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Something to Watch: DVDs, 15Oct13

I saw Pacific Rim in IMAX 3D, and the screen still didn’t seem big enough to contain all the action. Even though I don’t have a screen that size at home I expect to enjoy it every bit as much there. The other sci-fi film this time around is The Colony, about surviving the next ice age, and the things that come with it.

In TV, Defiance: Season One is something unique, being the first show interconnected with an MMO, to the point where what happened in the next episode was influenced by developments inside the game that week. That had to be difficult, since normally your production timeline has you filming episodes several weeks in advance, but the result was a fairly impressive experience for those who experienced the series through both media. We also get Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Complete Season Five, a story line that is still going strong.

In Anime, Campione! Complete Collection is the story of an ordinary teen age boy who accidentally defeats the God of War in a fight to the death, and gets declared Campione, or God Slayer. His new job means he has to fight heretical Gods when they show up, and he gets assigned a crew of helper demoness’s who mostly end up getting him into still more trouble. Eureka Seven AO – Part 2 concludes the sequel to the original series, in which Eureka’s child finally learns his history and his part in the battle to save Earth from the aliens.

One Piece – Season 5 Part 3 brings another 11 episodes of piratey goodness, bringing us up to episode 299 (and yes, I do know “piratey” isn’t a word, but I used it anyways). Sword Art Online is putting out another of its little 5 episode discs priced just like a full 13 episode box set, so I will be waiting to catch it on sale. It is an excellent series, I just can’t justify paying 8 to 10 dollars an episode for it.

More J-Rock; Folca, Triceratops, Supercar

The first band is Folca with a track from their 2nd mini-album Curtain Call. That just came out in September, and they are touring Japan in support of it now. Then we have Triceratops with their song Going To The Moon. They are a 3 piece band heavily influenced by British Invasion bands like the Beatles and Stones, hence the nice harmony work and quality guitar riffs. They have put out a dozen albums in the last 15 years and are still going strong, with their latest release being a live tour recording they put out in August. The third band is Supercar with a live version of their song Lucky. They played good basic rock from 1995 to 2005, releasing 5 studio albums and a handful of project recordings.

Rurouni Kenshin trailer

Rurouni Kenshin looks like it should be quite a tasty story; an assassin who is now just a humble wanderer, seeking the life he would have chosen had the option been his. When his past hunts him down, he is forced to return to his old ways to protect his friends and family, as best he can. I suspect the hunters are going to regret their actions. While far from the only variation on this plot line, this is one of the better done. Check it out and let me know what you think, and if what you are thinking is it should have been an Anime, it was, back in the 90s. It was a Manga before that, and quite an enjoyable story in any format.

Oktoberfest starts tomorrow

By which headline I mean the Sci-Fi London Oktoberfest, which runs from the 11th to the 13th. This event is a science fiction film festival with workshops and panels, some of which are about making your own films and TV shows. The one that excites me is Starship London, where Sci-Fi London teams up with the Institute for Interstellar Studies to hold a symposium to promote awareness and education to support their goals. Their goals are simple yet profound, and if they pull it off everything changes for the human race: to realize interstellar flight before the year 2100. This is not a joke, they are absolutely serious, and they are working hard to generate the technical expertise and scientific knowledge required to make it happen. But don’t forget they are also running a whole lot of Sci-Fi on the Big Screen, including the first 3 of the new Evangelion movies in their Anime All Nighter.

Amanda Palmer: The Art of Asking

I don’t even know how to categorize this, but Amanda Palmer has proposed a bartering system to bring us back to how we used to share music, hundreds of years ago. It makes sense for some artists, and it works best if you use the latest social media technology. This is part of the amazing and ever growing collection of information available to all for free from TED, an excellent repository of open source information that we all can utilize to help create a much more interesting world to live in. OK, there might be a music video after that, possibly.

Le Voyage Dans La Lune

After watching the Smashing Pumpkins Steampunk song back in 2009 (the link has been removed or I would have it here), I had to track down the original 1902 French movie that inspired the video segment. Based on the 1865 story From The Earth To The Moon by Jules Verne, the movie was created by Georges Méliès. It was cutting-edge film making, with never-before seen special effects and production values, and was one of a handful that earned Méliès recognition as the inventor of science fiction movies. You can download the book to read on your computer or portable device, or read it online. You can also listen to the story online or download it for your portable media player (or burn it to CD) thanks to the good folks at Librivox. They remade the movie in 1958, but the original is the best. You can download your own copy for your permanent collection or just watch it online at Archive.Org.

By the way, Méliès also invented both the horror movie (in 1896) and the fantasy film (in 1898), as well as another dozen genres I don’t happen to watch. He was a world class pioneer in film making, the central character in the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and was played by Ben Kingsly in the Martin Scorsese film tribute to his genius in Hugo in 2011.