Buys
Aside from the 3rd Richard Castle book, Heat Rises, all I got is stuff for Kung Fu Fridays: Opium and the Kung Fu Master, Golden Swallow, Blood Brothers, True Legend, and The Sword with No Name.
"Accomplishments"
DVDs: The Marvel movie I missed this summer was X-Men First Class, but I did get it on DVD. Like all good prequels, First Class manages to be a good film in its own right, while at the same time giving the other films in the series an added depth. I will be interesting to rewatch X-Men and X2 (or possibly even watch X3 for the first time) with this back story now part of the mix. The idea to set the X-Men in the 60s is so obvious, it's crazy no one had thought of it before. The X-Men ARE, after all, children of the decade. The comic was a product of its time, set against the paranoia of the Cold War, the Fear of the Bomb, and a budding human rights movement. (It's in fact harder to understand how the franchise thrived only much later.) First Class is a very modern production, with a well-juggled cast and memorable action/effects sequences. But it's also given a 60s spin, with groovy splitscreens and credits sequences, and a frankly Bondian spy-adventure-around-the-world feel set against real world events (the Cuban Missile Crisis). If I have one complaint, it's that the cast was so Americanized (Moira and Banshee in particular) when it could have been just as international as the film's locations. Interesting reinventions across the board though. Hoping a sequel would make good use of historical events too (I suggest the Million Man March or the Space Race). My DVD has a single extra, but it's a pretty good making of (22 min.).
I only saw half of Chuck Season 4 last year before my schedule made it impossible to watch it on its scheduled night. The DVD is coming out in the next couple weeks, so to get ready, I decided to flip Season 3 (which I'd only watched on tv, not on DVD - it's been on the shelf a year!). Season 3 is when everything changes. Not only does the Intersect 2.0 change the premise a little bit (and all the character dynamics with it), but also takes the Chuck-Sarah relationship to a new level (Chuck vs. the Honeymooners may be one of my favorite episodes of the show ever). The addition of super(man)spy Daniel Shaw (Brandon Routh) as ally/antagonist is a brilliant piece of casting and builds into a proper arc. And hey, none of that damn Bryce Larkin all year! The DVD includes good deleted scenes from most episodes, a solid making of piece that talks about the season as well as a visit to ComicCon, a Behind the Music spoof on Jeffster, and a gag reel. Bring on S4!
Futurama volume 5 contains the first half of the series' big return to television (on Comedy Central), another show I stopped watching midway through, not because I didn't like it, but because I have trouble keeping to a television schedule. Granted, the first few episodes are a bit obvious in their satire (the iPhone one, for example), but halfway through the DVD, the season hits its stride with some excellent sci-fi fables, in particular The Late Philip J. Fry (the time travel one), and A Clockwork Origin (the evolution one). Futurama DVDs are always a good value, and this one has highly entertaining commentary tracks on all episodes (with cast and crew), Fry's motion comic (a limited edition given away at ComicCon, so if you want to read it... or have it read for you...), the making of one of the songs, the "previously" bits used by Comedy Central, a live table read over animatics, and deleted scenes too.
Michael Hoffman's 1999 version of Midsummer Night's Dream has some well advertised stars on the cover - Rupert Everett, Clalista Flockhart, Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer and Stanley Tucci - but I was more chuffed to see a lot of names that have perhaps become more familiar to me since: Christian Bale, Dominic West, David Strathairn and, oh my, Sam Rockwell! It's not a perfect adaptation of Shakespeare's greatest comedy, mostly because the Fairy World is poorly realized. There's a fine effort to throw in mythological elements, but the interior forest set never looks quite right, all gaudy golds and plastic leaves, all a little too theatrical for what they're attempting to do. With that casting, you can well imagine the accents are all over the place, but it only gets distracting when the actors don't really seem to understand the intent of their lines, which I'd say is fairly limited to Flockhart and Sophie Marceau. All is forgiven however - as if by Puck's apology - because the "comedic tragedy" of the play within the play is both genuinely funny and touching. This "hot ice" actually works, with much thanks to performance and staging. The DVD has no extras of note, only its trailer, but its copy and editing are cleverly done.
