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Something to Watch: DVDs

The top of the movie list this week is the Keanu Reeves remake of 47 Ronin, the latest in a long line of films, TV shows, plays and operas based on this historic true story. This is the first time I am aware of that it expanded this deep into the realm of Fantasy, but I thought the dragons were a wonderful choice. If you are more in the mood for an indi production, Knights of Badassdom is about a bunch of LARPers who accidentally summon a succubus from hell while playing in the woods. As you might expect from the description, this is a comedy/horror film, with several of my favorite actors in it.

I couldn’t find any real genre in TV except for re-releases, but Psych: Season 8 certainly comes close, considering the massive number of pop culture references the show manages to cram into every episode. This was the final season for the show, so it includes the series finale.

In western animation we have The Pirate Fairy, another adventure in Never Never Land from the gang at Disney.

In Anime, Ebiten: Complete Collection pokes fun at the art form itself, with a rabid group of anime fan girls with tenuous grips on reality, a maid on a secret mission, a Neko faculty adviser, an ass-tronomy club full of robots, aliens, and telepaths (and one poor guy who actually thinks it is a serious astronomy club), and more twisted anime parodies and allusions than you have probably ever seen collected in one place before. Expect to see the barrier between fantasy and reality shattered every 5 minutes or so. Then in Happiness: Complete Collection, the classes for magic users and non-magic users are kept completely separate until a gas explosion destroys the magical building and they have to combine the classes. Rest assured chaos and comedy ensue, as the two groups try to adjust to each other.

Edge Of Tomorrow new trailer

I am so looking forward to this one, which is a bit surprising since I am not a Tom Cruse fan, or at least wasn’t. But recently he has been doing some tasty Sci-Fi stories with interesting twists, and it looks like Edge Of Tomorrow may be another one. This movie is based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel All You Need Is Kill. Since the film will be on the big screen on June 6th in the US, May 30th in the UK, you have time to read the book first and get ready for it.

Something to Do: Movies, 28Mar14

There aren’t any real genre films this week, although the borderline horror film Awakened has some potential, as a young girl gets help from beyond the grave as she tracks down her mother’s killer. It won some awards while on the film fest circuit, and has a few actors I like, so it has possibilities. It is also in limited release, so don’t expect to see it everywhere. Even more not genre and of equally limited release, The Raid 2: Berandal is a violent martial arts police procedural out of Indonesia that may be worth checking out if you are an action fan. For myself, I will try to catch up with one of the genre movies of the last several weeks that I wanted to see but haven’t managed to make quite yet.

Something to Watch: DVDs, 25Mar14

The winner in movies this week is Odd Thomas, the first big screen implementation of Dean Koontz’s wonderful series. But it is not our only entry; Walking with Dinosaurs is a quality first-person (first reptile?) animation that explores life in that epoch. And Jackie Chan dishes out his own style of channeling Indiana Jones with Chinese Zodiac, although his character is torn between having his monster payday and restoring his cultural heritage. And then there is The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna, a documentary with teeth.

In TV, Continuum: Season Two continues the story of time-hopping criminals and the unlikely collection of people who might (or might not) be able to stop them.

For western animation, Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher is worth looking into. Well, western animation except for the detail that the animation work itself was done by Mad House, the Japanese animation company. But the characters, background, story line, plot twists, and everything else about it is pure Marvel comic book all the way.

In Anime, Mardock Scramble: The Third Exhaust brings the final chapter in Rune Balot’s struggle to bring the man who killed her to justice. It has taken quite a while for all three feature length presentations to be released, since they came out with a full year or better between each one. Now that I finally can get the end of the cyborg revenge story, I think I am going to have to watch them back-to-back so I get all the details fresh.

Fairy Tail – Part 9 continues that excellent saga, complete with all the collateral damage you have come to know and love. In Robotics;Notes: Part 2 the members of the Robot Research Club have finished building their giant combat mecha, only to discover their work is far from over. Just to keep things interesting there is also a robot uprising and a renegade AI rampaging across the countryside.