The Rover goes into wide release this week, but as I commented before I will probably pass on that one. That appears to be it for genre this time around, but the film version of the musical Jersey Boys is also coming out. There is one violent but interesting film from South Korea called No Tears for the Dead that looks like the best choice. An abandoned child is raised by an organized crime family to be a cold-hearted killer, but when he accidentally kills an innocent young girl he learns about guilt and remorse. The breaking point is his next assigned job; the mother of the dead girl is now being targeted by his bosses to stop her from causing trouble. But the killer starts to fall in love and wants out of the organization. Interestingly enough, the trailer you will find at that link has mostly English as the spoken language with Korean subtitles. The one place they did slip in Korean dialog did not have English subtitles, hopefully it won’t be like that in the theaters.
The top choice in movies this week is pretty much a matter of what kind of mood you are into. On the one hand you have The Lego Movie, a boatload of cult silliness and geek goodness. It doesn’t actually have more superheroes in one film than any other production, but it begins to approach X-Men like numbers. If you prefer some serious (or at least less silly) live action type indi adventure, The Machine is another tale of our Evil Robot Overlords, or Evil Android Overlord, in this case. It has won a number of film fest awards, including 3 from BAFTA Cymru alone. Bottom line, I think these are both worthy of being in the permanent collection.
There is also a documentary called I Know That Voice all about the voice actors you know from many animated series like Futurama or The Simpsons I think might be quite entertaining. As someone who has taken a turn around the voice actor track myself, this one will absolutely be coming home with me. There are 2 other documentaries worth mentioning: Live from Space from the National Geographic Channel, and Adjust Your Tracking, about folks who collect VHS tapes. I find it interesting you can only get the extended version (20 extra minutes of documentary) on the combo VHS/DVD version; the DVD only version is missing the extra stuff.
I should also mention a re-release of a classic you may not be aware of. 1963’s Judex is a French film re-imagining the 1914 French movie serial of the same name. This was not the creation of Movie Serials (that was the also-French-made 1908 Nick Carter film series), which later became the basis of episodic TV series when they brought them to early TV in the 1940s. Judex may also be the earliest example of Superhero stories in any format, but I have to do some more research before I will know if that is the case or not. The story line, father murdered and ruined by evil banker, son adapts secret identity and hidden lair, gathering an arsenal of technology and a team of circus performers and criminals with special talents as his minions, has been redone many times since. It was the inspiration for things as diverse as Batman, Spiderman, and The Shadow from the US and a ton of others from Europe and Asia, including K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces. In fact, in 1940 the French publication Hurrah! started a comic book version of Judex, which was really a French translation of the American syndicated Shadow comic strip; so the inspiration came full circle.
In TV Teen Wolf: Season 3 Part 2 finishes off the season 3 story, and it looks like the best project MTV has been involved with for a while. If nothing else, it up-levels everything from season 2, where they didn’t seem to be really trying.
In Anime, Busou Shinki is a harem story, where the girls are female action figures with weapons… who happen to stand 6 inches tall each. Not exactly conducive to a rich social life if the male in question happens to be multiple feet in height. The other series this time around is Shiki, a horror story that now available in a S.A.V.E. version for a real good price. This one is also a commentary on the genre itself, showing off those tropes that that draw in the audience, and making every viewer pay attention and appreciate what is going on. I am not a horror fan, but this one was worth watching.
One show I have been waiting for is Red Data Girl: Complete Series, which is an absolutely brilliant TV program. A girl is raised in isolation in a shrine, and has trouble fitting in when she is finally allowed into a public school. It doesn’t help any that computers, cell phones, and other modern electronics all crash when she comes near them. Then she finds out she is the last vessel of the goddess Himegami, and that is when things start to get truly strange.
There are a number of shows I am enjoying this season, although because of time constraints there are only 3 I have been keeping up with each week. If you are a Premium Crunchyroll member, you can watch any of these and a double dozen more an hour after they air in Tokyo. If you are not, you can watch them for free starting one week later. The current season is at episode 9 as I write this, the Summer season starts around the first week in July.
Brynhildr in the Darkness: 10 years ago Murakami lost a girl he was infatuated with in a lethal accident while trying to get a glimpse of aliens. As he heals from the accident he vows to find the aliens in her memory, which means years later he is running the Astronomy Club, searching the skies. Now she seems to suddenly turn up at his school again, revived from the dead and turned into a human weapon, but she doesn’t remember anything earlier than a decade back. She is not the only one to escape from the lab that upgraded her combat capability, and the military is out to kill all the escapees before they can reveal their secrets to the world.
Nanana’s Buried Treasure: In life, Nanana started the Adventure Club, and ran around the world collecting powerful artifacts, Indiana Jones style. She and the other club members used the proceeds to create an artificial island, where they built a city and hid the treasures. Then she was murdered in her room, and haunts it to this day, unable to rest until her killer is captured. The young man who gets tricked into renting that room for a year doesn’t have enough money left to live anywhere else when he finds it comes with a ghost. His only option is to try to bring her killer to justice, and since the killer was trying to get the treasures, that’s what he will have to do to track him down. There are a LOT of potential suspects.
No Game No Life: Genius gamer siblings Sora and Shiro are both NEETs and Hikikomori, and absolutely unbeatable in the online gaming world. One day they are contacted by a kid who is a god of a different world, where games decide the outcome of everyone’s lives and the ten commandments are gaming rules. There are 16 races in this world, and the humans are on the verge of being wiped out by the others, unless the siblings can win them back a chance to survive.
This short film from Patrick Kalyn looks like a trailer rather than a short, giving me the impression I will see it posted to Kickstarter, looking to be funded into a full feature film. I would consider contributing if it was, because I like what I see so far. I also think he did a nice job with his PSA and the viral design web site Don’t Do Mech attached to it. Considering he is a Visual Effects guy who’s credits include Avatar, District 9, X-Men: The Last Stand, Jumper, Dead Like Me, and King Kong, plus being writer/director on 4 projects including Mech, I think he has a shot at making something interesting. Thanks to SF Signal for the heads up on this one.
MECH: HUMAN TRIALS from Patrick Kalyn on Vimeo.
The show The Musketeers is coming to BBC America, and even though they are not exactly French (let’s face it, in most Musketeers variations, the British were the enemy even worse than the French king or Cardinal Richelieu himself!), this looks like it might be very good fun indeed. And I do like the Tag Line: 17th Century Paris, where Law And Order is more an idea than a reality. The show kicks off on June 22nd, and I intend to be there to check it out. Let’s face it, Alexandre Dumas was a genius with a unique place in time and a wonderful understanding of the human heart. I can’t wait to see which direction this newest variant on his story goes in.
This week we get How to Train Your Dragon 2, the animated fantasy sequel. I enjoyed the original Dreamworks production and the first season of the TV show. I felt season 2 of the show had gone a bit down hill, losing touch with the stories original values in honor of getting a bigger audience share by emphasizing the adventure aspects. I am hoping that the second movie takes us back to the kind of heart and character expressed in the first one. If you are in the mood for something more serious, The Signal may or may not be an alien invasion story that some folks have compared to District 9 for originality when it was on the film festival circuit. Other folks have been less positive, but I do like the trailer, and it got nominations at Sundance, so I may just check it out. I will not be attending The Rover, partly because it is in limited release this week, but mostly because the description reads like yet another Mad Max wannabe, and I have already seen my quota of Australian post apocalypse movies. It may be better than I think it is, because it got nominated for Best Film in Cannes; and it goes into wide release next week, so anyone who is interested can catch it then.