The new Terry Gilliam sci-fi film The Zero Theorem gets released on line tomorrow. It is the story of a computer hacker who is assigned by god to discover the meaning of life, if any, and report back so he can understand it himself. As near as I can tell, this is the perfect companion piece to Brazil, another twisted Terry Gilliam project. When we hit the actual weekend we have a number of interesting films in the theaters, starting with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. If you saw the first movie in this series, I don’t have to tell you about it; if you didn’t, nothing I can say will make sense until you experience it for yourself. A documentary coming out this week I want to see is To Be Takei, all about the man who should have been Captain Sulu decades ago. There are a few more new films this week worth mentioning, but the one I like is the romantic fantasy If I Stay. When you take them all together, it looks like this is the week with the most new and interesting movies so far this year. I can’t wait to see that record broken.
In Movies The Amazing Spider-Man 2 continues this franchises high quality reboot, and the aspect they bring from the comic much better than the original set of films did is the humor. They got the wisecracking that Spider-Man used when taunting the villains down right; it was a major part of his fighting style, used to distract his foes and make them careless with anger. The vampire rocker romance drama Only Lovers Left Alive also makes it onto disc, after a sadly limited run in the theaters. This one deserved a lot more attention than it got.
In TV, Once Upon a Time: The Complete 3rd Season continues to explore everything it means to be characters in a fairy tale. In the new season, which starts September 28th, they are going to include Elsa and Kristoff from Frozen, and you get just a teaser of her in season 3. Revolution: The Complete 2nd Season also hits the shelves this week.
In western Animation Toy Story of Terror! seems to have taken a leaf from the Simpsons with a made-for-TV holiday special. By the way, how many people recognized Totoro in the Toy Story 2 film?
In Anime, A Certain Scientific Railgun S – Part Two has the bad guys cloning the level 5 telekinetic Misaka and then killing her off, over and over. Misaka is not happy about this, and is out to bring them down, any way she can.
If you were there, you know there is no way to make anyone who wasn’t understand the experience. This is the set that closed the show, on Monday morning, August 18th, at 8AM. Of course, it was supposed to happen on Sunday night, but the entire event was running on hippy time, and by the time it became Hendrix’s turn, that rather elastic time frame had stretched more than a bit. The video quality is poor, and the portable audio recording technology of the time was never more than half as good as hearing a live song recorded in a studio, either of which couldn’t hold a candle to what you actually heard in person. But I just find it amazing that I can actually hear this again, let alone see it, and had to share it. The first choice is audio, thanks to Archive.Org, the second video from Vimeo, and the credit for the heads up goes to Open Culture.
They took the video down that I had embedded here, so removed the embed command string. I am guessing they only had it posted through the anniversary of the actual event.
I enjoy the hell out of the The Wil Wheaton Project, and this week I think he has outdone himself. John Barrowman joins Wil to get dressed up in Steampunk style and go party down the town. Lots of Arrow comments and Dr Who references, but what really makes the show special is the level of comedy Wil and his guests bring to the party, and John brings a lot. Trust me when I say everyone who loves both Sci-Fi and Comedy needs to see this show each and every week.
Wonder what the technology you are going to be able to buy and use 3 to 5 years from now might look like? Visiting the SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies exhibit each year should give you a pretty good idea, and this year there are a few particularly interesting ones collected on this video out of the 26 on the floor. The annual event ends today, and I wish I could have been there; perhaps next year. The other SIGGRAPH paths I enjoy are the Art Gallery and the Studio, so I am also including their trailers for this year.
Starting this evening the Science Channel is running a 3 part special about an aspect of the new race for space, with topics that include mining the Moon, colonizing Mars, and protecting Earth from low flying rocks like the one that wiped out the Dinosaurs. This isn’t science fiction or wishful thinking; these are engineers and scientists working for companies who have a business plan that they expect is going to make them a lot of money by utilizing resources previously inaccessible.
I contributed to a Kickstarter project called ARKYD who’s goal started with building a flock of orbital cameras to spot incoming meteors and asteroids. They have launched a bunch of them already with more in the pipe, and they are starting to map orbits using the Asteroid Zoo app and site. Step two is to do launches, both manned and robotic, to capture and change the orbits of the ones that come close enough so we can mine them for resources such as metals and volatiles (fuel and food). The ones coming too close and posing a danger to Earth? You just use that same capture and change orbits process to make sure they do us no harm, mining them for whatever they have to offer in the process. I suspect the third special might be about them.