The trailer for Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie is out, and the film will be in US theaters on November 10th, 11th, and 16th. This is the franchise that first brought Cyberpunk to the big screen in 1995, and along with Akira introduced American audiences to Japanese Anime. Meanwhile, the live action version of Ghost in the Shell, The Movie starring Scarlett Johansson has been pushed back to a March 2017 release, and is currently having its script rewritten.
While nothing stands out this week, there are a few amusing titles. The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse is a horror comedy geared to a younger audience, which makes it somewhat strange that they went for an R rating. Freaks of Nature is also a comedy horror where humans, vampires and zombies had to team up together to fight off the alien invasion. Again it seems written for 12 year olds but has an R rating. I won’t be seeing either of these but figured I should mention them.
The epic historical fantasy The Assassin has some of the best cinematography I have seen in many years, and deserves to be watched on that count alone. But when you add in the plot and the sub plots, the characters, the costumes, the FX, the sets, the props, and all the other details that go into making a modern film, this one has it all. Well, except for the dialog, and it probably has that for people who speak the language it was written in. The Assassin is worth checking out, if only to find out if it is as good as its advertising indicates.
The announcement was made at the recent NY Comic Con that the Tiger & Bunny franchise is going to get a Live-Action film. Not only that, but it will be a Hollywood film produced by Ron Howard, Masayuki Ozaki, and a few others. This one might be quite good, given the folks involved.
There are several interesting choices this week. The Last Witch Hunter is an action fantasy about an immortal witch hunter and his reincarnated most powerful opponent, battling it out in modern times to determine if the human race gets to survive or not. While not genre, Steve Jobs is a look at one of the people who completely changed how the world works (and plays) during and after the computer revolution, and will probably be the best film coming out this week. There is a lot of controversy about the live action Jem and the Holograms since the original Anime was at its core about women’s empowerment, with the heroine owning the record company the band played for and using the super-science of her AI computer Synergy to project holograms from her earrings. Those holograms protected her secret identity, generated illusions that baffled and confused the evil doers she was constantly fighting, and also created special effects for the band. It appears that in the new live action version Jem is not the owner of the company, not the possessor of a secret identity fighting the bad guys, not in possession of proprietary advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic and makes her powerful. Instead she seems to be a wanna-be rock star who leveraged a YouTube account into a ticket to being exploited by a record company, which is not even close to the original story line. Or is she? The trailer seems to have changed since it first came out, I am wondering if the production company may have realized their mistake when the public outcry started over the changes they introduced. Not hopeful, but wondering.
Hopefully everyone caught part on in the theaters, because Attack on Titan Part 2 will be on the big screen next week. At one point there were reports that Crunchyroll would be streaming the live action TV series that aired in Japan between them, but I can’t find a link to it. Happily they do have the full Anime series available to watch.