This film won’t be out until February, but Seventh Son looks like a tasty adventure fantasy. It stars Jeff Bridges, Ben Barnes, and Julianne Moore, and is based on Joseph Delaney’s The Last Apprentice.
There doesn’t seem to be anything exciting coming out this week, but Innocence could be worth watching, if the adventure and fantasy aspects are stronger than the horror. Based on the trailer, I don’t think they are.
The new Terry Gilliam sci-fi film The Zero Theorem gets released on line tomorrow. It is the story of a computer hacker who is assigned by god to discover the meaning of life, if any, and report back so he can understand it himself. As near as I can tell, this is the perfect companion piece to Brazil, another twisted Terry Gilliam project. When we hit the actual weekend we have a number of interesting films in the theaters, starting with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. If you saw the first movie in this series, I don’t have to tell you about it; if you didn’t, nothing I can say will make sense until you experience it for yourself. A documentary coming out this week I want to see is To Be Takei, all about the man who should have been Captain Sulu decades ago. There are a few more new films this week worth mentioning, but the one I like is the romantic fantasy If I Stay. When you take them all together, it looks like this is the week with the most new and interesting movies so far this year. I can’t wait to see that record broken.
The Disney movie Into The Woods won’t be in theaters until Christmas, but the teaser trailer which came out recently makes it look like it might be a fun film to watch. It takes four classic Brothers Grimm stories and ties them together with a new tale written just for the movie, bringing the whole thing up to contemporary times. A lot of humor and a few good tunes round out the presentation, which has one central theme: be careful what you wish for.
Daisuki is an online streaming service created by a consortium of Japanese Anime companies. Some of the titles they are streaming this season include Sword Art Online II, the Irregular at Magic High School, and M3 the Dark Metal. It has taken them almost a year, but finally the first Daisuki App is available for the iPad or iPhone (word is they will have an Android version available soon). Unlike many of the premium streaming services, you don’t actually need a paid account to get to watch programs from them. You will still be limited to their free programs, or the first few free episodes from some of their paid programs, of course. But you only need a free registration from their web site to use their app, which puts them head and shoulders above most such applications, which require a paid subscription. And since even the free registration log in to their app allows you to stream a ton of videos not available anywhere else, you can’t really go wrong by signing up for this.
Ready for this time travel story about war and the need for continuity across the centuries? Have a free glimpse of Outlander episode 1, and see if you don’t want to join the party. I found it quite tasty and I think you will too. Visualize it as Highlander with a Tardis.