How could I avoid mentioning it? It is not quite a Sci-Fi con, but some of the same people will be there. SETI Con is a convention centered around the question of where everybody is… everybody that didn’t evolve on this planet, that is. It is coming up August 13th through the 15th in Santa Clara, CA., and will be running four tracks: Main, Science, Education, and Q&A. The panelists and speakers lean heavily to the sciences (with a whole subsection just for the astronauts), but includes Sci-Fi Authors, some of whom are scientists, and Sci-Fi actors, one of whom is also an astronomer. And if it wasn’t already obvious to you, this party is put together by the SETI Institute, and yes, SETI does stand for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Thanks to the bloggers at Discovery for the heads up on this one.
Yesterday when I logged into Crunchyroll to watch the next episode of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu (so far, a series I associate with Genshiken and Welcome to the NHK in its expression of the Otaku lifestyle), I found a little flag telling me that episode 1 of the Occult Academy was available for viewing (it aired in Tokyo yesterday as well, so it is fresh!). So I felt the need to check it out and report back here, and if you want to watch it yourself, the direct link to the Occult Academy is here.
The story opens at the school commonly known as the Occult Academy in 1999, where the Dean/Principle/Headmaster has just died. He founded the school to help train people in non-standard modes of reality ranging from magic and astrology through telekinesis and UFOs. His daughter, Maya, arrives late for the funeral and in an angry frame of mind. When her father’s spirit-inhabited corpse gets out of the casket and starts attacking the students, Maya goes into action to protect them with a physical counter attack. While doing so, she hands out whatever disinformation she feels will best deflect the people she is speaking with from believing in the Occult as something supernatural, an equally important defensive move from her perspective. There are two brief segments, at the very beginning and the very end of the episode, where we catch a glimpse of something different than the main body of the program; a brief glimpse hinting at the time travelers from 2012 and their agenda.
This is only the first episode, so it is difficult to actually comment on the quality or give it any accurate rating as yet. The premise is first class and has a lot of potential, but as to whether the writers can convert that into an ongoing storyline that will build on the promise and deliver a riveting series that glues us to the screen remains to be seen. Likewise with the characters; in this opening episode we were introduced to Maya, several of the students, and the vice principle (or whatever the correct term is for the schools second in command). The only character explored in enough depth to get an initial peek at their motivation and personality was Maya, but that is not surprising in a 22 minute episode with 14 minutes of action sequences and 4 minutes of background and setup exposition.
Animation quality can only be inferred, since the available stream data density was not good enough to match a standard definition TV screen, but the actual animation itself looked pretty good within those limits. Not new or groundbreaking, but definitely solid and workmanlike in its delivery and quality. The animated Maya looks awfully familiar (think Eureka7), so I feel confident when I get to reading the credits in detail I will discover a few old favorite names. As for the music, it didn’t offend me, but I need to hear the intro and outro songs three or four times before they click in my head and I come to a conclusion. The incidental music, meaning the background audio that builds a mood for a specific scene or enhances the transition from one scene to another, did not stand out enough to distract me from what I was watching. That is half the job for incidental music, but because it did the first half so well, I didn’t notice if it did the second half and actually add to or improve the overall viewing experience. Again, with another two or three more episodes to base a judgment on I should be able to come to a conclusion. What can I say, my ears are a bit slow on the uptake.
Final conclusion: this one looks very promising indeed, and unless it takes a virtual header into the bottom of the quality pool I will see it through to the end of the first season. I will also tentatively recommend it, and keep my fingers crossed that I will continue to do so by episode 4 or 6.
There are a number of tasty films coming out in July, with two good ones this weekend. Despicable Me is the feature length animation to see. The villain played by Steve Carrol is out to steal the moon, but three little girls may just end up reforming him. I got an extra grin out of the fact that the villain’s name is Gru; how many here have played that game? If action/adventure is more to your taste, Predators also hits the big screen on Friday. In this next installment on the franchise, a handful of the worlds best killers have been kidnapped to another planet to be prey in a hunt. I am thinking I may have to see both of these.
The following weekend has three films coming out, two of them pretty much everywhere. On the 14th, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by the National Treasure franchise team takes a stab at reproducing that magic with real magic as part of the premise, and yes, that team includes Nick Cage. Two more on the 16th, with Inception in wide release, telling an original tale of dream theft and the thought police that I have been waiting about a year to see. The other film on the 16th is in limited release, The Wild Hunt, originally scheduled for release in May. A man looses his girlfriend to a bunch of guys in a medieval re-enactment game, but it isn’t a game to everyone.
