Get ready for The Boy and the Beast, in select theaters this March. It is the latest film from Mamoru Hosoda, who’s previous works include The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the cyber adventure Summer Wars and the Ghibli-esque Wolf Children. It has picked up a number of Film Festival awards already, no surprise considering its creator actually worked at Studio Ghibli before forming his own small animation studio with the goal of making quality animations like the world had never seen before. This is another presentation made possible by Funimation, and they have more coming soon.
One of the most exciting fields of engineering is the application of existing principles in totally new ways to solve long standing human-centric problems, and there have been recent breakthroughs on two such problems that will extend help to millions of people.
The GyroGlove is just what it sounds like: a glove with one or more small but intense Gyroscopes attached to it that will help steady the hands of victims of Parkinson’s and other degenerative neural disorders. Being able to shave without slicing your own throat/femoral artery or being able to eat soup without splattering half of the bowl across the table is a given for most folks, but for those who suffer from the trembling such a condition induces it makes all the difference in regaining a life with dignity and control.
For the visually impaired, electronic communication has meant a telephone so you could talk to people, or a (tiny motors driving very tiny vertical rods mechanism slaved to your internet connection) single line of Braille that you would have to read and remember until the next line was built up on the interface, and maybe the next, until you finally held the entire sentence in your mind. The advances in speech-to-text have been tremendous in the last decade, and that has helped, but there is finally a cost effective potential solution for a Braille Tablet. Using microfluidics rather than motors, a whole new class of Braille electronic outputs become available that make it possible to offer a complete screen worth of text rather than a single line, and for a fraction of the previously available outputs price.
These are powerful advances to my mind, offering new help to a lot of people that never had these options before. Even though each solution will only benefit some percentage of their target populations, I can’t help but grin at the thought that we continue to push back the barriers that keep us all from advancing.
On Wednesday Beauty and the Beast, the new French remake of 1946’s La belle et la bête will be hitting a limited number of US screens. This is a beautifully filmed fantasy classic, I am hoping one of those screens might be somewhere near me. On Friday we have several other options, beginning with The 5th Wave, based on the book of the same name, all about the invasion of the Earth. Ip Man 3 continues the Honk Kong series about the Martial Arts Master who trained Bruce Lee.
Movies bring us Jem and the Holograms, which I have yet to see, so I can’t comment as to how true it stayed to the original premise. Not very, if the reports I have read are accurate; they threw out the female superhero corporate executive of the original series and replaced her with a you tube star with no powers or control. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 19%, which I don’t find very promising, but I will watch it at some point just so I can make up my own mind. Much more interesting is Eden, a French film about the Paris Rave scene in the 1990s and the DJs who made it happen. Daft Punk flit about the edges of the film while the core DJs go through their own evolution played out against the backdrop of the clubs. Rotten Tomatoes gave this film an 82% and it won an assortment of film festival awards, so I am looking forward to catching up with it. I did not find any genre live action TV this week.
Anime has the release of A Certain Scientific Railgun S: The Complete Series, the second season finding a cabal of scientists cloning people with powers and murdering the clones. Their goal is to use the deaths to fuel the growth of a very powerful Esper, but Misaka and the girls of Judgement get wind of the plot when they run into their own clones. Now the battle is on to see who will control Academy City. In Terror in Resonance director Shinichiro Watanabe and composer Yoko Kanno are teamed up to bring you this highly suspenseful series, where Tokyo is decimated by a shocking attack. That is only the opening move in a plot to destroy the planet, and there isn’t much time for the detective chasing down the clues to sift through them for the truth and stop the bad guys.
The band La Luz from Seattle are women with a retro rock sound that reminds me of the best of the classic surf bands. The first track is their song You Disappear from their second album Weirdo Shrine, and posted online in September of 2015. The second is the full live set they did as part of KEXP’s Iceland Airwaves expedition in Reykjavik in 2014, and the third is their live set in the KEXP Live Room in Seattle recorded last year.
I watch near-realtime streaming TV shows from Hulu+/Amazon or Cable/Show/Network Apps because being tied to the TV Show clock is so 20th century. To begin I have to mention that RWBY kicked off its new season the other week, filling in lots of the missing backstory pieces explaining how everything got to be like this as well as advancing the current plot line to new levels of tension. This is my favorite animation created in Poser, it is quite nicely realized. It is also streamed from one of my two Asian near-realtime services, those being Crunchyroll and Funimation. They want to simulcast them within an hour or so of their Tokyo/Seoul/Hong Kong air time, but they face the added challenge of getting each episode subbed into English before they can post it online. Sometimes that makes the presentation a few hours late.
But next week we get a number of Broadcast TV shows I have been waiting for eagerly, so it is appropriate I mention them in this post since I will not be watching them as the shows air. In most instances, Broadcast TV shows are available to watch starting at local midnight after their transmission, just like the cable companies VOD presentations (and under pretty much the same distribution contract), and I usually go on a binge the following weekend. I might not be able to wait this week though.
Tuesday brings the long awaited Season 2 premier of Agent Carter, which is pretty much my favorite Marvel franchise. If you missed season 1, you can watch the whole thing for free on their site to get you caught up for Season 2, but you only have a few days to do so. The other stand alone show I have been waiting for is Heroes Reborn, but this time it is the season finale rather than the start of anything; that happens Thursday. And yes, you can watch the entire season of that online for free to get you ready to see how the season closes.
Tuesday also brings the Winter Premier (the 2nd half of the season) of The Flash, kicking off the next round of CW DC Universe stories. That is followed the next day by Arrow, and I expect both of them to be crossover stories gearing us up for Thursday’s Series Premier of Legends of Tomorrow. I am looking forward to this up-leveling of the DC Universe presentation, which finally puts them within range of Marvel’s TV offerings. Somehow, I just haven’t found the excitement in Supergirl, which needs to step up to the plate to be on a par with the rest of the shows.
It doesn’t quite end there. Also this week, on Wednesday Supernatural kicks off the second half of the season, and The 100 adds its own flavor to Thursdays. And finally, next Sunday we get the long awaited rebirth of The X-Files, bringing a true classic back to television. All in all, it promises to be one hell of a season!