There are an assortment of fun films coming to the big screen this week, starting with Vampire Academy, an action/comedy/fantasy that has an excellent soundtrack. If you want to skip the action component, try out The Lego Movie for a dose of pure silly fun. Also in the silly fun category although not strictly genre, A Fantastic Fear of Everything is a Simon Pegg comedy. It is a bit strange on the release dates, since it comes out this Friday in US movie theaters, but it came out on June 8th of 2012 in the UK, and you have been able to rent it to stream online for a while now. Also, the web site seems to be down, but I am including the link anyways in case it is just a server issue.
If you don’t feel like laughing this weekend, Sinbad: The Fifth Voyage is all about the action, and from the trailer at least looks to hold true to the original Sinbad tales. And one I would enjoy seeing on the big screen is being re-released in NYC, and with any luck perhaps it will have a limited run so the rest of us can see it. The French masterpiece Alphaville may not have invented Space Noir as a genre, but Jean-Luc Godard’s movie certainly put it in the public eye.
In Movies About Time is a romantic fantasy involving the Groundhog Day premise; you do each important event over until you get it right. It was in the theaters just a month or two back, I feel certain they are going after the Valentine crowd with this one. It is a very nicely done movie with a lot of heart, so not a bad choice. The animated comedy Free Birds also comes to disc, but although I am an animation fan I can’t say this one really caught my attention. A better bet for animated entertainment this week is Justice League: War, a direct to DVD feature film.
In TV, while not a fantasy, the historical epic The White Queen deserves a mention, about some power mad women who stopped at nothing to get on the British throne.
We do much better in Anime this week, leading off with Fairy Tail – Part 8. This magical guild continues to do as much damage to their fellow guilds and the surrounding buildings and terrain as they do to the demons they are called upon to defeat. AKB0048 Next Stage Complete Collection is a bit silly but a lot of fun, as season two rolls out the 77th generation of the ultimate IDOL group going across the galaxy singing and shooting. Why shooting? A number of planetary governments have outlawed “things that disturb the heart”, including music. So the girls swoop down on a planet, set up a live concert which is also spread on the planetary net, and sing and dance until the police and soldiers show up. At that point, they have to fight their way back off the planet and head for the next one. If nothing else, this series is a great way to collect a bunch of AKB48 music. BTW, the English version of their home page is broken at the moment, dumping you back to the Japanese version if you try to go to it, but all of their other English pages appear to be working.
Blessing of the Campanella: Complete Collection is a mash up of medieval quests and robotic harems, with supernatural meteor showers and automaton artisans. Plus a lot of time spent hanging out at the beach in between quests and mysteries. This package includes all 12 episodes of the series plus the OVA. I found the provenance of this a bit confusing at first, since the home page with streaming video in the US is over at Funimation, but the DVD release is coming from Nozomi/Lucky Penny/Right Stuf. It turns out that the original simulcast run was at Funimation in 2010, with a DVD release from that distributor in 2011. Normally I do not post re-releases here unless they are important in some way, but I completely missed the series the first time around. Since it is new to me, I am claiming that as justification and posting it anyways.
This week, a few tracks from the band Handsome Ken’ya (Sugimoto Kousuke), a less than subtle Japanese group/person. The first piece is Inferiority Beat, the next I Sing In My Own Way, also called I Sing So Much. Then we get Decision Speed, and finally Full Moon Party rounds out the set, a very tasty guitar riff instrumental.
AV Linux is another incredibly powerful boot-from-DVD build focused on a specialist task set and workflow, and once again it is centered around audio/video production (hence the name). It has all the tools most of us will ever need to create, edit, and compile our projects into coherent multimedia presentations. Like most Linux builds, the default menu buttons and icons are aligned across the top of the screen (although you can move them to any screen border you like best), and they have a small collection of the links to the stuff the developers felt was most important on the screen proper, like help files and the install tools.
Like more and more operating systems, they also have an Icon Bar running down one edge of the screen, giving you a smartphone-like collection of apps/programs to access from your start screen. Again, you can rearrange any component of the desktop to suit your own preferences and habits, like throwing the Icon Bar to any other border, but since this is a Live DVD, you will either have to remaster it, or install it on a Flash Drive/Hard Drive, to get it to remember your preferences from boot to boot. Besides making your choices persistent, installing it on a thumb drive will also allow you to update all the programs and install more of your own, so you can tweak it into the perfect tool set for your projects.
The build itself includes an amazing range of Audio, Graphics and Video content creation software demonstrating the excellence of Open-Source solutions, and the fact that they are free is just making a good thing better. This one is designed for a 32bit computer, meaning this Operating System is designed to turn a regular OLD PC or Intel Mac into an Audio/Graphics/Video workstation with power you won’t believe. I have been somewhat surprised to discover some of my legacy computers are able to outclass some of my newer Windows systems for multimedia creation after booting them from this kind of Linux Live DVD.
The video at the end of this post is for the LAST version of AV Linux; this version is way better! But he covers a ton of stuff included with the OpSys (no great surprise, he coordinated building it, so he knows it best), and most of the basic stuff is the same. Only the names have changed, to protect the innocent Apps (sorry, I couldn’t resist). It gives you a wonderful overview of a lot of the software packages included in the last release, and as always the latest version has all of that and so much more. If you are an audio or video creator and work inside computer environments, this will give you an excellent understanding of which tools you will want to call up for what processes.
Attack On Titan is very popular around the world, and has been signed up for a live action movie. The manga and Anime series is so popular in Japan that everyone wants to use it in their marketing campaigns and commercials. So the director of the upcoming live action production was given a chance to put together a Subaru commercial to try out his first Titans on. They haven’t decided yet if these are the way the Titans will be portrayed in the film, but it looks pretty good for a first attempt. Thanks to the folks at Anime News Network for the heads up on this one; they have more information about the movie at their site.
This is an amazing animation, by Carlos De Carvalho & Aude Danset. It doesn’t use or need words to tell its story, the pictures really are worth a thousand words. In Premier Automne, one lives in the winter, the other in summer… and one day, they meet on the border, and their lives are changed forever. This has won a ton of awards from around the world, and with good reason.
