(note: this is a rather old review but always kinda liked it, and since i haven't done shit lately, any activity is good activity)
So you wake up one morning to find your crankin' hand has turned into some chick who's always dug you? Straight, lets roll with this XD I wont go further into the basic story because a: there's a dozen reviews already here and b: you can look the hell up in the story synopsis for that if you still need it crowbarred in.
The show has one of the more outlandish premises i've seen in a show that isn't centered around pure chaos(a`la Abenobashi). sure the original set up is straight out of left field but the show itself is well written, has very likable characters and can easily put a smile on the face of the most angsty of the broody-brood set. The show has a fairly long list of good points and only a few, that i could find, of bad points.
for the good, lets start with the most important: IT ENDS!!
I don't know why, but a good percentage of Ro-Co's(romantic comedy) leave you with an ending that's left open so as to not piss off too many fans who wanted a specific ending. this show is at least kind enough to give you an ending. is it completely obvious 10 minutes into episode 1 what that ending will be? yes, but that's not the point. this show thrives on its characters: put them in the sun and watch them shine. Takamizawa being one of the best of the supporting cast. He's obsessed with dolls and puppets and is the only person in this entire universe that can actually see the fact that there is a frikkin person on protag-Seiji's wrist, which really doesn't solidify your hope for mankind. Of course he originally thinks she's a puppet to begin with and tries to get it naked so he can see the serial code so he can try and get one himself.
After Taka, there's Seiji's neighbor's 10(i believe) year old daughter who's got a mad-on for him, as well as a girl from school who keeps trying to set up the perfect opportunities for them to hook up that always are explained in a way that reminded you of when the Coyote finished setting up a trap for the Roadrunner and would non-verbally exposit exactly what he wanted to happen before it's inevitable downfall. I gotta admit, these fantasy sequences are flat-out awesome and even come equipped with title and ending sequences to cement the fact that every one of these people are bat-shit insane.
the biggest problem i had with the show was that, no matter how awesome the characters are, the bulk of them just disappear after a certain moment. loli-fest drops off the earth after her centric episode half-way through the series and Taka Kaiser Soze's after some chick runs after him like a fool in love, but at least that one makes a little sense since it can just be said that they were off making nasty, cosplay-rific, pimply(that's pimple-e, not pimp-ly), oily whoopee. The sister character only shows up to scream 'boogadu-boogie' every now again, steal all of Seiji's money and say something to try and get him and Midori together. What made me furious the most is that the character of Midori's maid seemed like she would be an awesome character to put into the story some, i know it would be hard to do but it looked like they took so much time into giving her a personality to just toss it all in the wastebasket and go about their day.
the only other bad part was some of the music. i heard a trumpet's wah-wah waaaaaaah a few too many times and was glad there was no chase scenes cause you just KNOW that Yakety Sax would cue up. But, as for bad parts, that's about it.some of the sound bytes were archaic and they dropped some characters with no explanation. But the goods far out-way that and its hard to properly convey how well this show is put together. if you're a fan of sight gags, cute and/or odd story telling and rocoms, i suggest you check this show out some time.
The show was released in the U.S under the title. "Midori Days" due to Media Blasters wanting to sell their shows to more than weeaboos. It has one wonderful thing the original does not, Bloopers! An amazing addition to any show, the first time I ever saw that was in Berserk and oh god did i fall in love with that show(might go into it in a later review[i'm going to have to make a drinking game compiled of all the times i say that]). It should not be hard to find the entire series in a collection set on the cheap, so there's very few reasons not to find it
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Sunday, June 5, 2011
X-Men: The First Class
as a prologue, to properly convey how i went in to this movie(like a few other people) i had absolutely no expectations coming into this movie. The trailer pissed me off to no end; What's Angel Salvadore doing there... and why doesn't she look trashy as all shit/Wait... Havoc is younger than Scott, wts?!/Is the villain supposed to be the Cold War?
But, I got off work early yesterday and decided to give it a shot, lord knows you can't be burned if you EXPECT the movie to be shit(see my Avatar Review for a contradiction to that fact) so i decided to downshift my dorkness and try it out, and what followed is something that I, honestly, thought i would never say: The First Class actually achieved the same result as The Dark Knight.
... You know what? I don't think i need to talk about the movie in general as there are much more in depth and less-ramblely reports on the movie out there(highly recommend the Movie Bob review over at escapistmagazine.com) so I'm going to touch on something i don't think anyone else really noticed from this movie.
We all know that, in the previous movies(and in this one particular) Magneto has,when not being a genocidal douchefuck, always look at mutants who think low of themselves and seen the greatness inside them. Like he, alone, was able to pierce the veil of social norms and see people for the beautiful, unique, snowflake that they are. Why, in the TFC, he is regularly harping on Raven that she needs to be more accepting of herself and let her scaly ass shine instead of hiding... Hell, when beast shows up all furry, Erik says he looks awesome and the dude thinks he is fucking with him and nearly chokes him out. But, if you pay close enough attention, it looks less like he's just an accepting guy, and more like he is trying very hard to not be anything like the Nazi(... wait, is the plural for Nazi still 'Nazi', like with moose? ah, who care) who had him at their whim during his formative years.
I know this sounds odd, but think about it. Here was a group of people brainwashed(god, i hope it was that because the alternative is just too fucking depressing) into thinking that all people who weren't what they considered 'proper' were disgusting aberrations that needed to be contained and eradicated. Now think that someone who fell WELL into this category was spared such a fate by them because Kevin Bacon had a science-boner for them, they would seriously have some issues with them, not only because of what they did to you(and, oh man, do you see that he had some issues with them, physically), but because of who and what they were. You would probably spend your life, when not plotting out all the wonderful ways he wished to dispatch every Nazi who escaped prosecution of course, making damn sure you saw people for as much of what they were as possible. Enter the only other mutants he has ever seen: Society will hate them and a good portion of them are physically awkward. So, naturally, he tells them all that they are beautiful and they are good enough, they are smart enough, and, doggone it, people like them, but it seems so wooden and forced, like he's trying to convince himself that they are not abominations as much as he is trying to convince them. He is trying so hard to be as unlike the people who wronged him, that his is ham-fisting them something that you can actually see he doesn't fully believe
No wonder, though, her was so focused on trying to see them as normal and fine, that he completely missed that he turned into a fascist cockstain who wanted to kill every thing that didn't have an active X-gene.
It's not even ironic anymore, it's just fucking sad.
post script
i may get into what i really thought of the movie and why, exactly, everything that pissed me off did, but right now i got a new comp to put through its paces
But, I got off work early yesterday and decided to give it a shot, lord knows you can't be burned if you EXPECT the movie to be shit(see my Avatar Review for a contradiction to that fact) so i decided to downshift my dorkness and try it out, and what followed is something that I, honestly, thought i would never say: The First Class actually achieved the same result as The Dark Knight.
