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Something to Watch: DVDs

In Movies, the 2011 remake of The Mechanic is a stand out rebuild. The original 1972 film was quite edgy at the time, starring Charles Bronson as the elder hit man and Jan-Michael Vincent as the young apprentice out to learn how to kill. They added some twists for the remake, and the combined talent of Jason Statham, Donald Sutherland, and Ben Foster noticeably upleveled the game, even if Sutherland died too early in the movie (it was necessary to keep the plot rolling). Why am I mentioning this non-genre film? Because the original was such a cult classic that it became a genre unto itself as soon as it hit the screen.

The indie science fiction film I Heart Doomsday has won a ton of awards at film festivals all over the world, but if it went into theatrical release it slipped right past me. Perhaps there is a reason for that and I should check this one at Netflix. And that leaves us with another feature length film to consider: RiffTrax: LIVE! Reefer Madness. RiffTrax is the successor to MST3K, with a lot of the same people writing the gag lines. I just wish they would put the theater back on a space ship.

There is a western animated feature length film from Marvel this week: Thor: Tales of Asgard. Based on the graphic novel of the same name it covers earlier adventures of the same five Asgard characters we just saw in the movie the other week.

In TV, all the entries this time around are old, starting with The Feathered Serpent, a 12 episode 1976 series that starred Patrick Troughton as the evil Nasca and Diane Keen as the Empress Chimalma. The story takes place in Aztec Mexico (which surely explains all the British accents) where Troughton is a fanatical Aztec priest out to topple the peaceful Emperor in the name of his human-sacrifice demanding god. Just like his time as Doctor Who, Troughton was the star of a children’s program, but this time he didn’t get to be the good guy.

The Twilight Zone: Season 4 also comes out this week. This isn’t the kind of show I have to explain to anyone; if you don’t know what the Twilight Zone is you have either never owned a TV or just moved here from Mars.

The Bionic Woman: Season Two brings the second round of the classic series back to be watched again. This 1975 spin-off of the 6 Million Dollar Man did well in its own right as well as having a number of crossover episodes with the original series. I quite enjoyed the 2007 rebuild of the franchise, but since it was apparently just me and some folks hiding behind the bleachers, it did not take off.

New anime this week is Allison & Lillia – Part 1, a planet with a single continent that has been at war since forever, with the inhabitants of each side of the dividing mountain range constantly fighting. While this program airs on NHK in Japan, it doesn’t play on either of the NHK channels I get here, nor is it available to watch on Crunchyroll, so to see it legally I went to The Anime Network where I watched the first episode to get a feel for the series. This is a period piece anime, with its old fashioned mores, prop-driven planes, and vintage cars; it would have been the mid 1930s if it took place on Earth, warming up for WWII. While it doesn’t look like anything exceptional, I did find the first one entertaining, and I look forward to adding it to my collection if I can find it for a good price.

The classic anime being re-released this time around is Excel Saga: Complete Series. If I had to pick a category for this series, Psychotic Anime Parody would pretty much sum it up, with a side order of Hysterical. If they missed messing with any anime tropes, it slipped by me; they made fun of the majority of them I could think of. If you don’t already own this and you have even a vestigial sense of humor, this would be the one to go for.

Finally, there is a classic old-school re-release: Project A-Ko: Remastered Special Collector’s Edition brings new quality from a classic. Created in 1986, Project A-Ko could not be shown on American TV at that point with its violence, nudity, and interstellar diplomatic issues, but it still gained a cult following. I think IMDB said it best with their description: Project A-ko is the typical love triangle of three school girls and their confrontations with aliens, giant robots, and women who look like burly men. At exactly 25 words, that quote is a legitimate implementation of the Fair Use rules, and at $14 most places it could be worthwhile updating to the remastered version.

New Doctor Who, Torchwood Radio Plays

My favorite BBC Radio station was always BBC7’s 7th Dimension, their science fiction and fantasy showcase which sadly got shut down a while ago, at least as a separate entity. It didn’t just go away, though; they folded it into BBC Radio 4Extra, where it joined up with some other quality radio plays and book readings. Last weekend, they aired Terry Pratchett’s Only You Can Save Mankind, and they are running J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World this week, James Follett’s The Destruction Factor, and the outer space comedy The Laxian Key. While the Pratchett episodes have mostly evaporated (just one left at the moment), you can still listen again to the others. But the exciting bit is what is coming, starting with a brand new Doctor Who radio play, Cobwebs, which begins Monday at 6PM (GMT/UT, adjust for your local time zone) and runs each day for 4 episodes through Thursday. This one stars Peter Davison as The Doctor, Janet Fielding as Tegan, Mark Strickson as Turlough, and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa; I can’t wait. While I am still heartbroken that the Tom Baker/Elisabeth Sladen new radio plays will now never be made since we lost Lis (Tom will still be doing new ones), it is good to know there continue to be new Who stories being created by our old friends.

