inconweebleant

The weekend DVD rental was An Inconvenient Truth, which was the documentary on Global Warming presented by Al Gore.

There's not really a lot I can say about it, tbh.

It's well worth watching the documentary as the case for Global Warming is well presented. There's also no particular howlers in terms of the scene used - there are a few things that are over-simplified, but it's basically all there.

I'd say go and watch it, hopefully it'll do its job.

Anyway, in the absence of a proper film review I thought I'd talk about Death Note http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/manga.php?id=4354 instead.

I may have mentioned it before, but the point is I've been reading Death Note.

Well, reading it is something of an understatement - "obsessively ploughing through it" would be a better description, tbh :/.

I did a similar thing with Genshiken - I'd bought all of the 9 volumes and once I'd started reading I really got that 'can't put it down' vibe and read it all in a week or two. It was really addictive, and it was also kinda a bad idea as I ended up going to bed really late and being shattered at work all day.

I've been a bit more sensible with Death Note, but I'm really enjoying it.

Weird thing is, though, until quite near the end of volume 1 I wasn't actually enjoying it that much. I dunno, it's odd and a little difficult to describe.

Basically, I've occasionally found with manga and anime that the portrayals of things can be utterly unrealistic. Now, obviously some stuff is meant to be 'unrealistic', like in Death Note, the existence of Shinigami or whatever, but those things are fine. I've no problem with them because they're genuine fantasy elements or things from the writers imagination or similar.

The problem is more stuff that's meant to be real or believable but is blatantly just wrong or silly or stupid.

In the case of Death Note, for example, there's this bizarre relationship between the NPA (Japan's FBI), the regular Japanese police, the FBI, Interpol and the G8 nations. These relationships are clearly wrong, but also made up in weird and illogical ways.

So in other words, my problem is almost that the writer hasn't bothered to do any real research and has instead made it up and got it badly wrong. The reason I have a problem with that is it's incredibly distracting to suddenly have something so jarringly wrong when you're otherwise enjoying what's going on. Normally it would really affect my enjoyment.

Ah, but I did say I was really enjoying Death Note, yes? Well I am and it's because the central plot and the relationship between the two main characters is extremely well done and incredibly interesting.

As such, despite my misgivings over the occasional "reality goof" I've still been enjoying it.

What's more it's full of really big twists. It's really not afraid to throw hefty spanners into the workings of its own story. The really clever thing is it then pick up the cogs and builds something even more intriguing each time it does.