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Something to Watch: DVDs

The top movie this week is The Adjustment Bureau, yet another Philip K. Dick story given the big screen treatment. I thought the early 1960s stylization of the sets and costumes was a good choice, since that matched up with the era it was written in. Another good one is The Eagle, the dramatization of what might have happened to the Ninth Legion in 120 AD. To counterbalance those, we have Van Von Hunter, a silly live action movie based on an American comic but filmed by Tokyo Pop (you may have recently seen their movie Priest), a now defunct American production and distribution company for predominately Japanese properties. The other counterbalance is Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, just to prove silly movies still sell. I have never been able to figure out why these kind of movies made in the US are so offensive to me, and yet I love Gojira and the like from Japan. Actually the US release of Godzilla with Jean and Mathew was a favorite as well; maybe it’s the monsters.

For TV, Medium: The Final Season becomes available, as well as the full series in a single box set. While I am aware this series was based on someone’s real life, to me it will always be Fantasy.

New Anime this week starts with Bleach Uncut Box Set 9, another handful of episodes in this long running series about the world of the Soul Reapers. When I say a handful, I mean just that; episodes 146 through 156 are included here, only 11 of them. At this rate, it will be a while before we catch up with the current production run, which is somewhere around episode 275. The Kanokon OVA Collection is all about summer break and how the relationships evolve as the Fox Goddess and Wolf Goddess continue to vie for the heart of the human Kouta.

While not actually Sci-Fi or Fantasy, You’re Under Arrest is one of my favorite Anime series, and the Complete Full Throttle set is also the complete season 3. It has been a while since the last season, and this one starts off with one partner having returned from forensics training in the US, while the other one just finished JSDF (Japanese Self-Defense Force) Ranger training, which is as close to Green Beret as makes no difference. If you thought these two were dangerous to everyone anywhere near them before (criminal or not), wait till you see them now! And Kekkaishi – Part 1 has two childhood friends battling it out to see who gets to be the destroyer of monsters using barrier magic. While both are doing their best to protect their people, they are not the same gender, so some romantic tension gets added to the story.

Finally, this weeks classic series re-release is Blue Gender, where our protagonist wakes up from a few decades of suspended animation to discover that instead of the cure for his terminal disease that he was expecting, humans are being hunted as food by giant insects. As usual with such releases, you can pick up this quality series for dirt cheap if you shop around, $20 being the est price I found.

Something to Watch: DVD’s

In movies, Red Riding Hood pits the darling caped cutey against a werewolf, or perhaps the werewolf hunter is the true evil one? The Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke put this together, but did rather a better job of it than in that series of films, or perhaps just had better source material to work with. For alien invasion fans, Battle: Los Angeles is hitting the shelves. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, is a martial arts movie about a wealthy playboy by day who becomes a masked crusader by night, fighting the Japanese occupation forces and Chinese mafia in 1920’s Shanghai. Staring Donnie Yen, playing the hero first portrayed by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury, this one is tasty. And while it probably isn’t genre, Miente looks pretty interesting with a double handful of film festival awards and a killer soundtrack.

In TV, Haven: The Complete First Season is sort of what would happen if you merged Twin Peaks with Castle; each week there is a murder to be solved, but they died in some really weird, near supernatural way. Based on Stephen King’s novel The Colorado Kid, there is an overlying mystery to be solved about the town itself that makes these things happen there driving the story arc. There is some good dynamic tension between the FBI lady, the local cop with no sense of touch, and the bad-boy rouge type who might be one of the good guys.

There are two classic Doctor Who episodes being released this week. Doctor Who: Frontios is a Peter Davison era story with Tegan (Janet Fielding) and Turlough (Mark Strickson) as the companions. A group of human colonists who fled the destruction of the Earth are being used as spare parts for some underground aliens with gravity control technology and a mining operation. Time and The Rani is the first Sylvester McCoy episode, with Mel (Bonnie Langford) as the companion. The Rani has enslaved a planet and built a supercomputer by networking a bunch of really smart beings together, including Pasteur and Einstein from Earth, as the first step in her master plan.

