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Things to Watch: DVDs

Two films mark this week as a major release date for the young and young at heart. Ponyo was supposed to have been on the shelves before Christmas, and then again in January, but each time they pushed the date back. Unfortunately I can’t read the official Studio Ghibli site, nor do I know which country it is telling us the DVD date is for. But Amazon seems to think it will come out Tuesday, so unless they pull another last-minute reschedule we may hopefully see it this time.

The award for best drama performance while wearing a rug-thick costume with built in animatronics goes to Where The Wild Things Are, the Spike Jonze implementation of the famous children’s book. This live-action film is designed for slightly older kids than the animated Ponyo, but both are wonderful stories that any adult can relate to.

Then there are two made-for-TV programs that you might think were for children, but they aren’t. The 1966 BBC program Alice in Wonderland was definitely built for adults, and even originally aired after 9PM. This masterpiece had such starts as Michael Redgrave, Peter Cook, Peter Sellers, and John Gielgud in it, and its release onto DVD is long overdue.

The other one goes by the shorter title Alice, and was on the Sci-Fi Channel in December. Also designed for adults from the same source material, this one stars Caterina Scorsone, Andrew Lee Potts, Matt Frewer, Tim Curry, Colm Meaney, Cathy Bates, and many others. I don’t think it is any great surprise both of these are hitting the shelves the same week that the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp version opens in Theaters. And that one also has some amazing actors, including Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway; one would think this story draws almost as many quality actors as Hamlet, a tale everyone wants to be in at least once.

For fans of disaster movies, 2012 does its best to kill off the entire planet, and you can’t get much more disastrous than that while we are all stuck in a single gravity well. While this one feels a bit more like a thrill ride than a movie, it is fun.

Speaking of fun, do not miss Gentlemen Broncos; while more a story about a Sci-Fi author than science fiction itself, this one is downright funny.

For classic TV, this time around it is Doctor Who: Dalek War, two John Pertwee era stories. Frontier in Space is grand space-opera told on a tiny budget, and features not only the Daleks but is also the last time we saw Roger Delgado as The Master. Planet of the Daleks may look like a Hartnell story, but it does have some original Dalek background information, plus after the photo layout I just have to grin any time I see Jo Grant with a Dalek.

Besides the previously mentioned Ponyo, there are several other anime titles this week. The Yozakura Quartet don’t play instruments, but are a mixed-blood (demon and human) demon fighting team; this boxed set is the complete collection. Season three of ARIA The Origination is also out, and the 13 episodes are packaged up with the OVA for extra value.

Eureka Seven: Good Night Sleep Tight Young Lovers was a re-imaging of sorts; they took all the same characters from the same world but changed the core premise of Eureka herself. That change to the character’s origin completely changed the dynamic of the plot line. Which means, even if you own the original TV series, you haven’t seen this story yet.

Kurokami The Animation Part 1 show a run time in the product description of 200 minutes, which tells me it is only the first 8 episodes of this 24 episode series. Since that would make the combined total for all three DVD releases somewhere around $90, I think I will watch it on Crunchyroll first and decide if it is worth that much cash, or if I should wait for a less expensive “Complete Series” release.

And I think I finally understand why they delayed Ponyo; because also on Tuesday there will be Special Editions of three other Studio Gibli classics; Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and My Neighbor Totoro. If you are missing any of these, now is the perfect time to add them to your collection.

New Who, More Science

New Doctor Who is on the way, beginning on April 17th per Airlock Alpha… and yes, according to a lot of other sites as well, including BBCAmerica itself. But Airlock Alpha is a great old site (was Syfy since the ’90s until they sold the name to a well-known cable channel) that deserves all the mentions it can get.

Meanwhile, the Science and Entertainment Exchange has a member who has been making the news for proposing Realism in Sci-Fi may be a good thing. As an example, a movie should only be able to break one law of physics, such as traveling faster than light or backwards in time (even though both of them are allowed for in Quantum Mechanics, String Theory and Brane Theory, we don’t have a workable engineering solution for them yet). This is the intellectual inverse of my current favorite science TV show, called Sci-Fi Science. Each week, they tackle one science fiction concept and look at the engineering it would take to make them happen, based on our current level of technology. I find it interesting to see just how close we come on some of them, like the super-hero suit or building a light sabre.

