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Things to Do: Cons

The ReaderCon of note this time around is Boskone 47 running from February 12th to the 14th, in Boston, MA. The Author Guest of Honor (GoH) is Alastair Reynolds, the Artist GoH is John Picacio, the NESFA Press Guests are Lois McMaster Bujold and Michael Whelan, and the Hal Clement Science Speaker is Vernor Vinge. How can you be anything other than awed with a lineup like that, and they are only the tip of the iceberg for this event!

Another ReaderCon happening from the 11th to the 13th is LTUE2010, also called Life, the Universe & Everything 28, at BYU, sponsored by the BYU College of Theatre and Media Arts. This is the The Marion K. “Doc” Smith Symposium on Science Fiction & Fantasy, with Author GoH Brandon Sanderson and Special Effects Wizard GoH Marty Brenneis.

BTW, if the referents for these two ReaderCons were not immediately obvious to you, take a few minutes to read Triplanetary By Doc E.E.Smith, so you will be ready to defend your galaxy.

For Anime Cons this weekend, KatsuCon takes place in The MD burbs of Washington, DC, at the National Harbor, and runs from the 12th to the 14th. My own personal hang-out point for this event will probably be the Katsu Lounge, listening to bands like the Tokyo Ska Paradise and Unicorn Table.

If there was a GeekCon category (I swear there isn’t, it just might somehow look like there was sometimes), this weeks winner would have to be the Genericon event from the folks at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

Things to Do: Film Festivals

The Berlin International Film Festival comes around for the 60th time from February 11th to the 21st. This monster festival is broken into 7 sections, each with its own director. There are a ton of movies, I thought I should mention a few that sound interesting to me.

One Life, Maybe Two is another paratemporal story, in which a single event goes both ways, and the fork between worldlines explores each outcome. The premise matches up with Sliding Doors in that regard, but the kind of events explored are quite different. While I suspect no one is referencing the Spanish Inquisition in this one, I am looking forward to seeing it some day.

Another film worth noting is Shutter Island, a rather surreal film about a disappearing mass murderess who may have escaped from a psychiatric prison. The talent involved with this film includes names like Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, and Max von Sydow, and the trailer looks great. This one is not just for the film festivals; it goes into public release on the weekend of the 18th/19th of February.

There are a few other films you might want to check out. Howl has been making the festival circuits, a DocuDrama about the Ginsburg obscenity trial in 1957. That was the birthplace of the American Counterculture movement, and everything that it evolved into over the following 50 plus years. This film includes a presentation of the poem itself, which more than anything else puts into perspective just how far we have come since then.

And Ginsburg begat Dury; so how appropriate this festival also includes Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll, a film format reconstruction of Ian Dury’s biography, showing how he became key to the development of Punk and New Wave music, and the culture they spawned. He influenced The Clash, The Pretenders and the Sex Pistols to name just a few. He toured the US with Elvis Costello and Lou Reed back in the seventies. As the title of the film (it is also the title of his smash hit song) might make you suspect, he really was on the direct line of decent from Ginsburg, and was a major influence on the development of his segment of the Counterculture.

And Ginsberg begat Warhol and Waters; also in the 70s, No Wave film making was born in New York City, mostly in the low-income parts of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The movie Blank City does a good job of presenting just how intense this Counterculture cauldron became, and what kind of film movements it spawned.

Wish I could be in Berlin for this fest, but I guess I will just have to cheer them on from here.

Things to Do: movies

With one of the longest titles of any film this month, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief looks to be very entertaining. The cast includes Pierce Brosnan and Uma Thurman, and the style looks very Harry Potterish. No real surprise there, as the movie is based on the first book in a series for YA Demi-Gods by Rick Riordan; I am sure they are hoping to tap the same youth market as the Potter films.

Also out this Friday, The Wolfman is a powerful remake of the original Universal movie, staring Anthony Hopkins and Benicio Del Toro. While it doesn’t look as Steampunk as either of the recent Sherlock Holmes releases, it does seem to lean in that direction.

Things to Watch: DVDs

The live action movie release to consider this week is The Time Traveler’s Wife, and yes, this is a love story, much in the tradition of Richard Matheson’s Time And Again. This close to Valentines Day, it seems appropriate, and it is a fairly decent treatment of the book.

The animation to be aware of is Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic, but be warned this animation is not for children, nor is it work friendly. The structure is the same as Animatrix, with a separate writing, directing, and production team (all leaders in the field who have created Anime classics) for each segment. This has not been released in theaters that I am aware of, although a limited number of lucky viewers got to see it on the big screen at various film festivals around the world. The DVD is being released in parallel with the game (the game company commissioned the film), both of which are based on the original epic poem.

The TV collection to look for this time around is SG-U Stargate Universe: 1.0; they lost the annoying blue vampires and re-invented the franchise as a Battlestar-style lost in space adventure. The Stargates have been relegated to the same role as Trek’s Transporters, and the galaxy spanning communications system introduced near the end of SG1 are used to keep the episodes from being limited to the ship, the landing zone of each planet, and the characters trapped on the ship. I personally loved SG1, and found any episode of SG-Atlantis that had the blue guys in it unwatchable (which did leave them with 20 or 30 good episodes over their 5-year run). So far I find SG-Universe to be about half way between the two, but if they stop trying so hard to be the new BSG (which they are failing at) and go back to the core strengths of SG1 (good mix of humor to go with the OMG moments, excellent dialog, and retain the good ensemble chemistry they have to bolster the dynamic tension), this series has the potential to equal or surpass the original.

On the anime front, Soul Eater Part 1 bears a style resemblance to Dead Leaves, both for the graphics and the audio, and looks like it could be a lot of fun. You can watch Soul Eater episodes online at that link to give you an idea if it should become part of your permanent collection. Gaogaigar Season One Litebox comes from the folks who built Godanner and Betterman, and shows you how that team started out. And while Naruto Shippuden: Volume 6 is also coming out on Tuesday, I will be waiting for the next season-long box set before plunking my money down; there are just too many episodes in the series for me to be able to afford any other choice.

Funny things…

Some things are too funny to avoid. One of those things is the tremendous body of work created by Mitch Ben and the Bonzo Dog Band. This was the place where comedy and music slammed face-first into each other, and each grew a bit in the process. So I thought i should post a few songs here, for those who didn’t know about them. But just before we go there, the best bit of street theater ever; Antwerp is singing scales from The Sound Of Music, and so is Wellington! If your town hasn’t gone there yet, you could still get lucky.