... You know what? I don't think i need to talk about the movie in general as there are much more in depth and less-ramblely reports on the movie out there(highly recommend the Movie Bob review over at escapistmagazine.com) so I'm going to touch on something i don't think anyone else really noticed from this movie.
We all know that, in the previous movies(and in this one particular) Magneto has,when not being a genocidal douchefuck, always look at mutants who think low of themselves and seen the greatness inside them. Like he, alone, was able to pierce the veil of social norms and see people for the beautiful, unique, snowflake that they are. Why, in the TFC, he is regularly harping on Raven that she needs to be more accepting of herself and let her scaly ass shine instead of hiding... Hell, when beast shows up all furry, Erik says he looks awesome and the dude thinks he is fucking with him and nearly chokes him out. But, if you pay close enough attention, it looks less like he's just an accepting guy, and more like he is trying very hard to not be anything like the Nazi(... wait, is the plural for Nazi still 'Nazi', like with moose? ah, who care) who had him at their whim during his formative years.
I know this sounds odd, but think about it. Here was a group of people brainwashed(god, i hope it was that because the alternative is just too fucking depressing) into thinking that all people who weren't what they considered 'proper' were disgusting aberrations that needed to be contained and eradicated. Now think that someone who fell WELL into this category was spared such a fate by them because Kevin Bacon had a science-boner for them, they would seriously have some issues with them, not only because of what they did to you(and, oh man, do you see that he had some issues with them, physically), but because of who and what they were. You would probably spend your life, when not plotting out all the wonderful ways he wished to dispatch every Nazi who escaped prosecution of course, making damn sure you saw people for as much of what they were as possible. Enter the only other mutants he has ever seen: Society will hate them and a good portion of them are physically awkward. So, naturally, he tells them all that they are beautiful and they are good enough, they are smart enough, and, doggone it, people like them, but it seems so wooden and forced, like he's trying to convince himself that they are not abominations as much as he is trying to convince them. He is trying so hard to be as unlike the people who wronged him, that his is ham-fisting them something that you can actually see he doesn't fully believe
No wonder, though, her was so focused on trying to see them as normal and fine, that he completely missed that he turned into a fascist cockstain who wanted to kill every thing that didn't have an active X-gene.
It's not even ironic anymore, it's just fucking sad.
post script
i may get into what i really thought of the movie and why, exactly, everything that pissed me off did, but right now i got a new comp to put through its paces
Monday, November 29, 2010
I hate Trailers now
(just going to do something really fast, plan on setting down and hammering out some more of the reviews i have written down sparsely soon, but that's not the point now, what is is....)
So, I was watching Deathly Hallows today(might go into details on that) and saw a little 'gem' of a preview for a movie and I shall walk you through it as I was introduced to it, just to share my pain.
Right off the bat, we get to see Daniel Craig; dirty, in the desert, and with a metal bracelet on. First thought: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF a NEW freaking Bond movie that isn't a real Bond movie?-now this isn't fully to do with my dislike of the new direction the Bond Movies have gone in, even though they are atrocious, its kind of the fact that we're supposed to believe that Daniel Craig is supposed to be a sexy, debonair mofo who can bed anyone with a single wink . Seriously, look at the guy, it's like he's been chewing on lemons all day and then was asked to be an extra in Madonna's Vogue video so he's trying to be super-pouty. He looks like he was chiseled out of brick. with a spoon. by the chick from Lionel Richie's "Hello(Is It Me You're Looking For)" video. I know this isn't a legitimate beef, but it just pisses me off.
But then the Banditios form "The Treasure of the Siere Madre" show up and color me right confused. Apparently its a Western... with Harrison Ford wanting to kill Craig(I am SOOOOOOOOOOO hooked now), followed closely by that chick from the new Tron movie with the eyes a bit too big for her head and then Aliens start attacking and Craig steals a page out of Liefeld's book and his fancy bracelet turns into a laser rocket and blasts the gorram ship to hell. Then, just when you're scratching your head and wondering 'what in the name of the armpit of Zeus is going on,' you get treated to the title
COWBOYS AND ALIENS
I facepalmed rather hard at the tile and even more at the simple fact that it is so goddamn stupid I HAVE to see this fucking movie.
Trailers, you SUCK nowadays. you should not be making your audience ashamed of the fact that they'll be seeing you're movie.
and don't even get me STARTED on the Green Lantern Trailer
So, I was watching Deathly Hallows today(might go into details on that) and saw a little 'gem' of a preview for a movie and I shall walk you through it as I was introduced to it, just to share my pain.
Right off the bat, we get to see Daniel Craig; dirty, in the desert, and with a metal bracelet on. First thought: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF a NEW freaking Bond movie that isn't a real Bond movie?-now this isn't fully to do with my dislike of the new direction the Bond Movies have gone in, even though they are atrocious, its kind of the fact that we're supposed to believe that Daniel Craig is supposed to be a sexy, debonair mofo who can bed anyone with a single wink . Seriously, look at the guy, it's like he's been chewing on lemons all day and then was asked to be an extra in Madonna's Vogue video so he's trying to be super-pouty. He looks like he was chiseled out of brick. with a spoon. by the chick from Lionel Richie's "Hello(Is It Me You're Looking For)" video. I know this isn't a legitimate beef, but it just pisses me off.
But then the Banditios form "The Treasure of the Siere Madre" show up and color me right confused. Apparently its a Western... with Harrison Ford wanting to kill Craig(I am SOOOOOOOOOOO hooked now), followed closely by that chick from the new Tron movie with the eyes a bit too big for her head and then Aliens start attacking and Craig steals a page out of Liefeld's book and his fancy bracelet turns into a laser rocket and blasts the gorram ship to hell. Then, just when you're scratching your head and wondering 'what in the name of the armpit of Zeus is going on,' you get treated to the title
COWBOYS AND ALIENS
I facepalmed rather hard at the tile and even more at the simple fact that it is so goddamn stupid I HAVE to see this fucking movie.
Trailers, you SUCK nowadays. you should not be making your audience ashamed of the fact that they'll be seeing you're movie.
and don't even get me STARTED on the Green Lantern Trailer
Friday, July 9, 2010
so... the Avatar movie
What follows is a ever-evolving rant about the latest movie i have seen, Avatar(fuck you, Cameron, you don't own the name) The Last Airbender(since it was written on the fly it is lacking any proper sentence structure, least of all basic capitalization)
it was the biggest piece of shit i have ever seen. if you liked the show, or even seen three episodes(hell, you could trim it down to one) of it, you will rage at this horseshit movie constantly.
i will try and be as specific as possible in my rantings so i will have to, ahead of time, list what i will rage about. those items are as followed
the concept of the avatar
the fire nation's reason for war
the pantomiming
Katara
Aang
Sokka
Zhao
Ozai
Shamalamadingdong
the script in general
anything else i can think of
k. so first lets rage about the concept of the avatar.
so, you know how you get like three lines of exposition at the start of the series about what the avatar is?
a bridge between the spirit and real world
mofo who can use all elements
Time Lord(seriously, think about it)
.... and maybe something about balance
well, here's what you get in the movie. The Avatar can access the Spirit World, which dictates the world we live in, thus making him important(seriously, you're just told he is important. no subtlety here, folks). nothing about balance or shit like that, just that his ass can go on a fuzzy walkabout so you best revere his ass. it was so choppy and lazy.
