The second half of the Attack on Titan live action movie, Attack on Titian: the end of the world. I saw it dubbed in Russian with bad English subtitles.

The digital effects are impressive especially if you have seen the anime. yes, they did manage to do the titans live action. But there is a whole lot of steam probably to hide the seams. And yes, the crazy glasses wearing lady scientist is well represented. I mean the lady twerks an RPG-7, how crazy cool is that?

I can only recommend it if you want to know what the story is while waiting for season two of the anime to ever appear.

And then there is Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Ars Nova DC the movie. It summarizes the series in the first 45 minutes. Really its only a highlight reel. But in the second half we get new story and some new ships (Fletcher class destroyer Natori light cruisers and fast battleship Hiei). I peaked at the next movie Cadenza and we get the Yamato superbattleships. I mean it's a Japanese anime you gotta have the Yamato class. I have to say models of these ships would be stunning as they're not your normal grey. Pink, purple, sky blue… really would look great on the shelf. And the girls are cute too. Shazam!

That Blue Steel thing sounds good!

I just finished a couple of series. One was “Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun” - or “Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun”

I liked it because it totally mixed up all the normal anime character roles.

It's about a girl who has a mega crush on this boy in her class: a big tall guy who's stoic and looks like an athlete. She tries to ask him out but gets too nervous and tells him she's his biggest fan instead, so he gives her an autograph… which she has no idea what to do with.

It turns out that he writes and illustrates a girl's romance manga and he though she was a fan of that. She ends up helping him with it and meets the rest of his helpers along the way (background artist, effects artist etc), as well as the models he bases his characters on- a very vain but painfully self concious boy is the model for the heroine, a handsome girl who plays heroic men in the school dramas and who all the girls fawn over becomes a model for a male charter in his manga… We learn that he identifies more with his main female character than his male one etc.

In the story there are a lot of boyish, confident girls and guys who are self concious or whatever… It's just nice to see the traits being mixed up a bit and in that way it arrives at a sort of almost realism: people are weird and don't always conform to stereotypes, or they try to but just don't fit them. And it also lends a more realistic view to the creation of a comic, in that you identify strongly with your characters, have trouble drawing certain things and scenes, need references, editing oversight, have trouble coming up with plots or ways to get your characters from here to there and so on.

It's a silly, light comedy, but had enough little bits of “meat” to be interesting.

I just started watching the “Republic of Doyle” I did not know there was a part of Canada that was so Irish..

I've been rewatching Lexx… I think I now like the bits I didn't when I was a teenager and hate the parts I use to like.

Still it is one weard show!

I am into the last season of ST: DS 9 and the whole war thing gave the writersame the chance to drag out every war story trope ever. Somehow having a planetary siege feature characters and dialogue out of Platoon or Hamburger Hill just seems so anachronistic. Sure Klingons would spout things like a barbarian warrior or samurai, but the Federation troops sounding like Vietnam grunts or a World War II GI ? One would also think that Star Fleet would have dedicated ground pounders. Most fans realized this and came up with the Federation Marines. The shows always refused. The security guys are supposed to do that. Right that grey jumpsuit is perfect for ground combat. A Klingon is more sensibly dressed for ground pounding with the leather armor and spiked boots.

And the anime Gate is turning out to be better and better with every episode. The main character is a slacker Otaku who is an expert special forces who doesn't apply himself outside of Fandom but is an excellent soldier. There is a great bit with the JSDF air mobile troops consciously acting out Apocalypse Now, just like soldiers would. Great stuff. Really worth watching. Great meta stuff but the characters are believable genre savvy types like a lot of the guys I served with.

Call Me Tom wrote:
I've been rewatching Lexx… I think I now like the bits I didn't when I was a teenager and hate the parts I use to like.

I have two full collections of the whole series on DVD, that's how much I LOVED it. 3rd series is AMAZING, 2nd series is gold and shit mixed together, 1st series is weird and cool, last series is strictly for the fans and just gloriously silly.

bravo1102 wrote:
Somehow having a planetary siege feature characters and dialogue out of Platoon or Hamburger Hill just seems so anachronistic.

