I'm a freelance videographer and entertainment journalist (Absolute Underground Magazine, Two Hungry Blokes, and Otaku no Culture) with a wide range of interests. From archaeology to popular culture to paranormal studies, there's no stone unturned. Digging for the past and embracing "The Future" is my mantra.
Danny Collins is one of those films that looks at how tough life is for some musicians who are groomed by commercial success and who seek to escape from its trappings. Before they got their big break, some might have had an idea in what direction they wanted to go with for expressing themselves, but when they broke into the industry, the producers see something else. Just like Begin Again, just what some musicians can become, namely in what Dave Kohl (Gretta’s musician boyfriend) became, may well be their own beasts of burden.
Dan Fogelman (Cars, Tangled) wrote a very thoughtful screenplay that certainly explores the difficulties in starting anew. Danny Collins (nicely played by Al Pacino) finally receives a letter from John Lennon decades later as a gift by his long-time manager Frank, (excellently played by Christopher Plummer), and if he read it sooner than later, maybe his career would have gone to different places. He is a commercial success, but was that what he really wanted?
The good news is that the next part of the How to Train Your Dragon saga is all coming in almost one fell swoop. Thirteen episodes of the 26 episode season, Dragons: Race of the Edge, is coming to Netflix on June 26th. In the weeks prior, fans can expect a new swarm of toys from Spin Master based on what the DreamWorks panel at WonderCon has revealed. Two ominous dragon names include the Death Song and the Snow Wraith. There’s even a video game being made to feature more!
In what’s spilled to the Internet grapevine, the third season will help bridge further details leading up to the second film, like in how Stoick trained the Skull Crusher. No word was said about the first dragon he trained, namely the Thunderdrum. Also, just how Hiccup made his flight suit will get looked at. And for many fans wondering if this Netflix world is self-contained, thankfully not! Hiccup’s rival, Dagur, is set to return! This panel also revealed that Tuffnut forms some kind of relationship with a chicken and a mysterious dragon rider will be spotted. If that’s Hiccup’s mother spying in at the scene, most likely not. With plenty of tension being developed between episodes, the huge volume release is going to be welcomed.
At the same time, the demise of weekly serials, even for animated products, will no longer have people tuning in for more much like how the 60’s Batman kept viewers glued to the sets. Have viewers become that impatient? Some folks do binge watch, or do marathon viewing sessions with DVD releases of television programs. With Netflix, their idea is to do away with that by getting folks to watch their programs anytime, however little as they want it or a lot. When a few countries are setting “Internet bandwidth” usage caps and penalizing them, the idea seems counterproductive unless those viewers have subscribed to the right data plan or are pumping streaming content through special set-top boxes.
But as some television critics may well wonder, can this new model of pushing out content in one huge lump be good in the long run? Will putting out entire shows in its entirety, like what Netflix has done with Marvel’s Daredevil, forecast the demise of the traditional television watching in a serial format? For some folks, they can moderate what they watch. At least CW’s Supernatural keeps that formula alive, but for some folks who just want to eat up every episode released in one day, they just might call in to work to register a sick day just to watch one of their favourite shows in one go.
Camosun’s Comic Arts Festival (CCAF) is growing, and just what this event does is to put ownership back to the artists who decided to make the visual storytelling medium their career.
Camosun’s Comic Arts Festival (CCAF) is growing, and just what this event does is to put ownership back to the artists who decided to make the visual storytelling medium their career. It’s been used as old as time, since the caveman days, to tell a story on a surface. In Ancient Egypt, the paintings on the tombs can evoke a magic like quality to help the deceased continue on to the Afterlife. The immortality is not just with their souls’ journey but also with how their legacy upholds when their life is told in illustrative form.
Interestingly enough, one of the students, Raphaël Pirenne, takes inspiration from this land, and will be hoping he creates a comic out of it.
The college that’s located in the garden city of Victoria, British Columbia, has played host to some special events, and unlike bigger shows that tends to spotlight brands more than with the independents, to get back to the basics is all that’s really needed for this show. The CCAF is simply starting small, but it has bigger plans.
Sadly, there will not be a FANFIX poster for Superman: Man of Steel. Collectors may feel disappointed but thankfully marketing is not going overboard in making every blockbuster movie event “special.”
Strangely enough, for this Friday, a 2nd variant poster will be made available for people going to see Star Trek: Into Darkness in IMAX 3D. This print will be available to the first 300 people, presumedly after leaving the show. The glow in the dark coating will be a different color to distinguish between the two editions.
Changes are in store for both Emerald City Comicon (ECCC) and Fan Expo Vancouver (FEV), two of the Pacific Northwest’s biggest pop culture conventions. They are now respectively owned by ReedPOP and Informa Canada. While Hobby Star Marketing still manages the Fan Expo brand, they now report to a larger company that operates out of 43 countries that deal with a variety of exhibits than just focussing on geekdom whereas ReedPOP is more about the popular culture scene.
In what I’ve experienced from both of this year’s shows, a few of these modifications are not all that visible. Some include courier expressing show passes to fans so they have them in time for the show (ECCC) and others mean hiring additional security / staff for traffic control (FEV). The check-in of fake weapons is another and these are honestly needed for the safety for everyone. These changes are perhaps the most noticeable for this year’s two shows. As for what will happen in 2016, fine-tuning is required to manage the crazy lineups I saw when big name stars appear on the show floor.
The EMP Museum has a new exhibit, Infinite Worlds of Science Fiction, to go along with its many other popular culture themed displays. Along with Star Wars and the Power of Costume, Indie Game Revolution, Star Wars: The Power of Costume (a travelling exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service & the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art), We are 12 and Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic, to take them all in half a day can be done.
But at a time when I was there to partake in Emerald City Comicon, I looked at as much as I could of the EMP world in an evening. This event opened a few weeks ago, and I’d be remiss to not check it out, even with a slightly impatient friend (he hates long lineups) in tow.
Sadly, there will not be a FANFIX poster for Superman: Man of Steel. Collectors may feel disappointed but thankfully marketing is not going overboard in making every blockbuster movie event “special.”
