This weekend we have a rather silly film: Zookeeper tells the story of a man who’s social skills are so bad he takes lessons from some real animals on how to get the girl.
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13 Assassins is an action movie set at the end of Japan’s feudal period, where 13 samurai are out to stop an evil ruler and save the country. This one gets my vote as best film for the week. Bloodrayne: The Third Reich has our half-vampire heroine up against the Nazi Vampire Army in WWII, and she has to stop them before they make Hitler immortal. Finally, Witchville is another made for TV movie from Syfy, so obviously I will be passing on this one, much as I did for their earlier efforts, like Sharktopus and Mansquito.
Also from Syfy is one of my favorite TV shows, as they roll out Eureka: Season 4.0, with the second half of the season hitting the airwaves on July 11th. It continues to confound me how they can produce such excellent TV series and such sucky TV movies. The lamentable The Cape: The Complete Series is also becoming available this week. It had such great actors and a good concept, but they dropped the ball on the execution part of the process (writing, filming, editing, etc.), which is why it evaporated after a single season. There is an enjoyable documentary TV series coming out, Mysteries at the Museum: Season 1 from the Travel Channel, which I will be checking out.
On the Animation front, Transformers: The Headmasters has been out for better than 20 years, but never previously available legally in the US. This is an alternate reality spin on season 4, where Optimus Prime never died and a whole new species of bots entered the battle. And finally, Mobile Suit Gundam 00 the Movie : A Wakening of the Trailblazer has the the Extraterrestrial Living-metal Shapeshifters (ELS) assimilating everyone in sight in a very Borg-like fashion. I am not a fan of the animation styles either of these classic Anime series used, but they both had very well developed story lines and situations, if you followed the original Japanese dialog and ignored the English forced on them to try to make them fit the Saturday morning cartoon time slot and target audience.
For 29 years I worked for Zambelli Bros. every 4th of July, my team and I putting on the best fireworks displays we could do for the budgeted explosives/insurance allotment for each town on the east coast we were assigned to entertain. And I will admit that hand loading the mortars and running around with a road flair to set them off was quite exciting, even if they did require computer controlled ignition if you exceeded a given shell size or for certain environments. And I am very proud of my crews safety record; at no point on any display was any member of the audience injured, and all of those of us on the shoot crew retain all of our limbs, eyeballs, etc. There may have been a few non-human damages inflicted, like the loss of the foliage on the 4th hole green at the Congressional Country Club golf course (they TOLD us it was OK to set up the finale racks there, but apparently they didn’t realize that things that exploded to launch themselves into the air would shower down some expended but still burning detritus), or the loss of some trees at the Antietam display in Sharpsburg the year the rain got to the launch charges (the wet launch charges threw them 100 ft. in the air, so the 400 foot blast radius for the larger shells made life a bit more exciting than we were expecting. But we moved all the cars out from under the trees before any of the gas tanks exploded, and it was fun watching the fire departments guy’s eyes bug out while he shouted “Is it SUPPOSED to do that??”).
I want to thank National Geographic for helping me relive that experience by putting together their excellent Naked Science episode, The Secret World of Fireworks. I came in part way through the first airing of the program on Thursday night, and will be re-watching it every time it airs this weekend; I encourage you to do the same. I especially liked that they devoted a noticeable segment of it to a display at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where I did my very last show in July of 2007. Happy 4th of July!
Again with the Nerdcore music; This time they built a A Bollywood Themed Gamer’s Anthem (their words), and it is just so much fun I had to include it here. Felicia Day and her team have created some of the best TV online with The Guild, you should be watching! The other music is also all about gaming enviro’s, with G33k & G4M3R Girls from Team Unicorn, Roll A D6 from Sir Conner Anderson, and Do You Want To Date My Avatar (again from Felicia Day) in both RL and VR format.
What more needs to be said, except that Captain America: The First Avenger will be out on July 22nd.
Originally scheduled for release Friday, now on Wednesday, Transformers: the Dark of the Moon hits the big screen. I am expecting the same non-stop thrill ride Michael Bay provided us in the first two movies, and while Megan Fox won’t be in this one, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley looks like she can fill that gap rather nicely.