I read a Gizmodo article the other day where they said: “Here's a bunch of war books that are essential reading for people writing military SciFi”
The trouble was that apart from a measly 2 exceptions EVERY single one was about US conflicts from a US only perspective.
And even the exceptions were lame:
One was about Russian female fighterpilots during WW2- so it was a situation hat was an exception and only bought up because it was novel.
The other was about women fighting on the side of the North Vietnamese army- so all you get there is the “enemy” perspective of another typical US conflict.
It's no wonder that every single America military space show is ALWAYS based on the same few American wars: Revolutionary war, Civil War, WW2, Korea, Vietnam. With a delicate sprinkle of WW1, Bosnia, and Iraq 1 and 2.

Those guys need to start reading about non-US wars, or about parts of those wars that didn't involve the US.

———————-

Have you seen “Upotte!!”?
It's a very freaky anime. Very freaky! I still haven't fully wrapped my mind around it.
A bunch of Middle school girls are actually guns… They are named after various assault rifles, which they train to use and compete with, but they actually ARE guns as well… in some way.
Their sisters in high school are battle rifles, and their sisters in grade school are sub machine guns,
They can never move up a grade because the type of gun they are will always be in that grade…
Some of the girls wear thongs because the gun they are has a skeleton stock. The AuStyre rifle girl has an optional longer barrel, which means she suddenly gets longer hair and becomes bolder.

They can get shot and it doesn't hurt them… Because they're guns and not people… but they ARE people and they use guns…
IT DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This show is aimed a very weird gun fetishists of the worst sort, I'm sure this would make perfect sense to Ted Nugent.

So I take it Henry V isn't on the list. You want to write about war you have to internalize the St Crispin day speech.

I tried to start with the next seasons of Durara X2 but the story telling is so involved with more characters introduced and episodes running backwards that it is hard to follow. What is meant by running backwards is that the action is told in a series of nested flashbacks, with each one explaining the events that just happened. Totally unlike Star Trek it is NOT a series where each episode reminds me of other shows I have seen .

During a bout of depresasion I watched 8 seasons of big bang theory. It's an odd show… well not odd exactly. I mean it's exactly what you expect from a US sitcom, it's quite funny and very formulaic. It occurred to me while I was midway through it that I didn't actually like any of the characters. I could relate to them all in different ways but like them, nope. It also doesn't seem to know whether it should be proud to be geek or ashamed of it.

It's hard for me to like shows with laugh tracks, and then I don't like the characterizations in Big Bang. So after watching 1-1/2 episodes, I generally shut up about it since so many of my friends like it and I. Really. Don't.

I just finished watching the 3 seasons of The Newsroom. Now I'm going through withdrawal. Sorkin is a phenomenal writer, the cast was wonderful (I love just about everything that has Sam Waterston's name to it), and the issues are still timely, even though the series ended in 2014. In fact, I think it should be mandatory viewing for all US voters.

Genejoke wrote:
It also doesn't seem to know whether it should be proud to be geek or ashamed of it.

Ashamed, firmly ashamed. Characters are only rewarded for doing “non-geek” things, or for doing “geek” things in a “non-geeky” way.
All aspects of being geeky are treated as an immature little secret life. Typical mainstream American TV show. Very sad.

——–

I'm watching more anime (ugh, gawd… I know).
This time the second season of Log Horizon has grabbed my interest. The show has evolved from the “real world people stuck in a computer RPG game”. They've come to think of the game reality as their own. The players are growing up there and having life experiences… There's politics, economics, policies to help the poor, it's a complex society.
There are a lot of characters in this show and they're all developing into fun familiar figures.

Another one was There's Gonna Be Twin Tails!
This was an action techno-magical girl genderswap fighting show. But what it REALLY is is just a massive spoof on all those genres. A good old crazy spoof anime that laughs at itself a bit too much. It was a good bit of fun.
I love that all the bad guys are basically extreme parodies of the fans of the very genres the show is lampooning! They're all crazy perverts, it's hilarious.

Key Largo
The Big Heat
White Heat
The Beast of the City
Scarface (1932 & 1983)
Little Caesar
The Public Enemy
The Departed
In Harm's Way
The Wings of Eagles
The Battle of the River Plate
Liberation
Waterloo
War and Peace (2016)
The Big Trail
The Man who shot Liberty Valance
The Northwest Passage

Movies. The good stuff I've missed and not so good stuff I'm curious about and a few old favorites just because everything can be seen in wide-screen now as opposed to a 19" TV on the Million Dollar movie like when I was a kid.

