This week is the Disney live-action remake of Beauty And The Beast, more specifically the live action remake of the 1991 Disney animated version of Beauty and the Beast. Just last year we had the French remake La Belle et la Bête, but of course that one was the remake of the 1946 masterpiece La Belle et la Bête by visionary filmmaker and poet Jean Cocteau. That one was a direct adaptation of the 1757 story of the same name, written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and published in an anthology of fairy tales. The other option this week is Atomica from Syfy Films, which seems to be a mid-future thriller with the potential to become a slasher movie, although I do like a couple of the actors involved.
The Western winner this week is Passengers, an excellent character driven romantic drama set against the backdrop of deep space during an era of interstellar expansion. Solace has a psychic doctor assisting a detective in tracking down a serial killer. The only problem is the serial killer is a psychic too, and a much better one than the doctor working with the FBI. It has a world class cast and an interesting trailer, the critical reviews indicate the movie has some serious flaws but the chemistry between the cast makes it work despite them.
In Anime, K: Missing Kings is the movie bridge between season 1 and season 2; there are 7 kings in the world, each with their own special power which they can grant in greater or lesser degrees to their followers. And there is war between the secret kings, with the potential to overturn the mundane world entirely. Ben To: The Complete Series is being released in a S.A.V.E. edition, with a totally different kind of war. In grocery stores across Japan, the battle for half-priced Bento boxes has become fierce.
SECONDWALL is an energetic J-Pop-Punk band who formed in 2009, with their first major single in 2012 and the first mini-album in 2013. The first song here is At the end of love, the cherry blossom dances, which was the OP theme of the TV Drama Love That Makes You Cry on Fuji TV last year. The second track is 2015’s Identity, the third is Period filmed live at Otsuka Deepa on November 9, 2011, and posted by the director.
If you are playing with 3D modeling, be aware of MakeHuman, a free open source tool for creating 3D characters. Written in Python, it integrates seamlessly into blender, and allows you to instantly generate a fully rigged and ready to animate human or near-human. It’s slider set has over a thousand morphs you can apply to modify your character, including (but not limited to) Age, gender, height, weight, body proportions, face shapes, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, ears, neck, hands, feet.. the list goes on. And it is licensed under the CC0 license from Creative Commons, giving you unparalleled freedom to use your creations however you like. The folks over at Games From Scratch did an excellent introduction video on this, which I am including here so you can see just how easy and powerful this package is.
Nevertheless She Persisted is a sci-fi/fantasy flash fiction collection featuring unique visions of women inventing, playing, loving, surviving, and – of course – dreaming of themselves beyond their circumstances, according to the event’s page at Tor. It was the reaction of some world-class authors to the statement made when Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced on the floor of the United States Senate for reading the words of Coretta Scott King last month:
Yesterday, on International Women’s Day, a number of those authors ran with it, turning an attempt at subjugation into the inspiration behind a collection of stories you absolutely need to read. And you don’t have to pay a penny to do so; they are posted online at Tor, free and accessible to all. Enjoy, and perhaps even be inspired; I certainly was.
Have you read the Pitchfork article The Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs? If not you should read it now in honor of International Women’s Day, and then watch the songs themselves; you just might learn some interesting things.