On Wednesday Beauty and the Beast, the new French remake of 1946’s La belle et la bête will be hitting a limited number of US screens. This is a beautifully filmed fantasy classic, I am hoping one of those screens might be somewhere near me. On Friday we have several other options, beginning with The 5th Wave, based on the book of the same name, all about the invasion of the Earth. Ip Man 3 continues the Honk Kong series about the Martial Arts Master who trained Bruce Lee.
Movies bring us Jem and the Holograms, which I have yet to see, so I can’t comment as to how true it stayed to the original premise. Not very, if the reports I have read are accurate; they threw out the female superhero corporate executive of the original series and replaced her with a you tube star with no powers or control. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 19%, which I don’t find very promising, but I will watch it at some point just so I can make up my own mind. Much more interesting is Eden, a French film about the Paris Rave scene in the 1990s and the DJs who made it happen. Daft Punk flit about the edges of the film while the core DJs go through their own evolution played out against the backdrop of the clubs. Rotten Tomatoes gave this film an 82% and it won an assortment of film festival awards, so I am looking forward to catching up with it. I did not find any genre live action TV this week.
Anime has the release of A Certain Scientific Railgun S: The Complete Series, the second season finding a cabal of scientists cloning people with powers and murdering the clones. Their goal is to use the deaths to fuel the growth of a very powerful Esper, but Misaka and the girls of Judgement get wind of the plot when they run into their own clones. Now the battle is on to see who will control Academy City. In Terror in Resonance director Shinichiro Watanabe and composer Yoko Kanno are teamed up to bring you this highly suspenseful series, where Tokyo is decimated by a shocking attack. That is only the opening move in a plot to destroy the planet, and there isn’t much time for the detective chasing down the clues to sift through them for the truth and stop the bad guys.
Pride And Prejudice And Zombies will also be on the big screen on February 5th. While I think Hail, Caesar! had the better trailer, I really enjoyed the book, so I might just go see this one.
Lost In Hong Kong is a truly twisted film, and the sequel to the highest-grossing film in China’s history (until Monster Hunt came along last July), Lost In Thailand. It does have some great action and comedy sequences, but the flavor of the trilogy, so risque and adventuresome in Lost on Journey, slid into slapstick with Lost In Thailand, and finally into mainstream with Lost In Hong Kong. Still, each of these films was quite entertaining in its own way, and this final one of the set will be out on DVD in March (it hit US theaters back in September).
The film Hail, Caesar! isn’t genre, so why post the trailer here? Because it cracked me up, and when I finally stopped laughing I knew I had to share it. Plus, it is comfortably recursive, a movie about making movies, poking a lot of fun at the industry and itself in the process. I may just have to be in the theater on February 5th to catch this one.
We get the animation Norm of the North in wide release this week, polar bear vs. corporation. In what appears to be a limited theatrical release, the live action film 400 Days tells about a group of trainees in a long duration space mission simulation who lose contact with mission control. This is a bit unusual because it is produced by Syfy Films, but being released in theaters and on demand, rather than being aired on the Syfy Channel. Also, it was released on DVD in Australia last October.