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Something to Do: Movies

The 800 pound gorilla in the theater for this weekend is Gulliver’s Travels, towering over the competition by orders of magnitude. The Jonathan Swift classic political satire gets remade as a TV show or a movie every three to ten years, with greater or lesser degrees of adherence to the core attitude of the original story. But this time around they have an amazing cast, which includes Jack Black, Emily Blunt, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, and Catherine Tate, to name just a few. And since they are bringing the same Special FX technology to the table they used for Night At The Museum, you know it is going to be visually amazing as well. So it just remains to be seen if they will faithfully deliver the scathing commentary on the nature of man when ensconced in the halls of power, or play it strictly for laughs and box office returns. Previous versions have been divided fairly evenly between the two approaches, but I have my hopes up for the former considering the attitudes of many of the actors.

According to IMDB, it is not the only film of interest being released this week; the documentary Trek Nation should also be coming out, with should being the operative word. They are apparently still seeking a distributor, per their home page. I hope they find one soon, or consider releasing Direct To Disk so we can have access to it.


Something to Watch: DVDs

In live action movies, Salt tops the list this week, in a twisted flic fully worthy of Philip K. Dick. I was a bit surprised when I first found out he didn’t write this one, as he has written so many like it. Also released for the younger crowd, Missy and the Maxinator is a live action kid-as-superhero film in which the teachers are out to take over the world.

There is only one live action TV entry this week, but it is an important one: Caprica: Season 1.5. This series was more like reading Sci-Fi than watching it, something you constantly had to think about and extrapolate from in order to understand. It dealt with some of the most important issues our current technology raises today, and did not sugar coat them or spoon feed the audience with a preprocessed answer. Unfortunately, most of the American audience wanted to be entertained, not educated, and the same non-Sci-Fi aware powers at the Sci-Fi Channel who brought you the WWE made sure to kill it without even letting all the episodes air. I am still waiting for an explanation of what mindless muscle boys beating on each other has to do with science fiction when it occurs outside of a Mad Max franchise.

For western animation this week we have the return of Futurama: Season 5, and I just want to say I am very glad that Comedy Central decided this program was worth financing for another round. If anything, this season was more outrageous than any previous, since they didn’t have to strictly follow broadcast television guidelines. I am hoping for many more seasons like this one.

The one new anime offering this week is the Bleach – Season 7 Uncut Box Set, Bringing us up to episodes 122 through 133 of this spirit world combat sequence. To put that in perspective episode 300 just aired on Crunchyroll and in Tokyo last week. That means there is a gap of years between what you can add to your collection here and what the actual current episode is. I am going to use this as a contrast and compare opportunity; If I watch the seventh season and follow it with the current season and do not feel like I am missing anything in between, that would be a good indication that the writing has gotten stale and the storyline is static. If I am missing some names of people and spirit realms but the action and structure of the two seasons are consistent with each other, that would indicate they settled on a formulaic structure and are only plugging in the villein du jour for the story arc and telling us the same tale over and over. If, on the other hand, it becomes obvious I am missing something fundamental in the relationships of the characters and the nature of the struggle they are involved in, that tells me they continue to evolve the underlying concepts and personalities, and perhaps this series could be worth continuing to follow and support. One thing is undeniable whatever the verdict; this anime has had some of the best J-Rock music of any series, and I will post on that soon.

The other anime release this week is a re-release in a cost effective package; Tenchi Muyo! GXP- The Complete Series [Viridian Collection], which will run you less than $30 for all 26 episode. This is one of a fistful of Tenchi series (and Tenchi isn’t even the main protagonist in this one, but all the other details are there), and for the most part they involve our hero being an unlucky klutz who gets dragged into serving on the galactic police by mistake, usually as bait in a trap. Except for the series of time-travel movies in which he was an unlucky klutz, or the sequence of Magical Girl tales in which he was an unlucky klutz, or the… you get the idea. The other detail which is always true is there are four (sometimes 5) girls doing the Romantic Interest part, and one of them is always a galactic police officer, and one is always the dread pirate Ryoko. If you are looking for something profound and beautiful, look elsewhere; this one is just silly fun, but it is very GOOD silly fun.

Killer Machinima Music

The first track is All Things In Passing by Bowie Bravin vs The Beautiful Freaks, and then Facelessape Mefusula and Deepskytraveler playing live at Raglan Shire earlier this year. These are just a few of the bands you can hear playing live inworld at Second Life; if you thought all the live music was a voice with a single instrument, now you know better. Finally, Portishead’s Mysterons featuring the Guerilla Burlesque Dancers from Idle Rogue… I don’t know if they played inworld, but the music and machinima were too good not to include it here.

