The choices are Silly Fun and Scary Fun this time around. The silly is supplied by The Secret Life of Pets, an animated fantasy all abut what the pets get up to when the humans aren’t home, which seems to include a Lost Pet Army out to take revenge. The scary comes courtesy of the latest Steven King book to be turned into a movie, Cell. Myself, I am going for the silly this week.
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.
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.
On the Big Screen this July, Nerve was sci-fi until a decade or so back, and looks like a very nicely done thriller. Based on the novel of the same name by YA author Jeanne Ryan, it seems like Eagle Eye meets John Dies in the End could have been the inspiration. I will be in the theater to check this one out when the time comes.
Stan Lee is one of the instructors at the Smithsonian class The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture, along with several others. The basic course takes 6 weeks and is free, but if you want a verified certificate that will cost $50; if you pass the class, besides the certificate itself you will get digital artwork created by comic book artist Dennis Calero (X-Factor, X-Men Noir). It was created just for this course, and is digitally signed by Stan Lee and Michael Uslan. This is the 4th time they are holding the course, and the first class took place/was posted this week, on the 17th. Since it is an online course, you can take it at any time, but it is fun having the forums to interact with your classmates and instructors as each week’s materials are posted. EdX is a massively open online educational system with some very interesting classes started by a collaboration between MIT and Harvard that quickly expanded to some of the best schools on the planet.
Roald Dahl wrote the story, Steven Spielberg directed the movie, and Disney is distributing it; The BFG is finally coming to the big screen in July. The Big Friendly Giant has been a children’s classic since it was first published, I am looking forward to seeing how they did with this iteration of it.