I'd never put a Godzilla movie on my Kung Fu Fridays schedule before, I don't know why. Terror of Mechagodzilla was perhaps not the BEST entry in the original series (its last, in fact), but it does feature a pretty intense showdown between Godzilla, Mechagodzilla and Titanosaurus. Getting there is the hard part. The actual story focuses on aliens of the Black Hole Third Planet rebuilding MechaGodzilla with the help of a scientist and his cyborg daughter while Tokyo's best try to prepare for the arrival of a deadly marine dinosaur. The film is marred by terrible editing and definite longueurs as the characters seem to have yet another meeting to drop exposition. But it was all worth a chuckle (especially with the hero being called Ichinose). One to holler and laugh at (and cheer at when the monsters fight). The Toho Master Collection's DVD also has the American dub version, which adds a long recap sequence at the front of the film, and cuts a brief flash of fake, cyborg nudity. The expert commentary track is on the latter, and is interesting and honest about the film's flaws, but a bit monotone. They're obviously reading from a script all the way through. Aside from an art gallery and the original trailer, there's a 10-minute piece on the Women of Godzilla (and by extension, other Japaneses monster movies), which talks about all the leading and not-so-leading ladies (actresses and characters) from the classic films (so up to 1975). Don't expect clips, it's all stills and narration.
Books: Just because KFF went to Japan this week doesn't mean I didn't get my fill of Chinese kung fu... Infinite Kung Fu is a 450-page trade collection of Kagan McLeod's incredibly entertaining martial arts comics series. McLeod re-imagines the "martial world" of his favorite kung fu movies as an amalgamated place where Shaolin monks are able to meet blaxploitation stars, a timeless place of action and zen Buddhism. It's also a magical world, where spirits return to dead bodies causing a zombie infestation of epic proportions, which the Eight Immortals have tasked the few students who haven't turned to the dark side (poison kung fu - an obvious wink to the Five Deadly Venoms) to stop. Wonderfully imaginative, McLeod's fluid, black&white, watercolor&ink art excels at showing the action both in large panoramas and in intimate play-by-play sequences between the good and evil masters. And throughout, winks and nods to great martial arts films from both sides of the world, there for those who can appreciate them. Get it direct from Top Shelf if you can't find it elsewhere!
Audio: The Daleks' Master Plan is a monster serial, with no less than 12 episodes and a prologue (Mission to the Unknown) that aired more than a month before. Only three episodes survived intact, and listening to it on audio, with narration by Peter (Stephen) Purves is now the best way to experience the whole thing. The main plot about Kevin Stoney's brilliant traitor, Mavic Chen, colluding with the Daleks and other races to destroy the solar system with a "time destructor" has a lot of good stuff in it. The villain is memorable, the tension high, and two short-lived companions die horribly. It's the most intense serial of the Hartnell years. And then there's the Chase-like runaround in the middle that threatens to defuse the whole thing. These distractions, often played for laughs, are all over the place. A light comic touch here (the police on New Year's), unfunny hysterics there (the Hollywood sequence), the sadly dull return of the Meddling Monk in the middle of it all, and the Doctor breaks the fourth wall on Christmas night. And amidst the silliness, we cut back to Daleks executing people. An atonal mess, but it starts off and ends strong. The CD package also includes an interview with Purves about his time on the show, and pdf versions of the scripts.
New Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG cards: Getting back into the swing of things after the incredibly busy month of September, I made a couple of new cards, though I'm still working out their kinks. Attempting a second edition isn't easy!
Hyperion to a Satyr posts this week:
III.i. To Be or Not to Be - Hamlet 2000
Aside from the 3rd Richard Castle book, Heat Rises, all I got is stuff for Kung Fu Fridays: Opium and the Kung Fu Master, Golden Swallow, Blood Brothers, True Legend, and The Sword with No Name.
