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Something to Do: Movies

August has some movie releases I have been waiting for, and this week we get Marvel’s reboot of the Fantastic Four. This is the origin story, where Reed Richards and company enter an alternate universe which changes them in ways they never anticipated. They are also bringing Victor Von Doom to the big screen with this one, and I have hopes that this release will rekindle the franchise. The series was always a favorite of mine because scientists were the superheros rather than the villains.

It isn’t the only choice this week as we also get the animated silliness of the Shaun the Sheep Movie. Built by the same Claymation specialists who bring us Wallace and Grommet, the stories are always packed with a lot of visual humor and very little in the way of dialog. Frankly, you don’t need words when you can tell a story with images this well, and I have to think that boosts their profit margin tremendously with international distribution. To translate the spoken part of one of these can’t take more than 3 people in the studio for one afternoon to lay down the recording, and maybe 10 hours of editing, mostly to mix the voices with the music and sound effects.

There is another animation also worth looking into this weekend for entirely different reasons; Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. This is a group project, with many award winning animators and animation directors from around the world contributing different “chapters”, and some world class actors doing the voice overs. It has already won a number of awards on the Festival circuit including Cannes, and sadly like most truly independent movies it isn’t going to be in a lot of theaters; only New York and LA this weekend, and while it will be hitting around 40 cities in North America during the following weeks, it generally is in a single theater per city. I have already posted trailers for the first two films (scroll down and back through my blog, they are obvious), now here is one for this wonderful creation.

LightSail Kickstarter

The Planetary Society had a Kickstarter goal of $200,000 to fund their LightSail Project. When they met that, they went for a stretch goal of $450,000, to use the extra money to educate scientists and engineers about how the combination of CubeSats and LightSails will change the exploration of the Solar System, making orbital observation missions to any of the planets cost about the same as buying a new car. When they met that and the money kept coming in, their next stretch goal was to educate the public about how unlimited free energy from the sun will provide CubeSat propulsion and revolutionize access to space for low-cost citizen projects. They passed that goal, and the contributions will be open for the next two days. If you haven’t already gotten in on The People’s Spacecraft, you have 2 days left to make your support known and get in on the rewards for your chosen donation level.

Something to Watch: Discs

On the movie front, Chappie is the clear winner. This Robot/AI coming to life tale is engaging on so many layers you won’t ever wonder why it belongs on this list. There were aspects of this production that surprised me, like their choices of gangsta-rap celebrities as core cast members (that would not have been my choice, but then I wasn’t the one telling the story), but the film as a whole had my approval. The other near-genre film this time around, The Lazarus Effect, was just a cheap horror flic as far as I was concerned, and not worth the time it takes to watch it. A non-genre release that was nominated for an Academy Award (best foreign language film) because of its amazingly twisted story was Wild Tales, which certainly is worth the time it takes to watch it, if you can handle how completely off the hook it gets. And then there is the documentary offering: The Wrecking Crew, about the studio musicians who showed up on almost every major recording from the 60s and 70s that is still overplayed today, because they were just that good.

In TV there is only one choice this time around: Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman: Season 5! This show has been one of my favorite programs for quite a few years now, and this season just proves it yet again. Trust me when I say you want to watch this one and see if you don’t also find it both entertaining and educational.

In Anime, there seems to be some confusion about Tokyo Ravens: Season 1 Part 2, which is being released either this week or at the end of the month. Both of the sites I trust to get it right say at the end of the month, but I am going to mention it this week anyways. Whichever it is, this rather dark series will draw you in, and hold your attention. Hard though it may be to believe, Is This a Zombie? of the Dead is a much more lighthearted adventure, with much sillier situations springing up, and it really does come out this week. Finally, Captain Earth: Collection 1 begins to tell the story of yet another teenager who is tasked with saving the world using his special video games skill set. All of these look like fun to me, and I have been enjoying them; I hope you do, as well.

AwesomeCon 2015

Awesome Con in Washington D.C. this past weekend certainly lived up to its name, and its rep. They had a huge collection of actors, artists, and authors (and that only covered the first letter of the alphabet) doing their best to make the gathering memorable. Pretty much all of the guest actor/voice talent celebrities manned (personed?) a booth on the bottom level, off to the side of the hucksters area by the primary entrance, most of the time they were not doing a panel or presentation. Between those two groups were the artists, both Comics and Fine, with quite a few other visual disciplines mixed in. That last sentence gives you the idea, but not the scope, unless you expect there to be a hundred or more impressive illustrator/storytellers on the multiple-football-field sized area you are crossing to get to your next scheduled event.

They had some presentations I never expected, like Twisted Toonz, where a group of world class voice actors played out a famous movie as totally different characters than the ones in the original. This year the film was The Wrath of Kahn, and the voice of Wini The Pooh coming from the bridge of the Enterprise was one of the the least disconcerting aspects of that presentation. I can’t wait to see another show organized around the same principle, it was absolutely amazing and entertaining! Although the voice actor tasked with being Bill Cosby for one part of it kept looking out at the audience like he was trying to find an escape route.

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