Let’s face it, no one can ever have enough One OK Rock, and here are a few of their tunes to prove it to you!
Terrestrial Human
Based on this trailer, I suspect Michael Bay’s The Last Ship is going to be a serious contender for this summer’s TV viewing champion. This post-apocalyptic action/drama starts with a virus that wipes out a major percentage of the people on the Earth… but the people on the Sea are uninfected, as long as they don’t land. Some of them are working desperately to find a cure, while others are just looking to survive any way they can. And it has Jayne, or Casey, or whatever name Adam Baldwin is using this time, which is always a good thing. It hits the small screen on June 22nd on TNT.
Eileen Gunn has an excellent article published in Smithsonian Magazine about the history and nature of Science Fiction’s relationship with science and discovery. Titled How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future, it is a thoughtful piece by an expert on the topic. It includes quotes from some of the best known authors in the field supporting or expanding on her points, and not all of those points are as comfortable as we might wish they were. I suspect this was commissioned as part of The Future Is Here Festival taking place next month at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.
Considering how often she has turned up on the hit Japanese TV show Music Station, I can’t be very surprised about Avril Lavigne’s latest music video Hello Kitty. I was not sure if it was filmed in Japan; that part has now been confirmed. It is kind of refreshing to hear Japanese lyrics in an English language song, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, I can not embed the video into my page for you, it is only available from her web page, linked here.
NOTE: Since that last comment, it has been released in embeddable form. Enjoy. Watch the third video here carefully, and you will see her being given the Hello Kitty guitar she uses in the Hello Kitty music video, when she appeared on a Japanese talk/variety TV show.
DreamWorks Animation just posted the first five minutes of How To Train Your Dragon 2, so I figured I would share it here. Enjoy.
There are two choices that could be fun this weekend; The Machine is about two engineers working to create an autonomous AI to help mankind (and specifically one scientist’s daughter). That lasts until the Ministry of Defense steps in, takes the AI operated robot over, and teaches it to kill. As you know, this is not the thing to do if you hope to survive the rise of our evil robot overlords. The other film worth noting is Brick Mansions, about a cop and an ex-con trying to keep Detroit from being destroyed by the criminal gangs running wild behind the containment walls erected to keep them imprisoned. If this Luc Besson film plot line sounds familiar, it is because he is remaking his own 2004 movie Banlieue 13 (District B13), but not in French and not in Paris this time. For those thinking this is not genre, this is the future we do not want to live in, somewhere between Escape From New York and Mad Max. The original movie introduced the world to parkour, something most folks had never even heard of at that time.