This week we get a shot of pure silly with the movie Pixels, and a whole new take on Space Invaders. I am still debating if this one needs the big screen or would be just as good streaming on a tablet, but however I see it I am looking forward to it.
Movies brings us What We Do in the Shadows, a horror comedy that has been winning awards all over the film festival circuit. A documentary crew follows around four vampire roommates as they make their nightly rounds of harassing werewolves, cruising clubs, and fighting about household chores. Kung Fu Killer starts Donnie Yen as an imprisoned martial arts master who is released by the police so he can stop someone who is going around beating martial arts masters to death. That counts as fantasy in my book so I’m posting it here. I didn’t see much in the way of genre TV shows this time, except in Anime.
In Anime, Blazblue: Alter Memory – Season One has the game characters come to life, with Ragna using a combination of magic and technology to battle it out with the Librarium to decide the future of mankind. Guardian Ninja Mamoru is about a family of Ninjas that has been protecting another family for the last 400 years. The current generation of both families are now in high school together, and things are getting exciting. Soul Eater Not! continues the story of the living weapons and their wielders with the new generation getting trained for supernatural combat. The gang from the previous series is around as well, and it is just as filled with outrageous comedy as the original.
TO – Elliptical Orbit & Symbiotic Planet is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you can pick up both award winning short features for a really good price. There are also a few re-releases worth grabbing if you missed them the first time around, including Mamoru Oshii’s classic Patlabor 2: The Movie and Persona 4 the Golden Animation.
The pick this week is obviously the latest release from Marvel, Ant-Man. It brings everybody’s favorite mad scientist, Dr. Hank Pym, to the big screen for the first time, although interestingly enough they chose a story in which Hank wasn’t the Ant-Man himself. Since Dr. Pym was a founding member of The Avengers, there will be some serious Avengers connectivity here, although it will be interesting to see where they go with it. After all, in different guises he was both a Super Hero and Super Villain, as his mind got warped by the mental changes induced by his various super-suites. One of the risks of being a true Mad Scientist, after all.
While that one is my first choice, there is a second movie I feel compelled to see this weekend. Mr. Holmes has Ian McKellen as a retired Sherlock Holmes grappling with an unsolved case involving a beautiful woman. This looks like an good story with some quality acting and production values, and shares something with the first film; Marvel. McKellen plays Magneto, Robert Downey Jr plays Iron Man, and Benedict Cumberbatch will be playing Dr Strange for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and now all three of them have played the iconic Sherlock Holmes.
This time Movies have Ex Machina, a cybernetic tale of the birth of AI as haunting as it is thought provoking. While not as relentlessly kill crazy as the Terminator series, you do get a glimpse into the birth of that attitude among the biologically challenged, and the kind of events that might provoke it. X-Men: Days of Future Past: the Rogue Cut started with 17 minutes of additional footage we have never seen before. Some of the new footage centers around Paquin’s Rogue, who I don’t feel we saw enough of in the theatrical version. In order to make the story line changes the new scenes bring to the film work they also have modified some of the original footage with either re-edits or alternate takes. The end result is as much of a different movie as some of the Blade Runner remakes, so it will probably have to follow me home. The 1959 French classic Hiroshima, Mon Amour is being re-released on Blue Ray off of a 4K master for the first time ever this week. No, it isn’t genre, but it was one of those films that changed the way people made movies from that point on, the way Indiana Jones did. This is one of those films you need to see at least one time in your life, or you will have missed something amazing and paradigm changing.
I didn’t find any TV entries this week, but there is one contender in a much older episodic story telling tradition. Beowulf is performed in the original Bardic style by Benjamin Bagby, Anglo-Saxon harp in hand and voice in full throat, singing in Old English. He has given this performance at the Smithsonian and at Carnegie Hall, to name a few. This is as close as most of us can ever hope to get to experiencing one of the tales that shaped our last few thousand years on Earth the way it was meant to be heard.
In Anime, Familiar of Zero: F is Season 4 of the series; ever since she first accidentally kidnapped him from Earth (yep, she did that by accident; she is just a tad clueless about how to get her magic to work), their relationship has been growing. But so has the list of powerful beings trying to take them out… permanently. In Recently, my sister is unusual Mitsuki is trying to adjust to her new life and brother, when an amnesiac ghost girl needs her help to pass on to the next world.
Is the Order a Rabbit? is a very kawaii show involving a cafe, a mysterious rabbit, one heavily armed girl, and some possible telepaths. One Piece is releasing both Collection 13 with Episodes 300 through 324 and One Piece: Season 7 Voyage 1 with episodes 385 through 396. I find it interesting that the one with 24 episodes is $2 cheaper than the one with 11 episodes, probably because it is about a year older.
Or, if you prefer, Samurai Cat The Movie; either way, a nice bit of silliness. Now I am just waiting for a Ninja Cat film to come attack them, to give it that true historical perspective. When the Japan Society in New York had a screening of this last year, they followed it up with the Edo Cat Party, and threw in free admission to their Life of Cats Exhibition. Sadly, I haven’t found this movie yet at any of my streaming services, although it looks like Netflix did have a license to stream it last year. But I still have more to search, including Funimation, Viz, and Daisuke, so there is still hope I might stumble across it.
This interview with Tim Curry happened just a few days after the original release of the Rocky Horror Picture Show back in 1975, and he did have quite a few interesting things to say about the show. If he did another interview that covered this range of details, I never heard of it. If you are a Rocky Horror fan, you need to watch this all the way through.