This is the weekend we finally get to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I have been ready since they first announced J.J. Abrams would be heading up the new films. I am definitely seeing it Friday, and will let the film decide if it needs to be seen again Saturday and/or Sunday. Also out this week is He Never Died, the crowdfunded fantasy starring Henry Rollins. And if you are a fan of great Asian films Mojin: The Lost Legend is a good Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider kind of story based on the #1 bestselling series of novels by Zhang Muye. This particular movie is based on his book Ghost Blows Out the Light, and if it does good enough at the box office perhaps they will turn the entire series into movies, one after the other.
As you might expect just before Xmas, a bunch of good movies have been released in time for you to grab them to give out as gifts. They include the Fantastic Four reboot and the second story in the literary franchise Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. In addition there is the incredibly silly (and politically incorrect) Ted 2, and the latest entry in another fantasy franchise, Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation. With that many new films coming out it is kind of sad that there isn’t a new idea in the collection, only studios trying to cash in on preexisting properties. There is one original new cinematic work, but it isn’t genre; Slow Learners is a romcom about the terminally dorky, and what they go through in the effort to have a real life. TV brings us Extant: The Second Season, which definitely is genre. Just the bit about the astronaut mother looking for her half-alien son to protect him from the government’s killer robots should be enough to put it squarely in the realm of Science Fiction.
In Anime, we have two tales about Earth being under attack by aliens, with Daimadaler: Prince V.S. Penguin Empire, The Complete Series and Majestic Prince: Complete Collection. We also get two butler-centric stories in Hayate the Combat Butler: Heaven is a Place on Earth, and Ladies versus Butlers! Complete Collection. Hayate at least is genre, the other I don’t know about as I haven’t watched it.
There is a new One Piece: Season 7 Voyage 4 which brings us episodes 422 through 433. Finally, Chaika: The Coffin Princess is refreshing, in that it misses a lot of the standard Anime tropes and tells its own unique fantasy story.
Art Rock band The Oral Cigarettes have put together some tasty tunes over the years, so I wanted to share a few of them with you. The first one is their track Hey Kids, which was the 2nd OP song for the anime Noragami Aragoto (the first Noragami OP was Hello Sleepwalkers). The second song is this year’s hit Amy, and the third is 2014s Star Get. I think this band has a lot of promise, and I can’t wait to see where they go from here.
Noragami means something like Stray God in English, and the slacker stray god at the heart of this story doesn’t have a clue how to grow his worshiper base. Yato is a minor god without a single shrine and with no divine weapon, but he wants to make it big. Then he meets a girl named Hiyori who changes everything in and about his world. I like the music and the animation style in this one, and look forward to seeing many more episodes; hope those episodes get created!
Japan’s first planetary orbiter Akatsuki is now sending back images of Venus from close up, and the folks at the Planetary Society have posted a nicely detailed Akatsuki Mission Status Report on their web site which includes those pictures. Besides telling us about the satellites current status, they also give some information about its mission as the Venus Climate Orbiter and the three cameras that are its primary data gathering instruments. There was also some background on the JAXA planetary orbiter history, of which this mission is the first success, and a translation of their press conference announcing the achievement. While I would personally rather move to Mars, the knowledge we can gain from studying the weather dynamics on Venus will be very useful in better understanding our own.
A recipe has been posted for Liquid Carbonite on the Star Wars web site which reads just like a normal milk shake. But the picture has convinced me I need to add a Han Solo in Carbonite silicone mold to my kitchen collection, and I am certainly looking forward to the new film hitting the big screen next week. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the first one I have been excited about since the original trilogy, so much so that I think I am going to have to spring for the IMAX version.