I’d likely be a crow – or a zanate! But i’d have a swank “pad”! 🙂

candybowl

longtime readers – Hmmm…. – may have seen the previous posts on Ghost in the Shell – both the movies and the 2 TV Series. recently a ‘prequel’ 4-episode miniseries was done that arguably fits ahead of all of them in time, although it’s closest in plot, characters and mentality to the two TV series – Ghost in the Shell:Arise.

So these episodes are a bit of a mix – they attempt to tell more of Motoko’s backstory (I can’t remember if they did much in the series with this, certainly not the movies, with this, barring one notable episode) – and they show the forming of the team (Motoko, Batou, Borma, Paz, Saito and Togusa with Aramaki as the Chief) that continues in the two series. And they attempt to include the other characters a bit more than seen previously (in the series it’s all about Motoko, Batou and Aramaki with Togusa in close second, the rest of the team have fairly 2-dimensional roles) although with four episodes there isn’t much time for that.

Here they also develop Motoko’s origins in Army Intelligence prior to joining Section 9, which is interesting but definitely not explained enough. And her former captain (Kurutsu) is seen throughout this series, in part as a foil, in part as a potential adversary? It’s not really clear.

Like all the Ghost series and movies, the animation is top-notch, and the visuals are always interesting and offbeat. And in addition to the backstory development mentioned above, there are at least two major plot lines through the four series in parallel, and those are sometimes hard to follow but interesting also.

The Section 9 ‘think tanks’ (Tachikomas in the two TV series) are seen here as earlier versions called ‘Logicomas’ – while the characters sometimes slam their capabilities as outdated or inferior, they seem as useful as the later versions – and not quite as silly in voice characterization as the later Tachikomas are).

And another interesting side topic is the infrequent commentary on ‘cyberization’ of humans – the human dream of merging man with machine – as well as the flip side of it being forced on people in part due to corporate greed. I found it kind of ironic that the people (with one exception) doing most of the commentary on this in the show are full cyborgs (all the members of Section 9 excepting Togusa and Aramaki).

I would say that besides the first movie, the first TV series (namely the Laughing Man story cycle within) would be my favorite – but this mini-series is very well done and definitely next in line – there’s likely sufficient timeline available for yet another between this series and the events in Stand Alone Complex, certainly. Like Initial D, Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell rarely disappoints and ranks right up there with the best anime – can’t wait for the next one!

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While I’m not as stoked for this as I was for the second coming of TRON – and was somewhat disappointed – doh! – I have to say, this looks pretty good. Now to avoid watching any other trailers to avoid spoilers for just over a year……

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candybowl

Discovered they finally finished Initial D – and watched the last four episodes (Final Stage). Very glad they kept with it. These start a bit slow and go a bit overboard on backstory, but all the things we love about Initial D are still there:

– ridiculous, over the top posturing (although less than in past Stages);
– crazy mountain driving without apparently any hint of fear, parental control or police;
– ‘mental monologuing’ throughout where people are constantly explaining things to each other out loud (or through narration);
– and last but certainly not least – Takumi Fujiwara and his amazing AE86 Trueno…..

Enjoy. I am not supplying a link because if you simply do a search, you’ll find it. 🙂 In case you missed Fifth Stage (immediately precedes Final Stage, there are 14 episodes) – you’ll want to search for and watch that first. And if you haven’t watched ANY of them, what were you thinking (and get to work – Funimation has Stages 1-4 online!

According to Wikipedia, there is also a three-part movie remake coming….woo hoo!

candybowl

HR Giger has passed away as of this past May, just found out about it tonight.

‘Alien’ artist H.R. Giger dead at 74

Love him or hate him, he was certainly one-of-a-kind and one wonders where the ‘goth industry’ would have been without him – much of its art can certainly be considered a Giger ripoff at some point or another.

Definitely not art for the timid or faint of heart, most well known for the xenomorph alien, movie artwork and set design in Alien (reused in the sequels), the ELP and Debbie Harry album covers, and a bit more obscure, one of the original attempts to make a movie out of Dune. I actually have copies of both Dark Seed videogames on my shelf, need to break those out sometime…..

In whatever eerie, disturbing bio-mechanoid resting place you now inhabit, rest in peace, Herr Giger.

candybowl

Finished the novel Civil War a few days ago. It is based in the Marvel universe, with Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and Captain America as its central characters, amid a cast of many, many more minor hero (and villain) characters.

This novel is a very mixed bag for me. On one hand, it’s interesting to see these characters applied into a semi-real world situation (the ever-expanding American Police State we live in – the novel is set just after Obama’s election, even though he’s not mentioned in the story). On the other hand, I really find it hard to believe that Captain America would be the only ‘main’ hero with serious problems about the main plot of the novel (which I won’t spoil for you) – and Reed Richards in particular seems a complete sell-out from the first page, almost like he was drugged or something (cult follower). Just not believable based on past stories from these various characters. And fine, Tony Stark is leading the compliance charge, but that itself flies in the face of immediately recent past stories too – heroes just don’t lie down and give up like seen in this novel.

