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Something’s happened. We seem to have some sort of fever and lightheadedness. Accompanied by the smell of sulfur and an acrid smokey smell. No, Tim’s mother hasn’t appeared within a pentacle. We’ve caught the fever of Amon and he’s contagious. Continue reading Manga Pulse 384: DevilDevilDevil Man
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We decided on doing something a little unorthodox for us. Instead of settling on a movie that Tim has to scour second hand or that Weltall has just happened to see we picked something in the theaters. And so we choose Upgrade[2018].
Or at least we would have jointly discussed it if Tim had bothered to go and see it. Sure he made some excuse about going on vacation in Tennessee as though they have yet to have received the gift of the motion picture in the south. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the movie was released on June 1st and has vanished from most theaters in just over two weeks. Apparently this movie is Hollywood’s awkward junior high phase and they want to bury it with all of those bad memories. A shame considering that it’s a much better movie than even the trailers make it out to be.
Michael Keaton has had quite an interesting career. Per request, Tim is talking about White Noise[2005]. It’s one of those films that takes a lesser known paranormal phenomenon and has no idea what to do with it. In it, the wife of Keaton dies and starts talking to him through EVP. This leads Keaton to finding a murderer who was also listening to the dead but they were telling him to kill for reasons that no one can even postulate.
Weltall then talks about Death Wish[2018]. One of the few newer movies that Tim has actually seen and was able to comment on. If only he was as prepared when it came to the movie we planned and agreed upon. It features a large measure of restraint from Eli Roth who didn’t turn it into an hour and a half of Bruce Willis practicing street surgery on those anyone within a mile radius of his wife’s death.
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Another trip to the bookstore? Yes, we made it out one more time. Just in case anyone didn’t believe we take advice from out listeners. Not the parts about lighting ourselves on fire because we know that’s all in good humor. That and we did that once and it wasn’t nearly as exciting as you might assume. A pity we no longer have the video.
Tim reviews The Promised Neverland. From the cover, Tim assumed it was one of those slice of life mangas that make him search longingly for a hangnail to remove. It is about an orphanage where a whole herd of children live in a seemingly timeless era where no one has a computer. Except when they’re taking tests. There’s a twist to everything which earns it a Read It Now.
Weltall’s Neeko wa tsurai yo is a manga about what we can only call “millennials”. The obnoxious version of a vague generation propped up by clickbaiting articles desperate to milk a little ad revenue from hate-sharing. The main character, Niito, is educated and young but not working or doing anything. She’s boring and would be improved by being thrown face first into an emptied pool. For the crime of being so boring that we’d rather be practicing calligraphy it earns a Burn It.
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Part of one of those things we normally do during the show is take note of what exactly we are reviewing. This is so we can later write up these incredibly professional descriptions. Which we write as the mighty alphabet company told us we didn’t have enough original content to deserve ads. We still don’t have ads but we’ve made this a habit and we’re not stopping now.
So when Tim falls asleep on the job, claiming something about working or some other excuse like the bitch he is, we’re stuck staring at an episode description the same blank expanse of a sheet of paper daring a writer to be creative. It will come down to Weltall then having to comb through the episode and gambling whether or not he can find the titles of what we talked about without having to listen to the entire episode.
Dual review Cashback[2006]
Tim Welcome to Mooseport[2004]
Weltall Last Knight[2015]
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After the general grumble about us not purchasing as many manga, and relying on other more lazy methods, we decided to purchase a least one more. This meant trekking all the way over to the local Barnes. We brought enough supplies to make the ten minute journey, browsed the shelves and choose a volume which hadn’t been reviewed before.
Tim purchased a copy of Devilman – Grimoire. Tim was only familiar with the original title thanks to the episodes brought over in the late nineties and his most recent review of the source material. While he wasn’t paying attention it bloomed into a couple of sequels. This time we have Amon living with Miki who believes herself to be a witch. She plays at summoning demons one night right as they’re attacked by some real ones. By accident, she summons Amon into Akira’s body and he starts killing demons around for reasons. It’s still good enough to get a Read It Now.
Weltalls physical copy of manga is Magical Girl Apocalypse. No, it’s not an apocalypse where magical girls are are driving resurrected gas contraptions along the desert of Australia. It’s an apocalypse of attacking magical girl looking things. While this does sound like yet another manga Weltall has reviewed, it gets a Crackers.
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Is it possible to make this show into a documentation of violations on cruel and unusual punishment? We don’t think so. What film could possibly be on the Hague convention of banned weapons? Oh look, another Uwe Boll movie.