"Accomplishments"
DVDs: The Marvel movie I missed this summer was X-Men First Class, but I did get it on DVD. Like all good prequels, First Class manages to be a good film in its own right, while at the same time giving the other films in the series an added depth. I will be interesting to rewatch X-Men and X2 (or possibly even watch X3 for the first time) with this back story now part of the mix. The idea to set the X-Men in the 60s is so obvious, it's crazy no one had thought of it before. The X-Men ARE, after all, children of the decade. The comic was a product of its time, set against the paranoia of the Cold War, the Fear of the Bomb, and a budding human rights movement. (It's in fact harder to understand how the franchise thrived only much later.) First Class is a very modern production, with a well-juggled cast and memorable action/effects sequences. But it's also given a 60s spin, with groovy splitscreens and credits sequences, and a frankly Bondian spy-adventure-around-the-world feel set against real world events (the Cuban Missile Crisis). If I have one complaint, it's that the cast was so Americanized (Moira and Banshee in particular) when it could have been just as international as the film's locations. Interesting reinventions across the board though. Hoping a sequel would make good use of historical events too (I suggest the Million Man March or the Space Race). My DVD has a single extra, but it's a pretty good making of (22 min.).
I only saw half of Chuck Season 4 last year before my schedule made it impossible to watch it on its scheduled night. The DVD is coming out in the next couple weeks, so to get ready, I decided to flip Season 3 (which I'd only watched on tv, not on DVD - it's been on the shelf a year!). Season 3 is when everything changes. Not only does the Intersect 2.0 change the premise a little bit (and all the character dynamics with it), but also takes the Chuck-Sarah relationship to a new level (Chuck vs. the Honeymooners may be one of my favorite episodes of the show ever). The addition of super(man)spy Daniel Shaw (Brandon Routh) as ally/antagonist is a brilliant piece of casting and builds into a proper arc. And hey, none of that damn Bryce Larkin all year! The DVD includes good deleted scenes from most episodes, a solid making of piece that talks about the season as well as a visit to ComicCon, a Behind the Music spoof on Jeffster, and a gag reel. Bring on S4!
Futurama volume 5 contains the first half of the series' big return to television (on Comedy Central), another show I stopped watching midway through, not because I didn't like it, but because I have trouble keeping to a television schedule. Granted, the first few episodes are a bit obvious in their satire (the iPhone one, for example), but halfway through the DVD, the season hits its stride with some excellent sci-fi fables, in particular The Late Philip J. Fry (the time travel one), and A Clockwork Origin (the evolution one). Futurama DVDs are always a good value, and this one has highly entertaining commentary tracks on all episodes (with cast and crew), Fry's motion comic (a limited edition given away at ComicCon, so if you want to read it... or have it read for you...), the making of one of the songs, the "previously" bits used by Comedy Central, a live table read over animatics, and deleted scenes too.
Michael Hoffman's 1999 version of Midsummer Night's Dream has some well advertised stars on the cover - Rupert Everett, Clalista Flockhart, Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer and Stanley Tucci - but I was more chuffed to see a lot of names that have perhaps become more familiar to me since: Christian Bale, Dominic West, David Strathairn and, oh my, Sam Rockwell! It's not a perfect adaptation of Shakespeare's greatest comedy, mostly because the Fairy World is poorly realized. There's a fine effort to throw in mythological elements, but the interior forest set never looks quite right, all gaudy golds and plastic leaves, all a little too theatrical for what they're attempting to do. With that casting, you can well imagine the accents are all over the place, but it only gets distracting when the actors don't really seem to understand the intent of their lines, which I'd say is fairly limited to Flockhart and Sophie Marceau. All is forgiven however - as if by Puck's apology - because the "comedic tragedy" of the play within the play is both genuinely funny and touching. This "hot ice" actually works, with much thanks to performance and staging. The DVD has no extras of note, only its trailer, but its copy and editing are cleverly done.
I'd never put a Godzilla movie on my Kung Fu Fridays schedule before, I don't know why. Terror of Mechagodzilla was perhaps not the BEST entry in the original series (its last, in fact), but it does feature a pretty intense showdown between Godzilla, Mechagodzilla and Titanosaurus. Getting there is the hard part. The actual story focuses on aliens of the Black Hole Third Planet rebuilding MechaGodzilla with the help of a scientist and his cyborg daughter while Tokyo's best try to prepare for the arrival of a deadly marine dinosaur. The film is marred by terrible editing and definite longueurs as the characters seem to have yet another meeting to drop exposition. But it was all worth a chuckle (especially with the hero being called Ichinose). One to holler and laugh at (and cheer at when the monsters fight). The Toho Master Collection's DVD also has the American dub version, which adds a long recap sequence at the front of the film, and cuts a brief flash of fake, cyborg nudity. The expert commentary track is on the latter, and is interesting and honest about the film's flaws, but a bit monotone. They're obviously reading from a script all the way through. Aside from an art gallery and the original trailer, there's a 10-minute piece on the Women of Godzilla (and by extension, other Japaneses monster movies), which talks about all the leading and not-so-leading ladies (actresses and characters) from the classic films (so up to 1975). Don't expect clips, it's all stills and narration.
