We've got our fingers on the pulse of Anime, Manga, Video Games, Movies with reviews, rants, and stories.
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Let’s make a wild hipster prediction. Tiny house breweries covered in reclaimed aluminum siding and vintage asbestos paint. What could be more retro and kooky than risking death be mesothilioma? Yeah, you’ve probably never heard of it. Look away as I ride my kickboard away in a flash of ninteies flannel and beard oils. Continue reading “Manga Pulse 364: Go Jo”
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Being the pop culture savants we are, we decided to do a movie featuring Bill Paxton. Frailty[2001] is the directorial debut of the, somewhat, recently deceased actor who gave all the best lines to himself. It starts by being a backstory being delivered by Matthew Mcconaughey. He claims he knows who a serial killer is and relates a backstory about watching his dad murder people. It’s supposed to leave us wondering if they actually are acting as abrahamic paladins and murdering evildoers or if they’re just insane. Continue reading “Popcorn Pulse 68: Frail Runner”
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Let us remind you of how technological progress has erased minor inconveniences that people of a certain age group didn’t have to grow up with. Remember when the only way to send messages was private courier. These upjumped children and their newfangled universal postal service don’t know how easy they have it. Continue reading “Manga Pulse 363: Double Borders”
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Let’s talk about everyone’s favorite smushable shower invaders, spiders. When they show up in literature, they’re often the sign of sneaky and crafty villains or antagonists. When they show up in our joint review, Enemy[2013], they’re mostly there to make it seem like there’s a deeper meaning to the movie.
It star Jake Gyllenhaal attempting to play a weak willed man who discovers there’s someone who looks just like him. They decide to meet and have sex as anyone would do with their doppelganger; or one of them decides to trick the other into swapping wives for an evening because he’s a pathetic horn-dog.
Weltall then talks about Inferno[2016]. It’s the third in the Robert Langdon movies starring Tom Hanks. The lord of interpretation of symbols wakes up in a hospital with amnesia. He gets recruited to help find someone with a world threatening plague using his ability to remember wikipedia entries. That’s right, when you need someone for bar trivia and don’t have enough bars to browse the internet surreptitiously, Robert Langdon will come to the rescue!
Tim then talks about Fatal Instinct(1993). A parody movie done in the style of Naked Gun. We say in the style because while it contains the ingredients of humor(sight gags, references to the movies they are parodying and people delivering jokes with a straight face) it fails to close the deal. It’s almost like an artificial intelligence that was built in the seventies using tape drives had deconstructed a Leslie Nielsen movie and churned out its own script.
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Can you believe that the Washington Monument has been finished for longer than television has been around? Also, only 1920’s kids will remember these mountains without the faces of US Presidents on them. Are we accomplishing our goal to feed your nostalgia and remind you of the inexorable passage of time?
Tim reviews a revisit of Kumo desu ga, nani ka? Our spider girl continues in her adventure deeper into the dungeon. She then gets attacked by a monkey which she kills. Tim approves, especially when this results in a horde of other monkeys attacking and getting killed. The manga continues to hold its Read it Now by keeping the tone light and the main character likable as she struggles.
Weltall’s manga this week is also based on a light novel, Accel World. It takes place in a world where the mental uplinks from Avatar have been invented and people mostly squander their potential to play shitty MMOs. Because if ever a manga features a video game, it must always be a never ending exercise with no overarching goal that will run until someone gets tired of it. Almost as a metaphor for the manga it’s featured in. It manages to snag a Crackers based on the characters.
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There’s been a rather dirty word thrown around since Taken live up to its title and caught the imaginations of a wider audience, dadsploitation. Unfortunately, there are films that embody the zeitgeist of the word. Movies where clearly a studio is trying to cash in a trend and aiming it at what they believe to be the target audience of older men who fondle themselves to fantasies of saving a bus load of cheerleaders who fellate them for their efforts.
Thus we have I Am Wrath [2016] starring the Travolta and his amazing technicolor hair. Someone kills his wife because she’s crunched the numbers on water safety and now she knows too much. Luckily for the premise of the movie, Travolta is an ex special forces who has loads of training and hunts down her killer for some revenge but mostly for fun. Considering he seems to be having a lot of fun for a guy freshly made a widower.
Tim then talks about Armed and Dangerous(1986) staring Eugene Levey and John Candy. They play a couple of guys who get fired from their day jobs and end up working together as security guards. This causes them to stumble into a plot by the company to steal merchandise and rip off other employees. It’s best watched while reminding yourself that it’s still better than Candy’s last film, Wagon’s East.
