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Something to Watch: Discs

I didn’t find any genre movies or TV shows this time, but there are still a few worth mentioning. Spare Parts is a true story of the four undocumented Mexican-American high school students who went head to head with the team from MIT in the National Underwater Robotics Competition, using robots made from spare parts. The TV series Halt and Catch Fire: The Complete First Season takes place the year after IBM came out with the Personal PC, with a fictional company comprised of renegade engineers reverse engineering it and improving on it, as the computer race got off the ground. While the characters are fictional, the engineering issues they face and the solutions they come up with for them are the very ones the entire industry was working on at the time. The personality mix of the engineers will look very familiar to anyone involved with any cutting edge engineering project; thinking outside the box and radical innovation are not done by ordinary engineers, but by the exceptional. Masters of Sex: Season 2 is also a story about real-life cutting edge science which actually took place in the past, as doctors Masters and Johnson did the research that would change our understanding of the most basic aspect of human nature.

In Anime Natsume’s Book of Friends: Season 4 follows our protagonist as he continues to give the yokai their names back. He is learning how to deal with the yokai and humans that surround his life and now must learn about himself as well. The World God Only Knows: OVA Collection finds the girls forming an Idol band among other wacky goings-on, now that Keima has become something of a wizard. I should also mention that the classic Patlabor: The Movie, previously available only in SD, is coming out on Blue Ray this week.

Controller: a new movie creation paradigm

With the power put into everyone’s hands by the growth of computer capabilities on an almost daily basis, people who want to create their own movies are starting to have a lot of the same tools as the major studios. What this means for folks who have a vision of the film they want to create is they have to approach the studios in a whole new way. Where it used to be good enough to go in with a verbal pitch for your film (This is like The Birds meets Jaws, and everyone is running for their lives), that doesn’t cut it any more. Now you have to prove you have the story telling chops and a tale worth financing by creating your own little preview, more than a trailer but less than a feature film. One of the best examples I have seen of this recently is Controller, about a girl who wants to escape from the corporation who controls her. To do so, she remotely takes control of her boy friend and forces him to wipe out anyone who would stand in the way of her freedom.

It was good enough that Fox is putting up the money to actually make the piece, so we can hope to see the extended story soon. I don’t know how long ago this trend started, but I first became aware of it when the first 6 minutes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was created in just under a decade, and the results shown to a movie company that decided to finance its completion. This is definitely a great way for people to spend minimum money to create something that might get them to realize their dream; thanks to The Dissolve for the heads up on this project!

CONTROLLER (控制者) from Saman Kesh on Vimeo.

Something to Watch: Discs

I didn’t find many genre Movies or TV shows this week, although Paddington is a fantasy as well as a children’s tale, so should be included in this list. Certainly it has some of the best CGI effects playing the part of its title character I have seen in a while. There is a live action Japanese movie that fits the genre criteria coming out this week, in the form of 2013’s Arcana. When you watch the trailer see if you can spot the actor who played the primary villein in the Korean sci-fi TV romantic dramedy My Love From Another Star. While not genre, Inherent Vice is based on the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, so should be both darkly funny and appropriately twisty.

We do much better in Anime this time around, starting with D-Frag!, where Kazama’s plan to rule the school using violence is tanked when he runs into the pretty psychopaths of the Game Creation Club. Now he will be lucky just to survive the whacked out games these girls play. In Nobunaga the Fool: Collection 1 the giant mechas were built by Leonardo Da Vinci, and Joan d’Arc needs to convince Nobunaga Oda to use them to unite both planets under a banner of peace. Then there is Hayate the Combat Butler: Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, another 12 episodes forming season 3, continuing the epic fight for Hayates life, and his charge’s freedom and well-being.

World conquest has been a dream of would-be dictators for centuries, but has never actually happened. At least not until one girl pulled it off in World Conquest Zvezda Plot, possibly the strangest tale of world domination ever told. I should also mention a couple of classics being re-released for another generation this time around: Fushigi Yugi (a book transports 4 friends into a parallel universe, giving them 52 episodes of adventures before they can escape) and Saiyuki (4 reluctant heroes are just as concerned about having a good time as they are about saving the world for 50 episodes). My super-short description of the two tales may sound similar, but they are far different than you might suspect. Plus, they are both absolute classics of their kind, and well worth your time to watch and enjoy.

