No new film fests again this week, but if you haven’t seen it yet, let me point you to Bobby Llewellyn’s LlewTube web site. This site is where he keeps his Car Pool programs, a unique format in which he drives around with his guest and interviews them. He isn’t wearing the Kryten head gear, but his trademark humor shines through.
For those who haven’t seen Amanda Palmer’s Gaga, Palmer, Madonna, here it is… be sure to comment on YouTube, and join your voice to over a thousand others.
No new SciFi movies this week (that I can find, at least), but the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus goes wide next week, opening beyond NY and LA to how up just about everywhere. In the meantime, Sherlock Holmes is worth seeing more than once…
These came along just a hair too late to take advantage of the holiday gift giving season, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some wonderful selections available.
From the world of Live Action, A Princess of Mars goes into public release. This is a Hi-Jack Movie example, starring Tracie Lords, not to be confused with John Carter of Mars coming out in 2012, even though the first story in ERB’s Mars series was The Princess of Mars.
Also in Live Action, Lesbian Vampire Killers is being released in the US under the shortened name Vampire Killers. The cast includes a former Doctor, Paul McGann, and if you were wondering they kill lesbian vampires, rather than being lesbians who kill vampires (that’s a different movie).
The dark animation of the film 9 puts Shane Acker onto a playground dominated by Tim Burton stories, with rag dolls out to save the world after the apocolyps strikes.
From the Anime choices, the one I have been waiting for is Genshiken 2 volume 3, which completes the third series of The Society For The Study Of Modern Visual Culture. This is the true Otaku Anime series, as the fact that each volume includes an episode of the story the characters are watching on TV tends to tell you. And yes, that means on the Genshiken series disks they had the Kujibiki Unbalance OVA episodes built in as extras to the disks. When they followed that up with the second series, Kujibiki Unbalance (official page HERE, in case you want to grab any extra videos or radio play goodies), the Genshiken OVA was embedded in the extras. I assume the Kujibiki OVA 2 files are embedded in the Gensiken 2 disks (I don’t know, since I haven’t bought them yet), but I was sad to learn there would be no boxed set of the third series.
Season 1, part two of Dragonaut comes out this week. To avoid Earth’s impending destruction from an extinction level event (an asteroid impact from a rock many kilometers along each axis), a Dragon’s Egg has been cloned and grown, the resulting DRAGONs paired up with human pilot astronAUTs. But as with any good plot line, there are complications (it would be boring otherwise), and as I really liked what they did in the first half of the season, I look forward to seeing how this works out.
And then there is Baccano, the Copmplete Series, a truely unique anime with almost as many primary charactors as there are episodes. While it starts out a bit confusing, the various story lines all come together by the end of the series as long as you pay attention. This one is worth the price of admission, and very much worth getting all at once, since you have no time to forget various subplot details while waiting for the next disk to be released.
There is also season 2 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle coming out with this Tuesdays collect of Anime TV series. This one is the companion series for XxxHolic.
FYI, there are a few leaning-to-documentary programs I should mention here, like Time Warp 2, for the Science crowd (of which I am a member). But I won’t.
We lost Dan Obannon last week, screenwriter for Alien and Total Recall, but before those he wrote a little gem in film school called Dark Star…
This being Xmas Day, I hope you and yours are somewhere warm and protected (or cool and protected if you are in the southern hemisphere), and enjoying today with close friends and family. You deserve every bit of quality time the Universe can offer; So Say We All!
Out of all the online Advent Calendars this holiday season, two of them have been outstanding. I didn’t know what an Advent Calendar was when I stumbled onto the first site, and by then I had missed the first ten days or so of the offerings. Rest assured that next year I will be searching for them in early November, and post a list of the best ones I find Thanksgiving weekend, so we can all be ready come 1Dec2010.
The first is the AppVent Calendar, a project put together by Blacksmith Games. Starting on December 1st, each day they made one to three of their IPhone/IPod games available for free, and several of them were quite impressive. Most of the games offered for free for one day were also offered for dirt cheap ($.99 for a normally $3 piece of software, on average) for the remainder of Advent.
The other one that gave me useful presents was the WP Engineer’s amazing offering, where each day the tech-savvy team handed out another way for you to rebuild your WordPress driven web site into a true powerhouse. Each entry in this arsenal is a small bit of code, usually in the 5 to 25 lines category, but sometimes as simple as using the Custom Fields entry in the Query Post function to sort entries in a way that would normally take you some development time (as a single example).
I am pretty sure their goal was to offer a VAR (Value Added Resource) to their site in order to attract another one or three hundred potential customers. I am also pretty sure they added a lot more visitors to their web site than they were expecting, and even if most of the new additions do not end up being paying customers today, it will be a good thing for them in the long run. Congratulations to WP Engineers on creating my personal favorite holiday site this year!