In genre movies we have the Japanese Mutant Girls Squad and the American Evil Dead Inbred Rednecks, but I won’t be recommending either one of those. The only movie I can recommend this time around isn’t genre at all, but a spy based romantic comedy: This Means War.
Top TV selection this time is Sherlock: Season Two, the amazing re-imagining of the Holmes saga in another Steven Moffat project. If you haven’t seen these yet, you are in for a serious treat. The other choices in TV this week includes MTV’s Teen Wolf: The Complete Season One, which is apparently their attempt to pull in some of the money from the Twilight audience. My Babysitter’s a Vampire: The First Season is targeting the children’s fantasy market.
Some folks no doubt think The Secret World of Arrietty is a Disney animation feature film based on The Borrowers. They would be right except for the minor detail that this one is Anime, produced by Studio Ghibli, although it did use Disney as its North American distribution partner. They are using this opportunity to re-release a couple of other Studio Ghibli classics: Whisper of the Heart and Castle in the Sky, both as combo Blue-Ray/DVD sets. If you are missing those titles now is your chance to correct that, and if you haven’t seen them yet I really recommend you do so..
Other new Anime this week includes Planzet, a story about Earth’s battle with Aliens a few decades from now. Humans have raised a defensive shield around the planet, but are trapped behind it; the time has come to drop the shield for an all or nothing counterattack, to try to win their freedom. This one, like Arrietty, is a stand alone story, but at 53 minutes long I don’t think I can actually call it a feature length film. More like a 2 episode OVA.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood releases it’s OVA collection this week, which clocks in right at 60 minutes. Bakuman: Season One Part One brings the Blue Ray formatted first 13 episodes of a story of two young men trying to break into the Manga publishing industry. It has an account of both the good and the bad, as reported by industry insiders.