The fire nation's reason for war
They don't like to be told what to do by the spirits so they be all like 'fuck the world, lets burn this shit!'
now, even for M. Night, this is some shoddy-ass writing. especially when you think about the reason for the show. The fire nation is power hungry and self absorbed and a tad delusional so they try and 'share the wealth' of their culture by murdering and subjugating all the other kingdoms. is this the best writing? no, not really because it basically says they're evil because they're evil, but its a somewhat believable evil. that's the big difference.
the pantomiming
okay, so in order for a bender to hover a goddamn rock, they must spend at least 15 seconds jumping about and doing kung fu poses before anything will happen. seriously, the kickass superfast shit you see in the trailer is like the only time you see someone do something with out first telegraphing so far ahead, Helen Keller could have seen it coming because you would have had time to first invent a time machine, travel to the late 1800's, grab her ass, put her right in the way of the attack and then hop right the hell back in your newly made Tardis and go to the 24 1/2 century and get the cure for blindness and come back and inject her with the serum and wait the 48 hours for it to take effect and STILL have time to get out of the way, even factoring in her obvious freaking out at a: finally being able to see, b: seeing some bald midget trying to dance up a tornado in front of her, and c: the fact that you just plopped her into the middle of a movie somehow.
... the point I'm trying to make here is its ridiculously stupid and long. hell, when Aang airbends a whirlwind at the northern water city to prove he is the avatar, in the middle of his dance routine/bending he fucking throws down a high-kick. how the fuck can a high kick make shit spin faster, who does he think he is, chuck norris?
... or, at the very least, David Lee Roth?
and now, the single worst part of this movie.
Katara.
goddamn is this bitch annoying. now, in the series, she is horribly annoying and makes more friendship speeches than the bitch from Yugioh, but at least she wasn't foot-in-mouth retarded. at the water temple, when Aang is looking at the mystical koi pond, she's all 'you two[Sokka and Yue]go on, I'll keep an eye on him' and Aang is all 'now i must concentrate and meditate and stuff' and the moment his eyes are closed-right in the middle of a goddamn war that said meditation can end, the dumb bitch is all 'i knew you would come back, i just knew it. i like shoes. you think that magneto-haired bitch is prettier than me'
... okay, not those last two parts, but honestly, it was fucking stupid.
and what makes you hate her MORE than that is how she pronounces everything. i know this is Shamalamadingdong's fault, but goddamnit is it annoying. right off the bat, she's talking about the 'Ah-va-tahr' like she's playing some snotty bitch in a SNL sketch from the 80s. and then there's 'Ahng' for Aang, 'Soh-kuh' for Sokka, and, even though she didn't say this and its just the way they did it in the film, 'Ee-roh' for Iroh. How the fuck can you mess up pronunciations of shit whose canon is already in a visual/audio format so you physically CAN'T fuck it up?
god this chick just pissed me off whenever she opened her mouth
Sokka.
They didn't even know what the fuck to do with Sokka. seriously, you could have taken him out of the film and you wouldn't have changed a thing... though Seeing Princess Yue fall in love with nothingness would be weird.... and hot.
So the series Sokka is a sarcastic little brat who gives everyone shit to make up for the fact that he is the weakest in the group(even though he is the one who actually KILLED COMBUSTION MAN BY THROWING A BOOMERANG BLIND AND POPPING HIM PERFECTLY IN THE GODDAMN SKULL!) but in this one he just stands there and stares. they give him one, MAYBE two comical moments and those are just barely passable. It's really annoying because he is a lot of people's favorite character simply because he is, at face value, the weakest one but give him half a chance and he'll fuck your shit up.
Aang
the main character, an overly jovial kid who acts that way to hide the fact that he's really insecure about being lofted with the weight of the entire fucking world. yeah, he's not here.
what you get is some annoying little prat who has the personality of a pod person. oh there's probably a lot more i hated about this kid, but I'm lost in a rage cyclone of... um... rage and its getting kinda hard to focus on the little stuff and most of its just because of horrible writing.
Zhao
Okay, i admit i thought it was awesome when i found out that Aasif Mandvi was playing him because it would be nice to see what he can do. now while he had that wonderfully snide attitude down, he wasn't as menacing or intimidating as he was in the cartoon. he was more like the evil assistant than the man with the plans. hell, they even have him going back to the fire nation and telling the Fire Lord everything he is about to do, from the raid of the Great Library(which he will bring up every three lines just so you wont forget that they're going to try and set up continuity), his plan to steal(or flat-out kill in the movie, but that probably goes with the motivations of the fire nation in the film of hating the spirits for some stupid reason) the moon spirit, and generally being all 'wassup, my bitch! what? someone blew up your kid? word? that's fucked up, dog.'
but, yeah, the biggest problem here was that the character wasn't being portrayed by someone who could rightly pull him off, sadly.
also, i liked how he got killed while Aang was going apestyle with the ocean spirit, which they changed to having him get fucking murdered by 4 waterbenders. while it was awesome and gave you a flat-out 'he's fucking dead' unlike the cartoon(cause lets face it, people can come back from anything), i just like the setup a mite better(movie had a good one too)
Ozai
now one of the great things about the cartoon was you had no idea what he looked like through the first two books and that made him seem more menacing, subconsciously. here they flat-out show him in the first scene and, trust me, even though the cartoons was nowhere near that bad(he was actually kinda normal looking-which made him even more badass when he went total batshit on everything at the end), the movie is just so damn plain. its horrible. there is no suspension of disbelief that the man you're seeing is supposed to be the most hated and feared man in all of the world? its goddamn laughable.
and he spends most of it bored with everything so you cant really get the sense that he is a foreboding presence. just so much fail
oh, and Zuko? he's the exact same. selfish little fuck who's only obsessed with honor-honor-honor. only you get no sense that he has any other side to him. you know how you're given a good glimpse of WHY he's so obsessed with his task in the cartoon by Iroh who was telling it to the shipmates who were hating on him to give them perspective while he sulked in his room writing poetry?
well in the new one he's at a town and calls a little kid over and, with a hood over his head and looking VERY sweaty and Aqualungy, says 'you look like a smart kid, now why don't you tell me, and the audience who Prince Zuko is and how his dome got fucked up' making him seem just like a narcissist. granted you could say he was doing that to counter his Uncles point of 'fuck searching for the avatar, there's some fine tail here, go get u some and forget about this' with a stance of 'no, i get pussy after i have the ahvatahr tied up on my ship' to which Iroh replies with a hearty 'what the fuck, man!' XD
M. Night Shyamalan.
M. Night Shyamalan. the end. seriously, that's all you need to say, anymore.
The Script.