Two more films the week after that, where Valhalla Rising follows a viking with supernatural strength to a mysterious and violent place. There is some discrepancy between various sources on whether Rising will be released the 16th or the 23rd, but it will be both in theaters and on Video On Demand, so it should be accessable to just about everyone. I might not have included Salt as a genre film, except it is vary obviously every Philip K. Dick book ever written, even if he didn’t write this one, so how could I leave it out?
Hands down, this weeks best DVD release has to be Life On Mars (UK): The Complete Collection. If you are only familiar with the US remake, which was unwatchable, you have my condolences, and trust me when I say the UK original was wonderful. If you are a fan of the original, but have been holding off on buying it because each 8-episode season ran around $45, now might be the time to make your move. While the SRP is $79 for the full set, I have found it at a few online sites available for pre-order for around $54, just over half of the original separate season costs. This is one of those Time Travel/Cop Show/Psychotic Break programs any thinking person can’t help but watch over and over (again, unlike the American TV remake), particularly because of the interaction between actors Philip Glenister and John Simm. Did I mention I recommend it?
For the rest of the TV choices, three Sci-Fi selections from classic Doctor Who and two documentaries round out the collection. The first Who release would be the William Hartnell episodes The Space Museum / The Chase. It is worth noting the Space Museum includes the actor who would later become Boba Fett as leader of the Xerons. Next of the Doctor Who releases is The Time Monster, starring Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning. The bit that makes this episode memorable is its redundancy inside a recursion; the Doctor hides his Tardis inside the Master’s Tardis, while the Master’s Tardis is inside the Doctor’s. This is a true Tesseract moment in the history of Dimensional Displacement. The final Who disk is The Horns of Nimon, a Tom Baker/Lalla Ward series episode. The Nimon were the first TV series examples I know of for the Sci-Fi trope of the intelligent interstellar locust species used to such good effect in Independence Day.
The documentaries are comprised of Douglas Adams final book, Last Chance to See, and the NASA/UA behind the scenes look at the Phoenix Mars Mission: Onto The Ice. The Adams film is hosted by Steven Fry, but even with that powerful combination of funny men this one is dead serious about all the species on the edge of extinction.
On the movie front nothing really spectacular leaps out, but a few potential hidden gems are lurking about the edges. Bitten looks like an interesting Vampire horror comedy (the Zombies have gotten too much of that field recently). I am thinking that looks at least worth a Netflix viewing, so I can decide if it needs to be part of the permanent collection. Eyeborgs has been making the Film Fest circuit for a while, and again looks real interesting. With all the reviews I have read about this one, there will not be a wait before I purchase.
For foreign live action this week Battle League Horumo stands out as a humorous (perhaps even downright silly) action adventure. The Battle League games consist of 10 players, each of which controls 100 Oni or small demons, fighting to be the last player standing. Kyoto is the playing field.
Anime gives some good options this time around. D.Gray-man comes out this week with a season 1 box set, as does Ghost Slayers Ayashi. Another full season collection is Gurren Lagann, which is a very warped little program using retro-70s animation styles (even though it was made around 2005 to 2007) to tell a twisted little story about the nature of existence and humanity’s place in it. And season 1 of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is also being released; no word yet on when the ONA, the movie, or the second season of the show might be available. All of these programs were previously released as individual volumes, but this marks their first time available as box sets.
The new Harry Potter trailer is just a bit dark, and the last book is broken into two different films, but it still looks like fun to me. So even though we all saw it this weekend in the Theater, here it is again.
In the land of Authors, I have to endorse this review of Ken MacLeod’s Restoration Game, and encourage anyone who hasn’t read MacLeod to get off their ass and buy and read a copy of everything he has ever written. He comes at the world from directions most of us cannot imagine. I would also like to recommend this weeks favorite Steampunk Romance author, Gail Carriger, who managed to create a wonderful milieu and the characters to populate it. If you can’t afford to buy them, hit your local library and read Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless, and see how the stories and series began.
Posted from a festival in Glastonbury, posted this past Sunday, Matt Smith took the stage with Orbital, introducing the theme to his own TV program and revving up the crowd. According to Suite 101 the control panel Matt then ran was a sampler interface, which pretty much makes Matt the only Doctor to play the Who theme himself at a concert. There was the A Capella version of the theme proformed by David Tennant and John Barrowman on the Brit TV program, so it is not completely unique, but very close. The video contains strobe lighting in the laser show, if you are susceptible you might want to give it a skip.