Blog Archives

You get what you pay for and in cinematic terms the currency, as everyone should know, is genre. If you go to see a big budget action movie, you should probably expect a big budget action movie and all that entails, and you really shouldn’t complain if you get it. In my opinion, it’s important to be clear on this concept; that way you don’t end up sitting behind me in the cinema making annoying pseudo-intellectual comments about a) the … (read more)

Genre is a funny thing. On the one hand, it gives you a ballpark for your expectations. Science fiction? Space ships and aliens. Horror? Dark scary places and the liberal splashing about of blood. Gundam? Bloody big robots. But on the other hand, genre can also confine and confuse in the face of reality, and looking at genre definitions across cultures can make things even harder. Black Butler (known to the early uptakers as Kuroshitsuji) originally ran in a … (read more)

Jyu Oh Sei, based on a three book manga by Natsumi Itsuki, is possibly one of the more underrated anime you could do yourself a favour and watch. Think Asmiov crossed with Golding – a kind of Lord of the Flies in space, where man is reduced to the most basic needs of survival, where the alien plant life is both beautiful and deadly, and where the rules are completely made to be broken.

Thor and Rai are twins … (read more)

For anyone who’s played even five minutes of the long-running Koei title Dynasty Warriors, the concepts driving the Capcom franchise Sengoku Basara won’t be all that alien. Basically, they’re what’s quaintly titled a ‘crowd fighting game’. If body count stats are your thing, if you like watching that ticker go up too fast to count, it’s the game for you. Games of this kind I’ve found involve a lot of dramatic posturing, a lot of powering up, and more … (read more)

A little while ago, this reviewer was seen complaining about a certain live action film’s failure to translate coherently from its source material. And admittedly, it’s possibly an unfair criticism. After all, a feature film is a limited frame of time and a manga series - particularly a long running manga series – has years to tell its story (and in film’s defense, some manga reads like the author doesn’t know where the hell it’s going, either).

The makers of … (read more)

I’ll freely admit it – I am vulnerable to franchising. Get me hooked on one thing, and I’ll seriously consider all the resulting variations and spin offs that get churned out. The cynical side of me knows it’s only a cash-in. All this trans-media marketing – games to books, books to series, series to comics, comics to movies, movies to games ad infinitum – is about one thing: how many dollars in how many markets the Powers That Be can … (read more)

There are levels of disappointment in this world. We all should know this by now. Finding out your latest crush is not at all like you thought is somewhere around the level of a mild case of indigestion. Not getting that pay rise you’d hoped for registers somewhere around that punch-to-the-gut level. Discovering the last Tim Tam is gone is upping the ante somewhat to the equivalent of a great gaping hole in existence, worse if it directly follows the … (read more)

It’s both a blessing and a curse that Bleach is the kind of show it is. With its non-stop action and a vast array of characters it’s little wonder it’s so popular; after all, when you practically have every possible character type covered – from the rebellious hero with the heart of gold to the comical and lucky bumbler (and so on and so forth) – you basically have something that will appeal to everyone. But the very things that … (read more)