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Something to Watch: DVD’s

It seems somewhat appropriate that I get to wish everyone Happy Halloween before I talk about the first selection today. And ordinarily it would be a sad week when the only live action movie title on offer had a name like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead, but this one pulled a ton of awards on the Film Fest circuit, and the trailers look wonderful. Independent films are pretty much the only place you can find non-formula original work these days, at least out of America where most studios either want to re-imagine something that made a ton of money 20 to 50 years ago, make a sequel of something that made a ton of money in the last few years, or make a film based on a youth cult mega-selling book/graphic novel/TV series. The other new film to DVD this week is an animation, and a sequel, but it is an instant classic: Toy Story 3. The original Toy Story was one of those works that changed everything within its field, and the sequels have been on a par.

In TV, the gorilla in the room is the re-imagined version of V (2009): The Complete First Season. I love the actors they have brought together for this variation of the story, definitely a number of my favorites, and the improvement in FX tech over the last few decades also helps make it more enjoyable. But I do not see the kind of quality upgrade that Battlestar Galactica brought to its franchise, where they re-examined the core concepts and the consequences that grew out of them, building a worldview with more realism and relevance to the current human condition. An actual original miniseries based on a book set, The Fallen ran on ABC Family back in 2006, telling a tale of a Nefilhim (a human-angel hybrid) who had the power to redeem fallen angels. It was originally broadcast as a sequence of three made-for-TV movies, and finally compiled into a complete program on the disks. The final TV series with new episodes this week is Doctor Who, with two entries: Dr. Who: Revenge of the Cybermen (the Tom Baker story, not the Hartnell/Troughton sequence) and Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis from the Silvester McCoy period. Classic Doctor is always worth watching, even if they didn’t hit the bulls-eye every time.

In anime, for the first time ever as near as I have been able to tell, the Original Dirty Pair: Part 1 becomes available in this country. I have the Feature Film box set, various OVA series, and Dirty Pair: Flash (a sort of remake), but I am really looking forward to finally getting my hands on the series that started it all. The original Girls With Guns program, I can’t wait to see how many times they say It’s not our fault per episode as they destroy the cities and planets they are protecting. Yes, this series inspired a lot of others, including the recently mentioned Birdy The Mighty.

As a former professional pyrotechnic engineer and avid sci-fi fanatic, I have been waiting for Oh! Edo Rocket for a number of years. The basic premise is simple; an alien princess lands on Earth and needs to be returned to outer space. In Edo period Japan (a few hundred years later they named the town Tokyo) the only man for the job is a fireworks expert that keeps tying her to a flying bomb and lighting the fuse. The local government officials frown on this practice, since in Edo during the mid-1800’s there was a set of harsh frugality laws that banned all luxuries, including fireworks. And then they threw in some silly factors, just to make the animation even more entertaining. They ran this one as two 13 episode seasons, and are releasing each season as a separate box set. I know I should wait until they release a complete series box set and pay $10 less for the combined product, but that is not an option for me this time. I have been waiting too long to have this as part of my permanent collection, I am not waiting any longer.

We have two other new choices this week, starting with Uta∽Kata, in which a school girl comes across a mirror that does not reflect the world around her. When Manatsu steps from inside the mirror, offering friendship and magical powers for the summer, it may be a promise too good to be true. The other? Blassreiter – The Complete Series rolls out in a single box set, for those that didn’t pick it up when it came out a season at a time, with the usual associated price drop. The Pale Rider series (for those who speak only English) is all about melding flesh with machine through a blood born virus, and those who fight against the spread. Another economical re-release, Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino – The Complete Series [Viridian Collection] also from Funimation continues the story of of the cyborg child-assassin teams begun in the first series.

That also brings up a question about the difference between a season and a series; a season would seem to be a complete year, and a series would seem to be a complete story. But a season often starts in one year and finishes in the next, while a story might constitute everything within a story arc, or everything involving the same characters taking place inside the same universe. Various sources explain it various ways, but no explanation I have ever come up against works for every instance and example. Answering that question should be a fun project and an interesting mental exercise; I will share my results (assuming I ever come to any) here when they happen.

