one. If nothing else, the trailer also makes it obvious that some of the visual effects, especially the combat scenes, will require the big screen to see them fully and completely they way they were intended. The Call Up is a British movie where a group of gamers are invited to try a new VR game, only to discover some of them will die before they can get out of it again. At least one reviewer compared it to Gantz, so I may have to check it out, although I will probably wait since the trailer on this one did not look like it needed the big screen. While I am not a horror fan, The Neon Demon looks stylish and interesting enough (complete with a visual referent in the trailer to another stylish horror/thriller I dearly love, the 1982 remake of Cat People) that I may need to see it as the thriller it started life as. This is also the first Amazon Studios project I became aware of that will be available in theaters before you can stream it online. That isn’t to say there aren’t others before this, but only that this is my first time to notice one.
There is also an Anime in extremely limited release this Friday that was nominated for Best Animation at the 2016 Japan Academy Awards: The Anthem of the Heart. Once a very happy girl, Jun said something when she was very young that tore her family apart. The Egg Fairy (more of a Kami really) appeared before her and sealed away her words in order to stop her from hurting anybody else. Years later she finds herself in a situation which gives her the strength to fight her way back to communicating with the world again. The author, Mari Okada, was awarded the 16th Animation Kobe Award (Individual Award) for her output in 2011, which included such titles as Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day and Fractale, among others. She has two Anime shows currently streaming from Japan, The Lost Village and Kiznavier, and if you are a fan of anime I guarantee she has written for at least one of your favorite shows over the last few decades. When I said this was in extremely limited release, I wasn’t kidding; you will only be able to see it at the Japan Information and Culture Center theater, which is part of the Embassy of Japan in Washington D.C., at the moment. It has played at a number of other theaters in the US in the past (maybe 20 or so nation wide) and it will no doubt be available to stream or buy sometime in the next year in North America for those like me who can never afford to buy the imported disc. If you do make this showing, perhaps we will get a chance to chat before or after the program.
The Disney/Pixar animated fantasy Finding Dory is going for the same audience as Finding Nemo, and looks like it will be every bit as much fun. Nemo and a number of other characters from the original film are in there, along with a collection of new fishy friends.
Warcraft looks like the winner this weekend, with some amazingly well done CGI and Fx work, and hopefully a story and plot that is just as good. When the portal between universes opens, one race faces destruction, the other extinction, unless they can learn to work together. The MMORPG the movie is based on has a huge number of devoted players, if they were true enough to the source material they can’t help but have a hit on their hands; if they weren’t, then the deserve the crash and burn that same fanbase will put them through. Most games turned into movies have been real turkeys, but there have been a few exceptions; I hope this is one of them. If you are not interested in this one, other options this weekend include Therapy for a Vampire, in which Sigmund Freud has to help a vampire deal with his undying relationship with his wife, and Now You See Me 2, which only has to be half as good as the original to be a total winner.