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Something to Do: Movies

There aren’t any US Sci-Fi or Fantasy movies coming out this weekend, but there is a Bollywood film that will hit the screens this week or next: It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, about an Indian mother who takes her obsession with marriage into the serial killer zone. This one is a romantic comedy horror movie, another genre mix you don’t see too often from India, although there are a lot of them from Japan. When you combine that with Robot which hit the big screen this past Friday and Action Replay coming out on November 5th, this is a great month for Bollywood Sci-Fi.

There is another movie that looks like fun this weekend; Nowhere Boy is the story of John Lennon as a teenager, and what drove him into music. The official web site is in the UK, so the release date mentioned on the page is the UK release, with the US release only coming now. I also need to let you know that the Avengers web site has gone live!

BBC Goodies

The new BBC iPlayer was rolled out yesterday, and it looks good. Unfortunately most of the video is not available outside the UK at the moment, but there is a subscription service in the works for the rest of us. But the radio segment works very well indeed wherever you are, with all the great programing one has come to expect from them, including my favorite, BBC Radio 7.

On the 2010 TV Choice Awards last night, Doctor Who was voted Best Family Drama, and Ashes to Ashes got Best Drama Series; congrats to both shows!

Also from BBC Worldwide comes two new games; Doctor Who: Evacuation Earth for the DS, and Doctor Who: Return to Earth for the Wii. The must-have for the DS games is the Sonic Screwdriver Stylus, while the mandatory item for the Wii is the Sonic Screwdriver Controller (Wii Remote). Unfortunately, so far the games are licensed for the UK, Australia, and parts of Europe, but not for the US. The stylus and Wiimote are not subject to the same kinds of licensing restrictions as the games, so those will hopefully be available to all of us.

Playing Doctor

Playing Doctor Who, that is. It has frustrated me for years that the BBC kept developing all kinds of wonderful online games that folks in the UK got to play, but the rest of us were locked out of. They have finally come up with a solution for that: Direct2Drive Dr Who is now an option for those of us on this side of the pond. Admittedly it costs money (4 or 5 dollars compared to free to folks in the UK), but since the previous games were not legally available at all I consider this a serious improvement, and will be handing them some cash.

In the meantime, you CAN have some fun working out the Doctor Who Jigsaw Puzzles, and they are a bit of a hoot.

Blastr, Filmclub

Blastr is not a new web site. It is part of the Sci-Fi Channel stable of online properties, and has been known for years as Sci-Fi Wire, an old and honorable internet name going back to the early ’90s when it was owned by a couple of independent Sci-Fi fans. They made a ton of money selling it to the Sci-Fi Channel before the Dot Com crash, and the site has mostly held to their initial format ever since, right up until its renaming and re-imaging. The look and feel of it does fit more with their other corporate offerings now, like DVice and Fidgit, and they have carried over at least some portion of the decades long archive of great articles. But what got a grin out of me was their celebratory story in honor of their rebranding: The 10 most gorgeous blasters and ray guns in science fiction. What a hoot!

According to this story at Female First, the kids taking place in the Film Club in the UK will be building their own science fiction films over the next month or two. Where was this kind of organization when I was in school, besides England; I would have loved it! Particularly things like their Close Encounters initiative.

Harry Trailer

The new Harry Potter trailer is just a bit dark, and the last book is broken into two different films, but it still looks like fun to me. So even though we all saw it this weekend in the Theater, here it is again.

In the land of Authors, I have to endorse this review of Ken MacLeod’s Restoration Game, and encourage anyone who hasn’t read MacLeod to get off their ass and buy and read a copy of everything he has ever written. He comes at the world from directions most of us cannot imagine. I would also like to recommend this weeks favorite Steampunk Romance author, Gail Carriger, who managed to create a wonderful milieu and the characters to populate it. If you can’t afford to buy them, hit your local library and read Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless, and see how the stories and series began.