Gintama is the story of an Edo era Samurai in a Japan where Aliens have invaded and taken over the Earth. Skyscrapers and traffic jams came to Kyoto centuries ahead of schedule, and the simple life was over. The manga and anime have gone on for hundreds of episodes, and now we finally get a Live Action Gintama Movie bringing this excellent series to the big screen. It looks like the release date is around July of 2017.
So far, the only film for this weekend I have found is Night of the Living Dead: Genesis, which is pretty close to nothing at all from my perspective, since I am not a horror fan. Since New Years Eve and New Years Day happen this weekend, that becomes a non-issue! You can just party your way through the weekend and skip videos altogether, or use the opportunity to binge-watch your way through a season of a series you have been meaning to catch up on, your choice. Enjoy!
I am so ready for this film, having waited what seems like a couple of decades for Blade Runner 2049. Based on a story by Philip K. Dick, if it is even half as good as the original film, it will be amazing.
Studio Ghibli is in hibernation for the moment, largely shut down although Hayao Miyazaki has said he plans to do another feature length film, this time a documentary about making the animation Boro the Caterpillar. But a bunch of former Studio Ghibli talent have gathered together under the brand new banner of Studio Ponoc, and have released the first teaser trailer for their first animation, Mary and the Witch’s Flower. Producers, directors, animators and writers of some of the most iconic animations of the last 40 years have placed their bet that people will want to continue watching what they can do. I certainly look forward to when this one makes it to the theaters next year, and we find out if they retain the magic touch they developed at Studio Ghibli. For a more detailed look at the new studio and project, watch the Tokyosaurus video after the trailer.
There are several excellent choices this week, starting with Passengers, where two people wake from cold sleep 90 years before their starship arrives at their new colony planet. Starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as the wakees, this may be the best choice for the weekend. We also get Assassin’s Creed, which started life as a game but seems to have translated to the Big Screen just fine. If you prefer something a bit lighter and more inspiring, Sing should be just the animated treat you are looking for.
The scariest part of this movie is that we have already successfully completed the initial experiments that will give us this technology. Mindgamers is about what could happen once you can hack the human mind, remotely or otherwise, focusing on just two (out of 200 or so choices we might decide to explore) of the potential uses. The first use is controlling the action of another human remotely through a neural connection network, and that was accomplished in the real world about 5 years ago. The second is recording the total gestalt needed to embed a given skill set to another human by playing it back directly into their brain. I am in favor of that when the new skill set I will be learning is how to fly a jet or play the violin. I am not so enthusiastic when it might be used to convince me who to vote for, pray to, or buy from. We don’t have that technology yet, but my best guestimate is we are only 5 years out from making it work. The first video is the MindGamer Movie trailer, and it looks like it is going to be a not-to-be-missed monster on the big screen.
My favorite of the earlier movies exploring this topic was 1983’s Brainstorm, starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson. It is the second video here, and considers the consequences of being able to record what one person experiences, and play it back so someone else can also directly experience it. Brainstorm memory storage was based on Beta tape recording media, state of the art tech for that time and the only option for storage density compact enough to save everything they implied to be included. The film inspired 1984’s Dreamscape and a handful of others, none of which understood how it could actually be made to happen, but each of them took one aspect of the implications and explored them. Most of them have some very scary stories to relate to us, a lot less positive than Brainstorm itself.
The third video included here is the real world success report on one person controlling another remotely through a brain-to-brain interface that can be built from $100 worth of parts slaved to a power supply, a couple of antennas, and a few RF/Neural Link interfaces. I am sure it will be no comfort when I tell you that you can do the same job for a third of the cost and half the parts these days, since the technology has advanced that much. The only good news is that if you learn to recognize the gear and processes used, you run a much better chance of avoiding becoming a victim yourself!