The one everybody knows about this week is Mad Max: Fury Road, yet another entry into the Mad Max apocalyptic franchise that began back in the late 70s. Like all the other films in this series, this one takes place in a desert, which Australia has a lot of. The filming location this time was the Namib Desert in Namibia, so I guess they decided the Australian deserts they did the first few films in just weren’t post-apocalyptic enough. Fewer people know about Time Lapse, a movie which has been racking up the awards on the Film Festival circuit for the last year, and is finally making it to some regular theaters. As near as I can figure it, this is a modern retelling of the 1960 Twilight Zone episode A Most Unusual Camera, where a camera that takes pictures of the future makes life in the present much more complicated (and possibly much shorter) then it would have otherwise been.
In movies, The Cobbler is a story about a shoe repair man working in the same shop his family has run for generations who is granted the ability to live his customers lives by walking in their shoes… literally. The premise has a lot of potential, but the critics paned the movie brutally, and is is coming out on disc only a month after it was in the theaters for very little money, not a very promising sign. These Final Hours is a film about the last 12 hours before a meteor wipes out all life on Earth; but even though its theatrical run was limited to a handful of screens in Australia, it has received acclaim from the critics and a 78% rating from Rotten Tomatoes. While not genre, Blackhat does star Thor’s Chris Hemsworth, but that may be about all that can really be said for it. In western animation we get Batman Unlimited: Animal Instincts, a new Batman vs. Penguin story.
In Anime, Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse, Collection 2 the fight to save humanity from alien invaders continues, but mankind may be its own worst threat. The leaders of several nations are willing to sabotage each other in an attempt to gain power, allowing the invaders to conquer still more of the planet. The Familiar of Zero: “Rondo” of Princesses brings season 3 of Louise the Zero and her magical misadventures with her human familiar and newly undead husband Saito. Finally, Michiko & Hatchin is having the complete series released in a S.A.V.E. edition, meaning you can now pick it up for somewhere in the neighborhood of $20.
Yet another Netflix exclusive TV series, this one was put together by The Wachowskis (The Matrix and Cloud Atlas) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5 and World War Z), a couple of my favorite Sci-Fi creators. As usual with Netflix originals, on June 5th you don’t just get the first episode, you get the entire first season. I worked very hard to ration myself for the Daredevil series, to not just binge watch it in a single weekend. I can already tell I am going to have the same fight with this show.
Possibly one of the best parody videos I have seen anytime recently, Kung Fu Avengers: Civil War would have become a cult classic if it had been made in China sometime in the late 70s or early 80s. It tends to make you wonder what other gems you might be able to create on your own, doesn’t it?
This week Infini will be showing up on a limited number of screens around the country. An elite search and rescue team hit an off-world mining site to rescue the lone survivor of a man made plague.
I didn’t find any genre movies or TV shows this time, but there are still a few worth mentioning. Spare Parts is a true story of the four undocumented Mexican-American high school students who went head to head with the team from MIT in the National Underwater Robotics Competition, using robots made from spare parts. The TV series Halt and Catch Fire: The Complete First Season takes place the year after IBM came out with the Personal PC, with a fictional company comprised of renegade engineers reverse engineering it and improving on it, as the computer race got off the ground. While the characters are fictional, the engineering issues they face and the solutions they come up with for them are the very ones the entire industry was working on at the time. The personality mix of the engineers will look very familiar to anyone involved with any cutting edge engineering project; thinking outside the box and radical innovation are not done by ordinary engineers, but by the exceptional. Masters of Sex: Season 2 is also a story about real-life cutting edge science which actually took place in the past, as doctors Masters and Johnson did the research that would change our understanding of the most basic aspect of human nature.
In Anime Natsume’s Book of Friends: Season 4 follows our protagonist as he continues to give the yokai their names back. He is learning how to deal with the yokai and humans that surround his life and now must learn about himself as well. The World God Only Knows: OVA Collection finds the girls forming an Idol band among other wacky goings-on, now that Keima has become something of a wizard. I should also mention that the classic Patlabor: The Movie, previously available only in SD, is coming out on Blue Ray this week.