Haibane.info

Category: Movies and Television

  • “ancient” is a human concept, not a universal one

    I was totally mesmerized by the APOD a few weeks ago:

    Milky Way Over Ancient Ghost Panel
    The Ghost Panel and the Milky Way

    There are two kinds of antiquity here – one cosmic, the other human. Of course the age of the foreground is insignificant compared to the age of the background, but I confess to being more viscerally awed by the former.

    I think it’s impossible to really relate to things beyond human timescales. The idea of something being “ancient” has no meaning if it predates our human comprehension. The Neanderthals disappeared 30,000 years ago, which is probably really the farthest back we can reflect on. When we start talking about human forebears of 100,000 years ago and more, it becomes more abstract – that’s why it’s no coincidence that the Battlestar Galactica series finale set the events 150,000 years ago, well beyond even the reach of mythological narrative.

  • torrenting with no fear

    I’ve become markedly more paranoid about bittorrent in the past few months, with all the news of systematic, widescale lawsuit shakedowns and the craven willigness of ISPs to hand over private IP address data. This is a perfect case study of how not having anonymity and privacy can lead to outright persecution, even if you are totally innocent of any copyright violations (fair use or not).

    I don’t use BT for much beyond catching up on anime and various TV shows. Netflix doesn’t always have what i want, and even if it does I have to compete with the rest of my family for slots in the queue. And trying to catch things when they are broadcast is essentially impossible (no DVR, either). Ultimately I have to either be able to time shift or not watch at all; and paying more money above and beyond the cable TV and netflix subscription is just too high a barrier.

    Unfortunately, the threat posed by the copyright tyrants is no longer negligible. So I do watch less and less TV nowadays (and play more Warcraft, read books, etc*). Though I did just discover CastTV which was indispensable for catching up on Doctor Who Season 5…

    What I want is a way to torrent without losing my privacy. I did try PeerGuardian, which is a constantly updated realtime list of suspicious IP addresses to blacklist, but it never worked for me – the blacklist just doesn’t download from their server. I suspect the load is too high for a volunteer open source project to handle. The more compelling solution seems to be a paid proxy service, such as BTGuard, which is surprisingly affordable. If I understand BT correctly, even using a private tracker like BakaBT won’t protect your IP from the Bad Guys, so I am pretty sure I am going to have to bite the bullet on this one. BTGuard is intended primarily for torrenters, but I might as well also start using proxies for my casual browsing as well. There’s also the TOR project which purports to protect your web traffic from being intercepted… not sure I entirely understand that yet, but worth looking into.

    I guess I’m not really sure how paranoid I should be. But the present system of just blindly and openly surfing and torrenting doesn’t seem sustainable.

    *all these hobbies of course are competing for the tiny sliver of time I have late at night to myself, since my waking hours are dominated by family and work.

  • sigh. del Toro leaves THE HOBBIT

    here’s the bad news from AICN. The uncertainty over the rights to the film die to MGM studio’s pending sale resulted in too many delays, and del Toro has a lot on his plate.

    Will we ever see the Lonely Mountain in film?

  • Scotty’s send-off

    The remains of James Doohan have been sent into space (briefly):

    UPHAM, N.M.–The cremated remains of actor James Doohan and U.S. Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper soared to suborbital space yesterday aboard a rocket.

    It was the first successful launch from Spaceport America, a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New Mexico desert.

    The Canadian-born Doohan was most famous for portraying engineer Scotty on Star Trek. Cooper, one of the original Mercury astronauts, had been in space twice during his lifetime.

    Doohan died in July 2005 at age 85. Cooper, who first went into space in 1963, died in 2004 at age 77. Doohan inspired the legendary catchphrase “Beam me up, Scotty” – even though it was never actually uttered on the popular television show.

    Suzan Cooper and Wende Doohan fired the rocket carrying small amounts of their husbands’ ashes and those of about 200 others at 8:56 a.m. local time from the launching grounds near Truth or Consequences, N.M.

    During the 15-minute flight, the rocket separated into two parts and returned to Earth on parachutes – coming down at the White Sands Missile Range – with the capsules holding the remains. The maximum height reached was about 116 kilometres. Capsules containing the ashes are retrieved, mounted on plaques and given to relatives.

    While nicely symbolic, I think a far more powerful memorial to Doohan was his final turn as Scotty in the TNG episode Relics. In a way, that episode really closed the book on the old Star Trek for me. And whose heart didn’t leap when Scotty walked onto the holodeck and recreated the Enterprise bridge, “no bloody A, B, C, or D!” ? It’s hard not to think that Scotty’s words to Picard on that recreated bridge of legend weren’t as much coming from Doohan himself.

  • down the Hobbit Hole

    Looks like the Hobbit movie is still on hold, awaiting the fate of the MGM studio being sold to clarify the rights situation. Director Guillermo del Toro himself lays out the status, via AICN:

    Q: We’ve been following your production of THE HOBBIT, and every time the production gets delayed. Do you know when you’re actually going to start and get on set?

    Guillermo del Toro: There cannot be any start dates really until the MGM situation is resolved, because they do hold a considerable portion of the rights, and it’s impossible to make a unilateral decision by New Line or Warners to give the greenlight to proceed. We really believe that things will be known after the fact of MGM’s fate. Whether they stay and get supported, or they get bought, or they transfer some of the rights: nobody knows. We’ve been caught in a very tangled negotiation.

