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Trailers: Red Riding Hood, Love

The movie Red Riding Hood trailer makes me think the tag line should be “it’s The Company Of Wolves meets Twilight“, and it’s directed by the original Twilight movie’s Catherine Hardwicke. Hopefully that does NOT mean this one is as bad as that series of films, because it does have a lot of good story potential. There are some more pictures here, and the film itself will hit the big screen in just a few weeks, on March 11th.

The movie Love looks amazing based on this trailer supplied by Angels and Airwaves and former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge. Release date is set for 14 February 2011, according to Geeks of Doom, as a combined CD and DVD.

ANGELS & AIRWAVES presents “LOVE” MOVIE TRAILER from Mark Eaton on Vimeo.

Something to Watch: Online

My apologies to the 99% of the audience that already knows this, but it is in my Master of the Obvious contract that I have to get the word out to that final 1% that haven’t heard yet. I should also mention before we get started that the US Version of Being Human pilot episode is available as a free download from iTunes right now…

If you missed this past Monday’s episode of Chuck, you can of course watch it directly from its NBC website for free. This is something more and more networks are doing, making their programing available on multiple platforms to build their audience, a process known as convergence in the industry; making any show available to watch any time on any device. So if you didn’t catch The Cape when it was broadcast over the airwaves, you could watch it from that web page, pull it up from the NBC Video On Demand folder from your cable companies set top box, or pull down one of several viewing Apps for your phone or tablet, and see it free. The links I used in this example are NBC, but all the networks are doing it now; if you can’t watch a program on the network web site directly, they probably house it over at Hulu, iTunes, or YouTube. If you wanted it for your permanent collection you have the option of purchasing many of them from a number of distributors for download, Amazon and Apple being the largest and best established operations.

Cable TV companies have also been rebuilding their networks for convergence, for the same reason; they want the largest audience for their products they can get. So they now also have webpages for watching shows and Apps you can download to make their programming portable for no additional cost. The links I included were for Comcast, but all the cable companies are doing it. I used my login and the hotel WiFi to my laptop while half way across the country to watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special, and it worked great. The Comcast App allows you to control your cable boxes remotely, check your voicemail, and so forth, with being able to watch the videos on your phone or tablet coming shortly.

Just announced, the Anime Network starts their free simulcast of Infinite Stratos this Sunday at 8:30 PM CST. They are getting a bit of a late start, so this Sunday’s simulcast will be episode 3, but they will also post episodes 1 and 2 at the same time so you don’t miss anything. This one is Mecha combat comedy judging by the description.

I wanted to mention that Fractale is finally available for viewing! This twisted little show stars a boy with virtual parents, a girl in a world with mostly guys, a villein class of bad guys that show evil promise, and an escapee from deep in the past whom only the boy can protect. With only one episode to extrapolate from all of my conclusions may be wrong, but I am enjoying the way this is starting out.

UPDATE: Soapbox Mode On: Thanks to pirates, it now appears only the first episode of Fractale will be simulcast unless the illegal sites are shut down. According to Anime News Network, the Fractale Production Committee has forced Funimation to cease the simulcast until such time as the illegal streaming and file sharing sites are under control. The question that confuses me the most is what sense does it make to pirate something that you can watch for free, especially when doing so means you might make it no longer available for legal viewing, possibly for years until the DVDs come out? Which is not to say there are not serious issues of abuse in the other direction, as best personified by the companies that want to censure the internet, and claim they are trying to protect against piracy when they are really trying to destroy the structure of the internet because they cannot get oppressive and invasive anti-piracy laws passed. There is already a body of laws in place, a courtroom adversarial response structure that allows for due process when piracy is suspected. You don’t need to install spyware/virus sotware on peoples computers to delete files without the users permission, and you don’t need to break the router paths so the internet doesn’t work properly. This is the core of why we have a judicial system, to keep idiots from either side from destroying what we have spent decades building. Soapbox Mode Off

From Anime News Network, The Sacred Blacksmith and Vampire Knights are both newly launched programs you can watch online from the Fall 2010 season. After watching the first episode of each, I will be watching the Sacred Blacksmith to the end of its run.

Something to Do: Movies

The live action version of Gantz will be on the big screen for one night only this Thursday, January 20th. It will only be at about 340 theaters around the US, so if you want to see if it is near enough for you to make the show, go to Fathom Events and enter your zip code. It will display a list of the closest sites and set you up to buy tickets. If you are not sure if this is a movie you want to see, check out my previously published review and then just buy the damn tickets anyways. The following day, also under limited release, the anime re-imaging of the second quarter of the story in the classic series Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance hits a select assortment of theaters across the country.

