Obviously The Dark Knight Rises is the movie of choice this weekend, but at select theaters you can also see the Dark Knight Trilogy. Apparently they were pretty impressed by what Marvel pulled off with their marathon leading up to the midnight release of The Avengers, so Warner Bros stole the idea. Batman Begins starts on Thursday evening the 19th at around 6PM with the new film playing at midnight, and the entire run of three movies will take 8 hours and 45 minutes.
There are several tasty movies this week, starting with Lockout. This one is another Luc Besson action adventure film, which seems a lot like Escape from New York done in orbit; escapist action fun all the way (yes, pun intended). Extraterrestrial looks like a lot of silly fun; you wake up with no memory of the one night stand who’s house you are in, to meet her wacky ex-boyfriend and neighbors, only to discover the Earth has been invaded. This one is Spanish with English subtitles, and definitely falls into the comedy category. Also in comedy, The Fairy (Le Fee) tells the tale of a man who searches all over Le Havre for the fairy who granted him two wishes and disappeared, taking his heart with her. This one is French with English subtitles, and is the third in a series of rather surrealistic films, the previous titles being Iceberg and Rumba. Finally, 4:44 Last Day on Earth is an award winning love story on the day the world dies.
We do every bit as good in TV this time around, with Eureka: Season 5 bringing this excellent series to a close… unless there was an announcement at Comic-Con this weekend I missed (please, please, please…). We also get Alphas: Season One, which just gives you time to catch up on it before season 2 starts next Monday. And Sanctuary: The Complete Fourth Season also hits the shelves, with more monster protecting adventure. And for those who like a bit of reality TV with their unreality, Stan Lee’s Superhumans: Season Two is also going to become available.
Anime also has some winners, starting with Fractale: The Complete Series. A boy who geeks out on obsolete electronics saves a girl being chased by dangerous men, and when she later runs away from him she leaves behind a necklace crammed with data. Suddenly he is being chased by both the political group who wants to destroy the technology that drives their world, and the one that wants to save it, for the data he has holds the key to it all.
Meanwhile, The Book of Bantorra: Collection 2 Continues the story of the Armed Librarians and their battles with the religious fanatics who are trying to capture the soul books and use their knowledge to conquer the world. It is a completely different premise than either Library Wars, where the librarians took up arms to defend against political censorship, or Read Or Die, where the Paper Sisters, book addicts of the first order, used their mystical powers to defend the world from the illiterate hoards who wanted to enslave it. Even so there is something of a common theme here, and as someone who has been reading everything I could get my hands on since the age of 7 (yes, I started late, but I have been doing my best to make up for it ever since), I dearly love all three series. And yes, I will be in the theaters to see the new version of Fahrenheit 451 when they release it.
Psychic Squad – Collection 2 rounds out the new releases for the week, but that link will get you little info, since they do not stream to North America. If you caught the first collection, expect more of the same. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Collection 2 compiles the second half of the series (episodes 34 through 64) into a single box set, for a more cost effective package than the original one season at a time release. And finally, Girls Bravo S.A.V.E. edition, which as usual means you can pick up the entire series for less than 20 bucks. Enjoy!
I am still trying to decide if this is a major tech advance or just creepy. Using some Augmented Reality goggles and software, a Japanese engineer has come up with a way to date his favorite virtual idol, Hatsune Miku. A bit creepy, was my first reaction. But what if you then used a Kinect or other low cost motion capture solution to drive your anime character of choice in real time with an actual person wearing the avatar? That could end up being a new level of RPG and Cosplay interaction amongst consenting adult geeks. Perhaps it is time to break out your own copy of the ARToolKit and start programming your glasses.
Ryo Ikehata’s light novel Calamity of a Certain Zombie Girl has begun production as an Anime, and there is already an initial trailer for it. If the name sounds familiar, Ikehata’s last published series to get turned into Anime was Blood+, an excellent little Vampire story. Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on that one.
I wanted to break from my usual kind of entry for a moment and cheer on the MOD production process, meaning Manufacture On Demand. Warner Brothers, Shout Factory, MGM, and several others have done this with a lot of titles which have not been available for a while, and it is a great business model for the digital age. You pick one of the titles in their MOD catalog and put in your order, at which point they burn you a copy of the CD or DVD on their industrial grade reproduction gear, print out a label, and send it your way. For the customer, thousands of titles you could not previously get your hands on except possibly in very low quality bootleg format are now accessible. For the manufacturer, titles they own but were not previously making any money on can now turn a small but steady profit for them, without the loss incurred by going to a full press run when the demand for the product is not there. If it turns out the demand is there as evinced by the number of folks putting in orders for an MOD title, they can then release the disk or box set as a full press run (“press” being a leftover term from pressing vynal records, the original media distribution format).
Obviously this process is good for both music CDs and video DVDs, but it doesn’t stop there. With the advent of 3D printing, objects of all kinds can be put through the manufacture on demand process. Even better, they might be designed anywhere in the world, but you could have them printed locally and avoid the shipping costs, downloading the printing template across the web. Did you know this is the same technology Jay Leno uses to produce mil spec perfect replacement parts for his vintage automobile collection? This stuff is available today, and although it can be a bit pricy, there are also open source 3D Printing options worth looking into, such as the ongoing MIT research.
It seems the Japanese government is now debating on whether or not to start building real bipedal multistory combat vehicles, and I mean real ones, for the actual army. It makes no sense for me to post the 12 hour debate video since it’s in Japanese, but if you understand that language and want to check it out the link is here.