When the Suicide Squad movie comes out next year it should put quite a different spin on the whole Superhero film experience. After all, these are the bad guys. Sort of. We had a video taste of this team in Arrow, with a limited collection of the powered, and it looks like they expanded on the theme quite nicely for the big screen. While they are quite recent to video production, the print version made its first appearance in 1959, and transmuted into its current form and structure in 1987, finally becoming the modern version of itself on 2011. I will be in the theater for this one when it gets released in August of 2016.
The pick this week is obviously the latest release from Marvel, Ant-Man. It brings everybody’s favorite mad scientist, Dr. Hank Pym, to the big screen for the first time, although interestingly enough they chose a story in which Hank wasn’t the Ant-Man himself. Since Dr. Pym was a founding member of The Avengers, there will be some serious Avengers connectivity here, although it will be interesting to see where they go with it. After all, in different guises he was both a Super Hero and Super Villain, as his mind got warped by the mental changes induced by his various super-suites. One of the risks of being a true Mad Scientist, after all.
While that one is my first choice, there is a second movie I feel compelled to see this weekend. Mr. Holmes has Ian McKellen as a retired Sherlock Holmes grappling with an unsolved case involving a beautiful woman. This looks like an good story with some quality acting and production values, and shares something with the first film; Marvel. McKellen plays Magneto, Robert Downey Jr plays Iron Man, and Benedict Cumberbatch will be playing Dr Strange for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and now all three of them have played the iconic Sherlock Holmes.
This time Movies have Ex Machina, a cybernetic tale of the birth of AI as haunting as it is thought provoking. While not as relentlessly kill crazy as the Terminator series, you do get a glimpse into the birth of that attitude among the biologically challenged, and the kind of events that might provoke it. X-Men: Days of Future Past: the Rogue Cut started with 17 minutes of additional footage we have never seen before. Some of the new footage centers around Paquin’s Rogue, who I don’t feel we saw enough of in the theatrical version. In order to make the story line changes the new scenes bring to the film work they also have modified some of the original footage with either re-edits or alternate takes. The end result is as much of a different movie as some of the Blade Runner remakes, so it will probably have to follow me home. The 1959 French classic Hiroshima, Mon Amour is being re-released on Blue Ray off of a 4K master for the first time ever this week. No, it isn’t genre, but it was one of those films that changed the way people made movies from that point on, the way Indiana Jones did. This is one of those films you need to see at least one time in your life, or you will have missed something amazing and paradigm changing.
I didn’t find any TV entries this week, but there is one contender in a much older episodic story telling tradition. Beowulf is performed in the original Bardic style by Benjamin Bagby, Anglo-Saxon harp in hand and voice in full throat, singing in Old English. He has given this performance at the Smithsonian and at Carnegie Hall, to name a few. This is as close as most of us can ever hope to get to experiencing one of the tales that shaped our last few thousand years on Earth the way it was meant to be heard.
In Anime, Familiar of Zero: F is Season 4 of the series; ever since she first accidentally kidnapped him from Earth (yep, she did that by accident; she is just a tad clueless about how to get her magic to work), their relationship has been growing. But so has the list of powerful beings trying to take them out… permanently. In Recently, my sister is unusual Mitsuki is trying to adjust to her new life and brother, when an amnesiac ghost girl needs her help to pass on to the next world.
Is the Order a Rabbit? is a very kawaii show involving a cafe, a mysterious rabbit, one heavily armed girl, and some possible telepaths. One Piece is releasing both Collection 13 with Episodes 300 through 324 and One Piece: Season 7 Voyage 1 with episodes 385 through 396. I find it interesting that the one with 24 episodes is $2 cheaper than the one with 11 episodes, probably because it is about a year older.
I love all the great new stuff Comic Con brings us each year, and this year has a bunch of good stuff. I am going to have to go back and re-watch the original TV series so I am ready for this one.
I love all the great new stuff Comic Con brings us each year…
Or, if you prefer, Samurai Cat The Movie; either way, a nice bit of silliness. Now I am just waiting for a Ninja Cat film to come attack them, to give it that true historical perspective. When the Japan Society in New York had a screening of this last year, they followed it up with the Edo Cat Party, and threw in free admission to their Life of Cats Exhibition. Sadly, I haven’t found this movie yet at any of my streaming services, although it looks like Netflix did have a license to stream it last year. But I still have more to search, including Funimation, Viz, and Daisuke, so there is still hope I might stumble across it.