Alice Through the Looking Glass will be on the big screen on May 27th, but while you are waiting, here are a few things to watch…
There isn’t much out this week. In Movies Steve Jobs hits the shelves, and will hopefully recover some of the money it lost in the theaters. It was a bit too cerebral for audiences raised on a diet of explosions, car chases, and sex scenes, and it didn’t have a mega-star playing the title role, so it never got the traction it deserved on the big screen. I didn’t see anything for western TV, which makes me think I may be missing something.
Anime has Space Brothers 7 with episodes 76 through 87; there should just be one more collection to finish the tale of the sibling astronauts. Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 2Wei! has Illya going head to head against her evil magical clone in a 10 episode series that follows up the previous season. Finally, Bleach Movies: The Unforgiven Double Feature are the 3rd and 4th Bleach movies, packaged together and released at a discount.
I absolutely can’t wait for Zootopia to arrive, it looks amazing. This particular Sloth-centric sequence is made all the more intense by the fact that the police officer looking for results is a bunny. There is something of a difference in the way each of these mammals binds time to their world view, after all. This animation makes extensive use of facial puppeteering to create the various characters personalities, which makes me believe it is a discipline I should be learning.
The primary option this week is Deadpool, a unique anti-hero in the Marvel pantheon. I will definitely be in the theater for that one, but that isn’t to say it is the only option. There are two music inspired films as well, Bigger Than the Beatles being about the Beach Boys and songwriter Charlie Manson, and Punk’s Dead: SLC Punk 2. I don’t think either of those are in too many theaters, and the only web site I could find for the first one had been hacked and taken over by a fashion blogger, so I am sticking with the Marvel offering this time around.
Freaks of Nature has a strange premise: Zombies, Vampires, and Humans all live in harmony, until Aliens invade the Earth. The cast includes Patton Oswalt and Joan Cusack, which is enough to convince me I need to see this Comedy/Horror. I should probably also mention Spectre, Daniel Craig’s last turn as James Bond, which didn’t do that well with the critics, but might still be worth watching. The Horror film Crimson Peak didn’t have a lick of comedy in it that I heard about, so I will be passing on that one. If there was any genre TV this week it snuck right past me with nary a ripple.
In Anime, Shirobako 1 is the rather recursive tale of 5 women who work for an Anime company, and according to the reports it is a fairly accurate depiction of the industry. This is the first half of the series, with the second coming along in May. Likewise Akame ga Kill: Collection 1 is the first half of its series, with a group of renegade assassins out to bring down the corrupt empire which bought and trained them. Finally, Lord Marksman and Vanadis: The Complete Series tells of two enemies who must work together to save a nation from destruction.
This short CG film Ascension has won multiple awards and certainly made me smile when I watched it. As so many of these are, this is a graduation movie, meaning it was built to prove they deserved the degree or certification offered by their school, the same way you do it to get a degree for film school. The school in this case was the Supinfocom Arles in France (if you don’t speak French they have an English version of the site), and the students who created this are Thomas Bourdis, Martin de Coudenhove, Caroline Domergue, Colin Laubry and Florian Vecchione doing the animation, with Seth Stewart composing the music.