I have been waiting for Pacific Rim for quite a while, and finally It Is Gojira Season! We get to don our Giant Mecha suits and battle the monsters head on, at least in the virtual universe of the big screen. I fully expect to be completely entertained by this one, and will probably come home only to spend the rest of the day being fully immersed in more Giant Mecha excitement.
The movie The Host was a surprisingly enjoyable story of alien invasion, sort of Heinlein’s Puppet Masters redone as a fem-centric YA story with an ending based on collaboration rather than conquest. Which makes sense, since it is also a romance, but much better done than the authors other movie series with all the sparkly vampires.
In TV we have season 4 of Warehouse 13, a fun little series full of artifacts with strange powers. Too bad Eureka isn’t still around to go with it, I loved the crossover episodes they did.
In Anime, Blue Exorcist: Complete 1st Season is the ultimate in inter-generational infighting; Th son is becoming a world-class exorcist going after demons. The father is Satan, infiltrating his minions into the world of humans. Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack! is more scientific, with mechanically augmented sea creatures attacking the land dwellers. Our protagonist leaves Okinawa and heads to Tokyo to see if her boyfriend is OK, only to discover the city overrun by the mechanized monsters.
I watched a beautiful trailer for Terry Gilliam’s latest masterpiece The Zero Theorem and I would love to post it here, but it was watermarked Not For Distribution, and while I couldn’t make out all the small print below that I got the impression it was to be used to shop the film around to find a distributor. As soon as I find a version that can be shared here I will post it; in the meantime, I thought you might like to here him speak a bit about it, and about the state of the film industry today.
Both of the two main releases this week are on the big screen on Wednesday the 3rd to take advantage of the extended holiday weekend box office returns. The Lone Ranger and Despicable Me 2 are both films I have been waiting quite a while to see, and I will be in the theater for both of them on the 3rd.
Top movie selection this time around absolutely has to be Tai Chi Hero, the sequel to the amazing Steampunk Tai Chi Zero. This film series is very hard to describe properly, but it is a world of fun, and I recommend it highly. 6 Souls might be interesting as well, I suppose.
I didn’t find any TV series this time around, but Anime did slightly better with three entries. Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere: Season Two continues the national maneuvering for power and position, and I mean that quite literally. It looks like we finally get to see the Armor of Deadly Sins in action this time around as well. Natsume’s Book of Friends: Season 4 finds our protagonist still tracking down the Yokai (monsters, spirits) listed in his grandfathers book and giving them back their rightful names. But now he must also consider his future, and make some hard decisions. Finally, Ruin Explorers is a 4 episode OVA about two highly trained magic users who can’t spell right (I am pretty sure the pun is intentional) in a race to collect three artifacts before their opponents beat them to it. This one looks pretty amusing for old school Anime, it is vintage 1995.
SIGGRAPH 2013 is coming up on July 21st through the 25th, with the latest and greatest in graphics development for movie production, gaming platforms, and scientific visualization. Some of the presentations and exhibits each year focus on new and emerging technologies, and as usual they have put together a prevue of some of the more interesting ones. A few of these are silly, and more of them need context to understand their potential applications, but a couple of them are obvious game changers that will revolutionize how we do things once they get into full production. And as a special bonus, I am including their Real Time Preview for this year as well.