Disney’s Big Hero 6 already has me laughing and cheering, and the movie won’t be out for months yet. I have commented on it previously from the perspective of the Marvel property it comes from, a graphic novel/manga of the first order with a lot of links to Japans Pop Culture. And that’s without even going into the whole Pixar/Miyazaki/Disney animation connection. As a single example, did you see Totoro in Toy Story 2, and recognize that high-quality animation universe crossover?
Terrestrial Human
Some of this stuff you just can’t make up. How about Eye of the Tiger played on a dot matrix printer? Or maybe you would prefer Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor? These are just two of the wonderful choices created by MIDIDesaster, a person who’s motto is Abusing old hardware to play music. I like these, and hope they will make a lot more tunes this way.
“Eye of the tiger” on dot matrix printer from MIDIDesaster on Vimeo.
Toccata and Fugue on dot matrix printer from MIDIDesaster on Vimeo.
If Tinker Bell was kidnapped by a UFO and subjected to probing, this is probably how their illicit love child would turn out. This aerial toy is the brainchild of someone who is using Yiwu, China as their main commercial sales center. Thanks to the folks at Vimeo for the heads up on this.
“tinker bell drone” from savasavasava on Vimeo.
This is a look at what it would have been like to live on a space station in the mid-70s. Space Station 76 is just good silly fun in the retro-future. This has been making the film festival rounds since March 8th of this year, when it premiered at SXSW, but I haven’t seen it get picked up for theatrical release in the US, nor have I heard anything yet about a DVD release. If it comes to a Film Fest near me, I will be going to check it out.
The new Terry Gilliam sci-fi film The Zero Theorem gets released on line tomorrow. It is the story of a computer hacker who is assigned by god to discover the meaning of life, if any, and report back so he can understand it himself. As near as I can tell, this is the perfect companion piece to Brazil, another twisted Terry Gilliam project. When we hit the actual weekend we have a number of interesting films in the theaters, starting with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. If you saw the first movie in this series, I don’t have to tell you about it; if you didn’t, nothing I can say will make sense until you experience it for yourself. A documentary coming out this week I want to see is To Be Takei, all about the man who should have been Captain Sulu decades ago. There are a few more new films this week worth mentioning, but the one I like is the romantic fantasy If I Stay. When you take them all together, it looks like this is the week with the most new and interesting movies so far this year. I can’t wait to see that record broken.
In Movies The Amazing Spider-Man 2 continues this franchises high quality reboot, and the aspect they bring from the comic much better than the original set of films did is the humor. They got the wisecracking that Spider-Man used when taunting the villains down right; it was a major part of his fighting style, used to distract his foes and make them careless with anger. The vampire rocker romance drama Only Lovers Left Alive also makes it onto disc, after a sadly limited run in the theaters. This one deserved a lot more attention than it got.
In TV, Once Upon a Time: The Complete 3rd Season continues to explore everything it means to be characters in a fairy tale. In the new season, which starts September 28th, they are going to include Elsa and Kristoff from Frozen, and you get just a teaser of her in season 3. Revolution: The Complete 2nd Season also hits the shelves this week.
In western Animation Toy Story of Terror! seems to have taken a leaf from the Simpsons with a made-for-TV holiday special. By the way, how many people recognized Totoro in the Toy Story 2 film?
In Anime, A Certain Scientific Railgun S – Part Two has the bad guys cloning the level 5 telekinetic Misaka and then killing her off, over and over. Misaka is not happy about this, and is out to bring them down, any way she can.