This is an unusual movie. Produced with an all-Japanese cast (except Quentin Tarantino), it unites 12th century Japan and 19th century Nevada. It is in English, but as though the characters (not the actors) had agreed to use that language beforehand for reasons of their own. Accents are thick, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility, [...]
Asatte no Houkou is, at its heart, a fairytale. It conforms perfectly to the classical structure: a normal person leads a normal life. A single act of magic grants a well-intentioned but poorly-worded wish. This creates confusion and distress for the wisher and all around her, but everyone eventually adapts to the new situation. Finally, [...]
Some of you may recall the Writers’ Strike of last winter. Finally, some good has come of it: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is a short film in three parts, free (until tomorrow midnight) to watch. It is very amusing. Can even Joss Whedon tell a grand story in half an hour? No, but luckily, [...]
Sometimes when writing reviews for anime I feel like a sommelier gone rogue: anime has exactly the same style of jargon. There are the broad classifications that everyone who is not blind can tell the first time they encounter an example, and there are the fine distinctions with weird, non-intuitive names which can only be [...]
This series is about a girl on summer vacation working as an intern. The only thing, really, that makes this unusual is the nature of her profession: she is practicing to become a professional mage. Magic is a regulated profession illegal to practice without a license, like medicine or law. It is is a natural [...]
When George Orwell wrote 1984, the technology to implement the sort of surveillance state he feared didn’t yet exist. It still didn’t exist when 1984 actually rolled around; a person might be forgiven for having assumed at the time that the relevant tech would stay uninvented for the indefinite future. Just over two decades later, [...]
I just finished it. Naturally, you all get a review as a result. I’m going to lead into this with another guy’s content; I agree with a lot of what he has to say. For those of you who don’t want to watch four minutes of amusing video review, his main point is that Bioshock [...]
Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei means, approximately, “Goodbye Mr. Despair.” The concluding line of the initial episode summarizes this series as well as anything: a man who sees in life only despair meets a girl who sees only hope. Only, this series isn’t really about her, except when she’s needed to foil the incessant gloominess of the [...]
So, Portal. I just played it through in its entirety; it took slightly less than 90 minutes. On the other hand, this was my fourth playthrough since I got it for Christmas. Is it short? Very. Is it worth its price? Absolutely. This game has tremendous replayability; it’s got the same sort of fun as [...]
The previous review was insufficient. It read as follows: —– The Charcoal Wings Foundation is an association of apparantly angelic people, living a life within a large walled area including a small city and enough farmland to support it. It’s all about self-discovery and the inner conflicts within people. What is a good person, anyway? [...]