Posted by the Nerdist Channel, the Animal Fighting Championships is done to the song Underdog by the band Wallpaper. They filmed it on a super high speed Phantom Flex camera to get that amazing high quality HD slo-mo effect. Chris Hardwick and the gang at Nerdist find some amazing stuff.
Former Star Wars producer Kaleb Lechowski wrote and directed the short film R’Ha, which you can watch below. He is now teaming up with Matthew Graham to turn it into a feature length film, according to SFX in one of their Link-A-Mania entries. Matt was the person who created two of the more interesting British TV shows, Life On Mars and Eternal Law. Not the first movie to start out as an independently produced short which was then shopped around in hopes of getting a backer, but with the state of modern desktop video production suites this kind of thing is getting better and better.
The obvious winner this week is Man of Steel, the latest in a long tradition of Superman movies. I have enjoyed many of them, and sat through the turkeys in the hopes they might get better, and I will be right back in the theater for this one. Strangely enough, the best trailer I have seen for it is from a cell phone company.
A couple of real winners in Movies this week, starting with Oz: The Great and Powerful. This Disney built prequel was a true homage to the 1939 movie on so many levels, as well as to Frank L. Baum’s wonderful but scary universe. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is another excellent selection, and I am definitely going to have to go for the unrated version with the extended footage. If those weren’t enough the Korean historical epic Masquerade tells an exciting tale of a commoner who becomes a king in the 16th century.
While there doesn’t seem to be any true genre TV this week, Burn Notice: Season Six comes awfully close. Hey, it’s got Bruce Campbell, that ought to qualify it right there.
In Anime, Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne is the story of a helpful high school girl who agrees to pilot a giant robot to kill aliens who are trying to invade the Earth. So yes, now that you ask, this one is a comedy, and I believe they are working on a movie to go with this 12 episode TV series. Bleach: Season 17 has the Soul Reapers battling their own weapons, which are under the control of a power with his eye set on the world of the living. This brings the US anime release up to episode 255, but I think the current Japanese episode is 640. We have a ways to go to catch up.
Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings has season 1 at 13 episodes, season 2 at 12 episodes, plus the OVA. It is a 3-way battle between ninjas, samurai, and pirates, each group trying their best to conquer the country, until the Demon King shows up to threaten everybody. Then the warring parties join forces to eradicate their common foe. While I am not sure if Mysterious Girlfriend X is genre or not (I am only about a third of the way through the series, it could still go either way), it is sufficiently bizarre to be worth checking out.
The BBC reported today that Iain M. Banks lost his battle with cancer this morning. With the M. he wrote his science fiction, most notable of which was his Culture series, an amazing galaxy spanning utopian/anarchistic society which somehow was always at war.
This Kickstart project will do exactly that: Put a Tardis in Orbit! It is on a par with an AM-SAT or OSCAR launch in that it is an amateur satellite launch, except without the radio relay functions. It does include a computer to operate the passive positioning system that will allow the camera to take pictures of Earth, and a low power transmitter to send those images back to earth. I like the project, and I like that attitude of the father/daughter team who put it together, so I have to contribute to this one. Check out the video to see what I mean about attitude.