While touched upon already, it's so damn rushed and horrid. and no, i don't mean the story since it was expected since it was the entirety of book one. i mean that he plowed through the first two drafts in one night-rushed.
here's basically how the plot goes(spoiler alert XD)
Hey, look a big glowy thing under the ice, lets hit it and surely gravity will not make us fall into it and die from hypothermia
Hey, there's a kid
Hey, now we're in the village and the kid's got tattoos
Hey, there's a dude with ray liota face here
Hey, he took the kid
Hey, where's that big thing the kid was on... oh wait there it is, it can fly lets take it and find him
Hey, he got himself out
Hey, lets go see my old home
Hey, look, at all the cool skulls of all your old friends T_T
Hey, i never got mystical knowledge of all the elements(wait... what?) so's i got to learn them all manually
Hey, lets go to the water peoples
Hey, look, we're in prison with other benders
Hey, look, we caused a riot
Hey, those people gave us waterbending scrolls
Hey, Aang, why do you get emo whenever u try n waterbend? why u suck, dawg?
Hey, imma go see the other temple, surely it's not a trap
Hey, it was a trap
[Admiral Ackbar facepalms]
Hey, a creepy dude comes to save me
Hey, it was Prince Bitched-Face, WTF
Hey, we're at the water place
Hey, Bitched-Face gets blowed up, sure hope he doesn't get anymore scars because then his ass will be right back to capturing something else to get his honor back(pokemonz?)
Hey, time passes by
Hey, shit goes down
Hey, let me raise the water levels a tad and it will scare the enemy away
Hey, it worked(seriously, what?)
Hey, the movie's over and everyone made it out okay, right Sokka? ... say, where's Yue?
honestly it was about that bad. although, on a plus, the way they did the whole 'Aang going to his old temple' thing was better than the show's. in the show, he just wants to go check for closure's sake but in the movie, he honestly hasn't figured out that its been a hundred years yet, so he's just on his way home and BAM tons of dead monks! that's some messed up shit and makes for a good way to give you a look at the inner workings of a character... or it would if Shpadoinkle didn't just have him go on a mental walkabout and talk to a dragon and then come back like nothing was ever wrong.
and why must they go learn all the elements? not because of its part of the natural cycle of the avatar to go out n find a teacher, making them learn the inner workings of the world so they can better keep it in harmony. heck no, you magically learn it or some shit, but he ran away before he could so now he has to go through the manual install. rather dumb, really.
the goddamn climax.
seriously, this is what happens. Zuko fucked off with Aang and Iroh, Zhao, some red shirts, and the water tribe trio is there at the koi pond and Zhao has sacked the moon spirit-fishie and Iroh is all 'don't do it, brah. bad shit will happen, yo' and Zhao is all 'fuck that noise. STAB' and Iroh Vader-NOOOOOOO's instead of, you know, STOPPING HIM!
Iroh then tells him he fucked up and makes fire come out of his hands and it scares all the fire nation there and they run away and him and the trio do the whole 'let Yue die' thing. Meanwhile, Aang, having gotten away, is off standing around while a war is going down, thinking about what he should do(fucking fight, maybe?) and he decides to go up to the wall and look at the warships and start breathing and dance-bending and raises the water level kinda high and that makes everyone run away.
seriously. that's all he does. he fucking raises water up-something that a group of waterbenders could easily do when working in tandem and, therefore, the fire nation would have trained for such an eventuality(though they ran away from someone who made fire, so what would you expect) and yet they run. fucking stupid.
i should talk about that Iroh thing too. you see, in the movie, Firebenders are like Pyro from the X-Men. They can manipulate fire, but they cant produce it. And Iroh being able to do this is a sign that he is a bad motherfucker and should not be messed with. and, apparently that's what the comet does, instead of making firebending super-powerful, it means firebenders can produce their own flame. somehow that is going to win the war for them. honestly they didn't think this plan through very well
i will probably find much more to rage about this in the coming hours so this is really a work-in-progress
it was the biggest piece of shit i have ever seen. if you liked the show, or even seen three episodes(hell, you could trim it down to one) of it, you will rage at this horseshit movie constantly.
i will try and be as specific as possible in my rantings so i will have to, ahead of time, list what i will rage about. those items are as followed
the concept of the avatar
the fire nation's reason for war
the pantomiming
Katara
Aang
Sokka
Zhao
Ozai
Shamalamadingdong
the script in general
anything else i can think of
k. so first lets rage about the concept of the avatar.
so, you know how you get like three lines of exposition at the start of the series about what the avatar is?
a bridge between the spirit and real world
mofo who can use all elements
Time Lord(seriously, think about it)
.... and maybe something about balance
well, here's what you get in the movie. The Avatar can access the Spirit World, which dictates the world we live in, thus making him important(seriously, you're just told he is important. no subtlety here, folks). nothing about balance or shit like that, just that his ass can go on a fuzzy walkabout so you best revere his ass. it was so choppy and lazy.
The fire nation's reason for war
They don't like to be told what to do by the spirits so they be all like 'fuck the world, lets burn this shit!'
now, even for M. Night, this is some shoddy-ass writing. especially when you think about the reason for the show. The fire nation is power hungry and self absorbed and a tad delusional so they try and 'share the wealth' of their culture by murdering and subjugating all the other kingdoms. is this the best writing? no, not really because it basically says they're evil because they're evil, but its a somewhat believable evil. that's the big difference.
the pantomiming
okay, so in order for a bender to hover a goddamn rock, they must spend at least 15 seconds jumping about and doing kung fu poses before anything will happen. seriously, the kickass superfast shit you see in the trailer is like the only time you see someone do something with out first telegraphing so far ahead, Helen Keller could have seen it coming because you would have had time to first invent a time machine, travel to the late 1800's, grab her ass, put her right in the way of the attack and then hop right the hell back in your newly made Tardis and go to the 24 1/2 century and get the cure for blindness and come back and inject her with the serum and wait the 48 hours for it to take effect and STILL have time to get out of the way, even factoring in her obvious freaking out at a: finally being able to see, b: seeing some bald midget trying to dance up a tornado in front of her, and c: the fact that you just plopped her into the middle of a movie somehow.
... the point I'm trying to make here is its ridiculously stupid and long. hell, when Aang airbends a whirlwind at the northern water city to prove he is the avatar, in the middle of his dance routine/bending he fucking throws down a high-kick. how the fuck can a high kick make shit spin faster, who does he think he is, chuck norris?
... or, at the very least, David Lee Roth?
and now, the single worst part of this movie.