And of course the latest version of War and Peace by BBC

Die Hard. Except for the hair styles, it's aged well. And it makes my heart break a little all over again knowing there will be no more luscious growls from dear Alan Rickman.

Ah Die hard… one of the few movie franchises that gazumped the titles of their porn parodies.

Stranger things.

A great homage to 80s movies, really enjoyed it as I was in the mood for a little nostalgia.

I have heard good things about that!

I have just started watching Maria Holic.
It's a very silly crazy anime…
It's about a lesbian girl who goes to an all girls school hoping to meet her true love, but instead gets stuck with a super bitchy, evil, nasty boy in drag. It's just weird.

I'm watching Stranger Things and I agree, the kids are straight out of some 80s flicks and kinda fun for that reason. And it's a hoot to see Matthew Modine as Mr Menacing, but Winona Ryder's character makes me cringe. Seriously. I think it's best for me to stop watching than to see more of her crazy “but I'm not crazy!!” desperation.

And I feel similarly about Mr Robot. I thought the first season was solid, but now it just seems like cardboard figures shuffling along on a cardboard stage.

I don't have much patience with one note characters

A parcel of westerns including Rio Bravo, Rio Lobo, El Dorado, 3:10 from Yuma, High Noon

And I just started a miniseries I last saw in 1989, ANZACs: The War Down Under. Portions were directed by George Miller which I didn't know the first time around.

Rewatched Nightmare on Elm St. film series… I always thought that the second one didn't make much sense for the series… now I'm more convinced it doesn't really belong…

I haven't watched a nightmare on elm street 2 since I was 9, it was kind of scary then but I don't remember a lot about it.

I've watched a few things lately.

Suicide squad…. the reviews are pretty accurate, it's a mess of a film. That said it does have a sense of fun to it in places.

Finding Dory, it's good. It's a standard pixar film really. Life lessons, goofy characters and amazing visuals.

Star trek Beyond. which was very good.

Star trek… DS9… I finished my rewatch and loved it, although they didn't fully marry up the episode of the week stuff with the ongoing plots all that well. The stand alone episodes felt jarring later on. Some great episodes in there though.

star trek Voyager… I'm on season 5 now, previously I hadn't seen much beyond the first season but the later stuff does get better as I had heard all along. Also 7 of 9… good eye candy.

Voyager was a great show in its own right, just as good as the rest of the Star Trek shows. I think Janeway's weirdly anachronistic character as captain was a bit of a turn off at the start, maybe there was sexism there in the dislike too, but from my perspective it was the anachronism that was the issue: A hairstyle from the late 1800s and a voice to match… and she also fetishised that type of character on the holodeck. It was an odd fit with the show.
But things got so much better.

I've been watching The Last Man on Earth, by Will Forte.
It's so, so funny. :)
Some “virus” killed off everyone, apparently. Will's character spends two years looking for survivors, writing “Alive in Tucson” on billboards as he travels all around the US.
He ends up settling in Tucson and slowly growing crazy, filling a big house with valuable paintings, destroying things, getting hairier and grottier…

And then a woman shows up and things change for him.
A very, very annoying woman.

Sense8. Again. I needed a Sun fix bad.

The Last Man on Earth went in silly directions… it was mostly funny but it really seemed to me that the creators approached the original concept as a goof- a pilot they weren't really invested in and didn't know if it'd be picked up.
The writing has a sort of “on the fly” feeling to it and it's not well rounded out. They have arcs and other characters, but it feels like they're faking it, pretending to have a bigger plan to the whole series, they're really just winging it.
Secondary characters are just not fleshed out at all, they're like cardboard cutouts and are only given a bit more life and motivation in the few solo scenes they have, in scenes with the two main characters they're limited to simple reactions.

It's like a tutorial in bare bones writing.


———————

On the subject of minimal writing, I've been watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
That started out very bare bones, like something a group of friends came up with through improvisation and the characters were impossible for me to differentiate from each other, but as you go on through the episodes and series it gets MUCH better, cleverer, and more nuanced!
Initially the comedy is very, very cringey, almost pianfully so, but it moves away from that a bit as it goes on.
Banes recommended this to me and I'm glad. It's great. :D
All the characters are evil, awful people.

