Since we posted our Digital Disc Picks for this week about
10 days ago, Amazon went and put several additional items up on
their list – here’s a few of the new picks that we missed last
time. They’re still sparse, but they are there.
There are no new Blu-Ray releases that bear mentioning for this week, that we didn’t mention last time (with the exception of Sin City for Blu-Ray being released in Japan, which shares a region code with the US), so we’ll go straight to the DVD releases:
Berserk
Complete – A remastered omnibus release of the anime
series I reviewed
around the end of November.
When They
Cry Vol. 6 – The extremely violent anime series released
in Japan as Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni. I’ve heard good things about
this… and I’ve also heard it’s Nightmare
Fuel, not to mention extremely violent. Consider yourself
warned.
Zatoichi:
Blind Swordsman Vol. 5-8 – This appears to be a collection
of the Zatoichi films On The Road,
Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold,
Zatoichi’s Flashing Sword,
and Fight, Zatoichi, Fight.
Nighthead
Genesis Vol. 2 – Basically, it’s a anime series about
telepaths who fight crime (there’s more to it than that, but that
would involve spoilers). It’s a prequel to a live-action Japanese TV
series that has yet to be licensed.
Nanaka
6/17 Complete – Slice-of-life comedy anime about a
17-year-old girl who gets hit on the head and regresses to childhood
(the age of 6, specifically) – Haven’t seen it, don’t know how
it turns out.
So, for the pick of the week –
if you’re going to get anything this week, go with the Zatoichi
collection. I’ve seen half the movies in that collection, and they’re
decent fare for Zatoichi films, they seem formulaic now – but
at the time, the Zatoichi franchise was fairly new, so they were
establishing the formula for what I guess you could best describe as
a “swordplay western” that would be done nearly to death
later on. The film’s are generally PG-13 (or whatever your local
equivalent is), so if you’re going to grab one of the films off this
list as a Christmas present for the film buff in the family (who
isn’t allergic to subtitles) with the thought of watching it with the
family, that’s the way to go.
My sole reason for not picking
Berserk Complete is I don’t know if they have the bloopers from the
original DVD release in the set – as the series got grimmer and
grimmer, the bloopers added some welcome levity – and if those
bloopers are absent from the collection… I’d consider the series
slightly less watchable unless you’ve got something lighter and more
amusing (like, say, Azumanga Daioh, or Tenchi Muyo, or the first
season of Black Lagoon) to watch as a chaser to lighten things up.