Katara.
goddamn is this bitch annoying. now, in the series, she is horribly annoying and makes more friendship speeches than the bitch from Yugioh, but at least she wasn't foot-in-mouth retarded. at the water temple, when Aang is looking at the mystical koi pond, she's all 'you two[Sokka and Yue]go on, I'll keep an eye on him' and Aang is all 'now i must concentrate and meditate and stuff' and the moment his eyes are closed-right in the middle of a goddamn war that said meditation can end, the dumb bitch is all 'i knew you would come back, i just knew it. i like shoes. you think that magneto-haired bitch is prettier than me'
... okay, not those last two parts, but honestly, it was fucking stupid.
and what makes you hate her MORE than that is how she pronounces everything. i know this is Shamalamadingdong's fault, but goddamnit is it annoying. right off the bat, she's talking about the 'Ah-va-tahr' like she's playing some snotty bitch in a SNL sketch from the 80s. and then there's 'Ahng' for Aang, 'Soh-kuh' for Sokka, and, even though she didn't say this and its just the way they did it in the film, 'Ee-roh' for Iroh. How the fuck can you mess up pronunciations of shit whose canon is already in a visual/audio format so you physically CAN'T fuck it up?
god this chick just pissed me off whenever she opened her mouth
Sokka.
They didn't even know what the fuck to do with Sokka. seriously, you could have taken him out of the film and you wouldn't have changed a thing... though Seeing Princess Yue fall in love with nothingness would be weird.... and hot.
So the series Sokka is a sarcastic little brat who gives everyone shit to make up for the fact that he is the weakest in the group(even though he is the one who actually KILLED COMBUSTION MAN BY THROWING A BOOMERANG BLIND AND POPPING HIM PERFECTLY IN THE GODDAMN SKULL!) but in this one he just stands there and stares. they give him one, MAYBE two comical moments and those are just barely passable. It's really annoying because he is a lot of people's favorite character simply because he is, at face value, the weakest one but give him half a chance and he'll fuck your shit up.
Aang
the main character, an overly jovial kid who acts that way to hide the fact that he's really insecure about being lofted with the weight of the entire fucking world. yeah, he's not here.
what you get is some annoying little prat who has the personality of a pod person. oh there's probably a lot more i hated about this kid, but I'm lost in a rage cyclone of... um... rage and its getting kinda hard to focus on the little stuff and most of its just because of horrible writing.
Zhao
Okay, i admit i thought it was awesome when i found out that Aasif Mandvi was playing him because it would be nice to see what he can do. now while he had that wonderfully snide attitude down, he wasn't as menacing or intimidating as he was in the cartoon. he was more like the evil assistant than the man with the plans. hell, they even have him going back to the fire nation and telling the Fire Lord everything he is about to do, from the raid of the Great Library(which he will bring up every three lines just so you wont forget that they're going to try and set up continuity), his plan to steal(or flat-out kill in the movie, but that probably goes with the motivations of the fire nation in the film of hating the spirits for some stupid reason) the moon spirit, and generally being all 'wassup, my bitch! what? someone blew up your kid? word? that's fucked up, dog.'
but, yeah, the biggest problem here was that the character wasn't being portrayed by someone who could rightly pull him off, sadly.
also, i liked how he got killed while Aang was going apestyle with the ocean spirit, which they changed to having him get fucking murdered by 4 waterbenders. while it was awesome and gave you a flat-out 'he's fucking dead' unlike the cartoon(cause lets face it, people can come back from anything), i just like the setup a mite better(movie had a good one too)
Ozai
now one of the great things about the cartoon was you had no idea what he looked like through the first two books and that made him seem more menacing, subconsciously. here they flat-out show him in the first scene and, trust me, even though the cartoons was nowhere near that bad(he was actually kinda normal looking-which made him even more badass when he went total batshit on everything at the end), the movie is just so damn plain. its horrible. there is no suspension of disbelief that the man you're seeing is supposed to be the most hated and feared man in all of the world? its goddamn laughable.
and he spends most of it bored with everything so you cant really get the sense that he is a foreboding presence. just so much fail
oh, and Zuko? he's the exact same. selfish little fuck who's only obsessed with honor-honor-honor. only you get no sense that he has any other side to him. you know how you're given a good glimpse of WHY he's so obsessed with his task in the cartoon by Iroh who was telling it to the shipmates who were hating on him to give them perspective while he sulked in his room writing poetry?
well in the new one he's at a town and calls a little kid over and, with a hood over his head and looking VERY sweaty and Aqualungy, says 'you look like a smart kid, now why don't you tell me, and the audience who Prince Zuko is and how his dome got fucked up' making him seem just like a narcissist. granted you could say he was doing that to counter his Uncles point of 'fuck searching for the avatar, there's some fine tail here, go get u some and forget about this' with a stance of 'no, i get pussy after i have the ahvatahr tied up on my ship' to which Iroh replies with a hearty 'what the fuck, man!' XD
M. Night Shyamalan.
M. Night Shyamalan. the end. seriously, that's all you need to say, anymore.
The Script.
While touched upon already, it's so damn rushed and horrid. and no, i don't mean the story since it was expected since it was the entirety of book one. i mean that he plowed through the first two drafts in one night-rushed.
here's basically how the plot goes(spoiler alert XD)
Hey, look a big glowy thing under the ice, lets hit it and surely gravity will not make us fall into it and die from hypothermia
Hey, there's a kid
Hey, now we're in the village and the kid's got tattoos
Hey, there's a dude with ray liota face here
Hey, he took the kid
Hey, where's that big thing the kid was on... oh wait there it is, it can fly lets take it and find him
Hey, he got himself out
Hey, lets go see my old home
Hey, look, at all the cool skulls of all your old friends T_T
Hey, i never got mystical knowledge of all the elements(wait... what?) so's i got to learn them all manually
Hey, lets go to the water peoples
Hey, look, we're in prison with other benders
Hey, look, we caused a riot
Hey, those people gave us waterbending scrolls
Hey, Aang, why do you get emo whenever u try n waterbend? why u suck, dawg?
Hey, imma go see the other temple, surely it's not a trap
Hey, it was a trap
[Admiral Ackbar facepalms]
Hey, a creepy dude comes to save me
Hey, it was Prince Bitched-Face, WTF
Hey, we're at the water place
Hey, Bitched-Face gets blowed up, sure hope he doesn't get anymore scars because then his ass will be right back to capturing something else to get his honor back(pokemonz?)
Hey, time passes by
Hey, shit goes down
Hey, let me raise the water levels a tad and it will scare the enemy away
Hey, it worked(seriously, what?)
