The choice this week is Spectre, the latest in the James Bond series, and perhaps the last that Daniel Craig will be Bond for. I appreciate the whole Day Of The Dead tie in, considering the timing. There are also a couple of other good choices, including The Peanuts Movie for classic animation fans, and Macbeth for straight-up classic fans. Myself, I will probably be making the Bond selection; I loved the Ian Flemming books, so I should support the films made from them.
Aniplex has confirmed that the Sword Art Online Movie project is going forward, with a brand new story from Reki Kawahara. It looks like this will push back the release of Season 3 to 2016, which is also when the film comes out. The movie and season 3 will have completely different stories, but be created by the same production team.
Two movies in different genres but with a link between the protagonists this week; Pan is the latest reiteration of the Peter Pan classic story, giving it a Prequel spin, showing how it got to the beginning of the event sequence we all know and love. Steve Jobs tells the tale of another who refused to grow up and give up his dreams, but instead dragged the entire world with him into the future his imagination created. If I only have time to see one of them this weekend I am going to have to flip a coin, because I really feel the need to see both. Of course, I may just go off the deep end, and opt for Yakuza Apocalypse instead, and enjoy watching a Tokyo Vampire Crime Lord go bats all over the Cityscape.
On October 10th Library Wars: The Last Mission hits the big screen in Tokyo. This time the Armed Librarians are guarding the one-of-a-kind “library law handbook” on display at a special exhibition. What they don’t know is this is a trap meant to overthrow the Library Defense Force and possibly wipe them out. This is the third presentation in this series of live action projects based on Hiro Arikawa’s series of Library Wars light novels, but besides the award winning books, this has also been a Manga, Anime series, and Live Action TV series. For the live action movies they started in 2013 with the film Library Wars, which will be airing on TBS (Tokyo Broadcast System; the same folks who came up with the Ninja Warrior and American Ninja Warrior game shows) on Sunday the 4th. A made-for-Television second live action film, Library Wars: Book Of Memories will be airing on Monday, October 5th, and the new movie itself follows that Saturday in Theaters. The author also got to write the Manga and the screenplays for the movies, so her romance and comedy made it into the films as well as the action. Thanks to the team at Tokyo Pop for the heads up on this one.
They released The Divergent Series: Allegiant trailer the other week, and it looks quite good. There is a less-than-trivial chance they will close the story with a typical Hollywood ending rather than the original one from the book series, but that might not be a bad thing (at least for folks who were as unhappy with the books ending as I was; it was powerful, but it wasn’t what I wanted to see happen). And like many book projects converted to film before them, they split the last book into two movies. The claim is always that they had to in order to tell the whole story, and the suspicion is always that they were overwhelmed by the need to milk their cash cow just one more time before they had to let it go. It is only after you see the final film that you find out which one it is, but considering how much richer in detail, backstories, and subplots most books are than the movies made from them, it takes a less than competent film production effort to create an inferior result. I look forward to finding out which side of that coin this series ends up on.
CGI is getting downright amazing as this trailer for Disney’s new The Jungle Book proves. The film will be hitting the big screens on April 15th, 2016, and as you can see from the trailer it does a great job of blending live action footage of the man cub with computer created animals to bring Rudyard Kipling’s classic story to life.