Something to Watch: DVD’s

I didn’t find any new movies worth mentioning, but Roger Corman’s Sci-Fi Classics could be entertaining if you haven’t seen them. This set has 3 movies from 1957/1958, Not of This Earth which he remade twice afterwords, the first remake being Traci Lord’s first non-porn film filled with all the expected nudity, Attack of the Crab Monsters, and War of the Satellites. These have been unavailable to fans except for really poor copies for quite a while, and are worth studying for anyone interested in making good movies on extremely limited budgets. You should read Glenn Erickson’s review over at DVD Talk for a detailed understanding of what each of these films are.

I normally don’t talk about DVD production companies here, but I thought I should mention Shout Factory, because I really like what they are doing these days. They are the ones who are releasing Roger Corman’s Sci-Fi Classics this week, along with a TV program I had about given up on seeing on the shelves, Dark Skies: The Declassified Complete Series from 1996. Dark Skies was arguably the best UFO Conspiracy TV series ever made, as long as the argument was that the X-Files covered a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with UFO Conspiracies, so it lacked the same focus. So that’s two genre sets in one week that lots of folks, including myself, have been eagerly awaiting. And that’s not the first time they have done this; back in August I went absolutely nuts when they released Max Headroom, the full American series. I had given up ever seeing that one come out by the end of the ’90s, and because of the impossible licensing issues involved I still doubt we will ever see the UK version of the show, also staring Matt Frewer as Edison Carter, released anywhere. I believe I also mentioned them when I found out they were planing to release ReBoot this March, one of my favorite western animation series and a direct conceptual descendant of TRON. And if that doesn’t cement their geek cred, come April they are releasing The Ernie Kovacs Collection, containing the majority of the surviving footage of television’s first and most important genius.

There are a few other TV shows being released this week, including Merlin: The Complete Second Season, which is licensed in the US to air on NBC. I first stumbled upon this show while channel surfing, hitting a random episode somewhere in season two, and not being overly impressed. Then a friend of mine talked me into watching it with her starting with the first episode of season 1, which was streaming on Netflix. Surprising how a show makes so much more sense when you see it in order, and I was quite drawn in as they introduced the characters and set the premises. I will avoid going into any rants about how Fox used that fact to kill Firefly, or any comments about how you can watch Doctor Who in any order you like, since he isn’t doing it sequentially either. Not being a Horror fan, I don’t know anything about the show Nite Tales: The Series, but it is also being released this week.

For Anime selections this time around, we have Kampfer – Complete Collection, a bit of a gender bender of a magical girl story, and Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom, where brain wiped assassins struggle to escape their masters and remember who they are. It is being released in two packages, parts 1 and 2, on the same day. It appears to have the better animation and pithier story, but I am not sure that trading the instant gratification of not having to wait to find out what happens is worth the higher price of having to buy two box sets at once. They should have included the option of a single Complete Collection box set at a reduced total price, for those who are sure they want the entire thing right out of the gate. If you don’t know if you want this in your collection, you can watch the subbed version online before making your decision.

Battle: Los Angeles trailer

Battle: Los Angeles will be in the theaters in March, and they have released another trailer now that it is getting close. In the trailer you can see Michelle Rodriguez playing a heavily armed Sargent, somewhat reminiscent of her recent roll in Avatar. Like Skyline and many others, this is another film that has learned from the Battlestar Galactica camera work, and looks like it just might be a winner.When I was at Green Hornet today they had a trailer for this, Sucker Punch, and Thor, and they all looked great. I should also mention the 3D didn’t work so well in Green Hornet, with only one hunting-the-Hornet scene (which was heavily video processed) and the credits at the end even looking like they were 3D, so I recommend saving the 3 bucks and seeing the 2D version.

Something to Do: Movies

This Friday, January 14th, the movie to attend is The Green Hornet, a tribute to the 1960’s TV show starring Bruce Lee, and referred to as The Kato Show all throughout Asia during that time period. This version is NOT directed by Stephen Chow, who brought us such masterpieces as Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, as I previously reported. He had been involved with the project, but walked away from the Director spot in 2008, and the Kato roll in 2009; I really need to check web pages more carefully for story dates so I am not reporting expired information. This has come a long way since 1940, when it was produced as a movie theater serial of 13 episodes or so, itself based on the original Radio Plays of the early 1930s. Unlike most of its contemporaries The Green Hornet was a radio play first, not a pulp or comics series, and every episode ended with the newspaper boy hawking his wares by shouting out the headlines for that story (bad guys in jail) ending with the phrase The Green Hornet Still at Large!!