Hey, the movie's over and everyone made it out okay, right Sokka? ... say, where's Yue?
honestly it was about that bad. although, on a plus, the way they did the whole 'Aang going to his old temple' thing was better than the show's. in the show, he just wants to go check for closure's sake but in the movie, he honestly hasn't figured out that its been a hundred years yet, so he's just on his way home and BAM tons of dead monks! that's some messed up shit and makes for a good way to give you a look at the inner workings of a character... or it would if Shpadoinkle didn't just have him go on a mental walkabout and talk to a dragon and then come back like nothing was ever wrong.
and why must they go learn all the elements? not because of its part of the natural cycle of the avatar to go out n find a teacher, making them learn the inner workings of the world so they can better keep it in harmony. heck no, you magically learn it or some shit, but he ran away before he could so now he has to go through the manual install. rather dumb, really.
the goddamn climax.
seriously, this is what happens. Zuko fucked off with Aang and Iroh, Zhao, some red shirts, and the water tribe trio is there at the koi pond and Zhao has sacked the moon spirit-fishie and Iroh is all 'don't do it, brah. bad shit will happen, yo' and Zhao is all 'fuck that noise. STAB' and Iroh Vader-NOOOOOOO's instead of, you know, STOPPING HIM!
Iroh then tells him he fucked up and makes fire come out of his hands and it scares all the fire nation there and they run away and him and the trio do the whole 'let Yue die' thing. Meanwhile, Aang, having gotten away, is off standing around while a war is going down, thinking about what he should do(fucking fight, maybe?) and he decides to go up to the wall and look at the warships and start breathing and dance-bending and raises the water level kinda high and that makes everyone run away.
seriously. that's all he does. he fucking raises water up-something that a group of waterbenders could easily do when working in tandem and, therefore, the fire nation would have trained for such an eventuality(though they ran away from someone who made fire, so what would you expect) and yet they run. fucking stupid.
i should talk about that Iroh thing too. you see, in the movie, Firebenders are like Pyro from the X-Men. They can manipulate fire, but they cant produce it. And Iroh being able to do this is a sign that he is a bad motherfucker and should not be messed with. and, apparently that's what the comet does, instead of making firebending super-powerful, it means firebenders can produce their own flame. somehow that is going to win the war for them. honestly they didn't think this plan through very well
i will probably find much more to rage about this in the coming hours so this is really a work-in-progress
Friday, February 5, 2010
The World God Only Knows: my new guilty pleasure.
I would like to take a minute to talk about the single oddest comic I have read in a LOOOOONG time. It's called The World God Only Knows(original Japanese title 'Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai' but I'm not one of those pretentious dickholes who will always use the Japanese title because 'its more real that way' or whatever stupid excuse you get when asking them and their crappy usage of Japanese honorifics-I go with which sounds better) and it's the weirdest story that takes itself serious I've read so far.
It's a story about a boy,(vuja de?)Keima Katsuragi, who is obsessed with dating sims and shuns the real world because it's nowhere near as rewarding than his video games. He is known on the internet as "The Capturing God" because he can capture the heart of any heroine, any game, any time. This sparks the interest of a fledgling demon from Hell who is on a mission to capture escaped souls(totally not the same as Reaper. Trust me on this) who have taken up shop inside the gaps in the hearts of females. They wait in these crevasses until the girl gives birth so that they can be resurrected as their child(that's why they dont infect dudes... but chances are there's some yaoi fancomic that begs to differ)
Since Kiema is a brilliant, methodical character the demon, Elsee, has to be the bumbling type who always gets in the way. This is the shows main problem, the characters are very predictable-you always know exactly how they'll react to a given situation and have little depth. You know right out the gate that Elsee is going to fall in love with Keima and start to interfere with their work(we'll get to that after this little rant here) and shoehorn herself in the middle of Keima's endeavors. This would be a problem if the protag wasn't well aware of these things and doing everything in his power to keep those kinds of encounters from happening. after seeing an encounter with two other demons that could easily erupt into a competition for his affections, he thinks about the easiest way to get a heroine to hate you in a dating sim and walks up and grabs one of their tits. They all get pissed and storm out and I was left laughing my ass off.
Okay, time to re-rail this rambling. Elsee, being the bumbling idiot that she is, goes out to search for the fabled 'Capturing God,' the man who can capture any woman's heart. She is searching for this embodiment Fabioan machismo because the easiest way to get the souls to vacate is by filling the gap, most notably with love. That or by killing them. This is where you first realize that the whole 'demon' thing was not one of the first aspects of the story to be realized. Because the way most iterations of demonic beings are portrayed, killing mofos is not that big of a deal and would be the first-response for the situation. The writer explained this away by saying that there was some kind of reform in Hell and all the super douchey bad demons were locked away or some shit so that a new, more friendly Hell could come into being. But you don't really mind these too much on account of the fact that the encounters are always hilarious and often well written.
God i need to stop trailing off in my writings. I'm trying to explain the basic outline of the story and I'm veering off like Kelsey Grammer. So, where i left off: Elsee tracks down Keima and find that he is, in fact A Capturing God, just not the one she's looking for. Before he knows what's what he's bound to her and if he doesn't do his job, his head will explode. So now this socially repressed-and loving it- boy has to do what he hates the most: interact with real women, people he thinks of as sad excuses and not worthy of being compared to the girls of video games. Not only that, but make these girls fall in love with him. He finds that this is rather easy if he likens the encounters to those of his beloved games and plays each event as he would in a game. The series is amazing and the characters, while very arch typical and predictable, are written well enough that this fact doesn't bother you much-if at all. The art and writing are awesome and the sections where Keima goes full-on, pants-crapping, crazy are the highlight of the series. Any sad video game nerd will love the little visual cues in these segments, having the characters look like they're in Super Mario or various other games.
The series is currently on it's 78th chapter... at least thats as far as i can find, and there's no news on an English adaptation of it yet so you'll have to dig around online something fierce for it but be warned, your computer will probably get a virus or two even with a good antivirus while you're looking for it. Mangafox especially. Their horribly shitty ad system is what gave my computer the winsystem virus that still hasn't been fully removed. Currently using a sight called Onemanga but it's probably just as likely to give you the internet herpes. I would be lying if i said it wasn't completely worth it. the book is THAT good, people
It's a story about a boy,(vuja de?)Keima Katsuragi, who is obsessed with dating sims and shuns the real world because it's nowhere near as rewarding than his video games. He is known on the internet as "The Capturing God" because he can capture the heart of any heroine, any game, any time. This sparks the interest of a fledgling demon from Hell who is on a mission to capture escaped souls(totally not the same as Reaper. Trust me on this) who have taken up shop inside the gaps in the hearts of females. They wait in these crevasses until the girl gives birth so that they can be resurrected as their child(that's why they dont infect dudes... but chances are there's some yaoi fancomic that begs to differ)
Since Kiema is a brilliant, methodical character the demon, Elsee, has to be the bumbling type who always gets in the way. This is the shows main problem, the characters are very predictable-you always know exactly how they'll react to a given situation and have little depth. You know right out the gate that Elsee is going to fall in love with Keima and start to interfere with their work(we'll get to that after this little rant here) and shoehorn herself in the middle of Keima's endeavors. This would be a problem if the protag wasn't well aware of these things and doing everything in his power to keep those kinds of encounters from happening. after seeing an encounter with two other demons that could easily erupt into a competition for his affections, he thinks about the easiest way to get a heroine to hate you in a dating sim and walks up and grabs one of their tits. They all get pissed and storm out and I was left laughing my ass off.
