telly turn-off

This summer I'm sincerely hoping that there is absolutely nothing of note on television.

That's from my perspective of course. If you're a reality TV fan, general sports fan or more specifically a fan of football or tennis then your opinion will differ drastically.

What I'm basically saying is that this year appears to be something of a planetary alignment of TV I'm not interested in:

• - The World cup runs 11 June - 11 July
• - Wimbledon runs 28 June - 4 July
• - Big Brother runs June - August (I guess)

And then I'm sure there's various other reality crap on too - X-factor, strictly arse biscuits, I'm a celebrity, stove my head in with a pipe... clearly I don't actually know what's on, but the point is I'm fairly sure there's other reality crap that runs across the summer. Even if there isn't the above three will hopefully fill the schedules for a good few months.

Of course the reality is that with the BBC's extensive coverage of F1 and their reasonable coverage of MotoGP my sport quota does rise dramatically over the summer, but the main point is that the normal lull in new and original shows should be magnified this summer.

So why is this a good thing?

Because if there's nothing for me to watch/record then I will have even fewer reasons to avoid attacking my unwatched DVD pile. And this is a very good thing because the unwatched DVD pile is stupidly big and I keep avoiding it.

It's like last weekend - a big part of the reason I was able to scan stuff with reckless abandon was because I'd been really careful during the week to actually watch most of what I recorded. And there are clear signs of my recording schedule petering out - lots of shows I'm watching have only 1 or 2 weeks to go, all of which seem to coincide rather neatly with the above dates.

This next weekend is a Bank Holiday, so I'll be back on Tuesday, hopefully with even more tales of how dull and boring--er, I mean packed my weekend was with overdue box-ticking activities. And it's also Eurovision - my yearly opportunity to give my camp side an airing.

mu continuation

I walloped my head last night and have a big ol' bruise for my troubles. Rather embarrassingly, I managed to bash my head whilst sitting down on the toilet. It's a manoeuvre I've executed perfectly and without injuries millions of times before, but yesterday I managed to bang my head on the damn towel rail.

See, I've noticed whenever I injure myself, it's always got an embarrassing element to it. It's like when I did my back in - I trapped a nerve whilst bending down to clean the wheel of my car. Even I'm embarrassed at that and I'm the one that suffered the weeks of constant agony and sleep deprivation that went with it.

Anyway, here's the rest of the summaries for the fansubs I watched:


11eyes

What was surprising about 11eyes wasn't so much what it was and what it was about, it was that I quite liked it.

If I had to guess while I was watching it, I would have said this was adapted from a light novel. Having now had the opportunity to look it up on Google, it actually turns out to be based on a visual novel.

Visual novels are a kind of half way house between properly interactive games and novels. Basically you click through loads of dialogue and events and stuff and then generally there are one or two decision points that allow the game to branch in a particular direction.

The reason I'd have said Light Novel is that 11eyes has that old problem of feeling like a bunch of cool stuff the writer/artist likes thrown together and draped across an overly-familiar plot.

However, where usually this really turns me off, here I found myself enjoying it. Perhaps it's because it's a visual novel so there were subtle differences to the way light novels go about their business. Perhaps I'm simply being worn down by all the adaptations of these types of things there have been recently.

Or perhaps I was simply coming off the back of two really disappointing shows to find something vaguely okay-ish so I didn't hate it.


Hyakko

I wasn't expecting much going into Hyakko. I'd already sampled the OVA that came after this and while it was somewhat amusing it was also a bit of a non-event. I appreciate that this is a slice of life type show, but throughout the entire OAV two characters basically just sat in a shop eating cakes.

Rather pleasantly then, the series has a bit more variety of scenery with more characters at the very least. It's also still definitely a slice of life show set in high school and we've seen loads of them over the years, but Id' say this was a fairly reasonable example of the genre.

I mean, it's not earth-shatteringly good, but equally it's not utterly awful.


Konnichiwa Anne

I've never read Anne of Green Gables. Indeed, I know next to nothing about it.

And confusingly this is not an adaptation of it, although I understand there is one.

According to wikipedia, the original Anne book also had several sequels and this isn't an adaptation of those either. This is an adaptation of a prequel book. A prequel not written by the original author.

Yeah, I'm scratching my head too, but really, that doesn't matter, because you don't need to know anything about those books or who wrote them to watch the show.

I think if I was a child I would really have liked this show. As a very old person I liked what it was trying to achieve but found the actual presentation/style a bit simplistic.

Which isn't to say the stories where simplistic, just that the show has a feeling of being aimed at younger children. Though to be fair, the content is somewhat adult in places - Anne's alcoholic adoptive father hits his wife in several occasions, for example.

And that was the other thing - all bar one of Anne's adoptive family are so unpleasant (both towards her and generally) I kept wanted to get in there and give them a slap (or at the least a damn good talking too) myself.

Perhaps that level of engagement is a hallmark of good storytelling, but in the end I found it somewhat frustrating. Maybe it's the sort of show where the end gives you some sort of closure to those feelings, but odds are I'll never find out.


