A few highlights from SIGGRAPH Asia 2017, and an invitation to make the 2018 gathering. If you are into creating your own animations, or you like doing 3D modelling, you really don’t want to miss this event.
There hasn’t been anything worth mentioning for a while, but this week there are a couple of good choices. Top of the list is Marvel’s Black Panther, possible the only Marvel superhero to address the U.N. periodically as part of his day job. As near as I can recall, anyone else that went before the U.N. did it as part of their superhero persona, or worked for a U.N. agency. Also this week, Early Man from Aardman is a comedy about the Stone Age getting overrun by the Bronze Age, with all the highly detailed stop motion animation they made famous with Wallace & Gromit.
There are a number of choices this weekend, but top of the list in my mind is Pixar’s Coco, which just looks like too much fun to miss. It actually starts playing on Wednesday, to take advantage of the long holiday weekend. John Cusack’s new film Singularity could be interesting, but the trailer makes me think I have already seen this movie through a few dozen earlier iterations. I will have to see the documentary Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars, but I don’t think it requires the big screen to make it worthwhile, so I will catch it when it streams. Firangi on the other hand may need the larger venue, so I might have to check that one out this weekend as well.
Topping the list, Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets was an instant classic that didn’t do well in the US, since almost no one here was familiar with the French comic it was based on. We get another French film this week as well in the form of the animation Leap!, original title Ballerina. Birth of the Dragon is also out this week, and while it isn’t genre, The Hitman’s Bodyguard looks like a fun film. The Korean action-thriller The Villainess also hits the shelves this time around, if you haven’t seen it, now is your chance. TV brings us a couple of comedy favorites in the form of The Librarians, Season 3 and Red Dwarf: XII
I missed seeing it in the theaters, and it hasn’t been streaming anywhere that I could find (not even on Funimation who have the North American rights), but now it is finally available on Disc: Your Name. Featuring music by the Radwimps, it pretty much broke every theater record in Japan, and won multiple awards. Another winner this week is Westworld: The Complete First Season, an excellent reboot of the original franchise. You can stream at least some of the episodes at that SYFY link, if you haven’t seen it yet you should check it out. Project Itoh: Genocidal Organ is the latest Sci-Fi story in the Project Itoh series, dealing with some fairly current topics. Taken together, the series of feature films covers about 150 years of a parallel history, like yet unlike our own. Finally there is Trollhunters: Season One, with Season 2 available to stream beginning on December 15th.
The winner this time is Spider-Man: Homecoming, pretty much my favorite iteration of Peter Parker on the big screen so far. As you can tell by the link, Sony hasn’t given the character up, just lent him to the core franchise in return for pulling some of that core franchise audience into their version of the MCU. American Gods season 1 gets my vote for best TV show getting released this week, it is amazing. God of War looks like it should be the best bet out of this week’s Asian films, but somehow they seemed to have allowed the premise of Samurai Pirates to fall through their fingers. I do have to mention Ernie Kovacs: Take a Good Look, the DVD collection featuring one of the most bizarre game shows ever to air on Television. It ran from 1959 to 1961, and even the game show panelists didn’t understand what was going on. Samurai Jack: Season 5 and Samurai Jack: The Complete Series both come out this week, finishing off an excellent but also truly strange TV run. There don’t seem to be any new Anime releases this week, perhaps next time.