Tim and Weltal discuss Postal[2007]. The edgiest of edgelord games from the early two thousands got a movie adaptation. This is impressive as there is basically no story in either of the games. This should allow Boll to do something interesting and adapt the loose elements into a story. But Boll is a German who has has been bred for efficiency rather than creativity. At least the guy who played Scut Farkus got a paycheck out of the whole thing.
Tim then talks about Overboard(1987). Or at least he talks about how a single hypothesis about the movie and the relationship between the main characters has spread like an infection across the internet. Being the inarticulate bastard he is this comes across as clear as mud. Which is par for the course around here.
Weltalls movie is Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman[2005]. A movie based on the true story of England’s last executioner. As hard as it is to believe, the jolly old land of tea and chavs used to execute the occasional twat who failed to pay their TV license. As with any film based on reality, a lot of details are fudged and dramatized to make a story.
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Guess who’s back, back again? Probably some random celebrity who has a long history of saying something stupid and/or inarticulate. It turns out that age doesn’t automatically make people smarter or enhance their ability to communicate. And so they repeat their folly and the news breathlessly reports on it as though this is a fresh turn of events. All the while, click click click and the ad revenue comes trickling in.
Tim’s review is for Hachimitsu ni Hatsukoi. It’s a romance about two childhood friends who discover the power of hormones now that they’ve started going to high school. Our main character, Koharu, takes until the sixth chapter to discover that the reason her heart beat is irregular around Natsuki, isn’t because he emits microwaves and screws with her pacemaker. While it’s predictable and by the numbers, it’s so inoffensive it lands squarely at Borders.
Weltalls manhwa Love Parameter. Weltall doubts whether it counts because it’s a webcomic rather than print, the oracle assures us that manhwa is generally all things comic in Korea. It’s about a sad sack who can get dates and even get to intercourse but annoys girls so much they will leave midway boning and never call again. He stumbles into a traveling magic shop that hands him a pair of glasses that allows him to view things like a dating sim including prompting his responses to girls. It’s pretty direct though not hentai, in case you need to be warned not to read it while babysitting your six year old nephew. It gets a Read It Now.
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Looking over the movies we’ve talked about, we have apparently not done a musical. Though Weltall attempted to argue that we could count Spinal Tap. As such we watched Singin’ In The Rain(1952). It’s probably one of the best known movies about the transition from silent films to talkies. There’s a lot of very technically good dancing though some of the musical numbers feel tacked on. In spite of how we had a lot to mock within, we didn’t hate it. Don’t let that take away from the amusement of a robotic Gene Kelly knocking down walls as he is unable to process human imperfection.
Weltall then talks about the film. Dave Made a Maze[2017]. In it a guy named Dave makes a cardboard maze in his apartment that he gets lost in. As such a camera crew and friends go in to rescue him from the maze. It’s reminiscent of Labyrinth in the layout and the childlike atmosphere of cardboard monsters and sets. The lower budget definitely shows at times but well worth a single watch through.
Tim then talks about Cloak and Dagger(1985). Which he describes as one of two films in which Dabney Coleman doesn’t play the antagonist. He plays both the father and the secret agent imaginary friend to the kid from ET. ET kid stumbles into a world of espionage when he gets handed an Atari cartridge that has secret government plans on it, the titular Cloak and Dagger. So it almost serves as a commercial for a game that never quite got released due to the fact that the video game market crashed before the movie came out.
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What’s the best way to make a movie that makes all the monies? Just make a sequel, of course. But what if your studio doesn’t own the rights to anything currently popular because you weren’t busy buying the rights to every comic book out there? That’s when you dig through your catalog and make an illegitimate sequel to something people still talk about. If that fails, you at least have a tax write off and the knowledge that you did everything you possibly could.
Speaking of sequels, Tim’s manga is Donten ni Warau Gaiden. It’s a sequel or perhaps an epilogue to another manga. It’s set in the meiji era, which is basically Japan’s wild west for how it’s romanticized. Some people were supposed to fight a snake thing and they won, apparently. Also there are creepy ninjas who are or were crazy in that they forced their members to kill family to join the ranks. It’s intriguing enough that Tim gives it a Borders and may read the original.
Weltall then reviews Let’s Lagoon. In in, the main character awakens on a deserted island. He was apparently in a naval accident but can’t remember what happened. He’s joined by a girl and eventually an older man who is a teacher of hers. When the main guy ends up being pulled away by a riptide into the ocean, he awakens and finds he was only gone for fifteen minutes. There’s time screwiness somehow involved with the ocean and people trying to drown themselves to end up on the island that time forgot. It gets a Read It Now.
