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Something to Watch: DVDs

You know it is a slow week when the only two American offerings to roll out are Elvira’s Movie Macabre: Giant Monsters, a set of four movies, except none of the stores trying to sell you this package have a clue what any of the four movies are called, and Mysteries at the Museum: Season 2, a documentary series from The Travel Channel. That’s it, nothing else on offer this time around. Guessing the US holiday weekend made a major impact on the release decisions.

From an overseas source but still with a US release we have Needless: The Complete Collection as the new offering, where World War 3 has run its course and the survivors are depending on a pervert superhero to put the planet back together. Meanwhile, Ergo Proxy: The Complete Series gets re-released in a cost effective package, so if you shop around you should be able to grab it for just over $20.

If there is anything else interesting coming out on DVD this week, I haven’t been able to find it. If you have better luck, post a comment and let me know.

Continuum: you can’t see it here

And it is driving me nutz! Continuum is a Sci-Fi time travel cop show series with some incredible actors and production values, filmed in Vancouver and currently running on Showcase. But Showcase is a Canadian channel, and as far as I have been able to determine so far, if you live in the US you do not have a channel you can watch it on, and the web sites that stream it are blocked here as well. I have at least been able to watch the mighty impressive trailer posted below (unless they have yanked that too by now). The show normally runs on Sunday evenings at 9PM EST on Showcase (insert your own boilerplate that means check your local listings here). Last weekend they ran episode 5. This weekend, in honor of Canada Day, they will be running a marathon of those first 5 episodes beginning at 5PM ET Sunday and ending at 10PM. They will repeat that sequence beginning at 11PM, and the moment I find out how to watch it legally in the US I will be posting it here. The second video is from FanExpo Vancouver with some tasty background, and that is about all I have time to type right now… I am figuring an hour to pack the car, and maybe nine to 11 hours drive time to Toronto. If I can get in a 5 hour nap and a run to a local Thai restaurant for takeaway, I should be ready to watch the series so far!

New Looper trailer

Looper is the story of a man who kills time travelers for a living, and then goes back in time to save himself. The same himself who is trying to kill him. This is a new trailer for the movie, you can see the last one in my previous blog entry on the topic. And I still do like the tag line, Hunted By Your Past, Haunted By Your Future. Another fine Bruce Willis sci-fi film.

Barbarella as TV Show

I have a hard time imagining how they could do this justice, unless it was shown on an HBO-equivalent premium channel where running a hard-R program was a good thing. The are looking at making Barbarella as a TV Show according to that article from /Film. Both of the recent attempts to resurrect and re-imagine the original film for the big screen crashed and burned before they began filming. I have no real confidence that the TV version will be created either, but perhaps it might make it to the screen this time. The original report came from Deadline, and the closest anyone has ever come to creating a remake was 2001’s CQ, a very nicely layered film within a film which succeeded on many levels and which I recommend for everyone’s permanent collection.

Something to Watch: DVD’s

We have three interesting movies this week, two of them silly. The serious one is Wrath of the Titans, which I didn’t see in theaters because the first one took itself too seriously, and I didn’t need any more of that. I still don’t. I also didn’t see Mirror, Mirror, not so much because it looked too silly (you can never have too much silly in my book) but because I had to work that weekend. Before I decide whether to add it to the permanent collection I will catch it on streamy or HBO or somewhere equivalent. The third one isn’t genre: David Tennant’s The Decoy Bride was made for two and a half million pounds and earned $524 its opening weekend in the US. In part this was because it only showed up on a single screen that weekend, but even later on it wasn’t in that many theaters. Let’s face it, the only reason I will be watching it is because David is in it, and he made a wonderful Doctor. OK, and the trailer looked like silly fun, too.

Notice how I didn’t even mention Sector 7? Even the Korean audiences didn’t go to that one, a bit of a surprise as his earlier work The Host won such critical acclaim around the world.

No genre TV shows this week, but I will mention Casablanca: The Complete Series if only because it has Scatman Crothers as Sam, and one of the tracks he sings is the theme for the show. And yes, the original 1942 movie is where the phrase Play It Again, Sam came from.

Anime has a brand new release this week. Towanoquon: the Complete Collection tells the story of gifted mutant children born with special powers. Government cyborgs are hunting them down to kill them, while a rebel group with their own powers are saving them to train them to use their gifts to defend themselves. Don’t let the fact that the complete series is only 6 episodes fool you, because each episode is 50 minutes long, giving them a full 300 minutes to tell the story.