Serdar

Kakashi, or “Scarecrow”, is aptly named. He’s a scrawny little tyke with an unruly bush of pale hair, a ragged suit of clothes and a head stuffed full of dreams. One day he’s going to cut loose from his little seaside town and go around the world—fulfill all the fantasies that his father’s adventure diary touched off in him. The only problem is his total lack of a plan. A bicycle-driven propeller screw does not a seagoing vessel make, and Kakashi and his two (increasingly disgruntled) friends find this out the hard way.

Then Kakashi’s luck takes a turn, when a luxury airship—a rare and eye-popping spectacle—puts in to port at their town’s airfield. So desperate is Kakashi to see the world that he risks life and limb to stow away on board the airship in the cargo hold, where he quickly makes friends with another stowaway—a puppy. And in another part of the hold is yet another bunch of stowaways, the “Man Chicken Gang”, hijackers who ransack the passengers at gunpoint and toss them overboard into the ocean. (Well, they did give them life rafts…)

[Review written for AMN. Click here to read full text.]

The title should tell it.  Criterion is preparing its first wave of Blu-ray releases for this coming October.  Here's the list:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

Last Emperor is almost certainly getting snapped up on this end, but I'm faintly startled that no Kurosawa made the list. I suspect they're going by what sells best.  But my god, the fun has just begun, people.

Iron Man was everything I had hoped it would be and more.

A more coherent discussion of it will have to wait until I have a disc of the movie in hand, but

a) go see it now; it works beautifully on a big screen

b) Robert Downey, Jr., is only one part of a wonderfully-composed cast (Jeff Bridges and Gwyneth Paltrow rounded out the chemistry)

c) the special effects, as spectacular as they are, are never less than completely convincing, which is really saying something these days.

As I told my friends, "I still can't find my butt.  I think it was blown through the back wall of the theater."

The one-two punch of work and real life has left me without a great deal to talk about as of late, but here's some tidbits.

My last bit of foraging at Book-Off turned up a fun new manga: Batten, the adventures of Tsubaki Seijuro, a flamboyantly-dressed samurai who walks around in geisha getup and dispenses justice with both his sword and his mega-stacked platform geta.  I don't expect to be seeing this in translation anytime soon, so if you know any Japanese at all you might be inclined to snap up a used copy and check it out if the material sounds like your sort of thing.  (I'm a sucker for goofy period stories, so this was a natural.)

Vertical sent me a preview copy of the about-to-be-released paperback edition of Parasite Eve, inspiration for both the video game and the J-horror movie of the same name (available domestically thanks to ADV), although the game bears almost no resemblance to the story.  I'll be posting a review of this sometime in the coming week.

A snippet from the Paper Cuts blog, from the perspective of two writers who have had to go into hiding or receive police protection when they came under fire -- literally -- for their work.  One of them, as you can well imagine, was Salman Rushdie.  When his fatwa was first handed down, a whole slew of writers showed their support in the book pages of the Times, with the best one being: "Death threats are some of the best reviews possible."  I wish I could remember who said that.

Finally, I'm going to be seeing Iron Man this coming Tuesday.  The buzz from everyone has been through the roof and up somewhere in geostationary orbit.  Heck, my mother wants to see it, and she's about as far removed from being a comic-book fan as I am from being an Anatolian shepherd.  (Wait -- given that I'm of Anatolian descent, maybe that's not the best analogy...)

Dark Nocturne may be one of the best bargains in the whole of the Vampire Hunter D series so far: it’s three D adventures for the price of one. What’s most interesting is that any one of these novellas feels like it has at least as much detail and incident as any one of the previous full-length books in the series. It’s a hallmark of Hideyuki Kikuchi’s writing: he can make one sentence do the work of ten, and he has that economy of style and storytelling racked up to “11” through this whole volume. And, as always, it features those wonderful Yoshitaka Amano illustrations and cover designs.

[Review written for AMN. Click here to read full text.]

Masami Akita seems to have four major sources of inspiration for the work he releases under the name Merzbow: “scum culture” (his term for pornography, fetish/bondage material, horror/gore, etc.), pure abstraction, animal and nature rights (viz., F.I.D., Bloody Sea, Turmeric, etc.), and Japan’s own history and culture. The latter gets some of the least representation in his catalog, but for me it’s some of the most fascinating stuff. Yoshinotsune has been my stock best example of that, but Collapse 12 Floors sits nicely alongside it, especially since it refers to a piece of Japanese history that I have my own affinity for.

One of the first Hong Kong movies I ever saw was a totally mad production named Savior of the Soul (co-written by none other than HK indie-film maverick Kar-Wai Wong). Any five minutes of that movie have more back-to-back action than most any Western film—at least until Western movies started catching up with productions like Crank and Shoot ‘Em Up. But hey, the HK moviemakers got their firstest with the mostest, and that stuff is still golden even after all these years.

From what I’ve seen of Chinese Hero so far, the HK comics scene has also featured the same kind of incredibly compressed, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink and-the-contents-of-the-fridge-too storytelling. There’s more going on in any one volume of Chinese Hero than there is in any three or four (or five, or ten) volumes of most other comics, and it’s all thrown at you with a gusto that’s irresistible.

[Review written for AMN. Click here to read full text.]

The None May Say blog, by a fellow who "[spends his] free time searching out POD ("Personal Outlay Developed" or, more traditionally, "Publish On Demand") books, movies and music", has just published a rave review of Summerworld. 

With no nudging from me at all, he really nails what I wanted to bring across with the book.

Summerworld ... takes place in the world of magic, warriors and dreams that emerges after our modern society has been pushed aside. But the novel also is grounded in reality. On a literal level, remnants of our present world linger. More importantly, many of the characters carry the baggage of their prior lives. As a result, Summerworld's characters feel completely genuine and of this world, notwithstanding their larger-than-life fantasy trappings. On the outside they may be heroes, but on the inside they're people.

Thank you, Devon.  Thank you, man.

[Footnote: Apparently the sidebar link to the .PDF sample was not working. It should be fixed now, or you can go right here to read it.]

The guys at The Digital Bits made my day, and probably my week.

New Line (via Warner) is releasing a Dark City: Director's Cut on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on 7/29 (SRP $19.97 and $34.99). According to the studio's press information, both discs will feature "enhanced picture and sound, never-before-seen footage and three commentary tracks that take you deeper than ever before into the world of one of sci-fis most exciting and revered tales." The Blu-ray will be a BD-50 disc, but we don't know what the audio format will be yet. Director Alex Proyas' new cut of the film runs 111 minutes (the original version was 96 minutes).

I saw this in the theater when it first appeared.  I ought to do a writeup for it when the director's cut drops.  There was evidence everywhere of serious post-production tampering, and it was still a terrific movie ... which is really saying something.

[Edit: More coverage at Blu-ray.com.]

The more I see of Nightmare Inspector, the more I hope it doesn’t just slip through the cracks and go unnoticed. This has to be one of Viz’s better mainstream acquisitions, a title that satisfies both me the critic and me the fan—and while I can often make one or the other happy, you know how hard it is to get both of them to smile?

The first volume introduced us to Hiruko, a baku or dream-eater in human form who holds court in the Silver Star Tea House. Those with nightmares come seeking to dispel them with Hiruko’s aid, and discover things about themselves, not always good, in the process. The unconscious, as Hiruko knows well, is more than just a feeding ground for a baku—it’s a place where the strangest demons can come to life without warning. What’s more, just when you think you’ve plumbed the meaning of what you’ve experienced, it turns out there’s yet another layer to it all.

[Review written for AMN. Click here to read full text.]