The winner this week is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, the next installment in the Hunger Games saga. They had to break this one into two pieces, not because the book was huge, but because so much of the story happened off the page and was just mentioned as something the primary characters heard about. That doesn’t work as well in a movie, so those parts of the plot needed to be brought to the screen. Also out this week are Extraterrestrial (aliens out to kill you) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (vampires out to kill you), but why go there?
With an amazing cast, the Disney film Into The Woods twists together some of the Brothers Grimm tales in ways the original authors never envisioned. It will be hitting the big screen December 25th, and I intend to be in the theater for it on opening day.
There doesn’t seem to be much this weekend. Wolves is a Werewolf coming-of-age film that is part action, part horror. I am not a big horror fan myself, so I won’t be there. Sounds like a good weekend to read a book to me.
This one will be in the theaters November 21st; I am looking forward to it! They had to break the last movie into two parts because of the amount of the story that took place but was only referenced, never described. To have the film make sense they had to add the missing pieces to Mockingjay Part 1.
They have now finished the GGO (Gun Gal Online) story arc in season 2 of Sword Art Online and are about to roll out the next one, Caliber. They did the same thing in season 1, where the first story arc was a Clear-the-Levels dungeon quest, and the second one was a Save the Princess game. While I think they could have actually broken them into 4 separate segments, they chose to do them in groups of two. I am really enjoying the Anime, almost as much as I enjoyed the books by Reki Kawahara they are based on. The other set of books he created, sharing that same universe and also turned into an anime series, is Accel World, which I am also enjoying watching. If you haven’t seen them yet, take some time to check them out; I think you will enjoy them.
The AnimeUSA con this past weekend was a lot of fun, even though the folks organizing it waited until the week before to announce the full schedule. They also abandoned the Guidebook app in favor of something I could not get to work on my iPad or iPod Touch, any of my Android tablets including my Nook (which will actually run the 3D graphical app for Second Life), or any of my computers. Because of some strange formatting that apparently required software to display it properly that I didn’t have, the PDF version of the schedule only allowed you to see what was scheduled on Thursday. I ended up having to track down the printer-friendly version of the schedule on their web site, print it out, and mark the things I wanted to attend with a Sharpie; how 20th century! It didn’t really matter, since the people who were doing all the different parts of the program worked their butts off to make sure their portion was done properly. Bottom line, a good time was had by all, thanks to the individual contributors and the wonderful attitude all the attendees carried with them everywhere they went. This matches the original concept for the event; BY Otaku, FOR Otaku. Most of the professional level guests were from Japan or the Left Coast companies who bring their Anime/Manga products our way. I loved the panels the Voice Actors put on, with the Inside The Voice Actors Studio segment perhaps being my favorite. The Cosplayers were fully represented and owned the hallways, and the panels I managed to attend were excellent, both Fan and Pro run.
I tried to take notes at the various panels, but was usually too busy enjoying them to remember to do so. Perhaps I can remember enough about some of them to post a few notes here. There was so much going on that most hours I had to pick between 3 to 6 things I wanted to attend that were scheduled at the same time. For those wondering, that is me in the picture taken at the con, holding up the sign for next year’s event, and wearing my Planet Tokyo shirt. Note that the shirt does not refer to the Puffy AmiYumi song, but to the radio show by Willow Leafstorm on Krypton Radio, Sci-Fi for your Wi-Fi.
