When you think of Jazz, CNBLUE and Girls Generation are not the first names that pop to mind, since they are much more K-Pop than anything else. And yet, Lee Jong Hyun broke free from CNBLUE to do Moonlight Swing, a great upbeat Jazz track and one of the songs on his first solo album. Likewise, the 9 member Girls’ Generation begat Girls’ Generation-TTS, a subset of the band comprised of Taeyeon, Tiffany, and Seohyun. They produced an excellent EP comprised of jazz/rock ballads, of which my favorite track was Twinkle. These two songs are only a fraction of the excellent jazz South Korea has produced over the last century, so if you enjoy these be sure to explore its other wonderful offerings in this genre.
Just one of many excellent video clips from Outrageous Acts of Science, which airs on The Science Channel every Wednesday evening. They cover an array of stories, all of which qualify as outrageous, and most of which have a noticeable touch of silly to them. Plus I find it interesting to see just what some of my fellow geeks are up to.
The Legend of Tarzan will be on the big screen in a matter of hours, and I am looking forward to seeing how they did with this iteration of the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs franchise. I have noticed that VR has broken out into two separate camps, the passive (it plays and you watch it, turning your head to get your preferred viewpoint) and the interactive, where you get to make choices that change the experience by clicking on things as you go along. All the movie 360 modules I have seen fall into the passive camp, which makes sense since almost all of the movies I have seen have also been passive experiences. There are a few rare exceptions like Rocky Horror, where you attend the film with the dialog memorized and a bag full of props including toast and squirt guns and newspapers, but the mind boggles when trying to imagine how you would program those choices into a VR environment. Here are the first two passive Tarzan 360 segments, strap on your headsets and enjoy; and remember, it is early days yet for the film industries VR experimentation. I fully expect them to get interactive in no more than a decade, as they slowly figure out just what you can do in this kind of a story telling environment.
In one of the Japanese trailers for X-Men: Apocalypse they included commentary after the trailer from Ryan Reynolds, AKA Deadpool. The reason was cross promotion; unlike the US, in Japan the two movies came out very closely together. They only made this trailer version available online a few days ago, so now I get to include it here; enjoy.
I will so be in the theater for the first showing of this one!
We have two choices this holiday weekend, both film treatments for classic books, and I may need to hit both. The Edgar Rice Burroughs classic The Legend of Tarzan is the first new movie from that franchise in quite a while, and I will definitely be in the audience for the reboot. Hopefully it won’t get killed off by active studio suppression the way John Carter (of Mars) was. Then Roald Dahl’s The BFG is brought to life by Disney Studios, geared to a more family friendly audience. The only real question in my mind is whether I do them back to back with a dinner break in between, or hit Tarzan on Saturday, The BFG on Sunday, and the fireworks on Monday.