There is only one movie I will be in the theater for this weekend: Ghost in the Shell live action US remake. Was there ever any doubt?
Leading the pack this time is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the next generation series from the Harry Potter universe. I can’t wait to see where J. K. Rowling goes with this one, the first film was exceedingly tasty, probably because she wrote the screenplay herself. The other selection is A Monster Calls, a serious and powerful movie that did poorly at the box office, probably because most folks thought it was about some friendly monster. The target audience wasn’t kids at all, so most of the kids that get sent to see it by parents who had never read the book left it depressed and confused, generating a lot of bad word of mouth for the film.
In Anime, Steins;Gate: The Movie brings home the ending that the original creators always intended, where Deja Vu are only your fragmented memories of alternate time lines. This is their last chance to get it right or to lose their possibilities forever. I found Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? a wonderful series, but it really only covered the events of the first book. So I am keeping my fingers crossed that the flag The Complete Series means the complete first season, and not that they are not going to produce the rest of the story. As the series final works its way toward us, Boruto: Naruto the Movie helps usher in new generation of ninja. Fairy Tail: Collection 7 brings another half-years worth of episodes home, with Lucy kidnapped and merged with a time bomb, and all the other guilds out to get our heroes, I predict an unprecedented amount of collateral damage with this one. The war continues in Heavy Object: Season 1 Part 2, but it is a full dozen episodes despite the title.
Luck & Logic: The Complete Series has the gods rampaging over the Earth, creating all sorts of problems, one of which appears to be wiping out the Funimation and Crunchyroll web servers that stream their episode, hence no link. Diabolik Lovers II: More Blood seems to have the same fate, so I am thinking the servers may just be down for the moment. When I find them back up, I will add the links here. Finally, Inari Kon Kon: The Complete Series + OVA is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, for those who do not already own the Fox Goddess driven magical rom/com.
After a decade of various US companies trying to bring a live-action version of Death Note to the screen, Netflix has finally posted the first trailer for their upcoming release. It will be very interesting to compare it with the Asian live-action TV series, which you can watch online for free at the previous link, which will take you to Crunchyroll. The Netflix version will be hitting the small screen on August 25th.
We get several interesting options this weekend, and while Power Rangers looks pretty campy just like it should, it also looks like they might take a more serious shot at the franchise. Leaning to the Horror side, Life has six astronauts vs. a single celled organism returned from Mars that can out-think them. In the Bollywood fantasy Phillauri, a man must marry a tree to break a curse, but the spirit of that tree has her own agenda.
Assassin’s Creed was a great game and an excellent premise for a movie; I don’t know if it succeeded or not, because I haven’t seen it yet. The critics seemed to be underwhelmed, with “confusing” and “disorienting” being the two words most often used to describe it. I don’t know if that’s because none of them ever played the game, or the script was that poorly done, but either way I will stream it before I consider buying it. I also haven’t seen Sing, but there is no question that this animation needs to be a part of my permanent collection. In Anime the new title is Attack on Titan: Junior High, probably the silliest series from this franchise, but still very worth watching. We also get a S.A.V.E. edition of BlazBlue: Alter Memory; The Complete Series, for those who haven’t seen it before now.
China has finally launched a film festival specifically targeting the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres, called the Just Film Festival. The group appears to have organized in 2014, holding the first festival in 2015, as near as I can tell. It seems to have gotten them off to a good start, because this year around 200 industry professionals were running 3 tracks, with the most popular session being the projects, promotion, and investment presentation. That started off with around 500 potential films putting in their bids for funding, and by the time the dust settled it was narrowed down to just 3 titles: Immerse, Saving Human, and Planet X. I don’t know which or how many of them got the money to begin production, but over the last decade or two there has been an explosive growth in the Chinese Science Fiction literary scene. Some of those books and stories have won recognition world wide, and some of them are now in bookstores in North America; it is nice to see their SF/F film industry starting to get some momentum and recognition as well.