After quite a long wait, Guardians Of The Galaxy is finally on the big screen this weekend. This group of criminals may be the only hope civilization has left, and boy, is civilization in trouble! It is not your only choice for the weekend; if you love Rock-N-Roll, you should also have Get On Up> on your list of films to check out, so you can get an idea of the struggle James Brown had getting his music out to the people. And Outpost 37 will be available in a limited number of theaters, a movie about a documentary crew who follows an elite unit of soldiers in the wake of an alien invasion. So you have a range of interesting choices this time around.
There don’t seem to be any new genre movies or TV shows being released this week, although in martial arts The Protector 2 is another Thai story of combat among the elephants starring Tony Jaa. We only get one real new title in anime as well, Problem children are coming from another world, aren’t they?, about three human girls who get invited to another planet to engage in games with combat they may not survive. Sadly, that’s about it this time around, or at least all that I have found that wasn’t a re-release from years gone by.
The 2014 summer anime season just started, and we are in episode 2 or 3 for most shows this week. There are a lot of great shows this season, with both returning favorites and a bunch of new programs, some of which look quite good even though it is still early in the season. I have my own favorites, but I will wait for one more week’s worth of episodes before sharing them. That is partly because I want an additional episode of each to make sure they are consistently good, and partly because I am still trying out new stuff I haven’t seen yet to decide whether or not to add them to my watched list. What I wanted to share today was a couple of good places to find out about the shows.
Crunchyroll has the Final Summer 2014 Anime Season Chart, with each show individually detailed to include the studio that made it, a description of the program/premise it was built on, what kind of media it began life as (Game, Manga, Light Novel, etc.), the date the show began, and a link to the Anime’s home page (the BAKA.BZ entry for each one). You can find the details about how this grid was created at Neregate, which includes all the entries, not just the ones Crunchyroll is associated with. This is a wonderful resource for figuring out what is available and where it began, but a pretty poor tool for basing your decisions on. With this one, you read about each entry and decide for yourself which ones to check out, without any kind of descriptive streamlining, trailers, rating system, or recommendation. Still, there is a ton of good info here, well worth your time to explore!
Kotaku has Your Complete Summer 2014 Anime Guide, and I do like the format. They give you the title, the genre, when it starts, where you can watch it, a single sentence description of the plot/premise, and a trailer for each show. It doesn’t take much time to go through the article and get a short list of interesting series to check out, with an idea of what other ones might be worth watching once you have discarded the less than stellar members of that first set. This way to go about your decision making takes a personal approach, meaning you have to be involved at every step of the process. While the initial run through the guide doesn’t take long, watching the shows themselves to decide which ones are worth following can take a bit. For instance, if you start by checking the first 3 episodes of the 5 shows you find interesting, you have burned 345 minutes, or just under 6 hours. Drop the 2 you find least interesting and check out a different show, and you have burned an additional 150 minutes. This is way better than doing everything yourself so I find it a serious improvement over the previous method.
Anime News Network has the Summer 2014 Preview Guide, which is built more on a crowd-sourcing basis than a traditional top down reporting structure. Any given show has reviews by multiple people, each of whom has their own perspective on the program. This kind of reporting system has its own advantages, such as allowing you to compare and contrast the different reviews against your own impressions about a given entry in order to build a rating system for the reviewers themselves. Once you rate the reviewers from 1 to 5 in terms of the ones who’s opinions always match yours at 5 to the ones who’s opinions never match yours at 1, the next step is simple. You build a spread sheet or database (depending on which environment you are most comfortable working in) that creates a matrix with your reviewer rating as the X axis and that reviewer’s rating of each show as the Y axis. It takes some time to do the original analysis of the reviewers and then build the matrix, my guestimate being around 12 hours total. But once you have the matrix built, it is just a matter of dropping the current seasons reviews into place, rating any new reviewers since last season, and running the report.
I admit, my conclusions are more about my being lazy while in geek mode than about your own best use of the resources to come to your own conclusions. So you will have to check out the sources for yourself, and see which source/technique makes the most sense for how you like to do things. Please let me know about any new resources or processes you find that I haven’t mentioned here; I am sure there are a number of them, and I would like to add them to the collection.
One of the choices this Friday is Lucy, the latest Luc Besson science fiction film. Scarlett Johansson is kidnapped and has an experimental drug surgically implanted in her, so she can be used to smuggle it somewhere. But when the container bursts inside her it triggers a series of genetic changes that act like accelerated evolution, and as her power grows she takes on those who tried to victimize her. Also this weekend, another version of Hercules, this time based on the graphic novels from Radical Comics and starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson. They both look like excellent choices to me, but before you make up your own mind about which to see you might want to check out Alan Moore’s call for a boycott of the Hercules film. It seems the writer of the comics, Steven Moore (no relation), wasn’t getting any money for the movie and had no creative input, but the company did agree not to put his name on it. Since his death earlier this year they have been promoting it as Steve Moore’s Hercules without paying his estate for using his name to try to increase their profits.
In movies this week Transcendence is a story of the singularity, as the first person to upload themselves becomes in control of the web and everything connected to it. I have not seen this one yet, but as someone who wants to be uploaded I intend to, and hope it does not end too badly. In the realm of Fantasy we have Heaven Is For Real, another movie I haven’t seen and can not comment on.
In TV we have Xena: Warrior Princess – Season Five, and yes, I know this is not the first time this season has been released. But when it was originally put on the shelves it had a list price of $79.95, which means if you shopped around you might be able to find it for $59, or a used copy for $45. The new set of releases list at $26.95 when each first comes out, meaning you can find it for $19 or so, a lot more cost effective choice, and a bit less if you wait about 6 months. The other thing I prefer about the new series of releases is that they are in a single multi-disc case per season, and so take up about a third of the shelf space of the original box set with 4 or 5 normal DVD cases in it. And the rumors of a new series/movie continue, so maybe we will get a bit more of this show to enjoy.
In Anime Appleseed: Alpha is the new prequel to the other series by Masamune Shirow about what it means to be human, and where the borders of your humanity are in a war-torn cyberpunk universe. For those wondering the primary series from the author/artist on the topic is Ghost In The Shell, the title referring to the human/AI mind/spirit encased in whatever combination of organics and machinery your particular cyborg situation has you in. Appleseed is one of the best professional instances of Machinema I know of, rivaled only by the Final Fantasy franchise. And the GITS link is a really good viral site, driving everyone nutz when it first went online; have fun learning your way around it.
The Severing Crime Edge: Complete Collection is a dark fantasy about people who inherit murder weapons from their ancestors, complete with a curse that causes them to re-commit the original murders. But they don’t want to do that, and are fighting their destinies. The other anime this week isn’t exactly genre, but it is pretty amusing, right down to the title: My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU. His student adviser put him into a club that had only one member until he arrived, and the club’s mandate is to help all who come to them solve their problems. Except the problems they are asked to solve are fairly strange, and get stranger as time goes on.
What would Doctor Who have been like if it was done in America? Sam Vestey took a stab at answering that question, using Final Cut Pro X and Adobe After Effects CS5 to build his own little 50th anniversary tribute. I think he did an excellent job on the audio/video production, and made some great choices about which video clips to present for each actor. He was inspired by SmugMode’s photo mashup of The First 8 Doctors and The Modern Doctors.