My star trek marathon approaches the end. I finished Voyager, which lame ending aside turned out a lot better than I expected as it was previously my least favourite star trek show that I had seen. Speaking of which I had almost never watched Star trek enterprise. It's a show I never gave the time of day when it aired and watching it now I'm really enjoying it.

I took a break from Start trek to watch Fargo season 2, that was excellent. If you haven't seen Fargo, do it, do it now.

I dunno, I haven't yet seen the movie version. :)

Watching films…
I saw Battleship the other day.
It REALLY WAS a movie made about a board game. WTF? WHHYYYY????? >:[
It had very bad SciFi, military jingoism, and a massive turgid hardon for veterans. As if a silly scfi movie about a boardgame will make them proud and honour them.

The boardgame elements were so dumb and stood out apart from the rest of the stuff:
- The enemy vessels fired orange pins, like in the game, and could only do that when it was their “turn”.
- All ship battles were turn based.
- They had to find the enemy using a grid map and fire blind.
- They used the USS New Jersey as their Battleship.

All in all it was dumb (oh SO dumb), but competent.

————————

Currently watching Coyote Ugly.
My impression is that it's a bit of a girly movie… The women are generically “Hollywood” sexy, but it seems to be a love story and a movie about girls bonding. It's sexy in a very safe, unsexy way, if that makes sense? A girl in the big bad city making her dreams come true.

I've only seen halfway through though.
Oh, and there's a non-ocka Aussie in it. Interesting.

ozoneocean wrote:
I dunno, I haven't yet seen the movie version. :)

Watching films…
I saw Battleship the other day.
It REALLY WAS a movie made about a board game. WTF? WHHYYYY????? >:[
It had very bad SciFi, military jingoism, and a massive turgid hardon for veterans. As if a silly scfi
- They used the USS New Jersey as their Battleship.

Did you watch the same movie? It was USS Missouri which is in Pearl Harbor Oahu.
New Jersey is in Camden across the harbor from USS Olympia.

The movie went beyond mere jingoism, it was a recruiting poster pure and simple. And it proved just how butt ugly those Navy camouflage uniforms were.

But it did get me to finally visit an Iowa class ship museum. USS Wisconsin in Norfolk VA.

I've been going through John Wayne movies and Clint Eastwood movies. I also threw in the remakes of True Grit and 310 to Yuma.

I watched it last week and must have miss-remembered :(
I visited both when they were on active service as working battleships in service back in the ‘80s and ’90s so I mix them up XD

I always have to mention that because I effing LOVE battleships and I still can't beleive I got to do that!!!
The US Navy is pretty awesome just for that.

That Navy camo is moronic. Do they really wear that now? The old tan stuff was better but still odd. Personally I think the blue one piece coveralls of the British and Aussie navies are the better service uniforms for working on ships. Same with the colour coded overalls of the US Navy carrier flight crews.

The Navy digital camouflage is not for shipboard use anymore because it wasn't flame retardant. They wear dark blue coveralls just like everyone else.

The marpat (Marine Pattern) like Navy camouflage is restricted to off board and special operation types.

The Navy always had too many uniforms. Or so my Navy Reserve friends would complain. The Navy still differentiates duty and service uniforms.

Because of the 50th anniversary of the first.broadcast of Star Trek, I have been watching original series episodes. Also hoping to get some inspiration for continuing writing a new installment of my comic.

So THAT'S why that's all over Facebook!
Good to know about the uniform details! Thanks for that.

——————

I'm still slowly going through Coyote Ugly and not finished it yet. It's dull to me.
I think I've figured out what it is though: the 21st century version of Flashdance.
Not as iconic of course, but the same sort of thing- “smalltown” Girl with big dreams compromises them in a seemingly exploitative way, although it's really a female focussed fantasy of that kid of exploitation, but in the end she finally gets the courage to follow her dreams.

That's still a prediction though because I haven't yet made it to the end.

Corpse Party. Four part OVA that is a triumph of horror in the best Japanese style. They added a 10 minute missing segments bit.that clears up a couple of bits but you just won't be ready for what happens.

And there's a great “Another” like twist at the end. The solution to the puzzle isn't what's important nor is one even possible because there is always a piece missing…