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Things to Do: Cons

The Media Con this weekend is Twilight Con in Seattle, WA, from the 15th to the 17th.

Reader Cons include DeConPression in Columbus, OH; billed as a Relax-con, with Amelia Mary Earhart as the Ghost of Honor. Also this weekend, Arisia 2010 takes place in Cambridge, MA. While primarily a ReaderCon with GoH Gardner Dozois, there will be a bit of everything going on there. Both of these events are fan run.

On the Anime Con front, Pokettokon takes place at the Illinois Central College (in the Technology Center), again a fan-run event.

Otronicon in Orlando, FL, is something a bit different. It calls itself Orlando’s biggest interactive technology expo, and is more of a commercial trade expo rather than a Con. But it has Gaming (up to and including Halo on an 8 story screen), Cosplay, and Robots to name but a few, so I had to include it here.

Things to Do: Movies

This week is the release of The Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic film starring Denzel Washington. I haven’t heard enough about this movie to make it stand out, so I am just as happy there is an alternative selection for the week: Jackie Chan’s The Spy Next Door. The latter looks to be a variant on his Robin B Hood story format, except I don’t think Jackie sings the theme song in the new film. If you missed him singing it for the other, here you go…

Things to Watch: DVDs and TV

Best choice for DVD’s this week has to be Duncan Jones’s Moon, filmed on a tiny budget but delivering a huge and powerful story. The creative use of miniatures at a time when everyone is making CGI effects is an entire tale unto itself.

A project that did focus on CGI and Animation to get its results was The Celestial Railroad. The classic Japanese story of riding a train through the Milky Way was used as a good jumping off point for creating a program to project onto a planetarium dome at IMAX resolution, and it is now available in Blue Ray.

For TV, tonight’s season 3 premier of Chuck kicked the series off in the right direction, even if a few details (like the whole Prague decision sequence) were beat on harder than they needed to be. And yes, if you missed it you can watch it online at that link. Later this week, the Discovery Channel Sci-Fi Science series gives you the info you need to build your own working light saber. If you haven’t already been following the series, then last week you missed how to build a Starship. Some of the top physicists in the world are involved with this one, so it is not just fictional speculation, but the real deal.

Jeep Rock, Tucker & Dale vs Evil

Some of the things you find online take more imagination than I generally expect from people, and the Jeep Rock video is an excellent example. The second video is the trailer from the film Tucker & Dale vs Evil, a comedy horror film that will hopefully get a distributor after it appears at Sundance this year.