Something to Watch: Streaming Xfinity

Like everyone else on the planet, I have become a big fan of watching streaming video online. For the most part, as new sources became available, they were connected to a service that had something to gain from the offering, and the ones that didn’t gain anything soon went away. The new one that fits that description is XFinity TV from my cable provider, Comcast. It is a bit of a surprise for two reasons: first, they aren’t asking me for more money for the service, it is just there as part of the package I am already paying for. Second, it has a lot of video my TV set top box doesn’t have, and is missing a lot of the things my cable box delivers. Both of these things make sense once I looked into the reasons for them.

On the first point, I suspect I am not the only person that noticed the economy got a bit rough around the edges over the last few years. Lots of folks have cut back on expenses, and if you are Power or Water you have no worries, because those are live or die items. If you are TV, Telephone, or the Internet, people will actually survive if they don’t pay for you, hard though that may be to believe. Except for that occasional 911 call, of course. So every TV, Telephone, and Internet provider is busy building VARs into their service (Value Added Resources) to make their service too valuable per dollar spent for you to want to give it up. Which makes it obvious why my cable company is giving me a very valuable additional resource without charging me extra for it.

The second point stems from the fact that each network and program production team have their own deals with various distribution outlets. A good example of this is from the Big 4 (or so) Commercial Broadcast Networks; ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox/CW. Both NBC and CBS are on my cable set top box Video On Demand service, with lots of the current programs. ABC is not there, nor is Fox/CW. So I can watch Chuck on NBC or Medium on CBS, but I have no access to No Ordinary Family on ABC, Smallville on CW/UPN or Fringe on Fox/WB. Or was it CW/WB and UPN/Fox? But when I log into XFinity, I have ABC and just watched the Pilot for No Ordinary Family, followed by this past weeks episode of Smallville, and tonight I just may rewatch Fringe. This combination works for me; I can watch everything I am looking for now, each through its assigned delivery system. And the streaming stuff goes with me, anywhere I have Wi-Fi access.

I first played with streaming online video in the mid 1980s, using the Multicast Backbone (MBONE) people were just beginning to develop. It could actually deliver low bandwidth audio in a two way environment at a reasonable rate, so even with a 3600 BAUD dial up modem you could do voice chat with people on another part of the planet. As long, that is, as you were both on one of the internet gateways like Q-Net, Compuserve, or AOL, rather than the much more common BBS systems. Video back then was a postage stamp sized picture at 16 colors refreshing at one frame a second if you had a good connection, and if you are interested in the basics of how it worked in olden days this thread is a good place to start.

It still pretty much works the same way today, except computers are much faster and more powerful, the ones on your desk, in your pockets, inside your TVs and DVD players, and most importantly the ones delivering the internet to you. So my Blue-Ray DVD player has its built in Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora widgets that pipe the output to my TV. On my computer, I have a premium paid account with Crunchyroll to watch Japanese, Chinese, and Korean TV programs an hour after they air in their respective countries, and another one with The Anime Network that gives me access to a completely different set of programming from those same countries. Similar fee-based arrangements are soon to be available in the US from sources such as BBC TV and Sky TV for areas outside the UK, and a whole lot of other programming suppliers from many other countries. In each case, you can watch the programs live (or near live, with a one hour delay being most common), which gives the license holder for that programming two instant advantages:

1) They get a regular payment from X number of online subscribers, without incurring any additional cost beyond building their server farm to handle the additional load. That load is minimal in a Multicast environment, and if you realized they have to pay their program suppliers for the additional people watching their show, you should also have realized they can see how many people are watching which shows based on the number of streams requested for each. So if I log into the BBC service, and only watch Doctor Who and Misfits episodes, all of the money they pass on go to the producers of those shows. That increases the odds that the programs I want to watch will be funded and renewed for another season; I know, because I helped fund them.

2) Both the Network/Service as a whole and those specific programs that pull in the subscription viewers get a spike in their ratings. In a commercial network environment, this means being able to charge more per 30 second spot. But even for non-commercial (in the sense of not running advertisements, NOT in the sense of not making money) networks like HBO or the BBC, ratings are king and are at the heart of increasing revenues.

Spirited Away Tomorrow

On the last Wednesday each month, the JICC has an Anime presentation free and open to the public they refer to as their Animezing Series. This month the presentation is Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a watershed animation and a perfect tale for Halloween. Reservations are required for tomorrow night’s event, since the theater has limited seating and there will be only one showing. They invite everyone who is so inclined to wear their best Halloween costumes, but do not bring costume weapons, not even plastic toys. Remember that the Japan Information and Culture Center (JICC) is part of the Embassy of Japan in Washington D.C, and like all embassies their security team is trained to err on the side of caution. I can’t wait to find out what they have in store for us in November, and for this and other events in and around DC be sure to check out their Calendar.

