The Librarians arrive on Sunday, December 7th on TNT, and I am so ready for this series! TNT were behind the original movies series this is based on, and I loved those movies because of the way they blended silly with action, and for the excellent premise. I am setting my DVR now, so I don’t miss an episode!
The animated George Lucas film Strange Magic will be in theaters on January 23rd, and should be a lot of fun. It looks like some of the same folks are involved who created Epic if the character design and animation style is any indication.
This week we get The Imitation Game, the true life story of Alan Turing, the genius British mathematician, logician, cryptologist and computer scientist. He was in the forefront of the project to crack the German Enigma Code that helped the Allies win WWII, without him we might have lost the war. Benedict Cumberbatch gets to play the great man this time around. If you prefer your spy’s animated rather than real, The Penguins of Madagascar is quite a bit funnier… but it also stars Benedict Cumberbatch, so he is in both of my selections for this weekend.
This is a good week, with several offerings in each category. Iceman has Donnie Yen as a Ming Dynasty palace guard, wrongly accused of a murder. When he and the three guards chasing him end up frozen, they get defrosted 400 years later, continuing their fight across modern China. The animation How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the second film of three in this series. I quite liked the first one, and am looking forward to this one since I missed it in the theater. The Movie category is rounded out with a documentary, James Cameron’s Deep Sea Challenge. This is the project he used to refine the development of his 3D camera system, just before he used it to make Avatar.
In TV we get True Blood: The Complete Seventh Season, which brings this series to a close. The camp classic Batman: The Complete Television Series starring Adam West and Burt Ward, are serious when they say complete. All 120 episodes and 3 hours of extras are included. Finally Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Lost Missions continues to detail the conflict between the Republic and the Separatists as the Jedi war grows closer.
In Anime, Patema Inverted appears to be an animated remake of Upside Down, and could be quite interesting. Sailor Moon: Season 1 Part 1 is being re-released in North America with a brand new English translation, making it almost like a whole different series. Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3 is a typical story about the school club the protagonist joins. But in this case, the school club is a serious survivalist team out drilling in the woods, and friendly fire may be their most dangerous enemy; this is the complete series.
My mental choices are completely interfering with my school romantic comedy takes place in the kind of universe where a game premise suddenly takes over our hero’s life, and seems to be designed as a curse more than anything else. Finally, High School DxD: New Season 2 is filled with still more zombie stomping action as the Archangel Michael joins the Occult Research Club in the battle to protect the living.
More and more of what I watch is streaming video, and less and less is based on some kind of physical media. I guess the reason these weekly entries focus on the discs is there is too much streaming Sci-Fi and Fantasy, especially out of Japan, that no single person could possibly cover it all. I think a team of three people, all doing it full time, could do it the way it should be done. But one person, doing one entry a week? No chance. I will probably start mentioning my favorites again, though, in case anyone missed hearing about them.
The folks at the British Film Institute has recently made available an interesting collection of the best global cinema on-demand, some on a pay-per-view basis, some for free, most of it amazing, and a few things you just won’t find anywhere else. Movies like Only Lovers Left Alive, Under The Skin, and most of the things presented at the most recent BFI London Film Festival. They even have a Days of Fear and Wonder science fiction collection. While I prefer most streaming services monthly fees, rather than the pricier per-viewing charges, I am going to have to sign up with them to at least see some movies I have heard of that have yet to be released here. Plus, the payments support the BFI, an organization as worthy of support as the AFI.
I love these guys, nice to see them starring in their own movie instead of just being comic relief for Gru! Minions 2015 will be hitting the big screen in June in Australia, the date I have found for the US just says Summer 2015 so far.