On Wednesday we get Victor Frankenstein as told from Igor’s perspective, and The Good Dinosaur, an animated Disney/Pixar presentation. Both films are obviously taking advantage of the holiday weekend to pack in a couple of extra days worth of box office receipts to bolster their opening weekend take, but there are a few good things coming out on Friday as well. Tamasha is a Bollywood/French fantasy tale about two people wandering about an island trying to fit themselves into a society they do not belong to, while Janis: Little Girl Blue is a documentary about Janis Joplin’s rise to stardom traced through her correspondence with her family, friends, and collaborators.
Movies has American Ultra, a wonderfully twisted little spy thriller comedy that everyone should watch at least once. I don’t know anything about Jim Henson’s Turkey Hollow beyond the fact that it is a family friendly fantasy film made for TV and aired on the Lifetime network. But as someone who likes all things Muppet, I am looking forward to checking it out. And since I missed seeing the Shaun the Sheep Movie in the theater I am also anticipating that one.
Anime has Durarara!! x 2, and the second season is every bit as strange and wonderful as the first. Dragonar Academy: The Complete Series is obviously about a school where you learn to command Dragons, but our hot tempered protagonist ends up being paired with a dragon who will do whatever it takes to be the one in command. DRAMAtical Murder is about a sleepy town who’s main passion is an online environment where people battle to the virtual death. Z/X Ignition: Complete Series takes place on an Earth where portals to other worlds have opened up, and the aliens who come storming out of those ports are fighting each other for survival. Being caught in the middle isn’t doing the Earth much good, so it must join the combat.
A rare classic story is being re-released this week: Night on the Galactic Railroad was a fantasy novel written by Kenji Miyazawa around 1927 and was turned into an anime in 1985. It mostly takes place on a steam locomotive that travels between the stars, so may be one of the earliest examples of Steampunk, at least that I am aware of. We also get two more entries in the S.A.V.E. format with EUREKA SEVEN Ao: The Complete Series and Good Luck Girl! – The Complete Series, both worth picking up at their newly reduced price.
Neil Gaiman’s excellent book American Gods is headed for TV, with screenwriter Bryan Fuller of Pushing Daisies fame heavily involved. The book won the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Nebula Award, which is quite a range of recognition for a single novel; I can’t wait to see what they do with the show. It is scheduled to air on Starz in 2017, and while I haven’t found a trailer yet I did find a rather interesting interview with Bryan about both it and the new Amazing Stories show over at Crave. And word is that Neil Gaiman will write some of the episodes for the new series, which puts me solidly on board with the project.
The only real choice this week is the conclusion to its series: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. Hopefully this will live up to the story Suzanne Collins created when she wrote the books. Everyone has seen the trailer by now, so instead I am including a wonderful fan tribute parody theme song.
Several days ago Disney released its first look at Tim Burton’s Alice Through The Looking Glass, the sequel to his Alice in Wonderland from several years ago. It definitely looks like it needs to be seen on the big screen, just like the first one did, and you will be able to do so next May 27th, provided it doesn’t get delayed.
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.