Something to Do: Movies

It played a few weeks ago at Sci-Fi London, and now Monsters goes into limited release in the US this Friday. If it doesn’t play anywhere close to you, the web site says it goes into wide release on December 3rd. The buzz from the film fest circuit is positive, and the trailer looks great; I am so there. Also out this week, again in somewhat limited release, is the third film in the brilliant Swedish trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. This movie wraps up the story begun in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and since the second film, The Girl Who Played With Fire comes out on DVD tomorrow, I will be re-watching both of them before hitting the theater for the final chapter.

Something to Watch: DVD’s

There are no real genre movies coming out this week, but Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire) brings part two of the trilogy that began with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo home. This Swedish series about an investigative reporter and a girl genius hacker is very much edge of your seat thriller to the core, so much so that even if you have to read subtitles it won’t slow down the movie. The third film, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest, is hitting the theaters on this Friday, October 29th.

For TV, they are finally releasing War of the Worlds: The Final Season, as well as the complete series in one box set, since it only ran two seasons. This was Adrian Paul’s last Sci-Fi TV roll before he became the Highlander. Someone is re-releasing the surviving episodes of Captain Video And His Video Rangers, America’s first Sci-Fi TV show. It ran live on the DuMont Network for half an hour every night from 1949 to 1954. If you don’t remember, Allen B. DuMont invented the cathode ray tube (also called the Picture Tube) in 1932, the Oscillograph (later called the Oscilloscope) in 1933, and Radar in 1934 (the US military asked him not to patent it so they could keep it secret). But he is best known as the inventor of the Television, and his company was selling the TV sets he invented beginning in 1938, with his TV Network going live in 1946.

Bridging the gap between TV and Anime, the American animation series Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Complete Season Two also hits the shelves this week. What I find much more exciting is the fact that Lucasfilm Animation is looking into doing a new animated series with direct creative involvement from Seth Green and Matthew Senreich.

In Anime, Birdy is back with all new adventures in Birdy the Mighty: Decode. Birdy is an interstellar agent with one minor flaw; she is more dangerous to innocent bystanders than the bad guys she pursues, and has been known to take out an entire planet while trying to stop one evildoer. This is part one of the new series, with part two coming out around Thanksgiving. You can watch the first episode online to give you an idea of what the series is like.

In the finest tradition of the Girls with Guns sub-genre, Canaan – Complete Collection takes place after biochemical attacks become common usage, and some assassins have synesthesia, giving them a distinct edge. If you liked Noir, you will love this series. Also in combat mode, Queen’s Blade: The Exiled Virgin – Complete Series takes place in a world where the Queen is chosen by being the last woman standing at the end of a series of battles. All contests are magically transmitted to crystal spheres for the entertainment of the populace. I don’t think either one of these places sounds like somewhere I would want to live, but the shows themselves are fun to watch.

Pandora Hearts part 1 seems to be a twisted variation on Alice in Wonderland meets the Count of Monte Cristo. For his birthday present they put him in a dungeon, with no explanations and no obvious way out. And Fullmetal Alchemist: The Complete Second Season (Viridian Collection) also becomes available, bringing still more world class timeline jumping steampunk into our hands at a more reasonable price.

Also out this week, Naruto Shippuden: Box Set 4 continues the ninja adventure (although there is some evidence it came out last week, since I already saw it on the shelves), while Hetalia: Season Two continues the rather silly story of WWII nations as schoolchildren. This program could actually be used as a teaching tool for that period of history, not because it is particularly accurate, but because it might catch a child’s attention and make them curious. Every teacher I know considers that the most difficult step in the education process, because once they are interested they seek out new knowledge on their own.

Something to Do: Movies

This Friday’s offering is a bit different, but looks like it could be interesting. Hereafter is a film directed by Clint Eastwood about a psychic who sees the afterlife and a few people he connects with deeply. I am not a fan of Clint Eastwood, Psychics, or near-death phenomena, but the trailer makes me think that perhaps there is something about this movie that would make it worthwhile. Of course, that’s what I thought about The Last Airbender trailer, and once the film actually started the guy sitting behind me kept nudging me to stop me from snoring. I think I will wait until this one is on a service I get anyways, like Netflix or HBO, rather than take another expensive nap in a darkened room full of strangers.