Media – Page 348 – Strider’s Web

Something to Watch: DVDs

In live action domestic movies, The Box comes out Tuesday. I missed that one at the theaters, but I think I’m going to rent it to watch before I decide if it needs to be part of the permanent collection. The one I will be bringing home for sure is Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, since my collection needs more comedy. For the imported live action movie this week, Battle Girl: Living Dead in Tokyo Bay would be the perfect gift for that Troma fan on your list.

The top TV offering this week is the first 10 episodes (first half of season one) of Flash Forward, one of the few SF TV series currently running based on an actual science fiction book, written by Robert J. Sawyer. While the whole DVD Release Pattern for Season 1.0 and Season 2.0 seems mostly to be a scam to get you to pay more for fewer episodes (my local BestBuy charged $49.95 each for seasons One and Three of Battlestar Galactica, but 44.95 each for seasons 2.0, 2.5, 4.0, and 4.5, even though the full season 4 had almost the same number of episodes as season 3, as one example), this time they did it right. The Season 1.0 package has a coupon to get the Season 1: Complete release at $15 off when it comes out. Since it only costs $20 for 1.0, you are basically paying $5 to catch up on the first 10 episodes now, as we get ready to roll into season 1.5. I hope this works out for them, so we can see this distribution model used for other TV series going forward.

If you have an interest in the history of experimental animation as I do, you might find Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow would be worth a look. Some of his work you have already seen in PBS presentations like Sesame Street, others will be new, and most will be interesting. Al Jarnow himself is into creating a lot of different kinds of art, check out his site when you get a chance.

There are several interesting Anime titles out this week, the most unusual of which may be the Maria-holic: Complete Collection. This starts off with several standard Anime tropes and gives each of them a twist, and then run the combined results full tilt; even when it gets more-than-normally weird, it stays fun and entertaining. And regardless what that review says, it really does come out this week.

The Doctor Is Coming!

Tom Baker was my doctor, right up until David Tennant came along. Of all the actors that played the part, these were the two who spoke to me, who became the Ideal Doctor. I don’t know how the new one will do, but I will be watching. This is all old news, but I felt the need to post these videos again since there is now a New Doctor 12 trailer online. And then I posted the others because I couldn’t help myself.

SciFi Art, Whedon does Fandom

If you appreciate science fiction art, you definitely want to check out Cool Vibe, an art site set up blog-style. When you hit their home page it looks like just images with titles, but when you click on the link it gives you details on the source and some comments. E Online Reports that Joss Wedon is looking to follow some serious fans around for a few months and put together a film from the resulting footage. I am betting he gets a lot of volunteers.

Something to Do: Movies

Not really; there don’t seem to be any new genre films hitting the big screen this week, although Shutter Island could be interesting. So you might want to take this weekend and see one of the films that recently came out that you haven’t caught yet. I was planning to see Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, as I hadn’t dug out from the snow last weekend, and based on the trailer it looks like something you really want to see on the big screen.

Something to Watch: DVDs

For live action, 20th Century Boys 2: The Last Hope, part 2 in the trilogy, is the clear import winner for this week. The gang continues to do their best to save the world from improbable attacks, and succeeds even against the scriptwriters assaults. The sad part is, staying true to the original Manga is what bogged the story telling down, but they got it going again in time to retrieve the film. If they shoot some properly selected extra scenes, they even have a chance to redeem the slower parts of the movie; I for one would love to purchase a Directors Cut version of the DVD that brought it all back into center focus.

Loosely based on the game of the same name, the movie Zombie Apocalypse is hardly worth mentioning here. But there don’t seem to be any other US movies worth commenting on, so there it is.

In the realm of animation, there are actually a few good choices this time round, from rather diverse sources, and in somewhat different styles. If you can only get one of them, I recommend Shaun The Sheep – A Woolly Good Time, created by the team that brought you the various Wallace and Grommet movies. There is little to no dialog in these animations, and everything is G rated, but neither of those details will prevent you from laughing your ass off. These 6 episodes appear to be from the 2007 run of the Brit TV series.

Halo Legends gives you seven stories from the gaming universe that go beyond the original Red-Vs-Blue structure I loved so much. The animation itself borders on Machinima, blurring the lines between the 3D game enviro and that of the animation studio.

Missing Farpoint, and Star Trek Sillyness

I can’t believe I am missing Farpoint again, and only realized it because of the Farpoint Hashtag running rampant through the folks I am following on Twitter! Not only is it one of the best Fan-run Cons ever, it takes place within an hours drive of where I live! Of course, even if I had remembered I would have missed it this year, because I seem to have broken my foot while fighting my way free of the Snopocalypse. Project for the weekend: build a database of events I don’t want to miss on one of my home computers, and set it up to propagate automatically to a few select servers. Project for next weekend: set up one module on every server farm in my cluster to spam me across all the devices I own one month in advance of every event in the local database, and resend the alert once a week until the event happens. Who knows, perhaps by 2020 I will stop missing events from ignorance, and only miss them for actual reasons.

This is a wonderful compilation of Star Trek: TNG segments, with the first iteration rumored to be a two minute long blooper reel assembled by Gene Roddenberry himself. As you can see, it has grown a bit since then, evolving into this 10 minute presentation called The Sexed Generation. But after that, I went looking for variations, and found a few…

Thanks to the folks at Sci-Fi Geeks for the initial heads up on this one. They were also the place I first learned Korea upgraded Avatar to 4D, adding 30 physical effects to the movie (including moving seats and the smell of explosives), because 3D was just not good enough.