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.
The primary selection this week is Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, based on the second book in James Dashner’s Maze Runner YA series. There are 5 books so far, so if it does well enough at the box office there may be three more films coming. For those wondering, I linked to the Japanese page for the movie because the US site set off my Site Adviser with warnings about aggressive linking. For those who were hoping for something sillier this weekend also brings us Cooties, in which a virus turns the elementary school kids into killer zombies. The teachers, led by Elijah Wood, have the fight of their lives trying to escape while three of them have an ongoing verbal battle trying to resolve their love triangle. I think I might go for silly this time around.
If you haven’t checked them out before, the folks at Humble Bundle are worth a look. They come up with various bundles of items and offer them on a pay what you want basis, then split the proceeds between the content creators and one or more charities chosen by that creator (if it is more than one charity, you can direct them to apply your money to just one of them, or give a specific percentage to each of them). If you pay more than a fairly low average payment, that unlocks some additional goodies in the same collection while increasing your total charitable contribution. As each bundle hits various total target amounts contributed, additional swag is added to the bundle, pretty much the same reward system used by Kickstarter, where both your individual contributions and the total group contributions up the ante on the deal.
Most often but not always the stuff Humble Bundle has on offer are games, books, and audio dramas. They have a couple of good ones this week, with their Books choice being Neil Gaiman Rarities. Besides his very first published story, it also has one of his Babylon 5 screenplays and a boatload of other rare tales and collections. As you noticed if you took the first link I posted here, the main package this week is about $200 of Tom Clancy classic games, while the Weekly Bundle and Mobile Bundle each have a selection of games as well. Every few days something gets added, or a selection changes, so you want to check back often. As for me, I am going to grab the Neil Gaiman bundle this week, going high enough over the base amount to both maximize my charitable contribution and make sure I get all the extra stuff as each target is reached. This is my kind of win-win, and they keep doing it, over and over.
Yes, I know that recently I have been using Friday’s to post about things you can watch streaming online, and I will be getting back to that next week. But I just found the new trailer for The Fifth Wave, so I had to post it. Based on the best selling trilogy by author Rick Yancey, it will be hitting the big screen in 2016.
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.
If you have ever read the books from R.L. Stine’s series Goosebumps, you already know why you have to see this movie. For those of you that haven’t read the books or short stories, here is the Goosebumps Movie trailer (Not to be confused with the TV Show from the late 90s).