And it comes down to this…
These came along just a hair too late to take advantage of the holiday gift giving season, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some wonderful selections available.
From the world of Live Action, A Princess of Mars goes into public release. This is a Hi-Jack Movie example, starring Tracie Lords, not to be confused with John Carter of Mars coming out in 2012, even though the first story in ERB’s Mars series was The Princess of Mars.
Also in Live Action, Lesbian Vampire Killers is being released in the US under the shortened name Vampire Killers. The cast includes a former Doctor, Paul McGann, and if you were wondering they kill lesbian vampires, rather than being lesbians who kill vampires (that’s a different movie).
The dark animation of the film 9 puts Shane Acker onto a playground dominated by Tim Burton stories, with rag dolls out to save the world after the apocolyps strikes.
From the Anime choices, the one I have been waiting for is Genshiken 2 volume 3, which completes the third series of The Society For The Study Of Modern Visual Culture. This is the true Otaku Anime series, as the fact that each volume includes an episode of the story the characters are watching on TV tends to tell you. And yes, that means on the Genshiken series disks they had the Kujibiki Unbalance OVA episodes built in as extras to the disks. When they followed that up with the second series, Kujibiki Unbalance (official page HERE, in case you want to grab any extra videos or radio play goodies), the Genshiken OVA was embedded in the extras. I assume the Kujibiki OVA 2 files are embedded in the Gensiken 2 disks (I don’t know, since I haven’t bought them yet), but I was sad to learn there would be no boxed set of the third series.
Season 1, part two of Dragonaut comes out this week. To avoid Earth’s impending destruction from an extinction level event (an asteroid impact from a rock many kilometers along each axis), a Dragon’s Egg has been cloned and grown, the resulting DRAGONs paired up with human pilot astronAUTs. But as with any good plot line, there are complications (it would be boring otherwise), and as I really liked what they did in the first half of the season, I look forward to seeing how this works out.
And then there is Baccano, the Copmplete Series, a truely unique anime with almost as many primary charactors as there are episodes. While it starts out a bit confusing, the various story lines all come together by the end of the series as long as you pay attention. This one is worth the price of admission, and very much worth getting all at once, since you have no time to forget various subplot details while waiting for the next disk to be released.
There is also season 2 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle coming out with this Tuesdays collect of Anime TV series. This one is the companion series for XxxHolic.
FYI, there are a few leaning-to-documentary programs I should mention here, like Time Warp 2, for the Science crowd (of which I am a member). But I won’t.
Disney’s animated feature The Princess and The Frog goes from limited to wide release on the 11th, making it available to people outside of New York and LA.
I haven’t found anything else new worth seeing, but that’s OK; next week Avatar is finally on the big screen!
From December 2nd to the 6th is the Sante Fe Film Festival with a number of interesting movies touring the festival circuit. The one that caught my attention at this one was Mythic Journeys, part animation, part documentary, and all story, starring Tim Curry, Mark Hamill and Lance Henriksen.
Running December 4th to the 17th is the 9th annual Anchorage International Film Festival, and with a tag line of Films worth freezing for you can bet there will be some good ones in the mix. They do have some we have seen at other festivals, like Zombies of Mass Destruction, and some new ones, like Homemade Vigilante, where his super-power is enthusiasm and his qualifications are his cape and comic book collection. Then there is the huge number of animations the have playing in blocks. In their assortment of film making workshops they even include an Animation Workshop 101 for people looking to create their own.
You can’t get much sillier than Gadgets you’ll need to Survive a Zombie Attack; thanks, Crave!
When I see a link from William Gibson on Twitter, I make a point of following it. He has found some of the most interesting things, most of which I was unaware of. This video is a case in point; A musical video clip by Yannick Puig Inspired by the sound track “I lived on the Moon”, of the Kwoon’s album “Tales and Dreams” (description from the creators YouTube page). Another great one is the Norism series of images.
And did I mention the Muppets do Rhapsody?
There are a few interesting movies coming to theaters this week, including one that was delayed some months while they reworked it: The Road. Another post-apocalyptic world is explored, but recent reviews are very mixed; a number of folks think it was better (truer to the book) in its original version. This one is on the screens Wednesday to take advantage of the holiday weekend box office window. Actually, everything else does that as well.
There seems to be a martial arts release with no element of fantasy in it, called Ninja Assassin. Since I have almost never seen one based wholly in reality, I thought I should mention it here anyways, just in case.
Another one that probably doesn’t belong here I have to mention for its 1938 War of the Worlds connection: Me And Orson Wells, a movie about the creation of The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The original 1938 broadcast of WotW electrified the country, because it realistically simulated a broadcast radio emergency program; many people thought a real Martian invasion was taking place. Now that I have said all that, I guess I’m going to have to re-watch another old favorite, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which also has a tie-in to that broadcast.
I do see one other actual fantasy movie for this week, this one suitable for the kids as well:The Princess and the Frog from Disney. This animation is only in the Limited release date, for LA and NY, however; the rest of us have to wait until December 11th to see it.
And here is a trailer from a movie currently in production that is going on my see-in-the-theaters list, Season of the Witch