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This Saturday, April 2nd, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. will be doing the Ninth Annual National Cherry Blossom Festival Anime Marathon. As usual Otakorp (the folks who bring you Otakon each year) are co-sponsors for the event, and the D.C. Anime Club will be helping to host it, also as usual. This year’s presentation includes a special remembrance of Satoshi Kon and his amazing body of work, which include Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Perfect Blue, and they will be showing his award-winning Paprika on the big screen. If you have only seen this on a TV before, now is your chance to see it the way it was meant to be viewed. The day starts out with the Hayao Miyazaki classic masterpiece Kiki’s Delivery Service for children of all ages. They will also be running a few titles from Makoto Shinkai, his excellent The Place Promised in Our Early Days and a preview of his new work, Hoshi o Ou Kodomo or Children who Chase Lost Voices. The theater is very nice and the price is free, but you want to get there early before the tickets are all gone. I can also recommend the non-film portions, like the Cosplay Competition and the reading and book signing with Roland Kelts, who will also be doing the presentation about Satoshi Kon. Hope to see you there!

Attack The Block is a UK movie in which a bunch of inner city kids fight back against an outer space alien invasion, with a little help from Nick Frost. This one looks to be good silly fun, but I haven’t seen a US release date for it yet. Much more serious is Falling Skies is a US TV series that is a lot more serious. When it opens we are already 6 months into the alien invasion, and humanity is fighting for its very existence. TNT will roll out Falling Skies in June, and you can see the new trailer here.

Pick of the week would have to be Source Code, about a soldier who is part of an anti-terrorist task force, and who keeps getting shoved back through time so he can gather intelligence about who planted the bomb, so they can be arrested. But that is not good enough for him; he knows that the true task is to save the victims on the train from the bomb. The problem is doing so would lead to some serious causality loops, possibly as severe as an actual paradox, and that threatens the very existence of the task force, and maybe even the planet. This one is worthy of Philip K. Dick in its twisty recursiveness, and is another win for Duncan Jones.

Also out this week, Super is the story of a man who turns himself into a costumed vigilante after loosing his girlfriend to a drug dealer. The Crimson Bolt may not have any super powers, but he does have attitude and a serious wrench as well as some great actors involved with project. For the younger crowd, the animated Hop shows what happens when the Easter Bunny gets run over by a distracted driver.

Finally, in a bid for the Batshit Crazy award we have Rubber, a film about a telekinetic tire which goes on a killing spree. This one is so outside the box it has a shot at cult status if the quality holds up.

The best two releases this week are animated. Disney’s Tangled was an absolute hoot on the big screen, and will be just as funny and fun filled on smaller screens, I feel certain. If you haven’t seen it, now is your chance. Be warned that in this movie the horse pretty much steals every scene he is in, which I found amazing for one simple fact; he does not get a single word of dialog. This one is being released in every format up to and including 3D.

The TV series worth noting this week is not sci-fi, but science: The Cosmos: A Beginner’s Guide. This one was built as part of the BBC 2 Open University project, and is in fact a collage level course for the price of a DVD TV series.

Evangelion: 2.22 You Can [Not] Advance brings us the updated second quarter of the re-imagined series. When completed, the four feature length films will take less total viewing time than the original 26 episodes and two movies although to be fair one of the movies was a retelling of episodes 25 and 26 to arrive at an alternate ending. Even so, they are getting all the key story line, plot twists, and character development of the original into them. To make it all fit, they are skipping a lot of the less important giant mecha vs. alien battles and just showing the critical ones. Whether you consider this an improvement or not depends to some extent on why you liked the original series, but I find that it makes for a denser story moving at a faster pace. While I haven’t heard of any plans to turn the new Manga series into an Anime yet, I should mention that Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse Graphic Novel 3 is being released by Dark Horse Comics this week as well.

The fantasy epic Guin Saga Collection 1 will also be released this week. Their homeland invaded, their parents slain, the prince and princess of Parro flee by means of a strange device hidden in the palace. It deposits them in the Forest of Rood, where a cat headed warrior named Guin saves them from their enemies; and so the story begins.

It is time for the SFX 2011 Blog Awards, where the world class Sci-Fi magazine staff have narrowed each category down to four or so nominations. They have six categories, but they have still left us some impossible decisions. Under Best Podcast, as an example, they have both Escape Pod and Doctor Who Podshock, both of which are insanely good, so how do you decide? The Fan Community choice is even harder; Gateworld or Whedonesque gets compounded with Gallifrey Base or The Trek BBS, and I want to vote for all of them! But you only get one vote per category, and trust me when I say the others are just as difficult to choose between.