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Something to Watch: Discs

In western releases, Arrival looks like the most interesting genre offering, with Alien spaceships touching down around the globe. It has been nominated in at least a couple of categories for every major film award going, with a total of 8 Academy Awards nominations alone. As near as I can tell The Crash is genre only by virtue of the line “set in the near future” in its advertising because its hackers are not nerds, but I suppose I should mention it comes out this week as well. The non-genre film worth mentioning is London Town, about growing up in the 1970’s London Punk scene. Check that that is the topic when you see it on the shelves, or you might end up watching another movie with the same name about a washed up comic trying to make a comeback in Vaudeville.

Anime brings us Busou Shinki: Armored War Goddess, A story about a gamer and his four 6-inch-tall combat androids, and yes, it is a comedy. Comet Lucifer is also a comedy of surreal proportions with the fate of the world ultimately at stake. Persona 5 the Animation -The Day Breakers- is a single 24 minute episode running just under $40, so I will not be recommending it. Particularly because I don’t know what it is about, and haven’t found it streaming on any of the North American services, nor on Daisuki, a Japanese anime consortium who stream directly to the US. We do get One Piece: Collection 18 this time around, though.

I want to make special mention of The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, where real works of literature combine with a supernatural world to create the backdrop for a series of interesting mysteries, whodunit style. The series came out in 2011, but first streamed to North America last year, and it looks like this will be its first disc release for the US and Canada. Finally, in Nobunagun our protagonist’s school trip is interrupted by a monster attack! A clandestine government agency arrives to battles the army of monsters, using possessed weapons. The spirits possessing those weapons belong to famous historical military figures, mostly generals, warlords, and shoguns. This one is coming out now in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you should be able to pick it up for under $20 if you shop around.

Marvel’s “Runaways” Cast Fills Up

Marvel’s Runaways is being made for TV, specifically Hulu, and will probably be ready to watch at the end of this year or the beginning of next. The story is simple (at least for a Marvel comic series); a group of teenagers who get together once a year at their parent’s annual party discover one year their parents are actually running a massive criminal organization. They all run away together, vowing to bring that organization down. I love that James Marsters gets to play Victor Stein, the mad scientist (or a scientist who gets really mad sometimes, at least). So they have now announced the cast members playing the Runnaways: Rhenzy Feliz, Lyrica Okano, Virginia Gardner, Ariela Barer, Gregg Sulkin and Allegra Acosta. And the latest announcement (at the initial link) gives us The Pride, the parental bad guys of the series: Brigid Brannagh, Ever Carradine, Brittany Ishibashi, James Marsters, Angel Parker, Kip Pardue, Ryan Sands, Annie Wersching, Kevin Weisman, and James Yaegashi. I can’t wait to see this one come to the small screen!

Sword Art Online The Movie -Ordinal Scale- Trailer 4

On March 9th, for one night only, Sword Art Online The Movie -Ordinal Scale- will be on the big screen, this time with a story based on AR, rather than VR. This is another Fathom Events special transmitted digitally to theaters across North America, with the distribution rights going to Aniplex. It appears to be booked in more theaters than these things usually are, so there is a good chance it is somewhere nearby. The Anime are based on a series of light novels by the same name written by Reki Kawahara, who also had his Accel World series of books turned into Anime. Both series have also become Manga and Video Games, of course.