Favorite music of '09

2009 was a weird year for music for me 'cause I almost never pay attention to any current music being released. Surprisingly, their was a lot of good shit both by bands I've loved for a while and bands I had never heard of. So here's my top five:

Honorary Mention: Veckatimest - Grizzly Bear


I know everybody and their little brother fucking loves this album, but the only song I like is Two Weeks. Fuck that's such a good song. I can't wait till somebody does some kind of hiphop mashup to that piano.

Favorite Song: Two Weeks



Honorary Mention: Hush - Asobi Seksu



The only reason this album ranks so low is because I discovered and became obsessed with Asobi Seksu only recently. My favorite AS album by far is definitely Citrus, so I've usually just had that on infinite repeat. I have to say my favorite song off of Hush is Me and Mary, the single. It's just a great song.

Favorite Song: Me and Mary



5. Saturdays = Youth - M83


Like Asobi Seksu, M83 is a band I just started listening to this year. This album starts off amazing with the first two and the third songs being pure gold and then I don't what happens exactly, but the rest never lives up.

Favorite Song: Kim and Jessie



4. Swoon - Silversun Pickups



While vastly inferior to their first album, this one does have some good tunes on it. The two singles, Panic Switch and Substitution, or both really good, but for some dumb fucking reason the radio version of Panic Switch cuts out the best part of the song, the crazy echoey reverby solo before the actual solo. Likewise, Substitution has a classy solo that seems to just come out of no where and have nothing to do with the rest of the song.

Favorite Song: Substitution



3. Farm - Dinosaur Jr.



I have to admit, I actually like Farm more than any other album DJ has ever done. I'm sure that makes me super lame to some people, but damn, this album is just hit after hit after hit of amazing songs. Pieces, the opening track, has a very singalongable chorus that blows me away every time, and I swear to God, See You has the coolest fucking guitar rift I ever ever ever heard, and I Don't Wanna Go There is just flat out amazing when the guitar solo kicks in, I mean damn.

Favorite Song: See You



2. There Is No Enemy - Built to Spill



It seems like There Is No Enemy flys all over the map as far as displaying the different lyrical moods of BtS. Songs like Planting Seeds show off their sarcastic and somewhat fun side while Things Fall Apart is a perfect display of their cynical, "I hate the world", "Nothing ever works out the way I wanted it to" side. I fucking love the guitar on the opening track, Aisle 13.

Favorite Song: Things Fall Apart



1. Gorilla Manor - Local Natives



Holy shit, I fucking love this. It's like Band of Horses without all the boring songs. I fucking loved this album the second I put it on; every single song is just fucking fantastic. I had a chance to go see them recently but missed out, but from what I hear, they seem to only play in LA so I'll likely get to see them sometime soon. Seriously, if you like jangle pop at all, this is the album to get.

Favorite Song: Wide Eyes





Wild Card: Gangsta Luv - Snoop Dogg featuring The Dream

Ya Goddamn Right

The Dead Next Door

Re-posted from Deshoblog

Let’s do another Zombie movie.

The Dead Next Door is one of those horror movies that doesn’t get talked about a whole lot, but those that have seen it tend to count it as a personal favorite and/or a guilty pleasure. I had seen fans refer to it as being a pretty good cult film akin to something like Evil Dead multiple times, so I was excited.

I was pretty disappointed.

This movie starts out completely awesome. The zombie apocalypse shows up and there’s well done scenes of general zombie mayhem occuring. The best part is when a zombie is shown with a stack of famous zombie films at a video rental store. From there we see that they’ve established a police force specifically for dealing with the zombies. This in an interesting concept that gets abandoned pretty much right after it gets established. This sucks because a Zombie police squad itself is a fucking great idea for a movie. They could’ve focused solely on these guys and had a great film right there.

After that is where shit gets boring; the plot shifts focus to some scientists who are trying to develop a cure for zombies. This shit is never interesting but it shows up in like every horror movie that’s about zombies. No one wants to see these guys figure out how to stop the one thing that is keeping us watching the film. If they cured the fucking zombies, I wouldn’t watch the damn movie; so you know they’ll never get anywhere with their research, which just makes scenes like these fucking boring because you know they’ll ultimately be fruitless.

