Skyline was not well received in part because Earth lost to the alien invaders. To me that wasn’t the point of the movie, but just part of the backdrop; the story was abut never giving up, even when they rip the spine and brain out of your body to use as spare programmable automation parts. I also thought that having humans be one of the resources the invasion was plundering the planet for was a realistic touch. It wouldn’t be cost effective to attack across interstellar distances if you did not maximize your return by utilizing everything you could from the target, and the processing power in the human brain still outstrips any computer we have managed to build so far. Odds are good their programming techniques would use far more than the 10% of the brain that most people are stuck with. A related film coming out on DVD this week, Battle of Los Angeles, I believe is the version from the Syfy Channel TV Movie production team, and not the one that hit the theaters a few weeks back.
This weeks documentary pick is the Walking Dead Girls, with George A. Romero, Lloyd Kaufman, and Bruce Campbell telling all about the rise of sexy bimbo zombies in America’s film culture. Even though I am not a horror fan, I had to mention this one for the silly factor alone.
For the younger crowd, Adventures of a Teenage Dragonslayer includes a wicked vice-principal, an evil dragon, a magical troll, and a 12 year old protagonist. Despite the title, the target audience appears to be noticeably younger than teenagers. Targeting that same audience, Arthur and the Invisibles 2 & 3: The New Minimoy also gets released on disk this week. It can be no surprise that the latter production is the superior product, since it comes from Luc Besson.
In anime, Bleach Uncut Box Set 8 comes out this week, bringing the US releases of the mostly human soul reaper team up to episode 151. One that looks like a lot of fun is Melancholy of Haruhi-Chan Suzumiya & Nyoron Churuya-san. This one started life as a Dojinshi, or fan-created manga, usually put together by a small team of fans, printed in limited runs, and sold at the huge Manga fests they run in Tokyo. This particular series was a parody of the original, done in small 4-panel single page segments, and it became so popular over there that it got picked up by Kodokawa and turned into an Anime series. Fair warning, the characters in this series are done in that terminally cute little-people Anime style known to cause kawaii overdoses in the sugar sensitive.
Also out this week, Ghost Sweeper Mikami Collection 3 continues the story of the money-hungry exorcist and her perverted sidekick as they use their considerable talents to satisfy their own personal desires. Finely, Kanokon: The Complete Series will finally become available. This one was supposed to follow the normal distribution path, first releasing three DVD volumes over the course of 6 months to a year (last year), and then coming out with the box set. But the second and third volumes were delayed to the point where Media Blasters finally announced they would just release the whole thing in a single package and price it low enough that those of us who bought volume 1 separately would not be punished for it. The story line is simple an familiar; boy (Kouta) transfers to new high school, meets girl Fox Deity (Chizuru) and rival girl Wolf Deity (Nozomu), both of whom want him for their own. Trust me when I say the normal high school male is helpless before two human girls in this kind of situation. When the women in question are both goddesses I give no odds on the boy surviving, let alone making a coherent decision about which one to be with. Obviously, this one is a comedy.