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Something to Watch: DVDs, 18Mar14

In movies, I have to vote for Frozen first and foremost, because it is such a wonderful story, with characters I love (and love to hate), music I sing along with, and incredible animation. It also won a boatload of awards, as I suspect you may have heard; if you haven’t seen it yet, now is your chance! Also this week, the lesser known but still important Kill Your Darlings brings together a very young Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, the three people who would go on to invent the Beat Generation which spawned everything that came after. I have no idea what percentage of this story bears any resemblance to reality, but it is nice someone is exploring the possibilities within it.

In TV, the new series Atlantis makes it to disc, and while I was not as excited by it as I was hoping to be, they have created an interesting premise with some good actors who have some decent production work behind them. To be fair, I have only seen the first 3 episodes so far, I need to return to it and try it again.

In Anime, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, Part 2 has Aladdin and Alibaba teamed up to take over dungeons and become very rich in the beginning. But somehow that changes into them trying to protect their country from its own ruler, and protect that ruler from a childhood friend turned Djinn. This box set includes episodes 13 through 25, bringing you to the end of the tale. Shakugan no Shana has released season 1 in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means if you shop around you can pick the first 26 episodes up for right around $20. Shana lives on the border between our world and the spirit realm, her purpose to fight demons who eat humans. When Yuji dies and meets her on that border, they discover he can increase her power, so they team up to protect the living. Finally, Upotte!!: Complete Collection includes all 10 episodes plus the OVA, about a homeroom teacher and his weapons-grade coeds. When your student’s are living weapons, the classroom gets even more dangerous than usual, as the new teacher finds out by winding up in the hospital.

BabyMetal

The band is BABYMETAL, and their 1st full album is now out, with the same name. Cute girls in kawaii outfits singing sweet heavy metal harmonies… what’s not to like? The first track I posted is the live version of Gimme Chocolate, the second is the studio version of Megitsune. And I had to include their song Headbangeeeeerrrrr!!!!!. This band is tearing up iTunes, rated in the top 10 in 7 countries including the US, and their physical media is available as a CD of the studio tracks, or a limited edition with the CD and a DVD with their live tracks, all from the self titled album.

DOLL＄BOXX

DOLL＄BOXX is a five to seven woman rock band from Japan (some members seem to be there intermittently as other projects draw them away), formed when the band Gacharic Spin joined forces with Fuki, the lead singer from Lightbringer. Both bands continue to record and tour separately, and both are very good, but I really like the music they created together. The first track is their song Take My Chance from 2012, the second is 2013’s Ｍｅｒｒｉｌｙ　Ｈｉｇｈ　Ｇｏ　Ｒｏｕｎｄ.

Happy Mardi Gras!

To everyone who did make it this year, from all of us who wish we were there: Happy Mardi Gras, New Orleans! Hope you get the Baby in your King Cake! And nothing really says Mardi Gras quite so much as a song or three from Professor Longhair; enjoy.

Ulful

If this J-Rock band isn’t channeling the love child of the Beatles and Chuck Berry in this song, they are coming damn close. Ulfuls got their name because back in 1992 one of the band members misread the word Soulful on his favorite album and they went with it. I find this rather ironic, since the lead guitarist’s name is Ulful Keisuke; or perhaps that was more of an inside joke. They turned out a ton of singles, albums, and videos from 1992 through 2009, at which point they retired, until the last few weeks. It looks like the band, or at least the lead guitarist, is once more cranking out music and putting together a tour, including the release of this track online earlier this week, and an appearance on Music Station to get himself back out in front of the public again.

UPDATE: There was a live version of the track recorded this week and released/posted on the 6th of March, 2014, so I appended it to this blog entry. Enjoy!

AV Linux Update

Earlier this week the audio/video production powerhouse AV Linux released it’s newest version, 6.0.3. This is a minor update, mostly focused on fixing bugs and updating software packages to the latest and greatest stable versions, but they did make one non-trivial change; they changed the default kernel to the 3.10.27-PAE low-latency build. This gives improved performance for all aspects of media capture and processing, but especially for PCI audio devices or firewire interfaces. Performance on older platforms and hardware is also enhanced by this change. Whatever type of multimedia creation and processing you were thinking of doing, this Live DVD has all the resources you need for every aspect of the production workflow. You can download the Torrent or the Image and burn it to disk to get your own free toolkit. After you have booted it from the DVD and had a chance to see just how complete the software collection included in this OpSys is, you can also install it to your hard drive if you so desire.