Durarara!!

And so for the big one.

I'd been kinda saving durarara until last as I'd heard a lot of really good things about it. In particular I'd heard it was similar to Baccano, one of the best shows in recent years.

Well from what I watched (and to cap off this theme of surprises) it didn't seem anything like Baccano.

Baccano does a lot of buggering about in terms of telling its stories in parallel and out of sequence. You can easily slip from 1931 back to 1930 and then forward to 1932 across a handful of scenes. For a simple western analogy it's a bit like Pulp Fiction, where there's a single story that's been chopped into bits and we're watching the bits out of sequence.

Durarara doesn't do that. What Durarara does (well, in the first 2 episodes - I've not seen beyond that) is more similar to Boogiepop phantom, where the same period of time is being covered, but from different people's perspectives. There is a recent western film analogy, but I can't for the life of me recall what it was - I seem to remember it had Matthew Fox of Lost fame in it, though.

The other big surprise is that Baccano is quite high energy. It's got quite a lot of funny stuff in and generally the presentation is an upbeat, brightly coloured one, which contrasts beautifully with the extreme violence and sinister undertones that pervade the story.

Durarara is more straight out dark and moody.

But the thing is I still liked it. Indeed, I think I liked it more because it wasn't simply "Baccano: the remake".

crank 2: high voltage

Last week I reviewed (or randomly dribbled about, whichever you prefer) Lesbian Vampire Killers.

My main thought was that it had gotten a critical panning, but that I'd actually kinda enjoyed it.

This week's movie kinda follows the same pattern. I remember there being quite a few bad reviews, most especially I remember comments along the lines of it being not as good as the first.

Those reviews are wrong.

I loved the first Crank - it was delightfully and wilfully bonkers, but not in a comedic sense, although it was plenty funny. No, the bonkers-ness was in the pacing - the film absolutely pelted along, barely giving you any time to stop and think.

The basic feel of the first film was that of a video game. I'm not unique in thinking this, indeed, the game actually has bits of computer animation in it. But it's the nature of these bits of computer animation that really clued you in as to what Crank was.

Back in the early days of home computing the games were more anarchic and bonkers. Modern day gaming is a huge multi-billion pound business and a lot of the games tend to focus on being realistic and are horribly complicated to make. Back then, when computers were low on power anyone could make a 'state of the art' game.

And that led to some truly daft ideas. I remember one game where your mission was essentially to go around being a bastard, playing tricks on people.

And that's what Crank was - it was the movie equivalent of that old computer game spirit.

Crank 2 then cranks this basic idea up (ho ho ho, I'm a comic genius) and expands it. Crank 2 is not only a bonkers video game, but it's also throwing in all sorts of other stuff that was around in my youth too.

And some of it is bizarre - I mean, there's one scene that apes the men in rubber suits antics of the Godzilla movies. The characters wear caricature masks of themselves and do battle, destroying the miniature set by falling on it in the process.

But there's also an element of taking things up a gear (whoops, missed another opportunity for a cranking gag). Think of it this way - with the first film they were trying to make a full-on 18 certificate film.

And they succeeded with this. However, imagine they hadn't and they'd actually ended up with a 15 certificate. So they then make Crank 2 and so the thought process is something like "let's make it as extreme as we can so that it can't possibly end up with a 15".

And this they do - there's more violence, more swearing, more sex and nudity. About the only thing it doesn't push is drug abuse.

So yeah, I'd recommend you watch the first film if you haven't and if you like that then this is a very worthy sequel.

animu splosion

As mentioned yesterday this last weekend was hugely productive and every spare minute was basically crammed with me scanning animedias and watching fansubs. Indeed, I've now managed to sample all of the shows available via fansub from the 2009/10 season, which is a very good thing.

I also managed to do this without completely ignoring normal telly or not doing other stuff I needed to do. So it probably points to a flaw in my character that I was slightly disappointed I didn't get to watch any anime on DVD.

Anyway, as mentioned yesterday, here's the roundup of all the fansubs I watched and my brief opinions on them:


Tatakau Shisho - The Book of Bantorra

If I was to summarise my feelings on all the fansubs I watched I could basically use one word - surprising. I think just about every show was a surprise - sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad.

With Book of Bantorra I wasn't expecting much, but I was rather surprised to find it seemed quite interesting.

One of the reasons for my surprise was that the first couple of episodes did a lot of info dumping. This is one of those shows with a made-up, mumbo-jumbo setting that throws mystical and other powers around like they're bouncy balls.

Now usually I don't like this sort of thing, but was surprised to find two things of interest. First off the main character is not a heroic character or even, based on initial impressions either one of the good guys or particularly special.

The other thing of interest was the head of the hero characters was actually something of a bitch. She was unpleasant to her subordinates and seemed to revel in the violence she dished out, yet she's presented as being the head of the forces of good. She'd actually have slotted right into Black Lagoon.

So yeah, not necessarily a sophisticated premise, but some surprisingly interesting characters.


Natsu no Arashi!

The surprise with Natsu No Arashi was that I didn't really like the first episode, but I quite enjoyed the second.