There are a number of Best of the 80s packages involving a couple of disks with eight or ten of the best episodes from the show, usually including the pilot and series finale, coming out this week. I mention it because one of them is genre: Knight Rider, but I will not be adding any of these to my collection.

For western animation, Marvel Knights: Spider-Woman Agent Of S.W.O.R.D. was a 2009 TV series that now becomes available on disc. While I have been loving the live action films Marvel has been putting out, I have not been very impressed with the quality of the animations as a rule. Which is kind of strange when you consider how much I have been enjoying the animated comics productions, but there it is.

In Anime, Demon King Daimao – Complete Collection is the new series for the week; when he took his entry aptitude tests at the Constant Magical Academy, the results he heard were Future Occupation… Devil King. While trying to avoid that fate, he ran into more than the usual amount of girl trouble, some trying to help, others trying to hinder, but every one with their own agenda. In re-release in a cost effective package is the masterpiece Last Exile – The Complete Series Viridian Collection. One of the best steampunk anime’s ever made, one of the best aerial combat anime’s ever made, and one of the best anti-war anime’s ever made, it is hard to believe you can now pick the whole thing up for around 20 bucks. I think this one has to be on my top ten list of best anime’s of all time.

Watch Eden of the East online

Eden of the East is now available to watch on Netflix from beginning to end, and you can follow that up with part one of the King of Eden movie (run the movie AFTER season one of the series). The story is simple; a dozen people have been given cell phones with a huge bank account attached, and they will either be the first to save Japan, or they will die at the hands of the folks who set up the project. A few work towards that goal, a few use the money for their own fanatic purposes, and a few try to destroy the country and everyone in it in the hopes they can escape their fate by eliminating those who may come back to neutralize them. This is one of the more interesting stories I have seen in the last few years, so I figured I should mention it here, and both the animation and the character development make this worth a look.

True Blood preview

According to SFX, this is the first 3 minutes of the first episode of season 4 of True Blood. If Tinkerbell held orgies, they might look a bit like this at the front entrance. Notice the familiar face in the last minute of the footage who will be playing her dead grandfather this season, and the timescales of fairyland compared to mortal realms implied by their conversation.

Something to Watch: DVD’s

The Wild Hunt has been making the round of Film Festivals for a year or two picking up some awards in the process, had a limited theatrical run, and is finally coming out on disk this week. A LARP reenactment gamer group is deep into their dungeons and dragons when a jilted non-gamer comes looking for his ex-girlfriend to win her back. Things get ugly when the line between game and reality gets blurry. Winning the award for strangest movie of the week is Rubber, the story of a tire that comes to life and terrorizes the countryside. That works with a whole car and has in several previous movies, but a single tire just doesn’t weigh enough to harm anyone larger than a chihuahua.

While not really genre, I have to mention Burn Notice: Season Four, if only because they have that whole McGuiver technology thing going on, and their tech is dead on target. Plus I love the show, of course; The new season kicks off on June 23rd.

In western animation we get Green Lantern: Emerald Knights. The trailer looks interesting, they are going to give us some info on the origin of the Green Lantern Corp, and Nathan Fillion gets to play Hal Jordan. Obviously the timing on this never-before seen feature length animation is to tie in to the movie release in the theaters, and I’m in.

Moribito: Guardian of Spirit – Complete Collection is a difficult story, with a warrior woman who needs to save one more soul before she dies, and a prince who may be that soul trying to save his kingdom. Together they may be each others salvation.

Revolutionary Girl Utena – The Student Council Saga is the first of three box sets of remastered video with a newly created Dolby Digital 5.1 Japanese soundtrack of this classic series. Containing the first 12 episodes, it has a ton of additional improvements and upgrades; this is more of a special edition set than anything else. Which makes it kind of amazing that if you shop around you can pick it up for as little as $30, especially considering this is in limited production, with only a certain number of them being made.