Something to Watch: Discs

There is one actual disc in the Movie category that I saw, Walter, an Indi film that blends ghosts, religion, and mental illness to create a story in which a ticket taker at the local Cineplex is responsible for determining whether the people he meets go to heaven or hell. This one looks pretty quirky, and if it came to a movie theater near me I missed it. Also, Jupiter Ascending is out on streaming and digital download; if you want the Disc version, that will be available on June 2nd. In TV we have The Musketeers: Season 2, buckling yet another swash as the adventure continues.

There are an assortment of Anime this time around, led by Space Brothers: Collection 2, where things are heating up in the competition to become astronauts. This set brings the count up to episodes 14 through 26, be aware that the series itself is currently up to episode 99 and counting. We also get Freezing: Vibration, in which a new generation of women are going through genetic engineering modifications to enable them to battle the alien invaders. Something is going wrong, and it is up to Satellizer el Bridget and her crew to get to the bottom of it before it is too late. Devil Survivor 2: The Animation, Complete Collection is about a group of people who’s cell phones acquire an app which shows their own death a minute or two before it happens. The deaths are caused by powerful beings from other universes/levels of existence, and to avoid dying they have to defeat the invaders. No one can fight these creatures alone, so they evolve into groups and teams, but even so death takes its toll. Unlimited Psychic Squad is a spin off of Psychic Squad, and is focused on Kyōsuke Hyōbu’s organization P.A.N.D.R.A. as it tries to oversee three of the most powerful psychics in the country.

Continuing a couple of old favorites, Naruto Shippūden DVD box22 contains episodes 271 through 283, while Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Blue-Eyed Casval is only 63 minutes long and is available only as an import. Considering it costs close to $100 for an hour of animation, I will watch it streaming on Daisuki, although it is also available from Amazon Instant Video and the Google Play Store. Speaking of expensive, The Garden of Sinners: recalled out summer has two movies about a precognitive woman who avoids death by seeing what is about to happen, but for $70 for 120 minutes I will pass. Considering the original price was $189, later reduced to $149, they are at least heading in the right direction with this, but I wish I knew of a legal streaming service carrying it so I could watch it there. Finally, Hanamonogatari: Suruga Devil is five episodes for $50, which isn’t as badly priced as the others but still seems steep. It is the Sixth arc to the Monogatari series’ second season, which I will continue to watch on streaming services.

Passepied; Tokinowa, from Rin-ne

This is the latest track from Passepied entitled Tokinowa. Normally you would get a bit more animation with a Passepied song, but you are seeing it out of context here; check this page to get the full effect. Tokinowa is the ending theme of the new animation of Rumiko Takahashi’s original Manga Rinne of the Boundary, officially subtitled as Circle of Reincarnation. The song becomes available on April 29th, in about a week and a half, although the Anime started airing in Japan on April 4th. Viz licensed both the Manga and the Anime for hard copy release, and you can watch it stream on Crunchyroll, where it is currently on the second episode.

Live Action Attack On Titan trailer

They have been talking about the live action Attack On Titan Movie and/or Miniseries for a while now, but up until recently we only had the shortest of teases, and that one car commercial. We finally had the first movie trailer come out last month, and I forgot to post it, so here it is. The movies break the story into two parts, the first hitting the big screen on August 1st, and the second one a month latter on September 19th. The miniseries is three episode long, features the same actors as the movies in the same roles, and is airing this August on Japanese streaming service DTV between the two film release dates. It will focus on the service and support staff, the development of the 3D maneuver gear, Titan research, and other story elements that don’t involve breaking the budget with constant FX heavy Titan attacks. The one issue I still have to solve is figuring out how to apply for the English language version of the DTV programming, which I have yet to locate. Thanks to the folks at Rocket News 24 for the heads up on this one.