In Saturn’s Rings covers topics from the big bang to the near future as seen from the perspective of the Cassini-Huygens Mission at Saturn. This is an IMAX film that will be playing in museums and planetariums around the country. Hot Bot is at the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum, but could be fun. Two unpopular teen geeks accidentally discover a life-like super-model sex bot.
This week the Disney film Into The Woods is going to corner the musical comedy fantasy market I suspect, and I will no doubt be in the theater to check it out on the big screen. Also, The Imitation Game finally goes into wide release. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, this telling of the life of mathematical genius Alan Turing has been nominated for 5 Golden Globes, on top of the 23 awards it has already won.
There are two very good choices this time around. The one I want to see first is Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb; the third film in the Museum trilogy takes place at the British Museum this time, and once more looks to be a world of fun. Also this week The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies brings that expanded story to completion.
Rurouni Kenshin 2: Kyoto Inferno looks to be every bit as intense as the first film, and there is one more to go after this before the series is complete. A former assassin wanders through Japan promising to defend those in need without killing. If the story seems familiar and you haven’t seen the 2012 movie that began the live action film series, you may have read the manga it is based on, or perhaps seen the 1996 through 2008 anime series Rurouni Kenshin: Wandering Samurai. The anime ran 95 episodes, with breaks of several years sometimes between story segments, so it took a while to make. The song you hear playing in the background in the trailer is One OK Rock‘s hit Mighty Long Fall, which I posted here previously if you want to hear the whole thing. They are an amazing band, and you can pick up their songs on iTunes.
They took Robert A. Heinlein’s time-travel story All You Zombies and turned it into an Australian movie called Predestination, and it will be out in January. This segment is the first 7 minutes of the film, just enough to give you a feel for the rhythm and mood of this rendering of the story. The tale is more twisted than Heinlein usually got, except when he was mucking about in time. Thanks to io9 for the heads up on this one.
There don’t appear to be any genre films this week, but there is one I find interesting; the first ever conversion of a Thomas Pynchon novel into a movie. The film, like the book, is called Inherent Vice, and is quite the twisted tale, taking place in the late ’60s and reminding me of nothing so much as Pulp Fiction. They have collected up quite a good cast, I think this one will be worth checking out.