What I watched in September: Digest Version

b El Cazador de la Bruja:  Less subtle than Noir, but still good, slightly campy fun.  An older young lady who works as a bounty hunter goes on the run with a young teen bounty and protects her as they travel across a frontier world on a road trip eventually leading to the answers to many of their questions.  With magic.  And crazy people.  Crazy, crazy people.  And mad scientists.  And conspiracies and undercover spies and gunfights and mysterious allies with Codes and slightly creepy little girls.  It's a fun time (except for the crazy guy because he was just too disturbing).

b StrAIn:  In this science fiction future, there lives a girl who is justifiably proud of her heroic older brother until he suddenly joins the enemy and starts slaughtering his former allies, including all of her friends at the military academy she was training at to follow in his footsteps.  Under an assumed name, she rejoins the military to find and kill her brother.  She's 100% aggressively antisocial, realistically focused on her mission and feeling like she deserves nothing but scorn as the family member of a traitor.  She gets picked on, but then nice young people see how hard she works and try their best to include her and restore her self-esteem.  This doesn't really work out very well.  Meanwhile, battles, fighting, slowly unfolding plot, some nice twists, and an explanation for how a former hero could turn into this kind of villain that is actually satisfying and (mostly) believable instead of lame.

b Summer Wars:  I'm still ticked off that I missed seeing this in the theater, but when they only have it for one night, and that night is the same one the anime club meets, and when I know the movie is going to be released on DVD, well, priorities . . .  It was impressive on the small screen and would have been moreso on the big one.  What a fun summer movie.  It's as good as the hype and very accessible to non-anime lovers.  It's put together by the same folks who brought you the also fun The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.  In the near future, a math/computer nerd is asked by a hot classmate to pretend to be her boyfriend for a while.  The poor schmuk ends up going to a huge birthday celebration for the matron of the family.  Their jaunt to the country ends up coinciding with an AI attack on the Internet that threatens to bring the world to a halt.  Fun times.  The awkward visiting-family-you-don't-know bits are spot on, and the online avatar action is a punch.  There's some sadness and some dirty family laundry and math.  I approve.