Haibane.info

Category: Movies and Television

  • Otakucoin

    Consider this a proposal, not a formal whitepaper, for an initial coin offering of a new cryptocurrency, Otakucoin.

    Otakucoin (OUC) is intended to be used to support Otaku who write reviews of anime, science fiction, and other television and film fiction, as a measure of credibility and authority. It is therefore analogous to Reddit gold and Medium claps, i.e. can be bought in order to be given, or sold after accumulation.

    I am still planning the technical backend and the details. Some references are below. I encourage anyone who is interested in participating to contact me by leaving a comment in this thread. This isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, it’s an excuse to learn something cool and have some fun. To that end, I intend to structure the coin so it does not pass the Howey test and is in no danger of being labeled a security. We may need to launch a Kickstarter to raise some money so we can hire Token Deck, Espeo, or IcoBox to take care of the details.

    References:

  • Opening Night, The Penultimate Jedi

    Spoilers follow. (more…)

  • This can’t be good

  • Existential Dredd

    (via @WobblyOnion)

  • Star Trek rediscovery: a real score

    FINALLY!!

    Whether or not I buy into CBS All Access, I will probably be buying this soundtrack. The music of Trek – except for the abomination of Enterprise – has always been hand in hand with it’s basic message of boundless optimism and grand adventure, about journeys rather than destinations.

    For no other reason than I love it, here is my favorite musical segment of all Trek: the Battle in the Mutara Nebula.

  • Star Wars, JJ-verse edition

    I guess Spielberg is out.

    I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. Cue the half-finished gas-giant-based super weapon with an orbiting planet full of cute aliens, a huge space battle and a climactic light saber battle where Rey defeats Kylo WHO IS HER BROTHER OMFG and then Kylo embraces the light and throws Snoke down a well.

    Then again, JJ is coming in late so hopefully the script will have been fixed by the story group and not be as vulnerable to JJ’s flights of fancy, or lens flares.

    If it sucks, we can always say it was an alternate universe and go back to Extended Universe for our head canon.

  • Star Wars at 40

    Photograph by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair
    Photograph by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair

    Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope was released on May 25th, 1977. I was 3 years old, so I didn’t see it until much later. But like everyone of my generation, it changed my life.

    Today’s Vanity Fair has the ultimate preview of Episode VIII. It is absolutely worth a read, right now.

  • Star Trek: Discovery – first trailer

    Here’s our first look –

    OK, I understand the idea behind the visual redesign. It’s 2017, not 1967. And the showrunners opted for Prime universe rather than Kelvin to preserve creative independence from whatever the movie franchise is doing. They do, however, want to appeal to the audience that the new movies in the Kelvinverse have recruited. Therefore: lens flares and Apple Stores.

    Klingonbar640

    But really, hairless Klingons? With a H.R. Geiger armor aesthetic?

    It’s not like we haven’t seen the 60’s aesthetic embraced by modern television. Deep Space Nine went there and did it brilliantly – they arguably made the TOS USS Enterprise look even more gorgeous than any of her successors, and they didn’t change anything about her at all – just lighting and texture. Enterprise itself managed to authentically portray a pre-Kirk technology chic that had a more industrial feel, which was utterly believable as the ancestor to the softened look of the Kirk era. I do not accept that the Kelvinization of the Prime timeline was necessary to modernize the production. After all, the aesthetic of The Expanse and Dark Matter is thoroughly modern but doesn’t have the same Kelvin fascination with chrome and glass. Not that I want any Trek to go the grunge-fi look, but I do at least want Trek to honor it’s own identity. This feels like a rejection – purely a Han shot first decision.

    Unless directly contradicted on screen, I think that my own headcanon about First Contact creating Enterprise can be amended here to argue that Discovery is in a Beta timeline. The Prime timeline was TOS/TNH/VOY/DS9, but the events of First Contact created the Beta timeline, and the Kelvinverse is an alternate reality branching from the Beta timeline.

    Some may dismiss all this timeline canon angst as pointless, but since time travel and timelines are literally a backbone plot of the Star Trek universe, this is a legitimate area of fan analysis.

    Related – great discussion threads at /r/DaystromInstitute that disagree with my headcanon First Contact created the alternate (Beta) timeline and a discussion of whether Enterprise is in Prime or not.

  • Space battles in The Expanse are incredible

    watch this.

    wow. that raises the bar in my imagination for any space battle in any sci fi. I’ll never be quite as enamoured of X-Wing dogfights ever again. The Expanse is true hard sci-fi in the TV era – there’s as much depth in the novels for a Game of Thrones-esque run if they do it right. Having read (most of) the books, I am amazed at how amazed I am at major plot developments in the show, even though I know they are coming – they just have such incredible impact.

    Related: the Nauvoo is just… a cathedral of awesome.

  • Highlander reboot? there can be only one

    zeist

    What would a guy really be like after 500 years of practicing sword-work? I’m still a stunt guy at heart. You want to reinvent gunfights, how do you do it? You want to reinvent swordfighting, how do you do it? And that’s where we are at now. I love the first Highlander and I think I’m in a pretty good spot. The creative team, the producers and the studio that’s behind it have kind of said, ‘It’s yours to play with.’ The trick would be coming up with an interesting way to introduce it to new audiences without stepping on what’s great about the original property. You don’t want to over complicate it. I think it speaks very simply: ‘There can be only one!’ ‘We’re immortals!’ ‘Don’t get your head chopped off!’ I think we all know what happened with the sequels.”
    […]
    “When I came on, the property had already been developed for a couple of years and, as things happen in Hollywood, yeah, there was aliens, meteors, spaceships, uh, DNA mutations, terrorists. I mean, they’d tried to drag every plot into the Immortal world. My personal opinion, I don’t want to see any of that. I’m not interested. I have seen other movies like that. I haven’t seen the Immortal world.”

    (grudgingly) fine, do what you want. but there can still only be one.

    Still, how do you do an interview with a director for a Highlander movie, reboot or otherwise, and not ask about Queen? SMH