Unclothed Man in the 35th Century and other indy flavors…

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is one of a number of amazing stories to come to us from the IFC Web Series collection, which you can enjoy online at any time. I do like their tag line: Always On. Slightly Off, and I do think they did a great job on the animation for this series. The series involves a human revolutionary/reactionary who tracks down and eliminates Droids, using both weapons and cunning, and not much in the way of ethics.

Another story from the IFC Webisode collection I find interesting is Dead And Lonely, about two hopefuls who are brought together by a speed dating service called DateOrDie.Com. Too bad one of them is a vampire, unless they can really work it out before dawn.

And then there is the ever recursive Twisted Night, a webisode program about making webisode programs. The Perl hidden at the core of this oyster is the Webisode How-To Guide, giving you specific details on how to make your home made indie production come across as professional as anything made by a major studio. Following this small handful of tips could make the difference between being ignored and being appreciated, but it won’t cost you much beyond time and attention span to upgrade your projects into something that has the potential to go viral.

GANTZ live action

They have made a live action version of GANTZ, which all by itself is amazing news. It is going to play in a limited number of theaters in the US for one night only as part of its world premier on January 20th, 2011, as yet another Fathom Events Original. And yes, if you click on that last link and enter your zip code, you will get to see just how close to you this show will be, and grab tickets if you are so inclined.

If you haven’t read the manga or watched the anime, the basic premise is simple. An alien sphere with a cybernetically integrated dead body manifests in a vacant apartment in Tokyo, and begins gathering other dead people. It does not communicate verbally or even directly with them, but makes a small handful of rules known to them by physical example. The quicker a given person picks up on the rules and figures out how to abide by/exploit them, the higher the odds get that they might survive the current situation, even though a prerequisite to being chosen was being dead.

It uses a Trek-like beaming technology to grab them a split second before they actually die, and makes it known that if they complete a certain number of missions for it, they will be released unharmed and alive. If they fail, they will be beamed back to a fraction of a second before the moment of their death to suffer their original fate.

If they are damaged, no matter how seriously, during the mission, but are still alive when beamed back to the apartment, the beaming process will rebuild them whole and well, by integrating the recording of their physical bodies it stored of their molecular state when it first appropriated them, but with their updated current memory gestalt. If they die before being beamed back, they have died the final death.

While they are on their missions for the sphere, no one in the normal physical world will be able to perceive them on any level, although their mission targets will have no problem observing them. Which makes it a bit difficult to get help from your friends and family to escape, or even flag down a passing police car, but makes it very simple for your targets to target you in return.

And the final detail; your mission is to kill your targets, with no way of knowing if they are monsters worthy of death, out to kill off humanity, or victims the sphere has decided would be amusing to watch die. Each and every mission, the clock is ticking; how will you choose this time?

Something to Do: Movies

This weekend hasn’t been in doubt since half way through 2009; TRON: The Legacy is the hands-down winner. Many of us have been waiting decades for the continuation of this story, an archetype tale of the computer age that changed movies forever. It wasn’t just the use of computer graphics (real and simulated), although that was a precursor of movie production processes to come. It was also the first time computer processes were personified, with each subprogram taking on the personalty its function set would require; the first time the kind of Artificial Intelligence we had known for years from books was portrayed on any screen.

There had been previous attempts to personify AIs on screen, such as 1967’s Colossus: The Forbin Project, which in my mind was the inspiration for the original Skynet from 1984’s Terminator movie, much as the original 1982 TRON was the inspiration for the animated masterpiece ReBoot in 2001. The most notable AI film after them was 1999’s The Matrix, which again completely changed the rules.

None of them led to War Games in 1983, because that box was a real computer and the logic of the plot line adhered to actual parsing rules any programmer of today understands. There was no touch of AI in that story, just the massive paranoia of the time combined with a lack of understanding on the majority of the audiences part of how computers worked. Just saying…

Interestingly enough, the other movie coming out this weekend is a spiritual descendant of TRON by way of William Gibson’s Neuromancer on several levels; the protagonist in Spark Riders invents a way for people to place their soul on the internet. When her idea is stolen by a power hungry psycho and a greedy spy, people begin to become trapped online. With a total budget much less than TRON spent on catering the location shoots, this film could still potentially be worth checking out; after all, they made Dark Star on 10% of Spark Riders budget, and Hollywood promptly threw a ton of money at Dan Obannon and John Carpenter (who then created the Alien and Halloween franchises respectively) because of it.

And one final note; for all of those who, like me, have been frustrated in their efforts to acquire ReBoot for their personal collections, an agreement was reached a few months age between Rainmaker Entertainment, Inc. (the direct descendant of Mainframe Entertainment) and Shout! Factory to release ReBoot in the US in some format or another, most probably a DVD Box Set version. ReBoot really is a direct descendant of Tron; what a treat if we could finally access the original of the former with the the next volume of the later within a year or less of each other! Here is the latest peek at the cover art for the complete series DVD.