Top choice of the week has to go to Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy), a live oratorio based on The Life of Brian. And yes, most of the surviving Pythons are there for the event. So far I have only seen the trailer (at the bottom of this post), but it is hysterical; this is on my Must Have list for the week. You might enjoy reading the Eric Idle interview about it at the IFC.
San suk si gin, in English the Shinjuku Incident, is a return to the classic Jackie Chan Crime/Drama/Thriller venue that originally made him a star in China. But this time he is not one of the good guys, and the movie tells a more complex and twisted story than any fans of his US movies are used to seeing. If you liked the Police Story series, you will love this one. Fans only of Jackie’s comedy work should skip this and perhaps pick up his other release this week, Jackie Chan & The Karate Kids 8 Film Set. I am sure some marketing person scrambled to find enough old (in this case, 1980 to 1989) Jackie Chan movies with kids doing Kung-Fu to release together in a package, with an eye to cashing in on the new Karate Kid movie hype. But if only two of these films are good, that’s two decent Jackie Chan movies for 10 bucks each, and what if 4 of them are good? And what a surprise, it looks like the new version of Karate Kid hits the big screen Friday.
Somebody decided to release 2008’s Metal Man on DVD, most likely in the hopes that people world confuse it with Iron Man and accidentally buy it. I disagree with the reviewer at IMDB though; I think the SyFy channel would air this movie, probably right after Mansquito, but even they would show it well after midnight but before the infomercials kick in.
A real gem, and my other Must Have recommendation is Animation Express from the National Film Board of Canada. The short films in this collection have between them won 99 awards (and one Academy Award nomination). Some of these have aired on the IFC, and most of them have been making the Film Festival rounds, so I was a bit surprised to find I am already familiar with a number of them. Because of that, I am going to do something I have not previously done, and recommend the Blu-Ray edition of this disk if you have the tech to support playing it. The additional animations include one of the best I have ever seen, Ryan, a groundbreaking animation about a broken former groundbreaking animator; all by itself it is worth the price point difference. Judge for yourself, the animation is at the bottom of this entry.
In Anime, Tuesday has the US DVD release of the Bleach Uncut Box Set: Season 5 and that season brings us up to episode 109 by the time it finishes. As I mentioned a few days ago, Tuesday is also when you can watch the latest episode of Bleach an hour after it airs in Tokyo on Crunchyroll, because that is when they start simulcasting it. There is a definite lag between episodes aired in Japan and the DVD releases in the US, since the current season starts with episode 266 and the one airing this week will be episode 274.