Then it almost gets interesting again; almost. They introduce the idea that there are religious cult memebers who believe that the zombies are a punishment/warning from God. Now that’s actually interesting. Like the anti-zombie squad, this idea alone is enough to make an interesting movie. In fact, you’d think the two ideas together would make a legendary horor movie, but man, would you be wrong. Like the scientists, the cult shit never goes anywhere.

Some of the redeaming factors in this movie:

• Zombie cops
• Zombies renting zombie movies
• Every major character is named after a horror personality (Romero, King, Raimi, Savini, etc)
• A zombie’s detached head eats a man’s fingers and we see them fall out the bottom of his head
• One of the main characters looks a lot like Bruce Campbell, even though it isn’t Campbell, his voice is actually dubbed over by Campbell for some fucking reason.
• The effects are actually really well done, especially for being in such a laughably bad low budget affair.
• The title is pretty cool, even though it doesn’t deliver.

It’s hard to really recommend this movie because it gets so damn boring near the end. I guess if you’re gonna give it a shot, shut it off as soon as the scientists show up. You won’t be missing anything at all.

Zombieland

Re-posted from Deshoblog

I love all kinds of horror movies, and zombies are great, sure, but I’m not one of those nerds that will watch any movie about the living dead. Dawn of the Dead was fun (both of them), Shaun of the dead was funner, and Evil Dead/2/Army of Darkness are my favorite undead movies. That’s all I know about Zombie movies.

Shaun of the dead is a fantastic film, but it seems like since it was successful we keep getting a lot of (mostly indie) horror comedies about zombies lately that aren’t anywhere near as good. So much in fact, that they’ve coined the term “Zomedy” which is fucking dumb and annoying.

Zombieland is awesome, but it can’t touch Shaun of the Dead.

You probably already know everything about the plot so I won’t get into too much detail as far as that goes. Besides, all you really need to know is that there’s a geeky, WoW-playing, loner who manages to survive a zombie apocalypse by being smart and sticking to his rules. He meets up with Woody Harrelson who plays a cocky badass and two sisters who are trying to make it to an amusement park in California for vaguely defined reasons. None of this plays out like the trailers implied, but it’s still pretty damn good.

The first thing I noticed was the clever use of typography. Throughout the movie, the main character’s rules are spelled out on screen in comical ways and the opening credits even sort of interact with their surroundings. This was very cool, and I hope to see more stuff like this in the future in all kinds of movies. The second thing I noticed was the soundtrack which was pretty eclectic. You get Metallica, Van Halen, Band of Horses, Doves, The Raconteurs, and some pretty cool instrumental stuff that I’m sure was written just for the movie.

I should point out that, like Shaun of the Dead, the movie favors comedy over horror and there really isn’t anything to be afraid of. It’s too bad because I was hoping for something more like Drag me to Hell, which had genuinely scary moments but was pretty damn funny too. The movie works best when it’s funny; one of the best scenes is when the survivors blow off some steam by destroying everything in a tacky tourist shop off the side of the road. There’s a few dramatic moments too, but they actually seem to work instead of being boring or coming off as cheesy. The movie is just fucking fun, the kind of thing you could watch drunk with some cool friends on Halloween.

Definitely see this movie if you like horror or comedy at all. Woody Harrelson completely knocks it out of the park as a twinkie craving redneck, and that alone is worth seeing.

Doubt

Re-posted from Deshoblog

This shit is spoiler free, so go ahead and read if you haven’t read the manga yet.

Cover for volume 1

Doubt is basically what would happen if you tried to make a Saw manga and then the deal fell through with the movie studio and you had to change some details at the last second so that it didn’t resemble the movie enough to be copyright infringement. Yet it still manages to be a pretty good read by being short and not trying to go overboard with humor or romance or any of that other shit that doesn’t belong in a horror manga. The author apparently drew one of the many Higurashi no Naku Koro ni manga which may or may not give him some added credibility, depending on whether you like that series or not.

The story revolves around this game called rabbit doubt which is never really explained well enough. The rules are pretty vague; but it’s the origin and the purpose of the game that I don’t get. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Who plays this game? Is it like a cellphone MMO or something? Or is it just these characters? I dunno, the game part just seemed half-assed and unnecessary to me. The plot could have worked just as well without it. It’s also likely that these things were explained and I just glossed over them somehow. Anyway, there’s this game where all the characters are rabbits, but on of them is deemed the wolf. The game begins when the wolf offs one of the rabbits, then it’s up to the other rabbits to discover the killer before he kills the rest of the rabbits and I guess wins the game. The characters are players of this game who decide to meet up and do some karaoke one afternoon. The main character heads to the bathroom and sees someone with a giant rabbit head come out of one of the stalls before he blacks out and wakes up in a warehouse or something. Horror ensues.

