There are two very good choices this time around. The one I want to see first is Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb; the third film in the Museum trilogy takes place at the British Museum this time, and once more looks to be a world of fun. Also this week The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies brings that expanded story to completion.
If you are in the mood for action/fantasy then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably just what you are looking for. This particular reboot is my favorite of the TMNT video offerings so far, and a whole lot of fun. On the more serious side, we get The Maze Runner this week as well, based on the YA series of novels by James Dashner.
TV gives us Extant: The First Season, a CBS sci-fi program that has been picked up for a second season. With humans, aliens, and robots, it is at its core a story about the human heart.
In Anime, A Certain Magical Index II: Part Two continues the magical story line from Academy City, a place where ESPers are produced through genetic engineering (as explained in A Certain Scientific Railgun). An encoded grimoire containing catastrophe magic has been stolen, and Index must be protected lest the thieves use her to unlock its secrets. In the Ambition of Oda Nobuna our protagonist is thrown back in time, and on arriving in a Sengoku period timeline noticeably different than our own promptly gets a historical figure killed. He will now have to do the work originally done by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, to help unify feudal Japan.
We also get Bleach: Season 23 with episodes 317 through 329 with the continuing story of the Soul Reapers. The really exciting Anime news for me this week is about a re-release: Cowboy Bebop is finally available in Blue Ray! I am going to have to watch that all over again, from the beginning. If you haven’t already seen it, you have a serious treat in store. Besides buying the discs or watching it at the Funimation site linked above, you can catch it on Toonami as Adult Swim does its Cowboy Bebop Marathon the weekend after Christmas.
Rurouni Kenshin 2: Kyoto Inferno looks to be every bit as intense as the first film, and there is one more to go after this before the series is complete. A former assassin wanders through Japan promising to defend those in need without killing. If the story seems familiar and you haven’t seen the 2012 movie that began the live action film series, you may have read the manga it is based on, or perhaps seen the 1996 through 2008 anime series Rurouni Kenshin: Wandering Samurai. The anime ran 95 episodes, with breaks of several years sometimes between story segments, so it took a while to make. The song you hear playing in the background in the trailer is One OK Rock‘s hit Mighty Long Fall, which I posted here previously if you want to hear the whole thing. They are an amazing band, and you can pick up their songs on iTunes.
There don’t appear to be any genre films this week, but there is one I find interesting; the first ever conversion of a Thomas Pynchon novel into a movie. The film, like the book, is called Inherent Vice, and is quite the twisted tale, taking place in the late ’60s and reminding me of nothing so much as Pulp Fiction. They have collected up quite a good cast, I think this one will be worth checking out.
Obviously, my choice in Movies this week is Guardians of the Galaxy, which still remains my favorite for this year, even as the year itself reaches its end. While not exactly genre, Frank is just strange enough to rate a mention (although it would have gotten one anyways for the music angle). If it came near a theater around me I missed it, now I get another shot at checking it out.
In TV we have Doctor Who: The Complete Eighth Series for Peter Capaldi’s first run as everyone’s favorite Time Lord. I do have to say I can’t wait to see Nick Frost as Santa in the Xmas special, come the day. Under the Dome: Season 2 is also out this week for the King fans. For those looking for nostalgia sci-fi, Mork & Mindy: The Fourth Season is the one where they get married and have a child, played by Jonathan Winters. It is also the final season of the show, so if you picked up the first three, this one will complete your collection.
In Anime, Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl is about a boy who meets his unsuspected cousin, who turns out to be an alien. What started out as a strange encounter turned into something truly surreal in very short order, as he learns that Earth is being targeted. Infinite Stratos II continues the adventures of the only male who can pilot a combat mecha in a training academy full of heavily armed combat ready women. That rounds it up for this go round; everything else in each category being released this week has been released before.
With time travel at the core of the story, Terminator Genisys is poised for a reboot in ways orther movies haven’t been able to touch, spinning off its own parallel timeline as part of the acknowledged plot. I loved the first two films in the franchise, the ones after not so much. This trailer makes me want to be in the theaters for a Terminator movie for the first time in a long while; hope to see you there. Too bad we have to wait until July of next year.