Samurai Champloo

April 10, 2006 · Posted in Reviews · 1 Comment 

You know, I don't think I've ever mentioned in my blog that I watched all of Samurai Champloo and really liked it. So I'm doing it now.

It's an anime made by the same team who made Cowboy Bebop (which I have not yet seen). It's set in Japan in the Edo period, but deliberately includes anachronistic elements from modern hip-hop culture (and the soundtrack consists of Japanese hip-hop). It is not, however, a silly, slapstick parody — it has many funny moments, but there's also a serious continuing storyline (although the series is generally more episodic in nature than other anime series).

The central theme of the series is the journey of a young woman, Fuu, across Japan in search of a man from her past — the samurai who smells of sunflowers. She is accompanied by two men who agree to put their martial rivalry on hold and help her after she saves their lives in the first episode: Jin, a quiet, restrained ronin trained in the traditional samurai school of fighting, and Mugen, a loud, brash and extremely anachronistic warrior with crazy capoeira moves.

The characters are broke, and have to pick up odd jobs along the way so that they can eat. The employment opportunities they find usually get them into trouble, and soon various unknown forces begin to target them as they draw attention to themselves. Spectacular swordfighting action ensues.

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Underworld: Evolution

April 9, 2006 · Posted in Reviews · Comment 

Today I saw Underworld: Evolution, and liked it. I'm really fond of the whole franchise, in spite of what everyone says. It's an enjoyable horror genre epic drama; sort of the horror equivalent of space opera, I suppose. It's the kind of movie not everyone is going to like, and which nobody else is making. It's a movie which tries to take its subject matter seriously, and not ham it up.

The second one was, I thought, better than the first, which I reviewed on my CLAWs Wiki blog. The things the first movie did well it did just as well, and the things the first movie did badly it did better.

My chief problem with the first one was the poor pacing of the revelation of the Great Secret Plot. There was also Shane Brolly's awful fake Eastern European accent. I am happy to report that the accent does not make it into this movie, and neither does the pacing problem.

The only flaw I can find is that the dialogue was a bit lack-lustre and cheesy in patches (but compared to the Star Wars prequels, it's Shakespeare, so I'm not complaining).

This movie is very pretty, and has lots of interesting things to look at. It has snow-covered landscapes. It has forests. It has dark, atmospheric abandoned warehouses and other facilities. It has Hungarian yokels at a dodgy eatery in the middle of nowhere. It has lots and lots of beefcake — cute long-haired men with unnaturally coloured eyes dressed in pseudo-mediaeval armour or very little. It has Derek Jacobi. It even has Bill Nighy, in flashbacks. The third, not previously seen vampire elder is played by Tony Curran.

In general, I am once again impressed with the choice of actors, and their performances. Everyone who plays a ruthless and bloodthirsty immortal creature pulls it off pretty well.

If you hated the first one, you should probably give this one a miss, but if you liked it, the sequel won't disappoint you.

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V for Vendetta, comics, balls

April 8, 2006 · Posted in General, Reviews · Comment 

V for Vendetta

We saw the V for Vendetta movie. It was one of those movies that I enjoyed while I was watching it, but found various problems with in retrospect. The largest of which (SPOILER) was that the makers felt the need to include an outrageous government conspiracy, to make sure that the viewers knew that the government was OMG EVIL!! Because, apparently, a totalitarian regime which rounds up all gay people and dissidents and sends them off to concentration camps to perform medical experiments on them is not quite evil enough in itself. Normal, mainstream people also have to die.

The glued-on-at-the-last-minute love story was horrible, but if you closed your eyes and hummed during two or three scenes, you could pretend it wasn’t there.

The totalitarian regime also didn’t look very totalitarian, or unpleasant. The massive wars raging elsewhere in the world did not appear to have taken much of a toll on the state of the country. As some other reviewers have observed, all these middle-class TV-watching people seemed to have very nice, large, luxuriously furnished houses, and it was difficult to see what things, exactly, were being restricted and censored.

This, I think, was due to the scriptwriters’ lack of experience of this kind of atmosphere (and a failure of research). The comic book beautifully evoked scenes which were straight out of Soviet-era Eastern Europe. The movie? Looked a lot like prosperous, vanilla Western civilisation to me. But we were told that it was really oppressive.

Evey was much older, better off and political than in the comic, which I felt seriously diluted the message of the story.

Finally, have any of the scriptwriters ever been to England? Making everyone say “bollocks” at regular intervals does not automagically make a movie look like it’s set in England.

Comics

Here are two D&D parody comics I don’t think I’ve mentioned before: The Order of the Stick and Goblins. Both of them use the humorous device of having the characters aware, in-character, of D&D system rules. Both also have interesting continuing storylines which set them above other such parody comics.

OOTS is light-hearted and has highly stylised art (but these are the most expressive and well-drawn stick figures you will ever see). It follows the exploits of a stereotypical party of adventurers.

Goblins is more serious, and frequently tragic. It presents life through the eyes of goblins inhabiting a small village. Adventurers are portrayed as the heartless oppressors of goblins.

Balls

We now have exercise balls to sit on in our study at home. Simon also has a proper desk (a nice big pine table). Mine has yet to arrive; it has to be specially constructed to be slightly shorter than the other one, so that it can fit next to it. Having a study which is nearly three metres wide is very irritating.

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