Just a reminder the second annual The Future Is Here Festival at the Smithsonian takes place this weekend (Friday through Sunday). Some of the speakers include Adam Steltzner, George Takei, Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, and The Mythbusters. At the higher ticket levels the event also includes priority seating on Saturday night for the national premiere of X-Men: Days of Future Past at the National Museum of American History, and Patrick Stewart will be taking questions from the audience afterwards.
In movies we have I, Frankenstein topping the list with its near-Dean Koontz like premise, great cast, and excellent special effects. In a completely different style but still with excellent production values there is Her, a touching story about a man who enters into a relationship with his household operating system. This Spike Jonze movie won a ton of awards, and is more than worth your time to check out. Goodbye World is one I missed in the theaters about the world ending while some old friends hold a reunion, and while the premise sounds ordinary it has the potential to be interesting if they did it right. Special ID has Donnie Yen as an undercover cop with some serious Kung Fu fighting for his life against China’s most ruthless crime syndicate. This looks to be the best week in movies we have seen in a few months.
In TV… not so much. In Anime, the Armed Librarians are back, with the The Book of Bantorra: Complete Collection. When you die, your soul becomes a book that anyone can read, and only the Armed Librarians can keep your secrets safe from the world. This series seems to have a lot in common with Black Lagoon (the anime, not the creature) in my mind. And then there is Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends NEXT, the 2nd season in the story of the school club that is supposed to be about making friends. They receive a warning that some of their activities (stalking, taking candid photos of their peers, playing adult video games, watching adult anime, and building time machines) are not approved club activities at their school. And finally, Deltora Quest is the complete series, 52 episodes of gem seeking adventure, striving to release everyone from tyranny once all the magical jewels are collected. And yes, this series is based on the Australian children’s book series written by Emily Rodda.
Robots haven’t been the stuff of science fiction as much as part of everyday life for years now, although Almost Human is a favorite show of mine, and still enough in the future to be sci-fi. How mainstream are robots getting? Recently President Obama exchanged bows with a Japanese Robot named ASIMO (just one letter short of Asimov, the sci-fi writer who invented the 3 Laws of Robotics), I think being acknowledged by a head of state counts as mainstream. Pretty much in that same number of days ago, sci-fi author John Scalzi tweeted about how he would like to see Babymetal, a three girl Idol group who sing sweet harmonies with a heavy metal band, tour with Compressorhead as their band. And yes, surprise, Compressorhead is a bunch of robots! I admit, I would pay money to see that show. Who is your favorite robot band?
This week sees the animated Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return on the big screen, with quite an impressive collection of actors doing the voice work. The book it is based on was not written by L. Frank Baum, but rather his great-grandson, Roger S. Baum, who also writes books about Oz. Roger’s grandfather, Frank Joslyn Baum, didn’t write any books, but he did broker the deal with Samuel Goldwyn in 1934 that gave MGM the film rights to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Frank J. had the contacts to make that deal because he was in the business, having adopted two other Oz books into screenplays that became an animation in 1933 and a live action feature film in 1925.
If Miyazaki Films Were Like Other Anime is the name of this hysterical video, made by the folks over at College Humor, a site I tend to visit pretty much every week to see what new silliness they are up to this time. Of course, Hayao Miyazaki never made an ordinary anime in his life. Each work he crafted was amazing, and are some of the best animations in the world.
He is called the God of Manga because he not only wrote some of the most iconic Manga of all time, including Astro Boy, but he basically invented the system of Manga and Anime creation and marketing in use to this day. Earlier this month Google opened up an online version of the Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum with a huge number of exhibits and displays for those of us who can’t get to western Japan and see the real thing. If you are a fan of Manga and Anime, you want to check this one out. Expect to spend some time there, because there is a lot to see and read. You could always follow your visit by getting some of the original Manga and reading it, even a lot o the older stuff is still available.