    Now I’ve been on the project for nearly two years. We have designed all the creatures; we have designed the sets and wardrobes; we have done animatics and planned very lengthy action sequences and scary sequences and funny sequences. We are very, very prepared for when it’s finally triggered, but we don’t know anything is sold.

    Q: The story that was reported earlier today that THE HOBBIT has been greenlit and will be shot in 3D, that is false?

    Del Toro: On both counts, there are no final answers. It is not greenlit. That is categorical. And 3D has been discussed literally once in the room. The budget and the schedule and everything that we are handling – the cost of the film, the number of days it would take to shoot – is being handled right now without looking towards 3D. Is there a chance it will become 3D in the future? Maybe. Right now, it’s not being planned as such.

    Well, there’s still the World of Warcraft movie to look forward to.

  • The Doctor is in

    I am really, really enjoying the new Dr. Who series. I confess I’ve never seen the older versions but the new one hits all the right buttons. I’m about 3/4 through season 2 and it’s really hard to pick a favorite thus far, though The Girl in the Fireplace probably comes close.

    One thing that especially appeals to me is the rigidity of the timeline. We see that t is possible to change events, but there are severe consequences for doing so – the universe “heals itself” by closing off paradoxes like an infectedd wound and then sending “antibodies” to excise it. And, alternate realities do exist but they are walled off in such a way that even the TARDIS can’t easily access them. Its not clear to me if this is how it always was or whether it’s a consequence of the Time War. In either case, though, it puts the show within a very specific (and unique, given the basic storyline features time travel so centrally) set of constraints. The exact mechanics of when the Doctor’s appearance makes him “part of events” and when he is outside those events are still mysterious to me but it’s good to have some unknowns.

    The show just really, really rocks. The only problem is that it has obliterated whatever token anime watching I was still trying to do on the side (especially now that I’ve completed Bebop).

    Also, I’m guessing that the Torchwood thing becomes more important later, since they’ve dropped a reference to it almost every episode since the Doctor regenerated.

  • The Secret of Kells

    Don had a short post linking to a tantalizing new animated film called Secret of Kells which seems to only be released in Irish theaters at present, but would be a prime candidate for torrenting (assuming Pirate Bay can get back online; I don’t torrent enough nowadays to be able to sustain a BakaBT account like Steven does).

    The animation has an exotic brushstroke painting feel to it, and there’s a gaggle of reviews online that are praising the storyline, with plenty of references to Miyazaki. I’m a little hesitant, since everyone universally praised Ponyo as the awesomest thing ever, but was a disappointment to me. Still, if this appears in local theaters then its a natural target for me and my 8yr old.

  • Iron Man and Batman

    incredibly insightful observation from Massawyrm about Batman and Iron Man:

    How do you take a comic steeped in cold war ideology, fixated upon a Vietnam war vet who becomes a philandering tycoon that rubs elbows with gods, monsters and superheroes and translate that into a viable franchise for a post-9/11 world? Favreau’s answer was to focus on the character, surrounding him with a terrific supporting cast whose primary objective is to wrangle Tony, while peppering the landscape with robots, power suits and plenty of explosive mayhem. He is played as the very antithesis of Batman: while Batman is the brooding hero pretending to be a rich socialite, Stark is the rich socialite moonlighting as a brooding hero. And Stark has better toys.

    I really didn’t find the first Iron Man movie that interesting, and have never really been a fan. I might have to check IM2 out, though, on the basis of this alone.

  • mecha movie madness

    via AICN I see that there’s a Voltron movie planned, and continued rumblings about Robotech:

    MTV Splash Page notes that “The Losers” director Sylvain White has expressed interest in helming an adaptation of the classic “Robotech” animated series.

    “Well, [‘Robotech’ is] not a project that’s greenlit,” related White during an appearance at last weekend’s WonderCon (via Sci-Fi Wire). “It’s a great cult series. When it came out, I actually saw it in France, growing up. I saw it in French. It’s a pretty amazing cartoon. And I’m hoping it’s going to come to fruition.”

    “I read a draft that’s really good,” continued White. “I’m interested in doing it, but the project is not fast tracked or anything like that, so there’s no official thing. There’s no deal… They sent me a draft. I liked it. It’s a work in progress.”

    Robotech was Harmony Gold’s compiled localization of mecha anime “The Super Dimension Fortress Macross,” “The Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross” and “Genesis Climber Mospeada.” However, given the level difficulties involved, a movie is more likely to be weighed toward South Cross and Mospeada than the moe popular Macross.
    (…)
    Corona Coming Attractions reports that efforts to make a Voltron movie are back to square one. Neither the Justin Marks script nor the more recent Jeff Davis rewrite will be the shooting script; the production is officially in “reboot mode” and Max Makowski is no longer attached to direct.

    neither of these looks to be approaching production status anytime soon. However, there’s a website for a Gurren Lagann movie, which in many ways would be far cooler than either of the others.

    What is it with mecha mania? I wonder if the Transformers movies have given a boost to the genre, or whether they are perceived as a separate sub-genre?

  • Why is the rum gone?

    I’ll admit that it isn’t as good as their classic Hobbits to Isengard but it’s still catchy. No Warcraft version is likely to be made of this one, however.