Nor is this phenomenon unique to Doctor Who. According to this SFX story, they are wrapping up production on Torchwood this week, and are about to go into the studio to record three new Torchwood radio plays. The first one they did, Lost Souls, was aired on the day CERN fired up its super collider in September of 2008, referred to as Big Bang Day by a lot of people who wondered if they would blow up the planet (and don’t you feel silly now?). Then in 2009 they did three more, called Asylum, Golden Age, and The Dead Line. These stories took place between seasons two and three, airing consecutively on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of 2009, followed immediately by season three, Children of Earth, which ran for 5 consecutive nights, July 6th through the 10th. These are all excellently done radio dramas, and if you haven’t heard them yet you can buy the disks from Amazon or download them from iTunes, and they are worth every penny. The three new episodes will be broadcast on BBC4 sometime this summer, which you can listen to online.

DosBox Games in Chrome

Over at NaClBox they are hosting a port of DOSBox to Google’s Native Client playground with one goal in mind: allowing you to play classic DOS games in Chrome. He currently has a limited number of titles set up in demo mode for you to try it out, including Alone in the Dark, the Secret of Monkey Island, and SimCity 2000. All of them play just like the originals, which tells me this VM implementation works great. I was able to play them on a 32 bit XP box, a 64 bit Windows 7 box, a 32 bit Xubuntu box, and just cause I could I then did it on my 64 bit box booting a Knoppix LiveDVD. Not that I recommend that, since all my settings evaporated when I took the disk back out, and Knoppix has its own DOSBox implementation bootable from the xStart GUI or command line menus anyways. I did not have a MAC box to test it on, but it claims to work on them as well.

I am unsure if the goal is to host a bunch of games at that site, but I suspect not. I believe he is trying to develop ports of open source projects like DOSBox for Chrome (the browser and the OS), and that belief is supported by the fact that his source code patch is available for download since this Tuesday so you can figure out how to compile and run your own. My project for this weekend is to see if I can get it built and working here. If I can, I have a few of my own favorite DOS games I look forward to playing again; Gibson’s Neuromancer, Zelazny’s 9 Princes in Amber, and Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Thank Ghod I copied the original 5.25′ floppy’s to 3.5′ floppy’s in the early 90s, and then to CD in the late 90s, because I sure don’t have a working floppy drive of any flavor now. I even still have the original packaging on a few of them, although Leather Goddesses of Phobos looks a lot more sedate than my earlier self remembered.

How does this stuff work? The Google browser Chrome has some built in functionality called Native Client, which basically allows you to embed C or C++ code into your web app. This is currently in Beta, and one of the things that will determine whether it gets widely used or abandoned is how it will overcome the obvious security problems you generate by letting random remote people run programs on your machine. Java already solved that issue with the sandbox and restricted code subset approach to running C online, so there is a good chance Google will get there as well. While having DOSBox in the Chrome browser is an easy fix for windows and apple folks looking to run classic DOS programs in those environments, the real power of this port will be realized by people running those programs on their tablets and smart phones.

National Jukebox

This is a fun little destination; the Library of Congress yesterday fired up its National Jukebox, primarily filled with audio recorded between 1901 and 1925. The event yesterday had Harry Connick Jr. putting in an appearance to sing a song from the Jukeox, and it blew him away. They have a huge collection of Jazz, Blues, Ragtime, Bluegrass, and many others, mostly recorded by their own teams of engineers who went all over the country to get it; a lot of this music exists no where else and hasn’t been heard for 50 or a hundred years. But up until now you had to actually go in person to the LOC to hear any of it. Thanks to this project by Sony and the LOC, anybody in the world now has access to it, or at least the parts they have gotten into the jukebox so far.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter trailer

I love that some folks are actually making trailers for books now, and the one for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is particularly well done. The fact that there is a good chance they will turn it into a movie doesn’t hurt either, since this story is begging for the big screen. The author, Seth Grahame-Smith, has written a few other books you might have run across, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Good fun!