I had started reading this a while ago and then lost interest because the first chapter is pretty lame, but trust me, it gets a lot more interesting afterwards. The thing is, it never really gets intense or crazy enough to keep you turning pages at a breakneck pace or anything. In fact I only read it so fast because it was short and I wanted to see if the ending would be as shitty as I thought it would. However, even though its so short, it starts to drag in the middle and there’s shit that could have been cut out or narrowed down.

The series throws in enough red herrings and twists and turns to make a good mystery but it never really becomes one. The selling point for me was the ballsy ending the author pulls out at the end. Even though I was sure that the reveal of the villain wasn’t as easy as it seemed. I still didn’t guess who the killer was which is pretty unusual for me. When you’ve seen as many movies and taken as many literature courses as I have, you get pretty good at figuring out twists ahead of time. But this one was set up to where I just didn’t see it coming, and the final pages changed my score from a 7/10 to a 9/10.

One other thing that bugged the hell out of me was the character designs. All of the chicks and dudes looked exactly the same, and there were several times where I saw a character and thought they were somebody else.

You can’t really lose here. If you’re not into horror, it might not float your boat, but there isn’t a whole lot of gore to offend you. If you are into horror, you’ll likely appreciate it as well. Even though I’d give it a 9/10, I get the feeling I’m only so generous because there aren’t enough decent horror manga out there to knock it down a peg; but until those manga come out, you can always read this.

Evangelion 1.0 on the big screen

Re-posted from DeshoblogA whole bunch of these postcardy things were in the theater lobby; awesome sauce, but I wish they were giving posters too.

A long time ago I was in a thread on /tv/ and anonymous asked, “What movie do you wish you had seen in a theater?” and someone said End of Evangelion. A good choice, as EoE had some amazing animation and one of the best dubs I’ve ever seen. So when I found out that Eva 1.0 was playing at a theater only 20 minutes away, I had to be there; and even though I almost didn’t make it, I did end up going and shit was so cash.

Here's my ticket for no reason.

First of all, I gotta say I was surprised by the crowd. I didn’t see any weeaboos or weirdos of any kind. Like, at all. On top of that, there was only one cosplayer and he was just wearing a lab coat and seemed nice and normal enough. I was completely expecting to be annoyed beyond reason, but once the shit started, people were quiet and respectful. I mean, holy shit. This is not the kind of behavior I’ve come to expect from anime/manga fans; I was delighted.

As for the presentation, I was expecting the movie to be on a film roll like most normal movies are (or however those new digital systems work) but it was clearly played off of a DVD, which kinda sucked, if only because it felt a little bit cheesy and the screen wasn’t completely filled. I was also expecting to see some trailers for other Funimation movies or even series, but no, the movie just started playing. However, they fucked up and jumped around a few scenes and there were some weird glitches like a cord wasn’t plugged in right or something. So once they got that all sorted out the movie actually started and went on with no problems.

Now, I’ve seen Eva from start to finish four times now. I’ve seen Death and Rebirth and End of Evangelion back to back about six times. I had seen the fansub of 1.0 before as well, but it had been a long time since, so while I knew what I was in for, I wasn’t completely bored. The movie, as I’m sure you know by now, is fantastic. The animation is absolutely incredible and it just looks all the more phenomenal on a bigass screen. The English dub was a step above decent. Not the best, but still really good. There were a few lines where I was like, “Really? Nothing else worked right there? That’s what you came up with?” I was a little thrown off too by some of the characters’ voices because I guess I was expecting all of the same people to be back from the original dubs. It was like you would see someone come on screen and expect them to sound a certain way and then they don’t; like when you see you’re cousin for the first time in years and he’s going through puberty. Very weird. As far as I could tell, the only voice actor’s that stuck around were Spike Spencer as Shinji and whoever plays Misato (who I always thought did a great job voicing her). The only problem with this movie is that Asuka isn’t in it, but Misato – my second favorite – is, so that was okay. Also, whoever did the voice for Rei this time around did a great job, and Kensuke as well. After the movie was over, the smarter fans hung out and we were lucky enough to be shown the trailer for 2.0.

