Not sure how to spend your hard-earned yet rapidly-devaluing dollar? Feel like saving up for the future would be a tragic mistake? Well, pilgrim, we’ve got you covered.
First, you’ve got your usual weekly DVD releases. I find myself surprisingly excited by the pending re-release of Robocop — I’ve never actually seen the movie in its entirety, but I suspect it’s going to hold up fairly well to my scrutiny. Its vision of the “future” strikes me as sober and realistic, which is always the least embarrassing sort of cinematic future when you look back a few years down the line.
And then there’s the weekly anime supplement, for which I serve as a gracious host despite the fact that most anime makes me want to punch people in disgust. Of course, so do most movies, but there’s that certain je nais c’est quoi about anime. (That’s French for “stigma,” and it’s a stigma that the medium has visited entirely upon itself. As this week’s column says, “One of the most perplexing things about Japan is that some of the better mainstream anime shows are based on pornographic games and cartoons.”) But hey, whatever. I won’t judge you for your tastes.
Unless you’re one of those people who keeps clicking on Kotaku’s stupid “OMG real life anime-inspired porn!!” entries. In that case, I want to punch you in disgust.
I also kind of want to punch Interpol for their forehead-slapping belief that the fact that you can reverse an application of the Photoshop “Twirl” filter by applying a reversed twirl is some kind of super-secret spy knowledge. Really, hasn’t the entire world known that for like a decade?
Ha, ha, just kidding. I wouldn’t really punch Interpol. That would make me some kind of terrorist.
Please don’t put me on the no-fly list, ECHELON :(
Everything about Robocop holds up surprisingly well… except for the way the ED-209 squeals like a pig after being upended. Wouldn’t it have been better to have the whir of servos and the grinding of gears? Otherwise, it’s a great film. And the biggest surprise is that the man who played the villain went on to become the father on That 70’s Show!
I remember one guy who used to say that you only need to shoot Robocop in the mouth to kill him. That would be awesome.
Robocop is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is sarcastic, critic and ultimately a fun movie to watch. It stands out even today (except for some ED-209 scenes as stated before). Just a note of how ahead of its time it was: in 1986, when Robocop was released, music CD’s were still not a part of everyone’s lives, yet in the film they appear as a video storage device, predicting the advent of DVD’s!
Die out of envy, Nostradamus. Oh, he’s already dead.
You Kill Me was actually a pretty good movie — especially when you compare it to the mess that was 28 Weeks Later (which turned from awesome to terrible after its first 15 minutes). If you didn’t read up on it, it’s about a hitman for the Polish mob with a drinking problem. He gets sent to AA so he can get better, and because he loves his work, he genuinely wants to quit the habit so he can start killing people again. Also, Ben Kinglsey is awesome in pretty much any movie he’s in.
Reign Over Me does look like crap, but I heard from that kotaku post that Shadow of the Colossus features heavily in the movie or something, so that’s enough to maybe make me rent it.
Considering I have that “rent as many movies as you want for a monthly fee,” so I have plenty of time for lame stuff.
But what would SotC have to do with somebody’s family dying during the 9/11 attacks?
But I will join the consensus and say that Robocop is, indeed, one of the best movies out there. One of the last things Orion Pictures put out, and it happened to be good.
And I’ll go ahead and say what nobody else will – Lucy Liu and Carla Gugino in “Rise”? Yes, please :)
I have no compunction about making myself the lowest common denominator.
Reign Over Me is sub-mediocre sentimental crap designed to draw emotions from 9/11 and filming Manhattan. Don Cheadle is totally wasted, and Sandler hasn’t done any good “serious” work before or after Punch Drunk Love.
SPOILERS
That said, I think their use of Shadow of the Colossus was relatively clever and one of the few well-used metatextual uses of video game media that I’ve ever sene. The idea is that Sandler’s wife and kids both died on 9/11, and he has a mental breakdown. Because he’s rich from the govt. settlement money, he spends every day bicycling around Manhattan and obsessively replaying SoTC in his apartment over and over again. So why would we he be obsessed with defeating a game where climb up giant building-size monsters and collapsing them….
P.S. SUX-5000.
Don’t punch Interpol! Carlos D. rules, and they’re the kind of nice guys who, when you buy their records on vinyl, give you a free download of all the tracks.
Wait… Different Interpol? You can punch them all you want.
I dispute some of those reviews. 28 Weeks Later is unbelievably contrived and undoes the good of the first film, while Surf’s Up is definitely above average.
To be fair to Fate/Stay Night, it’s not really all that pornographic in that it makes you sit through about twenty hours of text defiling everything you know about mythology before you get to your boobies. I kind of suspect the porn-free PS2 version would fair rather better than the PC version with it’s superfluous sex scenes. I’d probably question the idea of calling F/SN “mainstrem anime” anyway (I fail to see how anything which airs post-midnight can be considered mainstream).
What I won’t mention is that the Galaxy Angel anime series weren’t based on the games at all, but that would imply I actually have an interest in the show …
I think it can safely be considered mainstream due to its sheer prevalence in Japanese shops. Fate/Stay Night is everywhere in Akihabara, and I didn’t even venture into the adult floors. Well, just once, but only because that’s where the men’s room was.
There’s no denying that Fate is popular – hell, even Capcom recently cashed in it’s popularity with Fate/Tiger Colosseum on PSP – but that’s nothing to do with the anime version, it’s popularity is derived pretty much entirely from the original work. What I was questioning was calling the anime version mainstream, when infact it was no more popular than any other random late-night anime show. It’s not something that someone who isn’t already an anime viewer would have watched.
I was going to post the same thing ShakeWell posted, but he beat me to the punch . *ducks*
Oh, please. Don’t worry about ECHELON. Everybody knows that it’s going to rebel against its master and merge with the MAJESTIC-12 computer system in Area 51 and then take over the brain of a nanite-enhanced superspy to become a world-spanning techno-god… wait, maybe you should be worrying.