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Something to Watch: Online Pt. 1

This is a huge topic, so to begin I will break it down to a tiny subset with a very limited scope, so it doesn’t run away from us right out of the starting gate. Since this is my introduction post to the topic, it will be confined to:

1) Anime
2) Generic Servers
3) Free Sites

There are a lot of places online to watch Anime, which is a great way to pick out the good ones before laying your money down for the DVD’s. I spend so much time watching great animated sci-fi and fantasy this way, I figured it was about time to make it part of my Blog entries. To begin, I just want to mention a few of the generic video servers, and I should also mention the updated Anime Nation App with all new functionality for watching through your iDevice.

Hulu is of course now running Hulu Plus, but it also has just added several new titles to its free Anime Network section, including Xam’d, Blue Drop, Ghost Hound, and the second season of Hell Girl, to name just a few. Outside of that company there are a ton of classic titles, like Full Metal Panic (including all series), Vandread (both seasons and the OVA), Gad Guard, and Kaze no Stigma, and the inevitable whole lot more. There is an entire additional range of recent works, including D.Gray-Man, Sands of Destruction, and Birdy the Mighty: Decode. Those titles are just the tip of the iceberg, and don’t even begin to impinge on whats available in the premium section of the video service.

It gets a bit blurry when you try to follow a given production house, even when they are importing and converting, rather than creating, their works. As an example, Funimation Online Video can point you to their own internal company servers, or the Hulu Servers (that last link was to the feature film Vexille: 2077 Isolation of Japan), or to their YouTube Site where you can watch some great new titles like Birdy the Mighty: Decode and classic recent additions including Vandread and Witchblade. The title duplication was not an accident, just serves to indicate that the edges of what is available from various sources does include a lot of overlap, and rightly so. The more formats and servers supported, the wider the potential audience becomes for a given program; which works very well for the content creators long run, since it helps create the largest possible market for their product. But at its heart, their product is stories about the human condition, whatever the media they use to present them, as all stories must be.

Another great source is Anime News Network, which maintains its own set of streaming servers. This site has a unique set of programs you won’t be able to see anywhere else, and my personal favorite series in their current collection is Oreimo. You get woken in the middle of the night to discover your little sister is an Otaku in so deep she is creating her own Manga’s which are now being turned into Anime’s. As the honorable Big Brother, you do everything needful to protect her.

Finally for today, this link is the winner: you can click to watch the US premiere of Fractal, when it becomes available.

Something to Do: Movies

This Friday, January 14th, the movie to attend is The Green Hornet, a tribute to the 1960’s TV show starring Bruce Lee, and referred to as The Kato Show all throughout Asia during that time period. This version is NOT directed by Stephen Chow, who brought us such masterpieces as Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, as I previously reported. He had been involved with the project, but walked away from the Director spot in 2008, and the Kato roll in 2009; I really need to check web pages more carefully for story dates so I am not reporting expired information. This has come a long way since 1940, when it was produced as a movie theater serial of 13 episodes or so, itself based on the original Radio Plays of the early 1930s. Unlike most of its contemporaries The Green Hornet was a radio play first, not a pulp or comics series, and every episode ended with the newspaper boy hawking his wares by shouting out the headlines for that story (bad guys in jail) ending with the phrase The Green Hornet Still at Large!!

Something to Watch: DVD’s

A whole lot of titles being released, or mostly re-released, this week hoping to ride on the coattails of the new Green Hornet movie. The Green Hornet: Movie Edition, The Green Hornet: Original Serials, and Kato & The Green Hornet are all repackaging of the 1940 Green Hornet serials from Universal Studios. Note that the one that starts off with Kato’s name is coming out of South Africa and being sold predominantly across Asia. I find it disappointing that I have located no reference to the 1960s Bruce Lee TV show being re-released this week, as existing editions are a bit pricey if you can track a legal copy down at all. However, The Jade Tiger is going on the shelves Tuesday, so martial arts fans will have something new to watch.

The animated feature film this time around is Alpha and Omega, which has some quality animation work and an excellent vocal cast. It is targeted at the younger set, so don’t expect anything too profound out of the plot line, but a good choice for sharing with the family.

Interestingly enough, 2010’s Piranah 3D is actually being released on 3D Blu-Ray this week, while 1989’s Alien from the Deep seems to have neither a Blu-Ray or 3D version. Personally, I won’t be seeing either one, not being a horror fan.

On TV, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea: Season 4, Vol. 2 finishes up the final episodes of that series, so you can now have the entire thing in your collection. As with almost any other TV program from the 60’s (Star Trek and Twilight Zone being the notable exceptions) it is a bit campy, but still fun.