Finally, this novel completely demonstrates a fundamental problem with superhero stories as a genre: They really only work well when you have ‘one’ team of them that are the good guys, amid a possible sea of villains or indifferent others. When you have too many, it just doesn’t work well because the story has to pay homage to all of them and in the end, shortchanges nearly all the characterizations and plot in the doing. I thought the X-Men movies in the past (not all of them being very good, of course) effectively walked this line, because most of the X-Men aren’t heroes and aren’t interested in being mutants much for that matter – they just want normal lives. So having a bazillion of them all over the world isn’t near as much an issue as most aren’t going to be putting on spandex anytime soon. Here, it seems like there are so many superheroes that its hard to see how there COULD be any crime (save possibly white collar – but for that, we have The Punisher anyway) because there are so many of them.

Moreover, SHIELD ends up in a villainous role here too for the most part, and given their historical role, that’s fairly unbelievable too. Yes, Nick Fury isn’t running the show here either, but they just seem like high-powered vigilantes that effectively force the human govts to kowtow to them too.

Basically, this story is a big disappointment, even if the ending does ring a bit true for Captain America’s fate – he is effectively painted as the one true soul throughout the book, and remains that way.

Sigh…..

candybowl

Finished watching the recent BBC television anthology show Black Mirror tonight. Scarecrow has the series on DVD, albeit only Region 2 PAL format for now (no USA release yet).

This is one dark show. It’s basically two series (so far), each one is three shows, none are connected to one another. Think of Twilight Zone meets the (somewhat subtle) horror aspects of The Matrix, with the forboding, ever-present sense of doom from The Prisoner and a bit of the bleak outlook from Max Headroom to top it off.

These shows make you think, but make no mistake – they are very, very dark. Not horror per se, but just very dark in tone and outlook. Hard to say if they are being cynical or simply realistic but certainly Rod Serling would be a fan, there’s no question.

I’m not going to talk about any of the plots, because to even read about them on Wikipedia would spoil some of the effect – just watch the show. But there are some things in each show that are hard to watch, be forewarned. I personally thought the first series was a bit better than the second, although the second episode of the second series is a complete mind-trip in the best 70s dystopian sense, updated for the 21st century. The other two episodes for the second series were a bit weaker IMHO, somewhat predictable. But all of them certainly make you think (or even worry)!

Black Mirror on IMDB

candybowl

So the summer movie-going season kind of hit a wall in mid-July due to work and other commitments, sadly. But that’s why the DVD was invented, rightl? 🙂 So I finally saw Pacific Rim this afternoon on DVD. While I’m sure the effect of mecha-robots and kaiju slugging it out was diminished somewhat by watching it at home – it was still entertaining.

Likes: – the way the soundtrack draws you in when the battles intensify (this was done well IMHO in other recent movies, notably The Avengers);

– The robots are pretty cool, even if not that original (we’ve seen them all pretty much a zillion times before if you have seen Transformers or any anime mecha from Gundam onward through Evangelion) although I was a bit disappointed the majority of the battles occur at sea rather than on land – gotta smash up those buildings and stomp the people and cars! One of the mecha uses an actual ship as a bat at one point, so that’s pretty cool, too, even if I think they have a bit of a comparative scale issue on that point;

– The actors are all fairly unknown (to me, at least) save Idris Elba, who seems to be really hitting the big time of late. Charlie Day also resembles Sam Rockwell more than a little bit – I was surprised it wasn’t the latter. I’m glad they did it that way and not just have a bunch of big names who demand more money and more screen time – stories like this are about kaiju and the men/women who waste them with huge robots, first and foremost!

– the fact that the robots didn’t just win the war at first go and that the kaiju kept coming back, meaner and more vicious.

And, then the inevitable gripes and spoilers (alert!)

– it’s been pointed out many times over that building big robots to take out big monsters wouldn’t work. Godzilla proved that with Mechagodzilla, and that was guys in rubber suits (and arguably, both characters were bad guys anyway)! Suffice it to say that with mecha, you just have to disbelieve from the word go, or you can’t enjoy it;

– why, oh why don’t the robots simply RIP OFF THE MONSTERS’ HEADS when they fight them? It’s obvious from the start of every fight that trying to punch them out (especially when half submerged in water) DOES NOT WORK. Nor does throwing them around, on the few times they try it. And when you have pilots trained in martial arts and that have flexible swords mounted in the back of the mecha, using those skills and weapons more than as an afterthought *might* make sense – who knew? Again, a boxing match works best on land, and more likely between guys in rubber suits who don’t have the benefit of CGI weapons. 🙂

– the whole thing of the monster shorting out all the mecha in one of the later battles excepting the Gypsy Danger because they were ‘digital’ and it is ‘analog’ is completely bogus. Do you really think that shorting out wires and hardware depends on whether there’s a CPU? The answer is NO. Fried wires and computers are fried, period, guys. Ask any Cylon, old or new.

– there are a few too many ‘fight to the last man’ cliches here, but at least the movie doesn’t drag them out, so they don’t distract *too* much.

– I don’t care how many helicopters you use – there is no way they could lift a mecha like that? But barring some other plot device (like how the Autobots could fly when the plot suited it), not sure how you resolve that one….?

All in all, an entertaining ride, even if not seen on the big screen. Next up, catching Elysium and Oblivion on DVD to finish out summer movies …. three months late!

A final word – throughout this movie I was constantly saying to myself – Gojira would have kicked ALL their a**es! Thankfully we only have to wait until the start of next summer to see it happen……muhhahhah!

candybowl

Not sure if i’d have the patience to create something this detailed, but it sure is cool!

LEGO Kaiju diorama

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