Okay, time to re-rail this rambling. Elsee, being the bumbling idiot that she is, goes out to search for the fabled 'Capturing God,' the man who can capture any woman's heart. She is searching for this embodiment Fabioan machismo because the easiest way to get the souls to vacate is by filling the gap, most notably with love. That or by killing them. This is where you first realize that the whole 'demon' thing was not one of the first aspects of the story to be realized. Because the way most iterations of demonic beings are portrayed, killing mofos is not that big of a deal and would be the first-response for the situation. The writer explained this away by saying that there was some kind of reform in Hell and all the super douchey bad demons were locked away or some shit so that a new, more friendly Hell could come into being. But you don't really mind these too much on account of the fact that the encounters are always hilarious and often well written.
God i need to stop trailing off in my writings. I'm trying to explain the basic outline of the story and I'm veering off like Kelsey Grammer. So, where i left off: Elsee tracks down Keima and find that he is, in fact A Capturing God, just not the one she's looking for. Before he knows what's what he's bound to her and if he doesn't do his job, his head will explode. So now this socially repressed-and loving it- boy has to do what he hates the most: interact with real women, people he thinks of as sad excuses and not worthy of being compared to the girls of video games. Not only that, but make these girls fall in love with him. He finds that this is rather easy if he likens the encounters to those of his beloved games and plays each event as he would in a game. The series is amazing and the characters, while very arch typical and predictable, are written well enough that this fact doesn't bother you much-if at all. The art and writing are awesome and the sections where Keima goes full-on, pants-crapping, crazy are the highlight of the series. Any sad video game nerd will love the little visual cues in these segments, having the characters look like they're in Super Mario or various other games.
The series is currently on it's 78th chapter... at least thats as far as i can find, and there's no news on an English adaptation of it yet so you'll have to dig around online something fierce for it but be warned, your computer will probably get a virus or two even with a good antivirus while you're looking for it. Mangafox especially. Their horribly shitty ad system is what gave my computer the winsystem virus that still hasn't been fully removed. Currently using a sight called Onemanga but it's probably just as likely to give you the internet herpes. I would be lying if i said it wasn't completely worth it. the book is THAT good, people
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Dual Parallel! Trouble Adventures
You can sum up Dual in one sentence: 'It's Evangelion but not too far up it's own ass"
I know it's a flame-worthy summation, but it's true. It's a not-very-well-disguised clone of the series with some harem aspects. For christ's sake, the annoying, overbearing chick who's secretly into the protag even runs around in a red mech. You cant buy that kind of blatancy. But what does it have that NGE doesn't? Why a protag that you ACTUALLY like. Or, at the very least, you don't hate him for bitching and moaning every three seconds and masturbating to comatose girls!
(wow, didn't even get through the first paragraph without mentioning that. a new low)
Okay, now that i got that little bit out, story time!!
The show centers around a boy named Kazuki Yotsuga, a regular dude(don't they all, though) who everyone at school laughs at because he keeps seeing these giant mechs fighting in the street. He sees this so frequently he's even started a little website where he chronicles what he sees. Well it all goes tails up for him when the school queen, Mitsuki Sanada shows an interest in the boy, telling him that she believes that he sees these things. More importantly her father believes him too. He has a theory about there being a parallel world with events and a time line similar to theirs, and that Kazuki has the unique ability to peer into it. Since this is an anime the Professor immediately straps the poor schmo into the deus ex teleporter he already had made up, complete with comfy chair and arm straps, and BAM!! Kazuki is now in the other world.
He soon meets up with the Mech he is always seeing in his psychotic episodes and, through serendipity and overly obvious plot devices, he ends up piloting it; defeating the generic mech it's pilot, now unconscious, was fighting. It is through here that young Kazuki learns that he is in the other world when he runs home to find that his parents have no idea who he is(NOT when he was piloting the mech he's seen so many times in his hallucinations that he's actually given it a name... which i am not even going to TRY and pronounce, let alone spell. i just started calling it "Harpsichord"). Eventually he is swept up by the Giant Mech Military, ran by this Earth's version of the loon who sent him there(just go with it), because he is the only male who has ever been able to pilot a mech, previously only women could for some reason. He soon runs into Mizuki, who decided to follow after him into the Chair of Spatial Impossibility shortly after he disappeared but got there a month earlier for some reason(SCIENCE!!!), and she turns out to be a mech warrior as well, along with the 'Rei' character of the story who is actually explained in the first appearance as an alien-clone-robot-thing.
you read that right, they ACTUALLY flat-out told you that she was a alien clone-robot-thing instead of making it painfully obvious but never even really alluded to in the bulk of the story. And she's a very interesting character, i always liked Tabula Rasa characters, their humor may be obvious(i.e. when looking for a character who ran away they tend to look in the trashcan for some reason) but they're always enjoyable and usually give me a smile.
And all this brings up a really important point, why the crap can only children pilot giant mechs of death? does puberty not compute with the OS or something? but at least this show altered that a bit, the pilot originally controlling Harpsichord was 23, so at least there was that.
After the establish the main cast the episodes went kinda basic, they met the Team Rocket-inspired villain who seems more concerned about the the spectacle of invading rather then the actual winning of the battle. The also have all the old songs of anime here: They go to school, everyone is jealous of/hating on the protag because the school queen is always hanging around him, everyone wants a piece of him, there's a stray dog somewhere along the line that the alien-clone-robot-tabula rasa-Priscilla: Queen of the Desert grows attached to. It doesn't really try to push any boundaries as a show, its more like the people who created the story were given a big box of what all anime before it did and was told to pick two good concepts to play with and three bad concepts to try and fix and to make a show out of those 5 things and they said 'to piss with that' and took the whole box and ran with it.
And, to me, that's not a bad thing. It's a good view if you're bored off your rocker and want to just enjoy yourself for 12 episodes. There's nothing really to take away from it in the end, but is that really a bad thing? Eva tried shoehorning some depth into itself near the end and it turned into one of the few shows that i stop watching before the last 4 eps.
The ending is one of the better ones out there, even though it has one of them open ends that damn near every harem show has, but this show's harem aspects-while predominant throughout the entirety of the story-was never more than a plot device... to me, at least. There was even a 'finale' episode after the story proper where they showed what happened after everything was righted and whatnot and everyone gets on with their lives and eventually setting up yet another open ending where they all try to go to space. What really pissed me off about this is that there was NO continuation of the story after that. I would have loved to see more of the show because it was the first non-toonami/adult swim anime that i ever really loved. Hell, the show even opened me up to the awesomeness that was once TechTv since I found it on the channel's Anime Unleashed block. The show will always be one of those few things I can watch over and over without getting bored of it. It is worth a viewing if you're wanting an amalgamation done right.
postscript: Found out later that it was done by the same guy who did Tenchi Muyo, one of the best harem anime ever done. too bad its had so many different people working on it it got rather confusing to figure out its continuity.
