If you thought movies made from games had gotten silly enough, well, perhaps now they have.
Oh, wait, you didn’t think that was a real movie, did you?
This week Snow White and the Huntsman is a much darker tale and closer to the original than the recent Mirror, Mirror comedy. With Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, and Chris Hemsworth anchoring the cast and some equally interesting choices on the production side, this one has the potential to be quite good indeed.
For movies, The Woman in Black is a bit of a ghost story, and the made for TV version of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island is from the Syfy Channel. I am not terribly impressed by either, but I will at least watch the Verne story when it comes out on the streaming services.
We fare much better in TV, with True Blood: The Complete Fourth Season finally coming out on DVD. This is one of the few series that I think does much better in the TV incarnation than as a book series, with more believable characters and better stories and subplots all around. I have a friend who believes the books are far superior, and we generally argue with each other about for about an hour at a time, each of us bringing overwhelming examples of why our viewpoint is the correct one. We always seem to end up underwhelmed with the others debate points somehow, but it does lead to some pretty lively discussions which we both quite enjoy.
In western animation we have Wing Commander Academy: The Complete Series from 1996. It only lasted one season at 13 episodes, but the voice talent included Mark Hamill as Maverick and Malcolm McDowell as the commander.
Anime starts off this time with Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker, which is a feature length film set in the world of Dragon Age. If you are a fan of the franchise, you will not want to miss this one. There is another feature film called Gintama: The Movie, taking place in a historic Japan where aliens have taken over and Samuria have to run odd jobs to feed themselves. This whole series is quite funny, I am looking forward to seeing what kind of trouble they put the protagonists through this time.
In series, Shiki: Part 1 and Part 2 are being released as two box sets, but on the same day. This one is a bit of a thriller/horror story, and also a commentary on the genre and the folks that like to watch that kind of thing. People in the village are dieing at a rapid rate, but when the dead rise from their graves to drink the blood of the living the desire to survive can turn the living into some real monsters.
The other recent series is KenIchi the Mightiest Disciple – The Complete Second Season, previously released in 2 parts for the season, so this is more cost effective. Some folks have referred to this series as Anime’s answer to The Karate Kid, but it has a bit more fan service than that. Finally, Black Cat – The Complete Collection has been released in a S.A.V.E. edition, so if you shop around you can pick it up for around $20.
Until midnight Sunday night central time there are some great anime titles streaming for free over at The Anime Network. Some of them give you a choice between Subbed and Dubbed, myself I prefer subbed, so I can hear the original actors emotional inflections. I have had some problems viewing some of these, where an hour and a half film ends 30 minutes into it, but I am not sure that isn’t a problem with my browser, rather than at the server end.
Some of these are recent productions, like Loups=Garous, where the members of J-Rock sweethearts Scandal are both the protagonists and laying down the killer soundtrack, while trying to break free of their imprisoning environment and track down the killer before they all die. Another recent choice is Five Numbers, a rather twisty locked room mystery that they need to solve to escape their fate. Asylum Session, ICE, Coicent, and Coffee Samurai round out the more recent productions, and every one of them is worth watching.
Some of these are classics, such as Appleseed, where the surviving members of humanity are equally divided between cyborgs and meatbags, or RahXephon The Motion Picture, a Giant Mecha Defends Against Alien Invasion story where music is the weapon set. The remaining classics go straight to the heart: Grave of the Fireflies and The Place Promised in Our Early Days are true masterpieces that would have won every award on the planet if they had been live action, and won awards enough for their anime versions.
If there is a single one of these you have missed, this is your limited opportunity to see it for free. If you haven’t seen any of them, you are in for a serious treat, and I recommend nuking the popcorn and settling in for a marathon. I would start with The Place Promised, and then alternate between the new and the classics until you have watched them all. It will be time well spent.
This week we get the long-awaited Men In Black 3 for more sci-fi comedy fun. And this time around we get a bit of time travel to fix the world with, and I am definitely looking forward to it; I am thinking the 3D IMAX version may be the way to go.
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.