For those wondering what the count down clock is all about, it is all about the Doctor Who 50th Celebration and the episode they will air around the world that night, Day Of The Doctor.
The one film that looks like fun this week is Mickey Virus, a Bollywood comedy about a computer hacker, his tomboy sidekick, his imaginary girlfriend (which he programmed into a computer game), a whole lot of police, and the computer hackers he has to stop.
The Wall is a German fantasy adventure about a woman who suddenly finds herself isolated from humanity by an invisible barrier she can not cross. This looks like it could be a very powerful interior movie if it is done right. The documentary this time is Necessary Evil: The Villains of DC Comics, because there just isn’t enough nerdyness already in the world.
In TV, the excellent but short lived Primeval New World: The Complete Series is available to bring home. I liked that series, and was very sorry it did not get renewed. The other tasty series is Nikita: The Complete Third Season, spy fun for the whole family.
In Anime, Blood-C: The Last Dark is the feature film that complements the TV series about the half-monster vampire killing girl. Kokoro Connect: Complete is about a group of friends who suddenly find themselves swapped in each others bodies with no clue as to why. Even with the cross-gender swapping, objectionable content is mild; this one is played strictly for the laughs.
Winning the award for this rounds longets title, Yamibo – Darkness, the Hat, and the Travelers of the Books: Complete Collection, I find the premise of this one interesting. Our protagonist has had her elder sister/love interest vanish in front of her. In the process of seeking her out, a talking parakeet leads her to the Great Library, where every book is a gateway to its own unique world. Not surprisingly, this is from Bandai, the same folks who distributed Read Or Die.
Di Gi Charat: Complete is centered around an extraterrestrial princess and her friends who descend on Tokyo with the objective of making her an Idol. The original anime and OVA were kind of promotional, since the Gamers store it is set in, in Akihabara, actually exists, and is part of a chain that has stores as far away as LA, California. This is more of a re-release, but it has been quite a while since the series was available in North America.
It is a serious treat to learn they recently recovered 11 old Doctor Who episodes from a storage closet in Nigeria, 9 of which have not been seen since they originally aired! And now we can watch the first few.
They have already digitally remastered two of them and made them available for download on iTunes, both Patrick Troughton stories. The Web of Fear previously existed only as a rumor except for episode 1, usually mentioned when talking about how Pertwee’s end as The Doctor came at the mandibles of his old spider foes, who we had never seen before. Every so often someone mentions that was also the episode where we were introduced to Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, later to be promoted, and mostly referred to as The Brigadier. Episode 3 is still MIA, but they have the original audio track and 11 stills to use to reconstruct it, so the story will be intact. How nice to have the rest of them back for the first time in forever, and the missing episode partially reconstructed!
The Enemy of the World has Patrick Troughton being both the Doctor and the bad guy, the first time that had happened (Tom Baker was later to reprise that in The Mind Of Evil). This one they only had episode 3 of previously, with this discovery they now have all 6. Companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) are in both of these stories, and while we have seen a lot of Jamie, most of Victoria’s stories were lost, so I look forward to the opportunity to learn more about who she was and what she brought to the role of a Companion.
I also have to mention that the link to download them from iTunes didn’t work for me. The link did launch my iTunes app, but then I had to search for each title before I could find the correct link to buy and download it from. A bit of a pain, but I am willing to go through a lot more than that to get Doctor Who episodes I have not already watched dozens of times each!
My apologies for posting the moral equivalent of commercials this time,but the on-screen words pretty much matched up to my attitude on each episode, so I just posted them as is.
This week Big Ass Spider looks like the camp comedy winner, with several of my favorite actors in it. The Carrie remake is also this Friday, proving yet again that religious brainwashing, school bullies, and telekinetic power are not a good mix. My favorite choice this time around has to go to Chinese Zodiac, with Jackie Chan leading a team of mercenaries out to recover the stolen artifacts.
By which headline I mean the Sci-Fi London Oktoberfest, which runs from the 11th to the 13th. This event is a science fiction film festival with workshops and panels, some of which are about making your own films and TV shows. The one that excites me is Starship London, where Sci-Fi London teams up with the Institute for Interstellar Studies to hold a symposium to promote awareness and education to support their goals. Their goals are simple yet profound, and if they pull it off everything changes for the human race: to realize interstellar flight before the year 2100. This is not a joke, they are absolutely serious, and they are working hard to generate the technical expertise and scientific knowledge required to make it happen. But don’t forget they are also running a whole lot of Sci-Fi on the Big Screen, including the first 3 of the new Evangelion movies in their Anime All Nighter.