Books: Just because KFF went to Japan this week doesn't mean I didn't get my fill of Chinese kung fu... Infinite Kung Fu is a 450-page trade collection of Kagan McLeod's incredibly entertaining martial arts comics series. McLeod re-imagines the "martial world" of his favorite kung fu movies as an amalgamated place where Shaolin monks are able to meet blaxploitation stars, a timeless place of action and zen Buddhism. It's also a magical world, where spirits return to dead bodies causing a zombie infestation of epic proportions, which the Eight Immortals have tasked the few students who haven't turned to the dark side (poison kung fu - an obvious wink to the Five Deadly Venoms) to stop. Wonderfully imaginative, McLeod's fluid, black&white, watercolor&ink art excels at showing the action both in large panoramas and in intimate play-by-play sequences between the good and evil masters. And throughout, winks and nods to great martial arts films from both sides of the world, there for those who can appreciate them. Get it direct from Top Shelf if you can't find it elsewhere!
Audio: The Daleks' Master Plan is a monster serial, with no less than 12 episodes and a prologue (Mission to the Unknown) that aired more than a month before. Only three episodes survived intact, and listening to it on audio, with narration by Peter (Stephen) Purves is now the best way to experience the whole thing. The main plot about Kevin Stoney's brilliant traitor, Mavic Chen, colluding with the Daleks and other races to destroy the solar system with a "time destructor" has a lot of good stuff in it. The villain is memorable, the tension high, and two short-lived companions die horribly. It's the most intense serial of the Hartnell years. And then there's the Chase-like runaround in the middle that threatens to defuse the whole thing. These distractions, often played for laughs, are all over the place. A light comic touch here (the police on New Year's), unfunny hysterics there (the Hollywood sequence), the sadly dull return of the Meddling Monk in the middle of it all, and the Doctor breaks the fourth wall on Christmas night. And amidst the silliness, we cut back to Daleks executing people. An atonal mess, but it starts off and ends strong. The CD package also includes an interview with Purves about his time on the show, and pdf versions of the scripts.New Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG cards: Getting back into the swing of things after the incredibly busy month of September, I made a couple of new cards, though I'm still working out their kinks. Attempting a second edition isn't easy!
Hyperion to a Satyr posts this week:
III.i. To Be or Not to Be - Hamlet 2000
Comments
Nah, there's no need to subject yourself to X3. ;)
the first few episodes are a bit obvious in their satire (the iPhone one, for example), but halfway through the DVD, the season hits its stride with some excellent sci-fi fables
The second half of the season is much more even, with most of the episodes being very good, but lacking some of the great standouts of the first half (such as the ones you cited).
One to holler and laugh at (and cheer at when the monsters fight).
That's exactly why I love all those old Godzilla movie. Very few are, objectively, terribly good, but they are tons of fun.
Futurama: Don't know when the DVD'll come out.
Godzilla: While the best classic Godzilla movie is the first one, it lacks the personality exhibited by the monsters in later installments. If pressed, I'd say vs. Mothra is my favorite.
I should mention though that the end of First Class suggests that it isn't in continuity with The Last Stand, which annoyed me even if it pleased everyone else.
Agreed with you about the new Futurama season, it got a lot better with The Late Philip J Fry, (love the Planet of the Apes parody). Another highlight for was That Darn Katz, for Professor Shpeakenshpell - "The horse says 'Doctorate Denied'" - and the professor's claim that "We're certainly not building something sinister, if that's what you're implying. Now come on, Bender. Something sinister won't build itself."
It's definitely worth checking out on the cheap, just to say you've seen it. And it certainly has things worth recommending (I personally have always liked Ellen Page's Shadowcat). There's just a couple of major things that really irk me and bring down the whole movie for me.
If pressed, I'd say vs. Mothra is my favorite.
Ditto.