I don't remember who's blog I stole this from, but I wish had these kind of kid's meals in the U.S.

Anyway, I’m really glad I got to experience the movie on a big screen and I sincerely hope they play 2.0 in theaters as well so I can see Asuka. I’m actually looking forward to buying this, but I think I’m gonna wait til I get a Blu Ray player because I hear the Blu Ray version is complete magic.

Weirdos are moe~

Re-posted from Deshoblog

There’s a growing trend in manga lately where we have a timid male character paired off with a just-plain-fucking-weird female character. No longer content with tsunderes and yanderes, the latest trend seems to be girls that are so odd that they’re cute because of it. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a few examples of moe weirdos ranked in order of strangeness.

3. Sundome

The least weird of the series I plan to talk about is still pretty fucking weird. The main character, Aiba-kun is a spineless wimp who is a part of the Roman club; a club who’s goal is apparently to make sure their members remain virgins throughout high school. No really, that’s literally the point of the club. Anyway, some shit happens and he becomes friends with and subsequently develops a crush on a girl named Kurumi. Kurumi gets her kicks by forcing Aiba-kun to man up and not be such a pussy. Of course, she has to offer perverted rewards in order to pique his interest. However, she swears that she’ll never allow him to ejaculate; go figure.

So Kurumi’s deal is hard to pinpoint. Fan speculation seems to point to the idea of her being either a post-op transsexual, or having some kind of STD or something. Whatever her deal is, she is often visited by an older man who is presumably a doctor of some kind and she tends to spend a lot of time away from school. Add these theories to the weird sexual games she plays with the lead character and it’s all very weird and only kinda moe.

I have to say, this series started out strong but then just got less and less interesting as time went on. The only real reason to continue reading at this point is to find out the truth about Kurumi’s condition.

2. Mysterious Girlfriend X

Quite a bit weirder than Sundome, and a hell of a lot more enjoyable, Mysterious Girlfriend X is by far the best series on this list. MGX started life as a mere oneshot, but it was inevitable that such an interesting an unique idea would be spun off into a full series. So the main character of MGX is perfectly average, agreeable, all-around normal boy Tsubaki. One day, a new girl comes to school and manages to creep everybody out by being mostly silent and sleeping at her desk whenever the chance comes. This keeps up and most people keep their distance, but Tsubaki can’t help but take an interest in the weirdo. So cut to afterschool one day as the new girl is fast asleep at her desk, our hero decides to wake her. She thanks him and walks home. Here’s where shit gets interesting. After she leaves, Tsubaki notices that the new girl left a small puddle of drool on her desk while sleeping and for no fucking reason at all he decides that it would be a good idea to see what it tastes like. So things spiral down to weirder and weirder points from here. Tsubaki gets sick and misses several days of school until the new girl- Ueno- comes to his house and informs him that he is love sick and now has to taste her drool everyday or else his fever comes back. So she sticks her finger in her mouth and lets him taste her drool again, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s perfectly fine the next day. From here they decide to start dating and very weird things continue to happen.

Not only does Ueno have the weird factor with the drool, but she also (for no reason at all) carries around a pair of scissors in her underwear and tends to cut things into neat little shapes whenever Tsubaki tries to get close to her. Add to that the fact that she seems to really like to be naked around Tsubaki (while he’s blindfolded of course). Oh yeah, and that whole drool thing? Apparently tasting each others drool allows them to feel each others emotions. Makes sense to me. Ueno is harder to figure out than the last girl, but the only thing I can figure is that maybe she’s some kind of alien or something. The difference between MGX and Sundome is that Sundome relies heavily on the main characters secret to be interesting; as I said, the only reason I keep reading is to see whether they ever reveal what the deal with that shit is. With MGX, the author doesn’t really need to explain anything for the series to remain interesting, it just is.

I seriously recommend this to anyone who likes any kind of manga, it may sound kind of gross, but it’s actually really cute and rather sweet at times.

1. Choku!

Choku! is a series that I actually just read last night and only has one chapter translated so far. This manga is what led me to type up this whole article; when I read it I just couldn’t believe how fucking weird the main character was. So we have yet another average guy who meets a weird girl with weird fetishes and adventures ensue. I can’t remember the characters’ names, but basically there’s this tall girl who has a crush on this short guy. The guy says let’s just be friends. The girl asks her “friend” what friends do and then tries to do these things with the guy. Also, the girl is obsessed with shitting for some reason and has constant powerful nosebleeds; so powerful in fact, that she has to wear a gas mask looking thing in order to keep blood from splattering on a wedding dress she’s wearing while taking a picture with the main guy who is also wearing a wedding dress. Also, she has a weird motorcycle with some kind of mascot side cart.

wat

The artwork is kind of cute, but I don’t know if I really wanna read about a girl who likes shit and has constant bloody noses. We’ll see.

