There are several good choices this time, starting with Suicide Squad, which I have more hope for now that they retooled it somewhat to add more humor. DC saw the box office Deadpool pulled and figured they would give it a shot, I am hoping this makes it a bit more fun than their entirely dark take from the recent Superman/Batman outing. If you are looking for something lighter and more family friendly, the classic tale The Little Prince is brought to life in an animation format for the first time, and it looks excellent. Finally the fantasy Nine Lives is about a business man who gets trapped in the body of his cat. I ordinarily wouldn’t even consider this one, but it has Kevin Spacey and Christopher Walken, so it could be good.
Tesla Noir, French Animated Steampunk, and turning people into animals against their will; this is an interesting week for disc releases. April and the Extraordinary World is French animated Steampunk at its finest, and I can’t wait to see it. The Lobster is already coming out on disc, even though it is still in its limited run of theaters. If you don’t partner up and couple down by a certain age, you are transmogrified into an animal and turned loose in the wild to fend for yourself. The American Side has the protagonist drawn into a race to find a secret device designed by Tesla with unknown powers and potential, hidden somewhere near the power plant that Tesla also designed, but which was built by his adversary Edison at Niagara Falls. There is also another DC animated release, Batman: The Killing Joke, which might have been better if they hadn’t brought it to the screen.
In Anime, Gundam Build Fighters: Complete Collection looks like a good choice, as does The Rolling Girls: The Complete Series, kind of a superhero road trip. Plus World Break: Aria of Curse for a Holy Swordsman is the complete series in one box, about reincarnated warriors going to school together, and Jormungand looks at illegal arms dealers out to save the world. For once I haven’t seen a single one of these, so I am going to flip a coin and start streaming the winner.
We have 5 movies to choose from this time around, 2 of which will be playing everywhere, the last 3 will be more limited. Nerve is not only first out of the gate with a release on Wednesday the 27th, but it also has a Pokemon Go tie in, I guess because the edge-of-your-seat story line just wasn’t enough. Jason Bourne is the other out-everywhere title, and like most spy books/movies it includes science fiction elements in its plot, premise, or gadgets, if you were wondering why I count them as genre.
In more limited release we get Monkey King: Hero Is Back, an animated fantasy starring Jackie Chan as the Monkey King. The last Monkey King movie Jackie Chan was in was the live action Forbidden Kingdom, and Jet Li got to play the famous demigod in that one. Both movies include the Monkey King’s release after 500 years from his prison of ice, a rather pivotal moment in his legend. League of Gods is based on the 16th-century Chinese novel Feng Shen Yan Yi, in which King Zhou becomes evil after a spirit disguised as one of his concubines twists his mind around. And finally the description of Dishoom sounds like a fantasy adventure premise to me: John and Varun go on a suicidal mission to rescue Jaqcueline, the princess, from her evil fiancé. Everybody’s already seen the trailers for the first two movies, here are the ones for the other three.
Monkey King: Hero Is Back – Official Trailer from Viva Pictures Distribution, LLC on Vimeo.
There are several good choices this week, with the first being Star Trek Beyond. Have no doubt, I will be in the audience for that one, probably paying the extra for the 3D IMAX variant. For those needing a serious influx of silly, Ice Age: Collision Course also includes a spaceship, although it may bounce of more planets than the Enterprise does.
There are a number of good choices this week, starting with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC’s first group superhero outing. For a more mundane conflict, the Thai/Hong Kong film Kill Zone 2 is about an undercover cop and the crime boss he is trying to bring down. If you are looking for something noticeably lighter with a positive attitude, Underdogs may be the animated feature film for you (yes, this is a re-release of the 2013 feature animation, but so few people in the US know about it I thought it was worth mentioning again). There is also an interesting documentary: Outatime is the story about how a group of fans teamed up with a movie executive to save the most famous DeLorean ever, the one from Back To The Future. There are even a couple of Music oriented docudramas in the form of Miles Ahead and Elvis & Nixon. If there were regular TV genre releases this week they slipped right past me.
Anime brings Yona of the Dawn: Part 2, with the princess chasing the dragons and preparing to take her country back by force. This is an enjoyable series that throws a few anime tropes on their heads while fully embracing others, and overall I like it. A Certain Magical Index II: Complete Collection brings another 24 episodes of science based magic excitement onto the small screen, with an encoded grimoire containing catastrophic magic stolen by persons unknown, and the Science Society restarting a program to create a generation of people with a range of psychic abilities (see A Certain Scientific Railgun for the details of how that is going).
Plastic Memories Volume 1 is a beautiful trans-species love story about a human and android, but at $10 per 23 minute episode for the first half of the story, it is way overpriced; I will enjoy it on streamy until someone puts it out more reasonably. Likewise, Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie – Part 1: Beginnings / Part 2: Eternal, the first two feature films of the franchise, will require you to pay $1 for every 3.5 minutes that you watch (and that’s at the discounted off of list price), but that is at least a bit better than the previous title.
On the flip side of that coin, Fractale – The Complete Series and Kamisama Kiss: Season 1 are both coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, so they will be more cost effective than ever to add to your collection.
Toho is releasing GANTZ:O on October 14th, at least in Japan. It is a 3D modeled CGI presentation, as opposed to the original 2d hand drawn (at least the key frames) animation, and the more recent live action version only used 3D CGI for the special effects and aliens. This one is also a feature film based on the Manga, like the live action films, where the 2D animation was a series that spanned half a year.