Fun Videos from new directions

Just a few fun videos, based on modifying observable reality in non-standard ways. The key for both of these is only partly to use the latest evolution in communications and data processing to achieve the desired result. Having the latest tech is good, but what is critical is using that tech in ways never before tried to go for desired results nobody else thought of before. The embarrassing part is how obvious it all looks once you finally see it in action; why didn’t any of us think of that before?

The first is the MIT FlyFire Project, which lives at the Senseable City Lab site. Now that sensors of all types, from static units like traffic cams and mobile units like cell phones are ubiquitous, privacy is right out the window; but new ways of gathering, displaying, and using data are in our hands. The helicopter-optics project itself combines the emergent behavior of the swarm of drones interacting with the environment with the top-down control imposed by the computer orchestrating the display patterns. Learning to program this combination will be challenging but most worthwhile.

The second video is a glimpse at how David Byrne approaches ways to share an appreciation of music. In this instance, by converting an entire building into a musical instrument, and allowing interested parties to sit at the keyboard and play the building. The subtle layer below that one is the fact that every child or adult who sits at a control panel and wrings music (no mater how pitiful) out of a multi-story structure will never again think of it as a box they might be inside of, or as part of the background. From then on, every building they see will become an instrument they might play, which means an interconnected whole that can be manipulated to achieve a desired result. The more people that have that epiphany, the more minds there are working to build our future; and that is a GOOD thing, trust me on this.

Things to Do: Cons

The most important Doctor Who Con of the season has to be Gallifrey One: Blackjack 21 in Los Angeles. Guests include Sarah Sutton, Katey Manning, Georgia Moffett, Debora Watling, Frazier Hines, John Levene, and many, many more.

There are two good general sci-Fi cons in the US this weekend; on the left coast is Condor XVII in San Diego, with Writer GoH CJ Cherryh. The theme is Tripping the Past Fantastic in all its Steampunk glory, with a Mad Science Faire and nominations open for the Mad Scientists Hall of Fame. Out of those already nominated, I have to vote for Nichola Tesla for the Real and for the Fictional, it’s a toss-up between Dr. Emmett Brown and Professor Albert Wickwire (in both cases because of the skill and sheer joy the actors brought to the parts). There are also writers workshops, dealers rooms, anime rooms, the Hogwarts Educational Retreat, lots of live music including the Steam Powered Giraffe, and ever so much more.

Over on the write coast, SheVaCon in Roanoke, VA, has guests covering the spectrum of authors (including Kevin J. and Rebeca M. Anderson), artists, and actors. All aspects of Fandom seem to be covered in the Events section, with Anime Rooms, TV/Movie Viewing Rooms, Game Rooms, Computer Rooms, Fan Groups (a LOT of them), multiple competitive Cosplay events as well as non-competitive, and everything else you would expect. Whichever coast you are on, quality general Sci-Fi Fun is to be had!

If you are down under, Continuum 6: Future Tense looks to be the venue of choice this weekend. The premise for the event is that 2010 was used in so many books, movies, etc. to mean simply The Future, that now that it is here we should celebrate! Their home page describes it as Killer robots are beating down the door while Mutant Hordes gather… your Emotional Inhibitor is on the fritz and your Computer is calling you “Dave”, and again this event has everything a good general Con should have, plus something special. This is the event where they hand out the Chronos Awards, which I find somewhat disturbing. I am not disturbed by the thought of the award, but by the fact that I know none of the nominees in a contest that is pulling together the best authors and stories from an entire subcontinent. Looks like I have some serious reading to do!

Meanwhile the Japanese Art Festival comes alive at the Richmond Adult Community College in Richmond, UK. This is a Non-traditional anime-related event, if you are interested in the subject matter, I urge you not to miss this one; it is a monster!

Turning Japanese

This one was too much fun, so I had to include it here. The Embed-permitted version is courtesy of Veoh: this is Kirsten Dunst doing a remake of the classic Vapors song Turning Japanese. This one was even filmed in Akihabara! Strangely enough, this video was put together as part of a museum exhibit in London. For some reason the video seems to be blocked on the jstrider.net server, but it plays just fine on JStrider.Info, or you can watch it on YouTube if you are so inclined.


Watch Kirsten Dunst “Turning Japanese” in Music  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com