If you have any love of SciFi at all, run, don’t walk, to your nearest online streaming service, log into Netflix, and start watching Sense8. Eight cities, what starts out being 8 people (who rapidly become one), and one central theme; Homo Sapiens are becoming Homo Superior, and the powers that be will do everything they can to kill them before they lose their own power to control the world forever. This brilliant series includes the Wachowskis as creators, but J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame is the real storyteller here.
Terrestrial Human
This week we finally get Jurassic World, the latest in the Jurassic franchise. I have liked these since the very first one, and I will definitely be in the theater for it, hopefully the IMAX 3D version. There are also a limited number of theaters which will be showing Debug, a film about 6 hackers who go up against the AI in a derelict space ship, which will be a show I will be passing on.
In movies this week we get Kingsman: The Secret Service, an action/adventure/comedy based on the Mark Miller Marvel comic book series The Secret Service. In TV we get The Last Ship: The Complete First Season, an end of the world thriller with a lot of action.
In Anime, Hyperdimension Neptunia is one of those recursive anime about gaming on thinly disguised platforms anthropomorphized as (of course) cute girls. Knights of Sidonia: Season 1 takes place a thousand years after the destruction of the Earth by the Gauna, with the remnants of Humanity still fleeing for their lives. This one is a Netflix original, and they have already signed on for season 2, which will be online on July 3rd. Mardock Scramble: The Trilogy puts both the directors cut and the theatrical version of these three movies into a single box set for the first time. Our protagonist is murdered in the first film’s opening sequence, and her memory recording (taken before her human body fully cooled down) spends the rest of the story wearing a cyborg body and attempting to bring her killer to justice. It is just as cyberpunk as Ghost In The Shell, and worth watching.
It has been a while since I have posted any thing by Asian Kung-Fu Generation, so I figured since they have a new track I was about due to feature them again. The song is called Easter and was posted at the end of March. As long as I am mentioning them again I thought I would throw a couple of old favorites on as well, so the 2nd track is 2012’s After Dark, the third is the visually silly Well Then, See You Again Tomorrow.
Joeri Christiaen’s amazing animation 850 meters was produced by Thuristar in coproduction with Lunanime, and it has been screening in festivals as well as airing on CANAL+ in France and Ketnet (VRT) and Ouftivi (RTBF) in Belgium. This particular version is in English, which I can follow a bit easier than the original language (French, obviously). It was made with the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund and Provinciebestuur Oost Vlaanderen. To my mind the really good news is that a spin-off TV series called My knight and Me is now in production, with 52 episodes, 12 minutes long each, given the green light. Enjoy, and if you are so inclined also check out the Making Of video to get a sense of who these people are and how they feel about the project.
Awesome Con in Washington D.C. this past weekend certainly lived up to its name, and its rep. They had a huge collection of actors, artists, and authors (and that only covered the first letter of the alphabet) doing their best to make the gathering memorable. Pretty much all of the guest actor/voice talent celebrities manned (personed?) a booth on the bottom level, off to the side of the hucksters area by the primary entrance, most of the time they were not doing a panel or presentation. Between those two groups were the artists, both Comics and Fine, with quite a few other visual disciplines mixed in. That last sentence gives you the idea, but not the scope, unless you expect there to be a hundred or more impressive illustrator/storytellers on the multiple-football-field sized area you are crossing to get to your next scheduled event.
They had some presentations I never expected, like Twisted Toonz, where a group of world class voice actors played out a famous movie as totally different characters than the ones in the original. This year the film was The Wrath of Kahn, and the voice of Wini The Pooh coming from the bridge of the Enterprise was one of the the least disconcerting aspects of that presentation. I can’t wait to see another show organized around the same principle, it was absolutely amazing and entertaining! Although the voice actor tasked with being Bill Cosby for one part of it kept looking out at the audience like he was trying to find an escape route.
