I am so looking forward to this one, which is a bit surprising since I am not a Tom Cruse fan, or at least wasn’t. But recently he has been doing some tasty Sci-Fi stories with interesting twists, and it looks like Edge Of Tomorrow may be another one. This movie is based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel All You Need Is Kill. Since the film will be on the big screen on June 6th in the US, May 30th in the UK, you have time to read the book first and get ready for it.
There aren’t any real genre films this week, although the borderline horror film Awakened has some potential, as a young girl gets help from beyond the grave as she tracks down her mother’s killer. It won some awards while on the film fest circuit, and has a few actors I like, so it has possibilities. It is also in limited release, so don’t expect to see it everywhere. Even more not genre and of equally limited release, The Raid 2: Berandal is a violent martial arts police procedural out of Indonesia that may be worth checking out if you are an action fan. For myself, I will try to catch up with one of the genre movies of the last several weeks that I wanted to see but haven’t managed to make quite yet.
The winner in movies this week is Odd Thomas, the first big screen implementation of Dean Koontz’s wonderful series. But it is not our only entry; Walking with Dinosaurs is a quality first-person (first reptile?) animation that explores life in that epoch. And Jackie Chan dishes out his own style of channeling Indiana Jones with Chinese Zodiac, although his character is torn between having his monster payday and restoring his cultural heritage. And then there is The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna, a documentary with teeth.
In TV, Continuum: Season Two continues the story of time-hopping criminals and the unlikely collection of people who might (or might not) be able to stop them.
For western animation, Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher is worth looking into. Well, western animation except for the detail that the animation work itself was done by Mad House, the Japanese animation company. But the characters, background, story line, plot twists, and everything else about it is pure Marvel comic book all the way.
In Anime, Mardock Scramble: The Third Exhaust brings the final chapter in Rune Balot’s struggle to bring the man who killed her to justice. It has taken quite a while for all three feature length presentations to be released, since they came out with a full year or better between each one. Now that I finally can get the end of the cyborg revenge story, I think I am going to have to watch them back-to-back so I get all the details fresh.
Fairy Tail – Part 9 continues that excellent saga, complete with all the collateral damage you have come to know and love. In Robotics;Notes: Part 2 the members of the Robot Research Club have finished building their giant combat mecha, only to discover their work is far from over. Just to keep things interesting there is also a robot uprising and a renegade AI rampaging across the countryside.
Rocking out Kobe (the place the amazing beef comes from), Egg Brain knows how to party. The first track is called Muzic, their 4th single released on February 5th. The second song posted here is Vitamin from a year ago February (way back in 2013), and the final selection is Awake from their 4th full album in 2012. This band has an energy I haven’t heard since Asian Kung Fu Generation, I am looking forward to a lot more killer music from them. They have been cranking out an excellent assortment of tunes since 2007, I will probably need to post some more of their stuff soon.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, Knoppix 7.3.0 is the latest release of this grand-daddy of Live DVDs. When it first started out in the late ’90s it was built to be both a Live CD to give you an instant free operating system full of free software that would run on almost any hardware you had available, and to be a Rescue Disc. By 2003, when version 3.2 came out, it had become a lot more, with many different specialized builds, including Scientific, Engineering, Game and Network platforms. A lot of folks also used it as a Demo Disc environment, making their own customized builds that would launch straight into their own programs, allowing you to run the software without having to install it on your computer. Over the years the functionality has grown, but the two core abilities that make it so very useful remain its Rescue Disc and its Disc Authoring tool kits.
You can download Knoppix 7.2.0 from one of the mirrors listed, using HTTP, FTP, or BitTorrent, and it is available in both CD or DVD size, depending on how extensive your software needs are. Note that the 650Meg Live CD version unpacks to 2Gig worth of software, so even the smaller file is a powerhouse. The latest version, 7.3.0, can be picked up included with the March copy of Linux Magazine.
The second film in the reboot of The Amazing Spider-Man has released its final international trailer. I don’t know why this franchise ended up with Sony when most of the Marvel universe became part of the Disney family, but they have been doing an excellent job with it. This one will be on the big screen in May.