The problem was that the second episodes was set well after the second and involves time travelling and people walking through walls and all sorts of random stuff. It did have some funny moments and the time travel was quite cleverly done, but it also felt like you were being dumped into the middle of a bunch of storylines and no-one was helping you understand them, which made it really frustrating.

However, the second episode jumped back to the beginning of the story and made a lot more sense, so I enjoyed it a lot more.

Which isn't to say I thought it was great. I didn't particularly take to the character designs, for example, and it didn't really give any impression of having an overarching plot. But still, I'd probably buy it and it was made by SHAFT whose stuff is always worth a look.


Katanagatari

Now Katanagatari was the first of two shows where the surprise was not a pleasant one. I'd fully expected going into this that I'd enjoy it.

It seemed to have some quirky character designs and artwork and I'm all up for a bit of that. It seemed to have some sort of feudal Japan thing going on and I wouldn't be a bit of a Japanophile if that didn't appeal. There was even a hint that it was basically a love story from what I'd heard and I'm a sucker for a bit of a love story.

The big surprise was how tedious it turned out to be.

The first episode was about 50 minutes long (presumably an hour when broadcast), but it didn't seem like they'd given them twice as much money to animate it. Indeed, it looked more like they'd give them half the normal amount of money, because there were huge stretches of people just talking.

And while they were talking it often didn't even show faces - there were loads of slow panning shots across random static things like tea pots. What made this worse was that the dialogue was often kinda dull - there was a bucket load of info dumping and even when the bad guy turned up I thought they were going to try and talk each other to death, rather than fight.

And then they did fight you got very little actual action.

It was terminally dull. Perhaps the second episode is shorter and more action-oriented. The file size would suggested not and I just couldn't be bothered to find out.


Winter Sonata

And it's a similar story with Winter Sonata.

Now to be fair, this one didn't have any suggestion that it was going to have action so the fact it didn't wasn't any sort of a let down. Also, this one definitely was intended to be a straight up romance.

My problem with it was that it was that it was so melodramatic it was almost comical. Except it wasn't comical, it was annoying.

It was like a soap opera, only one of those Mexican soap operas where everything is stupidly high drama. Only where those have a wide range of emotional over-exaggerations, Winter Sonata was entirely fixated on maudlin and melancholy.


Blimey, this is eating through words - I'll continue tomorrow.

Actually, no, tomorrow is movie rental review day, so make that Thursday!

tired but not knackered

As the heading suggests, today I feel tired, but not knackered.

This is a little odd, because the weekend was intensely knackering, and I'd normally expect that sort of thing to carry over.

The knackering bits started with me having to clean bed-sit, having not cleaned it in several weeks. I've spent most of the last few weekends trying to sort stuff and that's not left a lot of time to do any cleaning, so things were rather grimy - I had to Hoover the floor twice, for example.

I then decided to take the bull by the horns and do some scanning. Something my sorting out again highlighted was the huge pile of un-scanned magazines, which keeps growing. I realised that my heroic trudge through all the megamis was so long ago that I'd actually received two new issue of megami since then.

The result of this horn-bull paradigm thingy was that I ploughed through 8 or 9 (I actually lost track :/) issues of animedia. Now animedia of course is the famously light anime mag, generally having the fewest scannable images, but we're still taking what must have been the best part of 10 hours of scanning across the weekend.

That also means I watched a heck of a lot of anime on fansubs - I'd do the summaries tomorrow - which is all rather mentally exhausting.

And on top of that I went for another walk on Sunday! Now I can't speak for the entire country, but down here in southern England is was a veritable scorcher yesterday (supposedly it'll be even hotter today).

For some reason, although this made me slightly trepidatious about the walk, I still went out wearing my jeans. I dunno why I did that - I have plenty of shorts I could have worn that I'm sure would have been cooler.

In the end the walk wasn't as bad as I'd feared, even with the unsuitable attire. I think what helped was that there was quite a lot of shade and the bit that's up the hill had a nice breeze.

I still can't walk up that hill without a couple of pauses to catch my breath, but I guess the point is that it was not much worse given the elevated temperature. Also, it didn't seem to take me as long to recover when I got back as it has done in the past, which I hope is a good sign.

The last entry on the list was the temperature last night. As is often the way when the temperature suddenly goes up I haven't had a hair cut in ages, which is never a help. Of course the new thinner duvet I bought in Friday's spending spree is not here yet, and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't turn up until the end of the week

I therefore decide to take matters into my own hands a bit and I used some ice packs to pre-cool my bed and to cool my pillow especially (think hot water bottle but in reverse). It was pretty successful as I got off fairly quickly.

The ultimate solution of course is to get the air conditioner out, but there are two problems there. First off the temperature is apparently going to drop for later in the week, but also with my sorting out still ongoing, it's going to be something like a logistical nightmare to get it out.

I therefore put down the fact that I'm tired to the fact that I did a lot of stuff over the weekend and the fact that I'm not knackered to the fact that you tend to sleep better if you've tired yourself out.