Weltall then talks about Precious Cargo[2016]. It’s back in the same cash-in vein as I Am Wrath. This time it’s Bruce Willis grumping his way around a green screen. It’s a heist style movie and, would you believe it, there are betrayals of trust? Shocking, we know. Next we’ll tell you that there are action scenes in which Willis suffers only a torn sleeve and a mild grimace of disappointment.
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Back at the ranch, we’ve been farming manga reviews by hand just like our grandfathers did. Sure, you can find mass produced manga reviews for a little cheaper at those chain sites. But we feel you lose some of the care that our artisans refuse to compromise on.
Tim reviews Magikano. In it, we have our useless male protagonist who wants to get a perfect attendance award from school. That’s his major ambition and tells us that his personality is as exciting as plain oatmeal. Luckily a busty witch shows up to try and make him into a man and not the before photo in an ad for low testosterone. It manages to bump itself up to a Crackers.
Weltall then talks about City of Walls. A manga set in the now defunct Kowloon district in Hong Kong. There are people and slums, as Kowloon was known for, and they do stuff. For some reason there’s a dude who’s been working on a plane in his basement and dreams of flying it. How the hell our main characters are going to manage to get it to the ground, if not a rooftop, for this to happen is beyond us. Crackers for it all around.
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There’s an old joke that when a horror series gets stale the producers will react in desperation and move it to the vastness of space(see Leprechaun 4 or Jason X). Some wonderfully drugged producer snorting coke through his fifth ruptured nostril decided to do away with the conceit of a series altogther. Why not just begin in space without all that mucking about. And that’s how we got Dracula 3000[2004].
It stars Casper Van Dien as a Helsing descendant running a salvage ship. They run across a fifty year old abandoned transport which originated from the “Carpathian” system. So yes, Dracula decided to send himself priority mail across the galaxy to earth in the year 300X. Of course, he snacked on the staff and got it stranded. Watch a cast of five people fail in stopping a vampire and earth save through the accident of autopilot.
Tim then talks about Mom and Dad Save the Universe(1992). It stars Jon Lovitz as emperor Spengo. Spengo has a bit of a Mavin the Martian problem with earth and wants to blow it up. Before he does, he kidnaps two earthlings to woo the wife. If there’s anything good that came from this it’s that this bomb is the reason that Jon Lovitz left the cast of SNL permanently. That’s a pretty good value for fourteen million dollars.
Weltall then talks about a YouTube channel, Lindybeige. He’s primarily focused on history, weapons and whatever else strikes his fancy. At Weltall’s suggestion, Tim watched a couple videos after the show. He recommends that if you check it out, the pair of video about the katana are excellent starting points.
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We’re back onto the comics this episode and we have managed to find some rather interesting ones. They’re both centered around alternate worlds and have some wonderfully nitpicky things to laugh at.
Tim starts us off with Jaryuu Tensei. The main character is from modern day Japan and, much like the spider manga from 357, he died and was reborn into fantasy world Tolkein-A27Q. And he’s a dragon who’s incredibly powerful. He gives himself a name late in the manga, just before buying a slave to fix her up and resell her. Yes, it runs on banana pants logic. In spite of all this it somehow gets a Borders.
Weltall reviews Mirror which may be both a webcomic and an OEL. There’s a “Mirror World” which magic is flourishing after being separated from our world. As always, it’s not just separated but held apart by a barrier which is starting to fail. Our main characters end up in the magic world and fight for reasons that are kind of baffling. If nothing else, the Batman-esque style written sound effects are hilsious. Still not enough to get it above a Burn It.
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Given it’s rather weird source material and the era out joint review is based on, it’s not much of a surprise that Remo Williams(1985) doesn’t get much love. A movie based on a pulp novel series which is still ongoing for some unbeknownst reason. Our main character is trained in magic martial arts by a racist Korean master who is directed to do so by Wilford Brimely for reasons that only make sense in the film.
Weltall briefly discusses the youtube channel of Officer 401 and recommends anyone looking for police stories seeks it out. Then he delves into The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness[2013]. This is a documentary about Studio Ghibli. Weltall highly recommends it whether you are a fan of their films or just curious to see how an animation studio runs.
Tim then discusses Trailer Park Boys. It’s a Canadian show centering around the hapless members of a trailer park. They’re often focused on attempting to make a lot of money by selling drugs without getting caught. These shenanigans run them afoul of the law and other members of the park. Tim says it’s funny and has a lot of true to life elements within.