Skip to main content

Something to Watch: Discs

In Movies we have Hot Tub Time Machine 2, a movie I haven’t seen but which was panned by just about every critic I have read. My thoughts are to watch this one when it comes to one of the streaming services I am already paying for anyways. We also get the animated fantasy Strange Magic from Disney and George Lucas, which looks like it could be quite fun (yep, I haven’t seen this one either).

TV gives us Beauty & The Beast: Season 2, which sadly only seems to be available in Standard Def. But it is in time to be able to binge watch it before season 3 kicks off on June 11th.

There is a single new entry in the Anime category this week, in the form of .hack//Roots: The Complete Series. One of this seasons shows which I am really enjoying, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, is up to episode 7 on the anime series, but its Manga only becomes available in the US this Tuesday; I mention it because it usually works the other way around.

Something to Watch: Discs

In movies, The Cobbler is a story about a shoe repair man working in the same shop his family has run for generations who is granted the ability to live his customers lives by walking in their shoes… literally. The premise has a lot of potential, but the critics paned the movie brutally, and is is coming out on disc only a month after it was in the theaters for very little money, not a very promising sign. These Final Hours is a film about the last 12 hours before a meteor wipes out all life on Earth; but even though its theatrical run was limited to a handful of screens in Australia, it has received acclaim from the critics and a 78% rating from Rotten Tomatoes. While not genre, Blackhat does star Thor’s Chris Hemsworth, but that may be about all that can really be said for it. In western animation we get Batman Unlimited: Animal Instincts, a new Batman vs. Penguin story.

In Anime, Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse, Collection 2 the fight to save humanity from alien invaders continues, but mankind may be its own worst threat. The leaders of several nations are willing to sabotage each other in an attempt to gain power, allowing the invaders to conquer still more of the planet. The Familiar of Zero: “Rondo” of Princesses brings season 3 of Louise the Zero and her magical misadventures with her human familiar and newly undead husband Saito. Finally, Michiko & Hatchin is having the complete series released in a S.A.V.E. edition, meaning you can now pick it up for somewhere in the neighborhood of $20.

Something to Watch: Discs

I didn’t find any genre movies or TV shows this time, but there are still a few worth mentioning. Spare Parts is a true story of the four undocumented Mexican-American high school students who went head to head with the team from MIT in the National Underwater Robotics Competition, using robots made from spare parts. The TV series Halt and Catch Fire: The Complete First Season takes place the year after IBM came out with the Personal PC, with a fictional company comprised of renegade engineers reverse engineering it and improving on it, as the computer race got off the ground. While the characters are fictional, the engineering issues they face and the solutions they come up with for them are the very ones the entire industry was working on at the time. The personality mix of the engineers will look very familiar to anyone involved with any cutting edge engineering project; thinking outside the box and radical innovation are not done by ordinary engineers, but by the exceptional. Masters of Sex: Season 2 is also a story about real-life cutting edge science which actually took place in the past, as doctors Masters and Johnson did the research that would change our understanding of the most basic aspect of human nature.

In Anime Natsume’s Book of Friends: Season 4 follows our protagonist as he continues to give the yokai their names back. He is learning how to deal with the yokai and humans that surround his life and now must learn about himself as well. The World God Only Knows: OVA Collection finds the girls forming an Idol band among other wacky goings-on, now that Keima has become something of a wizard. I should also mention that the classic Patlabor: The Movie, previously available only in SD, is coming out on Blue Ray this week.