There are several excellent choices this week, starting with Passengers, where two people wake from cold sleep 90 years before their starship arrives at their new colony planet. Starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as the wakees, this may be the best choice for the weekend. We also get Assassin’s Creed, which started life as a game but seems to have translated to the Big Screen just fine. If you prefer something a bit lighter and more inspiring, Sing should be just the animated treat you are looking for.
James Patterson’s bestselling YA book series Maximum Ride made the transition to movie format, but it didn’t play anywhere near me; now I get a chance to see it as they release it to DVD. The animated film Storks may be the best bet this time around, good silly fun from the studio that did The Lego Movie. There are also a couple of documentaries that look interesting, Oasis: Supersonic being about the rise, reign, and implosion of the band, while Hitchcock/Truffaut is all about the 1962 week long meeting those two had when they dissected the film industry.
Anime has an unusual release either this week or next, depending on which web site you believe: Attack on Titan 20 Special Edition w/DVD is a manga/graphic novel that included a DVD with an anime episode not released anywhere else. Owarimonogatari 2 is only 6 episodes long, being the second half of the season, but it does tell the complete Shinobu Mail story arc. Finally Shakugan No Shana S: OVA Series is now available in a S.A.V.E. edition, but considering it only contains four 23 minute episodes being able to pick it up for just under $20 doesn’t seem like much of a deal.
Crimson Apple is a band from Hawaii (now based in LA) made up of 4 sisters and sometimes a friend or two, who have cranked out some excellent music. The first song is Run Along, the second is called Hello, the third is One Time, and they finish up with the track Replace This Heartbeat, all from their Hi Sessions episode. Hi Sessions brings Hawaii’s best music to the world from their studios which appear to be located most of the way up on the side of a volcano. They write their own original music, but they have also posted some great covers of One OK Rock songs which are well worth watching.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have some new Webisodes streaming: Slingshot! Each Webisode is about 5 minutes long, and a major percentage of the core characters are here, telling a story they couldn’t fit in to the regular TV episodes. This is one of the aspects of the multi-screen experience I really appreciate, where they expand the universe the stories take place in rather than just use it to sell the main TV show. Considering how much greater depth each actor gets to bring to their character’s story, I can’t help but believe they appreciate it as well. Here is the first episode of the Slingshot mini-series; be sure to visit their YouTube channel to see the entire sequence.
The scariest part of this movie is that we have already successfully completed the initial experiments that will give us this technology. Mindgamers is about what could happen once you can hack the human mind, remotely or otherwise, focusing on just two (out of 200 or so choices we might decide to explore) of the potential uses. The first use is controlling the action of another human remotely through a neural connection network, and that was accomplished in the real world about 5 years ago. The second is recording the total gestalt needed to embed a given skill set to another human by playing it back directly into their brain. I am in favor of that when the new skill set I will be learning is how to fly a jet or play the violin. I am not so enthusiastic when it might be used to convince me who to vote for, pray to, or buy from. We don’t have that technology yet, but my best guestimate is we are only 5 years out from making it work. The first video is the MindGamer Movie trailer, and it looks like it is going to be a not-to-be-missed monster on the big screen.
My favorite of the earlier movies exploring this topic was 1983’s Brainstorm, starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson. It is the second video here, and considers the consequences of being able to record what one person experiences, and play it back so someone else can also directly experience it. Brainstorm memory storage was based on Beta tape recording media, state of the art tech for that time and the only option for storage density compact enough to save everything they implied to be included. The film inspired 1984’s Dreamscape and a handful of others, none of which understood how it could actually be made to happen, but each of them took one aspect of the implications and explored them. Most of them have some very scary stories to relate to us, a lot less positive than Brainstorm itself.
The third video included here is the real world success report on one person controlling another remotely through a brain-to-brain interface that can be built from $100 worth of parts slaved to a power supply, a couple of antennas, and a few RF/Neural Link interfaces. I am sure it will be no comfort when I tell you that you can do the same job for a third of the cost and half the parts these days, since the technology has advanced that much. The only good news is that if you learn to recognize the gear and processes used, you run a much better chance of avoiding becoming a victim yourself!
In this war, Legion is the key; But who or what is Legion? The new Marvel series rolls out on the FX Network on February 8th, and it has the potential to become the most interesting story line in the entire MCU. For those of you who may have missed it, I am including the first trailer as well.