There are several good choices this time, starting with Suicide Squad, which I have more hope for now that they retooled it somewhat to add more humor. DC saw the box office Deadpool pulled and figured they would give it a shot, I am hoping this makes it a bit more fun than their entirely dark take from the recent Superman/Batman outing. If you are looking for something lighter and more family friendly, the classic tale The Little Prince is brought to life in an animation format for the first time, and it looks excellent. Finally the fantasy Nine Lives is about a business man who gets trapped in the body of his cat. I ordinarily wouldn’t even consider this one, but it has Kevin Spacey and Christopher Walken, so it could be good.
I was already excited about Marvel’s Doctor Strange, but now I want it to be November already…
SD Comic Con is better than Superbowl for movie trailers, so this week we will briefly skip the Saturday night music posts I normally do in honor of showing off a few of them. The first is from the next generation of the Potter franchise, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the second Wonder Woman, and the third from Justice League, which seems to have no official web site quite yet. All three of those were Warner Bros. with the last 2 being DC Comics; we also get some from Marvel and Netflix, including Iron Fist and Luke Cage. There are a ton of other good ones as well, I will be fighting the urge to keep posting them, but I don’t know how well I will do with that.
There are a number of good choices this week, starting with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC’s first group superhero outing. For a more mundane conflict, the Thai/Hong Kong film Kill Zone 2 is about an undercover cop and the crime boss he is trying to bring down. If you are looking for something noticeably lighter with a positive attitude, Underdogs may be the animated feature film for you (yes, this is a re-release of the 2013 feature animation, but so few people in the US know about it I thought it was worth mentioning again). There is also an interesting documentary: Outatime is the story about how a group of fans teamed up with a movie executive to save the most famous DeLorean ever, the one from Back To The Future. There are even a couple of Music oriented docudramas in the form of Miles Ahead and Elvis & Nixon. If there were regular TV genre releases this week they slipped right past me.
Anime brings Yona of the Dawn: Part 2, with the princess chasing the dragons and preparing to take her country back by force. This is an enjoyable series that throws a few anime tropes on their heads while fully embracing others, and overall I like it. A Certain Magical Index II: Complete Collection brings another 24 episodes of science based magic excitement onto the small screen, with an encoded grimoire containing catastrophic magic stolen by persons unknown, and the Science Society restarting a program to create a generation of people with a range of psychic abilities (see A Certain Scientific Railgun for the details of how that is going).
Plastic Memories Volume 1 is a beautiful trans-species love story about a human and android, but at $10 per 23 minute episode for the first half of the story, it is way overpriced; I will enjoy it on streamy until someone puts it out more reasonably. Likewise, Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie – Part 1: Beginnings / Part 2: Eternal, the first two feature films of the franchise, will require you to pay $1 for every 3.5 minutes that you watch (and that’s at the discounted off of list price), but that is at least a bit better than the previous title.
On the flip side of that coin, Fractale – The Complete Series and Kamisama Kiss: Season 1 are both coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, so they will be more cost effective than ever to add to your collection.
Toho is releasing GANTZ:O on October 14th, at least in Japan. It is a 3D modeled CGI presentation, as opposed to the original 2d hand drawn (at least the key frames) animation, and the more recent live action version only used 3D CGI for the special effects and aliens. This one is also a feature film based on the Manga, like the live action films, where the 2D animation was a series that spanned half a year.
In one of the Japanese trailers for X-Men: Apocalypse they included commentary after the trailer from Ryan Reynolds, AKA Deadpool. The reason was cross promotion; unlike the US, in Japan the two movies came out very closely together. They only made this trailer version available online a few days ago, so now I get to include it here; enjoy.