Anyway, if nothing else, check out Mysterious Girlfriend X, it’s a good read for sure.

Kino no Tabi Volume 1: Book One of the Beautiful World

Re-posted from Deshoblog

I’ve heard great things about the anime “Kino’s Journey”, but I haven’t yet had a chance to check it out. If it’s anywhere near as good as the novel(s) then I’ll definitely see it eventually.

In the first of eight books in the series that Tokyopop is putting out (Wikipedia says there’s ten volumes so far/all together but TP only has eight volumes on their release schedule) we join Kino and her talking motorcycle Hermes on a series of episodic adventures through several different countries in her world. Most of these countries look pretty nice on the outside, but as the individual stories progress their true nature becomes evident, often involving violence or just plain foolishness.

The way each chapter is presented, the series comes off very similar to The Twilight Zone. Kino and Hermes end up in a new country and invariably find out that it has an unsavory past or some kind of ridiculous town policy. A good example would be the opening chapter which deals with Kino’s home country. As a traveler named Kino (not the title character) enters the country he is greeted by a young girl on the verge of her twelfth birthday. She shows him to her family’s inn where he stays and fixes up their old motorcycle. While there he has a profound affect on the main character. It’s her country’s custom to perform a kind of lobotomy on a child’s twelfth birthday, thus helping them to become adults who love nothing more than to do their job and contribute to society. As she begins to question the necessity of this she decides she wants to become an adult by maturing and not by surgery. Her parents aren’t happy about this and decide stabbing her would be for the best. Luckily Kino (not the main character) jumps in the way in the knick of time to get stabbed and save the main character. It’s at this point that Hermes starts talking and when she sees an opening the main character jumps on the motorcycle and drives away. She soon decides that she’ll take Kino’s place and become a traveler as well, spending only three days in every country she comes across in order to understand their civilization.

POSITIVES:

Most of the stories have a dystopian future feel to them, which I tend to be a fan of, and it works really well. Every chapter stands alone well enough that you could hand it to someone randomly and they’d be able to understand it without any problems. The adaptation into English is amazing, the only other novels from Japan that I’ve ever read (Battle Royale and the first volume of the Fullmetal Alchemist novelizations) were handled by Viz and both had significant grammar and spelling errors, which is extremely irritating. Consequently, while the front cover is pretty badly handled, the back cover is very nicely done. I can’t tell you why, but I really like the way it looks.

NEGATIVES:

I’ve never been happy with the way Tokyopop markets their products. I can’t even explain how much it bothers me when they put that big stripe on the right side of every cover that screams TOKYOPOP!!!! What the hell is that about? Well, luckily they didn’t try to pull that off with their new Pop Fiction line. However, instead we get these crazy graphic arts class photoshop experiments on the cover of every novel they’re releasing, and even worse than that, for some reason that I can’t fathom, they took all of the inside illustrations and scaled them down to make this weird film strip looking thing on every chapter title page. Why couldn’t they just put the pictures in the way they did originally? This blows my mind, I’ve always felt that these kinds of things should be left alone and made to look exactly the same as they do in Japan. We should have got the same cover with English text and no company logos, color illustrations left in tact and in place where they belong, and black and white chapter illustrations left alone. On top of all that, the chapters have been reorganized to be chronologically ordered (they were apparently out of sequence in the original) and they didn’t bother to translate the title into English (though something tells me this has to do with the fact that ADV owns the rights to the anime, maybe).

OVERALL

I have to say I’m proud of Tokyopop. Aside from some extremely annoying and unnecessary changes to the layout of the book, it doesn’t look half bad (pretty good I’ll admit) it’s just kind of annoying. I love the stories and the characters, and am definitely a fan of the fantastic translation. Many people have read the back cover and flipped through the book with interest, so I have a waiting list now for friends who want to borrow it.

Overall I give Kino no Tabi Volume 1 an A-, go out and buy it, you’ll be glad you did, and if you’re more literary pals are anti-anime, they may actually get a kick out of this.