From December 10th to the 17th is the Bahamas International Film Festival, and I can’t think of a better place to have one in the winter. A lot of the pieces (69 of them) are shorts, in the 5 to 30 minute range, and one of them looks really interesting: The Macabre World Of Lavender Williams. The cast includes Lily Jackson, Rex Linn, Christopher LLoyd, and John Lithgow in this 26 minute fantasy film. Another one to consider is At World’s End, a Danish film from this year about someone who believes he is 130 years old, an action-comedy.
Disney’s animated feature The Princess and The Frog goes from limited to wide release on the 11th, making it available to people outside of New York and LA.
I haven’t found anything else new worth seeing, but that’s OK; next week Avatar is finally on the big screen!
For live action, J. K. Rowling’s next brilliant book has been turned into the next brilliant movie of the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. That film is the pivot point for this weeks releases, it seems to me.
In Anime this week, a show with a truck full of pigs, flying saucers, and crazy dream sequences comes along, and what are you going to do except cheer it on? School Rumble – Complete Series includes season 1, season 2, and the OVA, and nowhere in it does anything rumble.
Another new Anime this Tuesday is Naruto Shippuden volume 4 with still more tales on Ninja prowess. While I am a big fan of the nine-tailed fox, I will be waiting for the seasonal box set on this one, so I can see all the episodes at once (plus it’s more cost effective).
Moribito volume 8 also becomes available; the Public Broadcasting homepage of it can be found on the NHK.
Also out this week, Monster – Box Set 1 takes you into the What-If world that asks which decision would you make, when faced with a true human monster?
Cons are pretty thin on the ground in December, at least this year. The Steel City Con is a Toys and Collectibles kind of event, going on in Pittsburgh, Pa this weekend, and the CapIcons event is the same, in Tyson’s Corner, Va.
The only Con of importance this weekend is a kind of Meta-Con: the SMOF Con, or Secret Masters of Fandom Convention. They have to hold it when nothing else much is going on, because they run all the Cons that count, and would be too busy to show up when their Con was happening. So from December 4th to the 6th the majority of them will be in Austin, Texas, and syncing with this years theme: Time Management! Even people with time machines need to keep it under control, after all. My favorite Gimme from this cons collection: the SMOF Austin Restaurant Guide, which even non-SF folks will find very useful when they visit the best little town in Texas.
If you haven’t been to a collectibles event before, they are different from most other cons in that they are pretty much all dealer room. The one thing that makes them worth attending (unless you are a collector, of course, and if you are you already know this stuff) are the Celebrity Guests. You actually get to talk with them one-on-one while you pay your money for an autographed photo, or to get a picture taken with them. I have passed up a lot of photo opportunities over the years that I regret now, but count myself lucky for the questions I have had answered from folks like James Doohan (Trek) and Candy Clark (Man Who Fell To Earth), amongst many others.
Celebrity Guests at the Steel City Con include Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), and Luciana Carro (BSG).
CapIcons doesn’t seem to have any guests (at least that I could find), so from my perspective, what’s the point? Collectors will still be there, of course.
This weeks top choice for Horror/Spoof goes to Transylmania, college kids doing a semester in Romania with the wrong kind of night “life”. This comedy will probably only be in theaters for a short time, but it is also the only new genre live action I could see being released this week.
December looks to start off as a slow movie month, but Avatar comes along on the 18th, and xmas brings both The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Sherlock Holmes to the big screen.
We have two top domestic live action choices this week! The first is Terminator Salvation, and Warner Bros. is holding a online event on December 5th with the director. If you are interested in the history of this kind of event, read all the way to the bottom of this posting to see my latest rant on the topic.
The other big film is Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, which I just missed seeing at the Smithsonian IMAX theater premier event (tickets were WAY tight). It is also being released as a two movie package if you didn’t get the first one already, Night at the Museum/Battle of the Smithsonian.
If there was a live-action speculative fiction TV show released this week, I managed to miss it. Someone will no doubt point it out to me about 15 minutes after I post this.
It is a DVD, and Fantasy, but it is a DVD Game, not a movie: Harry Potter DVD Game: Wizarding World also comes out on Tuesday.
There are several interesting Anime releases this week. For the classics, there is My-Otome Complete Collection: Anime Legends edition. The Anime Legends series are extremely popular programs re-released with an economical pricing structure. Out as a compilation for the first time this week is Chevalier D’Eon – The Complete Series, a beautifully crafted alternate history sequence, but definitely not a lighthearted story.
Hunter X Hunter Box Set, Volume 4 continues the push for Gon and his friends to track down power in the form of treasure, magical beasts, and so forth. The Gunslinger Girl OVA gives some more background on a few of the formerly human characters, and trust me when I say these are children you would NOT want to meet in a dark alley.
‘Rental Magica’ DVD Collection 1 is an assortment of strange magic users out to battle evil, and come from a variety of magical traditions. Most sites claim this was actually released last week, but since I missed the Anime section last week I though I should mention it now.
About the Warner Bros. Special Events. This is something they have started recently (there is another one coming up for the new Harry Potter DVD release), and seems to involve group watching of the DVD together with an internet connection to the meeting software that allows you to type in questions, which the director (or actors or anyone else they involve from the movie production team) can answer verbally.
If you have been in moderated celebrity events in Second Life this decade, Virtual Places Chat in the ’90s, or live Usenet (meaning IRC or Internet Relay Chat) in the 80’s, you have already experienced this. And yes, I know the Usenet example I cited was from the 90’s, it was just the one I had handy courtesy of a recent post on a different topic. I actually have transcripts from moderated IRC sessions with SciFi authors I asked questions of going back as far as 1984 from QNet (the Commodore version of AOL and Compuserve in those days), but I didn’t have a link to any of them to point to. Perhaps this reference work will help, should you need it.
The bandwidth, and therefore the resolution, has just gotten better each decade; text only in ’84 at 300 baud, downstream-only audio in the mid ’90s at 56K, entire 3D virtual worlds with 2-way audio chat and streaming video by the mid 2000’s with 2-way asynchronous broadband. From the description of what they are going to do and how they will be doing it, this application of the event environment appears to be something we had the technology to do by 1998 or so, except for the Hi-Def video. But since the Video is going to be played locally from a DVD player and not streamed over the Net, it does not in any way change the bandwidth requirements.