A pair of big screen spectacles by octogenarian directors that I’m pleased to have been able to see on the big screen.
Tag: anime
I started to write this round-up of the as-ever ridiculous pile of comics I walked away from the two Vintage Stock locations with on the Thursday following that weekend run; it was the first time I’d felt clear-headed and wide-awake during an evening all week long. Heaven knows this ain’t ever happening the night after — no, Saturday evenings after a successful outing are spent doing the ritualistic peeling of all the tape and price tags off the comic bags. Maybe if I’m lucky, actually opening one of the action figures I bought. Deeply silly how exhausting peeling a bunch of labels and tape can be, but after the twentieth time a piece of Scotch tape has decided to rip instead of cleanly come off of a poly bag, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to expend a lot of extra effort for the rest of an evening either …
Then the rest of that week and the following week got away from me, and … well, at first I thought wouldn’t it be funny if I pulled this whole thing off on a Saturday evening, like I said I couldn’t? And, reader, I did manage to finish writing up the pile from April 22nd, but I only managed to get this past weekend’s books unstickered and organized before crashing.
Let’s dig into the piles, shall we?
DRAGON BALL SUPER: SUPER HERO is everything I wanted from a new Dragon Ball anime in 2022. The series’s star rivals Son Goku and Vegeta are sidelined for the duration, allowing other members of the long-running franchise’s super-powered roster of martial arts defenders to shine: primarily, former would-be world conqueror and present day babysitter Piccolo and his ex-pupil, former world savior and present day harried scholar Son Gohan, whose three year old daughter Piccolo has spent an AWFUL lot of time looking after. The story concerns the revival of the long-beaten Bond villain-esque organization the Red Ribbon Army; its current leader, Magenta, has decided they need a trump card, and the man to craft it for them is Dr. Hedo, the grandson of long-dead Dr. Gero. Gero’s crowning abomination, the living biological weapon Cell, was obliterated by reluctant hero Gohan when he was just a boy in one of the series’s more spectacular climaxes and Magenta wants an improved version of the monster. But with Magenta having convinced Hedo that Goku and his friends constitute a rival organization seeking to rule the world, what the Red Ribbons first wind up with are the superheroic androids Gamma 1 & 2. Smart use of the series history, using the fact that, oh yeah, Piccolo WAS once a well-known supervillain to give these androids, who are programmed to think themselves champions of justice, a solid initial target; by the same token, the fact that Piccolo’s “the smart one” among our present-day protagonists means once he’s thought to be out of the picture, he’s able to sneak into the Red Ribbons’ compound and pull together a plan to take them down, hopefully for good this time. Probably incomprehensible to anyone not up on the series’s lore (or, at the very least, they won’t have the same level of investment), but for aficionados, a funny, exciting good time that does shamelessly play on our memories of Gohan and the rest’s battles with the Androids and Cell, but in such spectacular fashion that I really didn’t care. Tetsuro Kodama’s film (from a script by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama) is the first Dragon Ball animation to be entirely 3D rendered, and in the early going it’s very IN YOUR FACE about it, opening a swooping and swaying view of the world from the eyes of one of Hedo’s insect drones — but as the film goes on it settles into a more typical groove stylistically; the action is furious and flashy, new powers cool and slickly designed. I think the only weak spot is the fake Hans Zimmer score; it works in the moment, but god, as I was waiting for the post-credit scene, the repetition of the core theme got a little obnoxious. Overall, though, I came away just thrilled to bits that 2022’s entry in the Dragon Ball anime franchise was a fun throwback to my favorite part of the Dragon Ball Z story starring probably my favorite franchise heroes that ALSO added some fun new bits to the ongoing universe.
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My Year of Movies, 2021
If there’s one thing I can say for 2021, it’s: thank the heavens, at least the movie theaters were open again. Sure, you might still catch a life-altering contagious respiratory illness while packed in with a bunch of strangers all, together, staring up at beautiful faces larger than your house — but in a place the size of my hometown, and me being as vaxxed as one can be, I’ve considered the personal risk as slim as it could be given the state of things. So in the back half of the year, I did see a pretty fair number of films as the filmmakers intended, outside the comfort of home. What follows are cross-posts of the reviews I wrote on my Facebook page from July all the way through the week of Christmas covering almost every theatrical outing (plus, oh yeah, two somewhat notable streaming flicks) that I took in during that span of time. Enjoy!
In which Captain JLS discusses the biggest Robotech-related news since the announcement of The Shadow Chronicles in the early 2000s — Harmony Gold & Big West have, hopefully once & for all, settled their differences and unreleased Macross material and merchandise, new & old, can reach these shores through official channels starting … well, apparently about a month ago. Also featured: bits & bobs of Robotech & Robotech-adjacent merch ranging from the very recent all the way back to late last year.