Strider's Sci-Fi

I do enjoy Augmented Reality Apps, and wanted to mention one from the new movie Walking With Dinosaurs that is both educational and silly fun, and carries my favorite price tag: Free. It allows you to embed and position whichever dinosaur you select into the photographs you take and teaches you a bit about them in the process. The Walking With Dinosaurs App comes in both iPad and Android flavors.

I don’t know if I appreciate this more for the amazing cosplay or the quality video production, but this footage put together from this years Katsucon is just fun to watch. Congrats to Beat Down Boogie for an excellent job, and if you like this, check out their channel for a lot more of the same.

The Wachowski’s are at it again, and Jupiter Ascending has the potential to be as impressive as their first Matrix movie. Jupiter Jones cleans peoples houses for a living, but when a genetically engineered super soldier arrives on Earth to kill her and ends up saving her and taking her to her destiny, she begins to see her future is stranger than she had ever imagined. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this one is as good as this first glimpse would lead us to believe.

The obvious mention this time goes to J.R.R. Tolkien’s prequel The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, a single book dragged out into three complete films. I thought I should also mention Saving Mr. Banks, a movie about making the movie Mary Poppins, which almost never got made at all. It will be in limited release this week, and wide release next week.

I usually hit movies first, but Day Of The Doctor gets the number one spot this time around. This is after all the 50th Anniversary Doctor Who Special, and definitely had more Doctors than any other episode. While we are on the topic of TV, I should mention Futurama: Volume 8 and Futurama: The Complete Series will both be hitting the shelves this week.

Another break from my normal structure; I usually do live action movies first, but Despicable Me 2 has to start out the movie presentations this week. It was way too much fun, and you just can’t have too many minions. The other movies worth mentioning have either Cantonese or Mandarin as their primary sound track, including Man of Tai Chi. Note that that is the second Asian-centric film Keanu Reeves has starred in this year, and the first one he has directed. Saving General Yang takes place in 986 AD, and involves the famous Yang Family Generals. For something different, The Rooftop seems to be a Taiwan gangland musical with lots of singing, dancing, and fighting. It looks like a fun film to check out.

In Anime, Bleach: Season 19 brings us up to episode 279. To put that in perspective, they are up to episode 366 streaming from Japan, so the DVDs are finally starting to catch up with the streaming sources. Another returning favorite is Fairy Tail: Part 7, bringing episodes 73 through 84, and they are also releasing Fairy Tale: The Movie this week, so you get a double dose.

Btooom!: The Complete Series is about a combat game which suddenly changed when the 7 best players in the world were kidnapped, and woke up on an island with a bag of bombs each and holes in their memories; now they have to kill each other off and be the last one standing to escape, or so they are lead to believe. Finally, in the main series, a bunch of friends had their bodies repeatedly swapped so they never knew who they were going to be next, had their ages change at random, and had their desires overwhelm them and take control, all being done to them by an outside force. Now, in Kokoro Connect: OVA Collection, their inner emotional state is suddenly being projected into one of their friends, including phobias and suppressed desires, sometimes with near lethal results.

I had to; this is hysterical. Star Wars Bohemian Rhapsody was built by the folks at UAT Digital Video and they did an amazing job with it. Since I do musical posts each Saturday, this seemed like the right day to put this here.

If you like gaming, check out Did You Know Gaming, they have a lot more than just this history of Doctor Who references in games. Their other site (sister site? friends doing similar stuff?) is Video Game Facts, which also has a ton of cool stuff. And yes, I will get over all the Doctor Who posts in a while, but it is still the 50th anniversary and I am still a bit stoked.

Yep, Sony finally released it today, and it looks amazing, as befits a movie with the name The Amazing Spider-Man 2. I can’t wait for the new episode for the franchise, I like the reboot of the films a lot (although I still like the original trilogy, which had its own set of good points). I love all things Marvel, and still wish my mom hadn’t thrown out my comic book collection in the 70′s. It would be worth a fortune now, including as it did the first hundred or so episodes of Spider Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Thor, Avengers, and more, all of them bought new starting at issue #1.

Looking back, I realize I never collected Iron Man, Captain America, or Doctor Strange because I didn’t care for the artwork, but the same style of artwork was OK for Spider Man and a few others, because I related to the character so well. I guess you could say I loved styles like those Jim Steranko created over those like Steve Ditko made, as a general rule, and if you compare those two artists styles you can extrapolate the rest of my preferences easily enough. But the STORIES from all those universes were riveting, both for their sci-fi wonderfulness and their depth of character development with the accompanying interpersonal relationships. To this day, I want more excellent graphics with killer story lines and dramatic emotional development, and I suspect that combination is why the Marvel Movie universe has been such a delight for me. Yes, I will be in the theater for this one. Hopefully in I-MAX 3D for probably two showings in a row.

More coverage, this time with a glimpse of the crowd in the rather cattle-car waiting area they kept us standing in for a couple of hours. They could have just opened the doors and let us sit down, but that didn’t happen. That was just about the only part of the event I found less than entertaining, everything else about the event was excellent.

Yes, it really happened several days ago; Lady Gaga and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu shared a stage on the hit Japanese music program Music Station, and it was hard to say who was more Kawaii. It was also hard to say what they thought about each other, at least from this bit of footage. Considering no one has a face in a Kyary Pamyu Pamyu video except Kyary Pamyu Pamyu herself, my bet would be she was not happy that someone else was taking center stage on the Kawaii platform, but this is only a small slice out of the show. I haven’t seen it myself yet, but hopefully the DVR has captured it and I will be able to watch it and come to a much more informed conclusion. The show airs on Friday nights in Japan, on Sunday in the US for those with NHK Premium. It is the one Japanese rock show that musicians from all over the world drop in to sing one of their songs while they are touring the country, and all the best J-Pop bands hit as often as they can arrange (AKB48 are pretty much the show regulars). Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on this one.