After a decade of various US companies trying to bring a live-action version of Death Note to the screen, Netflix has finally posted the first trailer for their upcoming release. It will be very interesting to compare it with the Asian live-action TV series, which you can watch online for free at the previous link, which will take you to Crunchyroll. The Netflix version will be hitting the small screen on August 25th.
We get several interesting options this weekend, and while Power Rangers looks pretty campy just like it should, it also looks like they might take a more serious shot at the franchise. Leaning to the Horror side, Life has six astronauts vs. a single celled organism returned from Mars that can out-think them. In the Bollywood fantasy Phillauri, a man must marry a tree to break a curse, but the spirit of that tree has her own agenda.
Assassin’s Creed was a great game and an excellent premise for a movie; I don’t know if it succeeded or not, because I haven’t seen it yet. The critics seemed to be underwhelmed, with “confusing” and “disorienting” being the two words most often used to describe it. I don’t know if that’s because none of them ever played the game, or the script was that poorly done, but either way I will stream it before I consider buying it. I also haven’t seen Sing, but there is no question that this animation needs to be a part of my permanent collection. In Anime the new title is Attack on Titan: Junior High, probably the silliest series from this franchise, but still very worth watching. We also get a S.A.V.E. edition of BlazBlue: Alter Memory; The Complete Series, for those who haven’t seen it before now.
Starz signed up to put Neil Gaiman’s American Gods into production, and it looks amazing so far. They have a new trailer I had to share here, and since they also posted their SXSW panel, I am throwing that in as well. The show premieres on Starz on April 30th, these should help you get ready for it! Thanks to Tor for the heads up on this one!
This week is the Disney live-action remake of Beauty And The Beast, more specifically the live action remake of the 1991 Disney animated version of Beauty and the Beast. Just last year we had the French remake La Belle et la Bête, but of course that one was the remake of the 1946 masterpiece La Belle et la Bête by visionary filmmaker and poet Jean Cocteau. That one was a direct adaptation of the 1757 story of the same name, written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and published in an anthology of fairy tales. The other option this week is Atomica from Syfy Films, which seems to be a mid-future thriller with the potential to become a slasher movie, although I do like a couple of the actors involved.
The Western winner this week is Passengers, an excellent character driven romantic drama set against the backdrop of deep space during an era of interstellar expansion. Solace has a psychic doctor assisting a detective in tracking down a serial killer. The only problem is the serial killer is a psychic too, and a much better one than the doctor working with the FBI. It has a world class cast and an interesting trailer, the critical reviews indicate the movie has some serious flaws but the chemistry between the cast makes it work despite them.
In Anime, K: Missing Kings is the movie bridge between season 1 and season 2; there are 7 kings in the world, each with their own special power which they can grant in greater or lesser degrees to their followers. And there is war between the secret kings, with the potential to overturn the mundane world entirely. Ben To: The Complete Series is being released in a S.A.V.E. edition, with a totally different kind of war. In grocery stores across Japan, the battle for half-priced Bento boxes has become fierce.