This week we get The Imitation Game, the true life story of Alan Turing, the genius British mathematician, logician, cryptologist and computer scientist. He was in the forefront of the project to crack the German Enigma Code that helped the Allies win WWII, without him we might have lost the war. Benedict Cumberbatch gets to play the great man this time around. If you prefer your spy’s animated rather than real, The Penguins of Madagascar is quite a bit funnier… but it also stars Benedict Cumberbatch, so he is in both of my selections for this weekend.
In Movies we have The Giver, the story of a boy living in an peaceful, idealistic world; or so he thinks. When he get assigned as the Receiver of Memory for his people he learns things are quite different, and a lot more fragile, then he thought. This is based on the best selling YA novel of the same name by Lois Lowry.
I suppose I will have to put Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Turkey Day Collection in TV, even though it contains 4 movies. And the title is fully accurate, because the films are some real turkeys. While not genre, R.E.M. TV is worth mentioning; another Shout! Factory project, it is pretty much every instance of R.E.M. being on TV, including the out-takes.
In Anime, Log Horizon: Collection 1 is another virtual MMORPG that suddenly traps the players inside what doesn’t seem to be a virtual world any more. While it has a completely different flavor than my favorite of the type (SAO, of course), it is quite fun in a completely different way. We also get Road to Ninja: Naruto the Movie out from Viz Media, US home of all things Naruto.
Ex Hex is Pop Punk for today, and they do sound quite tasty. The tracks below are from their recent live visit to Soundcheck WNYC-FM, and should give you an idea of what this band is about. You can hear more of their songs at their home page, including some from their recent session at WAMU-FM. And as you can probably tell from the studio music video below, they are a D.C. band.
It is now called Project Almanac, but when I first blogged about it back in January the name was Welcome to Yesterday. It does look like it could be a very interesting time travel movie, fully grounded in the law of unintended consequences. Of course, it might just collapse into a horror type film as well; we will find out on January 30th.
There is a very creative guy called Joey Shanks who puts together videos that are tutorials in how to create various kinds of special effects in association with PBS. One of his recent projects was to show how to create a scientifically accurate Black Hole like the one in the movie Interstellar. The video allows you to see step by step how each element was captured by the camera, and then gives you a peak at how they look when all the elements are added to the composite layer by layer. This is not how the effect was actually created for the film, in part because a big piece of Joey’s approach is to do as many elements of a given build using real world objects and a camera to film them as possible. But it does give you enough information that you might get some really good ideas of how to build your own effects. I found out about this series from Cinefex, a great place to learn more about how the effects you see on the screen get built, and who is doing them.
Black Hole creation | Shanks FX | PBS Digital Studios from Joey Shanks on Vimeo.
It looks like we have a viral site for the upcoming movie Jurassic World in the form of Masrani, a telecommunications company who bought up InGen facilities after the death of John Hammond. According to Jurrassic World dot Org, which is either a fan site or another marketing team (I am not sure which), the first trailer will be out in another week or so. Thanks to Empire Online for the heads up.