The first track is Positif, the next is The Ego Has Landed followed by Johnny Insano, and the last video is The Full Pledge Munkees playing some good Ska during their live set at Baybeats 2014, Singapore’s alternative music festival. The band started out as a trio in 1999 Singapore, and has added to their lineup over the years. You can now get their music from iTunes, and they were one of the bands that played this years Hoppin’ & Steppin’ Ska Festival in Japan. You can hear more of their music at Nyaring TV, which is their record companie’s YouTube Channel, but I have no clue why some of their official music videos include only still images.
All forms of audio/video/text storage
Yet another Netflix exclusive TV series, this one was put together by The Wachowskis (The Matrix and Cloud Atlas) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5 and World War Z), a couple of my favorite Sci-Fi creators. As usual with Netflix originals, on June 5th you don’t just get the first episode, you get the entire first season. I worked very hard to ration myself for the Daredevil series, to not just binge watch it in a single weekend. I can already tell I am going to have the same fight with this show.
This week Infini will be showing up on a limited number of screens around the country. An elite search and rescue team hit an off-world mining site to rescue the lone survivor of a man made plague.
I didn’t find any genre movies or TV shows this time, but there are still a few worth mentioning. Spare Parts is a true story of the four undocumented Mexican-American high school students who went head to head with the team from MIT in the National Underwater Robotics Competition, using robots made from spare parts. The TV series Halt and Catch Fire: The Complete First Season takes place the year after IBM came out with the Personal PC, with a fictional company comprised of renegade engineers reverse engineering it and improving on it, as the computer race got off the ground. While the characters are fictional, the engineering issues they face and the solutions they come up with for them are the very ones the entire industry was working on at the time. The personality mix of the engineers will look very familiar to anyone involved with any cutting edge engineering project; thinking outside the box and radical innovation are not done by ordinary engineers, but by the exceptional. Masters of Sex: Season 2 is also a story about real-life cutting edge science which actually took place in the past, as doctors Masters and Johnson did the research that would change our understanding of the most basic aspect of human nature.
In Anime Natsume’s Book of Friends: Season 4 follows our protagonist as he continues to give the yokai their names back. He is learning how to deal with the yokai and humans that surround his life and now must learn about himself as well. The World God Only Knows: OVA Collection finds the girls forming an Idol band among other wacky goings-on, now that Keima has become something of a wizard. I should also mention that the classic Patlabor: The Movie, previously available only in SD, is coming out on Blue Ray this week.
Another Saturday, another great band. This time we take a look at Survive Said The Prophet, a Japanese Indi rock band who sing in English as often as not. The first track is Subtraction from their new 8 song EP Course Of Action, which was just released on April 15th. The second tune is If You Really Want To, which was posted online back in May of 2014 but is also on the new EP. They got together in Tokyo in 2011 and released their first single Let Us Party that same year. They have done tours and festivals across Asia since then, and you can find their music on iTunes Japan.
Studio Ghibli has produced some amazing animations in its history, and it looks like When Marnie Was There is yet another in a long line of triumphs. The box office results in Japan were poor for this one, but the critical reaction was positive to the point of acclaim, and this is another beautiful feature length production in the Miyazaki style. It will be premiering in New York and Los Angeles on May 22nd, and go into wider (but still limited) release after that. If you are lucky enough to be in a town where you can catch it on the big screen, you should try to do so.