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Something to Watch: Discs

Movies have no genre this week, but they do have the latest in Jackie Chan’s breakout drama series Police Story: Lockdown. Police Captain Zhong Wen is seeing his daughter for the first time in many years, and meeting her fiance in his nightclub. But the fiance has plans to take her, him, and the entire club hostage; plans which the Police Captain has to defeat if he wants to save his family. The original 1985 film Police Story was the movie that went beyond anything his comedy’s had done, making him a major star once and for all. The Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection has some excellent animated short features, including Frozen Fever and Tangled Ever After. They have been previously released as extras on various Disney feature film blue rays, but this is the first time that a number of them have been compiled together.

TV brings us Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, based on Susanna Clarke’s award-winning novel of the same name. The battle between these two magicians over who was the more powerful was fought while the Napoleonic Wars raged around them.

In Anime, Captain Earth: Collection 2 has things looking grim for Earth’s defenders. The Planetary Gear’s direct attacks have been beaten off so far, but the numbers against them slowly get worse as the enemy strips off various layers of their defenses and allies. Kawai Complex Guide to Manors & Hostel Behavior may be a slice-of-life type Anime rather than Sci-Fi or Fantasy, but it has a ton of humor built in and is quite entertaining in its own way.

Then there are a few re-releases; the Kite Collection tells you the whole story about this pint-sized assassin, and just how bleak her situation is, while Basilisk: The Complete Series give detailed information about the rivalry between the Ninja clans who saw to the end of the Samurai era.

Something to Do: Movies

August has some movie releases I have been waiting for, and this week we get Marvel’s reboot of the Fantastic Four. This is the origin story, where Reed Richards and company enter an alternate universe which changes them in ways they never anticipated. They are also bringing Victor Von Doom to the big screen with this one, and I have hopes that this release will rekindle the franchise. The series was always a favorite of mine because scientists were the superheros rather than the villains.

It isn’t the only choice this week as we also get the animated silliness of the Shaun the Sheep Movie. Built by the same Claymation specialists who bring us Wallace and Grommet, the stories are always packed with a lot of visual humor and very little in the way of dialog. Frankly, you don’t need words when you can tell a story with images this well, and I have to think that boosts their profit margin tremendously with international distribution. To translate the spoken part of one of these can’t take more than 3 people in the studio for one afternoon to lay down the recording, and maybe 10 hours of editing, mostly to mix the voices with the music and sound effects.

There is another animation also worth looking into this weekend for entirely different reasons; Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. This is a group project, with many award winning animators and animation directors from around the world contributing different “chapters”, and some world class actors doing the voice overs. It has already won a number of awards on the Festival circuit including Cannes, and sadly like most truly independent movies it isn’t going to be in a lot of theaters; only New York and LA this weekend, and while it will be hitting around 40 cities in North America during the following weeks, it generally is in a single theater per city. I have already posted trailers for the first two films (scroll down and back through my blog, they are obvious), now here is one for this wonderful creation.

Something to Watch: Discs

This week we get the award winning White God, a movie about dogs in organized revolution, which shares an attitude with the recent reboot of Planet of the Apes. It is unusual and has a lot of critical acclaim, and while it is in Hungarian it has English subtitles, so you won’t have any problem following the story. The other film is the animated Justice League: Gods & Monsters, from an alternate universe where Zod is Superman’s father, Batman is a Vampire, and Wonder Woman is the daughter of Ares, God of War. For a western animation, this one is rather dark.

TV has Helix: Season 2, a show that may have been vying with Lost for the Serious Weirdness in Television Award. We also get the Disney made-for-TV film Descendants, a comedy/fantasy involving the children of Cruella De Vil, Maleficent, the Evil Queen, and Jafar. It doesn’t come out on Tuesday, though, but goes on sale Friday the 31st, the same day it airs on the Disney Channel.

In Anime, Windy Tales is about a teacher who knows how to control the wind, and the students who learn everything from Air to Zephyr from them. While the show came out in 2004, I can find no reference to previous North American releases. No Game, No Life is about a couple of Neets who’s only connection with the world at large is through online gaming. They are good enough at that to end up representing humanity in a game that will determine the fate of the world, even though they can barely function enough to leave their home. Naruto Shippūden: Uncut Set 23 takes place during the 4th Great Ninja War, and finds the allies fighting against reanimated friends and enemies. This set brings episodes 284 through 295 home, while I believe they are up to episode 419 in Japan. Galilei Donna is about three dissimilar sisters who suddenly find themselves with one thing in common; an attempted kidnapping on the same day. It turns out they are descendents of Galileo Galilei, who left behind a treasure that the sky pirates are determined to have.

009 Re: Cyborg reactivates a group of cyborgs to try to save the world from a threat stranger than human. Speaking of strange, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Season 1 is an action adventure comedy series that is downright silly at times, but still has some serious moments. Inari Kon Kon has a girl given the power to shape shift after she saves the life of a familiar to a goddess. Finally, Recently, my sister is unusual finds Mitsuki haunted by a ghost who she must help pass on to the next world.

Something to Watch: Discs

Movies brings us What We Do in the Shadows, a horror comedy that has been winning awards all over the film festival circuit. A documentary crew follows around four vampire roommates as they make their nightly rounds of harassing werewolves, cruising clubs, and fighting about household chores. Kung Fu Killer starts Donnie Yen as an imprisoned martial arts master who is released by the police so he can stop someone who is going around beating martial arts masters to death. That counts as fantasy in my book so I’m posting it here. I didn’t see much in the way of genre TV shows this time, except in Anime.

In Anime, Blazblue: Alter Memory – Season One has the game characters come to life, with Ragna using a combination of magic and technology to battle it out with the Librarium to decide the future of mankind. Guardian Ninja Mamoru is about a family of Ninjas that has been protecting another family for the last 400 years. The current generation of both families are now in high school together, and things are getting exciting. Soul Eater Not! continues the story of the living weapons and their wielders with the new generation getting trained for supernatural combat. The gang from the previous series is around as well, and it is just as filled with outrageous comedy as the original.

TO – Elliptical Orbit & Symbiotic Planet is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you can pick up both award winning short features for a really good price. There are also a few re-releases worth grabbing if you missed them the first time around, including Mamoru Oshii’s classic Patlabor 2: The Movie and Persona 4 the Golden Animation.

Kung Fu Panda 3 trailer

in 2016 we get to return to the world of KUNG FU PANDA with the third animated adventure. In this one, we learn a bit more about Po’s history, and get to meet his long lost father. And then we get to watch him bust his chops to train all of his new found relatives into defending themselves, their friends, and their way of life. This will NOT be his easiest adventure!

Something to Do: Movies

There is no doubt that the winner this week is Minions, and finally we get to see the back story of the real stars of the series. Not that Gru and the girls aren’t amazing in their own right, but the little yellow guys are really at the core of the whole thing. It may be the best option this weekend (at least for those of us addicted to the terminally silly), but it isn’t our only one. The other choice is Self/less, about an old guy who wants to live forever. So he has his consciousness transferred into a younger body, without first doing his due diligence to determine what baggage that body brings along with it. That oversight leads to things he never suspected would be brought into the mix, and now his ability to survive the experience is at risk, along with his chances to create a new life; not the same thing at all, but certainly related.