In Anime, 11 Eyes: The Complete Collection tells the story of two friends who are transported into the strange world of Red Night, and must vanquish evil spirits and other foes in order to escape. The other selection is Black Butler – Season 1 Part 1, about a boy who trades his soul for revenge on those who murdered his parents, and the Demon Butler who dismembers his enemies. You can watch it on Hulu to help you decide if you want it in your collection.

If you are looking for something lighter than those two, there is an anime series about an Otaku girl who’s secret hobby is gradually revealed to her friends and family I can recommend: Oreimo. It is currently streaming online for free over at Anime News Network, and every Sci-Fi, Manga, Anime, or Gamer Fan will recognize a bit of themselves in this one. They just posted the final episode the other week, so you can watch the whole thing in one go if you like; it is almost addictive enough that you might even if you don’t intend to.

Music for Anime: Joe Hisaishi

Joe Hisaishi has built some interesting music for some quality Anime productions, most notably for Hayao Miyazaki’s incredible animated stories. Miyazaki is the world famous co-founder of Studio Ghibli,, and some of the wonderful stories that Joe built the scores for include Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. From which list you will no doubt have figured out that Disney Distributes Ghibli in the US, because their quality for amazing animation is on a par. And Joe has been doing some of the best musical scores for Ghibli, which is a bit more complex than it might at first seem.

We all know that every good Movie and TV show, whether live action or animation, has an opening and closing theme that ideally sets the tone and expectations for the program as a whole. And we all realize (even if we don’t notice it on any specific show) that within any good program there are variations of one or both of those theme songs that enhance scenes emotionally and make it obvious that we are in a chase, or combat, or romance, or one of the other standard kinds of situations. The ones that become easiest to miss are also the ones that stitch together the presentation at the most basic level; the interstitial music, the tones or brief riffs that introduce a transition from one kind of scene to the next. Trust me when I say Joe Hisaishi has mastered all of those musical flavors, and built some of the most complete and inspiring sound tracks for each of the projects he has taken on. Just in case you still think you don’t already know who he is, this short selection of tracks should prove otherwise to you.

And for those in the audience that thought if it wasn’t Rock-N-Roll I wasn’t interested, you were mostly right. But I haven’t heard orchestral music twisted around and tied tight to a story line like this since I sat in the audience and had Leonard Bernstein play Peter and the Wolf for me live one day; that kind of experience really does change your perspective.

Something to Do: Movies 2011

2011 has some quality movies coming up, so many that I would get overwhelmed trying to list them all here, or even all from just my own country, the US. But I can list at least a few of the ones I am most looking forward to for the first half of the year, in the hopes you might find them interesting enough to keep an eye out for.

In January 2011, the first release is Season of the Witch on the 7th (that’s this Friday). Nick Cage and Ron Perlman battle the forces of 15th century evil. The Green Hornet looks to be the movie of choice for January, coming up on the 14th. They are sticking to the attitude of the original TV show, which had Bruce Lee as Kato (the series was known as The Kato Show in China, Japan, Korea, and most other Asian countries), and no one these days can remember who the white guy was. Hollywood’s next TV series that Bruce Lee developed (called “Kung-Fu”) didn’t have a single Asian in a staring role, even though Bruce was supposed to be the star. They hired somebody named Carridine for that role. There are also 2 limited run J-Movies this month; the live action version of Gantz on the 20th (see my review and trailer here), and Evangerion shin gekijôban: Ha on the 21st.

In February there are several choices, a few of which are a bit out there.
Sanctum on February 4th sounds prosaic with the whole deep-sea diving stuff, but this is a James Cameron work in 3D and IMAX. Gnomeo and Juliet is a Shakespeare variation set in the world of warring indoor and outdoor gnomes, which should launch around the 11th. I Am Number Four on February 18th sounds like a quote from The Prisoner, but is actually an identification from one of 8 aliens who landed on Earth by accident. The previous three have already been hunted down and murdered, and he is next. Drive Angry on February 25th is about a soul who escapes from Hell to avenge his daughter and protect his granddaughter. Note that Drive is the second Nick Cage movie in as many months for this year.

March starts off with The Adjustment Bureau on the 4th, with a conspiracy theory story of truly epic proportions that will remind you of Inception. Also on the 4th, the animated feature Rango gets released, to teach us all abut the nature of courage. And then we have Apollo 18, which is a covert mission to the moon revealing an entire collection of aliens. Which is a nice warm up for the 11th, when a whole group of films get released, starting with the animated Mars Needs Moms!. It continues through Battle: Los Angeles where the story follows one Marine platoon’s encounter in the battle against an alien invasion on the streets of Los Angeles. It doesn’t end there, since also on the 11th we see Red Riding Hood, where a young woman is in a medieval village which is being terrorized by a werewolf. The final pick on the 11th is Suing the Devil, where Satan (played by Malcolm McDowell) shows up to defend himself in court. When the calendar turns to March 18th Beastly tells the story of a beautiful person turned hideous with only love to save him and turn him back, while Limitless is the story of a writer who tries a drug which allows him to use 100% of his brain instead of the usual 10%. The final entry for March will probably be the masterwork for the month; Sucker Punch the 25th may be the most interesting movie of the year, or at least have a serious shot at that title.