But that's another review
I know it's a flame-worthy summation, but it's true. It's a not-very-well-disguised clone of the series with some harem aspects. For christ's sake, the annoying, overbearing chick who's secretly into the protag even runs around in a red mech. You cant buy that kind of blatancy. But what does it have that NGE doesn't? Why a protag that you ACTUALLY like. Or, at the very least, you don't hate him for bitching and moaning every three seconds and masturbating to comatose girls!
(wow, didn't even get through the first paragraph without mentioning that. a new low)
Okay, now that i got that little bit out, story time!!
The show centers around a boy named Kazuki Yotsuga, a regular dude(don't they all, though) who everyone at school laughs at because he keeps seeing these giant mechs fighting in the street. He sees this so frequently he's even started a little website where he chronicles what he sees. Well it all goes tails up for him when the school queen, Mitsuki Sanada shows an interest in the boy, telling him that she believes that he sees these things. More importantly her father believes him too. He has a theory about there being a parallel world with events and a time line similar to theirs, and that Kazuki has the unique ability to peer into it. Since this is an anime the Professor immediately straps the poor schmo into the deus ex teleporter he already had made up, complete with comfy chair and arm straps, and BAM!! Kazuki is now in the other world.
He soon meets up with the Mech he is always seeing in his psychotic episodes and, through serendipity and overly obvious plot devices, he ends up piloting it; defeating the generic mech it's pilot, now unconscious, was fighting. It is through here that young Kazuki learns that he is in the other world when he runs home to find that his parents have no idea who he is(NOT when he was piloting the mech he's seen so many times in his hallucinations that he's actually given it a name... which i am not even going to TRY and pronounce, let alone spell. i just started calling it "Harpsichord"). Eventually he is swept up by the Giant Mech Military, ran by this Earth's version of the loon who sent him there(just go with it), because he is the only male who has ever been able to pilot a mech, previously only women could for some reason. He soon runs into Mizuki, who decided to follow after him into the Chair of Spatial Impossibility shortly after he disappeared but got there a month earlier for some reason(SCIENCE!!!), and she turns out to be a mech warrior as well, along with the 'Rei' character of the story who is actually explained in the first appearance as an alien-clone-robot-thing.
you read that right, they ACTUALLY flat-out told you that she was a alien clone-robot-thing instead of making it painfully obvious but never even really alluded to in the bulk of the story. And she's a very interesting character, i always liked Tabula Rasa characters, their humor may be obvious(i.e. when looking for a character who ran away they tend to look in the trashcan for some reason) but they're always enjoyable and usually give me a smile.
And all this brings up a really important point, why the crap can only children pilot giant mechs of death? does puberty not compute with the OS or something? but at least this show altered that a bit, the pilot originally controlling Harpsichord was 23, so at least there was that.
After the establish the main cast the episodes went kinda basic, they met the Team Rocket-inspired villain who seems more concerned about the the spectacle of invading rather then the actual winning of the battle. The also have all the old songs of anime here: They go to school, everyone is jealous of/hating on the protag because the school queen is always hanging around him, everyone wants a piece of him, there's a stray dog somewhere along the line that the alien-clone-robot-tabula rasa-Priscilla: Queen of the Desert grows attached to. It doesn't really try to push any boundaries as a show, its more like the people who created the story were given a big box of what all anime before it did and was told to pick two good concepts to play with and three bad concepts to try and fix and to make a show out of those 5 things and they said 'to piss with that' and took the whole box and ran with it.
And, to me, that's not a bad thing. It's a good view if you're bored off your rocker and want to just enjoy yourself for 12 episodes. There's nothing really to take away from it in the end, but is that really a bad thing? Eva tried shoehorning some depth into itself near the end and it turned into one of the few shows that i stop watching before the last 4 eps.
The ending is one of the better ones out there, even though it has one of them open ends that damn near every harem show has, but this show's harem aspects-while predominant throughout the entirety of the story-was never more than a plot device... to me, at least. There was even a 'finale' episode after the story proper where they showed what happened after everything was righted and whatnot and everyone gets on with their lives and eventually setting up yet another open ending where they all try to go to space. What really pissed me off about this is that there was NO continuation of the story after that. I would have loved to see more of the show because it was the first non-toonami/adult swim anime that i ever really loved. Hell, the show even opened me up to the awesomeness that was once TechTv since I found it on the channel's Anime Unleashed block. The show will always be one of those few things I can watch over and over without getting bored of it. It is worth a viewing if you're wanting an amalgamation done right.
postscript: Found out later that it was done by the same guy who did Tenchi Muyo, one of the best harem anime ever done. too bad its had so many different people working on it it got rather confusing to figure out its continuity.
But that's another review
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Welcome to Just Go With It Reviews
You will have to bear with me for a while here, a little new to the whole blogotetrahedral so it may take a bit to get this whole thing off the ground running. Let's start with the basics
What is this?
This site will be my little soapbox in a sea of them, where I will throw my hat over the wall, two cents tucked in the brim and give my take on whatever seems prevalent to my interests at the time. Mostly it will be reviews of odd shows/comics(American or Japanese)/whathaveyou that's out there in the world today. Will it always be about current things? No, as a matter of fact I have one review in line that's about a movie that came out some time in the late 60's.
What's with the title?
It came from a recurring theme i've found with a lot of my reviews of things when people asked me online what I've been watching/reading/whathaveyou. At some point in the explanation of the basic plot I found that I would always insert "just go with it" in parenthesis after every sentence that i knew was pure insanity to the uninitiated(case-in-point: my upcoming The World God Only Knows review)
How often will you update?
Your guess is as good as mine at this point, little kid. Got an odd schedule until after the New Year and after that I have to try and get a job, so Sho'nuff only knows when I'll get around to it.
So, until i can finally find time to sit down and work on this, please occupy yourselves with trying to find ALL the grammatical errors in the above post.
Should be a lot
What is this?
This site will be my little soapbox in a sea of them, where I will throw my hat over the wall, two cents tucked in the brim and give my take on whatever seems prevalent to my interests at the time. Mostly it will be reviews of odd shows/comics(American or Japanese)/whathaveyou that's out there in the world today. Will it always be about current things? No, as a matter of fact I have one review in line that's about a movie that came out some time in the late 60's.
What's with the title?
It came from a recurring theme i've found with a lot of my reviews of things when people asked me online what I've been watching/reading/whathaveyou. At some point in the explanation of the basic plot I found that I would always insert "just go with it" in parenthesis after every sentence that i knew was pure insanity to the uninitiated(case-in-point: my upcoming The World God Only Knows review)
How often will you update?
Your guess is as good as mine at this point, little kid. Got an odd schedule until after the New Year and after that I have to try and get a job, so Sho'nuff only knows when I'll get around to it.
So, until i can finally find time to sit down and work on this, please occupy yourselves with trying to find ALL the grammatical errors in the above post.
Should be a lot
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