And that is just the first 3 months; there is a lot more after that! HOP is the animated tale to beat on April 1st (from the team that brought us Despicable Me), or perhaps Rio on April 8th from the Ice Age team; I plan to be at both. Source Code is a recursive time travel story worthy of Philip K. Dick, and Super is the story of an ordinary guy wearing superhero tights and armed with a wrench, both on the big screen April 1st. The other April 8th film, Your Highness, is a comedy about the guy that tried to avoid slaying the dragon but still ended up on the quest (Natalie is the Warrior Princess while Zooey is the Damsel in Distress).

In May, the top movies are Thor from Marvel, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the Tim Powers book by way of Johnny Depp, and the animated Kung Fu Panda 2 (the Tree of Life is an also ran). Come June, X-Men: First Class gives some background (but doesn’t appear to be from Marvel studios), Super 8 tells the story of aliens gone AWOL, and The Green Lantern brings another classic comic book hero to the screen, this one a variant of the Grey Lensman. Rise of the Apes is the origin story also ran for the month.

That covers the first half of the year; the remainder will include titles like Transformers: the Dark of the Moon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Captain America: the First Avenger, Cowboys & Aliens, Conan 3D, The Thing, Immortals, the Shrek spinoff Puss in Boots, and Sherlock Holmes 2. All in all, 2011 looks to be a great year for films, with more than one goody every month.

Something to Watch: DVD’s

There are a few movies being released on DVD this week, but only one of any real importance. The first is Sci-Fi High: The Movie Musical, which supposedly was in theaters last April, but none anywhere near me. Even IMDB doesn’t seem to know anything about this one, so it will be a pass for me. As will be Wolvesbayne, another redundant 1800s vampire versus werewolf film. The movie worth adding to the collection this time around is Howl, the beat generation anthem and poem and the story of Alan Ginsberg’s obscenity trial in the 1950s because of it. This legal battle had fear and repression driving the prosecution and freedom of speech upholding the defense, in what would be a verdict that would help change the direction of what was permissible in America closer to true freedom for all. This one isn’t sci-fi, but it is an important milepost on the path of literature and the development of a culture.

The TV fictional pick of the week is the Sarah Jane Adventures: The Complete Third Season. They have just finished up season 4 in the UK, and the first season was aired in the US on the Sci-Fi Channel, but not seasons 2 or 3. Nor do they appear to have been picked up by BBC America, at least not so far. So the DVD’s may be the only way we get to see them for a while; at least the UK has acknowledged and signed off on season 5 for 2011.

Into the Universe with Steven Hawking is another Science of Science Fiction type educational program which covers such topics as alien intelligences, wormhole transportation systems, time travel requirements, and the evolution of life in radically different physical environments than ours. Obviously, the narrator’s voice is not that of professor Hawking, but the program is quite entertaining as well as providing scientifically rigorous and accurate speculation about many aspects of the currently unknown. Particularly useful if you were considering writing any science fiction books or screenplays of your own. You can watch segments of the program online at that link.

There are three restored superhero movie serials being released this week, all from 1940. Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe was the third Flash Gordon serial to be made; The Green Hornet Strikes Again! preceded the 1960s TV show by two and a half decades but Keye Luke was no Bruce Lee, and The Green Archer bears a striking resemblance to The Green Arrow. For those too young to remember, a movie serial was a series of 12 or so episodes, 15 to 25 minutes long, which would play before the feature presentation in a movie theater in the 1930s and 40s. Many of them were science fiction of one flavor or another, and they translated directly to television in the 1950’s, creating the template for the episodic TV series still used to this day. Their most famous feature was the cliffhanger ending, intended to draw audiences back the following week to find out how the hero escaped near-certain death this time, again utilized in TV.

In Anime, Koihime Muso – Complete Collection is a kind of Hidden Dragon versus bandits story line, not quite genre but not quite not, with combat grade heavily armed women protecting the innocent from outlaws and violence. The Tsubasa OVAs collection also becomes available this week, bringing us several more stories involving the protagonists crossing from world to world through the multiverse seeking to solve the mysteries affecting them.

Dirty Pair – Collection 2 completes the original Dirty Pair series with the final 12 episodes, but depending on which site you go to it might be coming out this Tuesday, February 1st, or February 8th. In any event, the original Girls with Guns destroying everything in sight series will be completed soon.