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Saturday, December 09, 2006 ( 12/09/2006 08:40:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC – Kyan does the immodest puppy sit with an eye on some off-camera treats.  THE USUAL NOTE: If you wanna see more dogg blogging, check out the weekly "Carnival of the Dogs" at Mickey's Musings (thanx for last week’s happy birthday wish!) And for a broader array of companion animals, there's Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Friday, December 08, 2006 ( 12/08/2006 01:18:00 PM ) Bill S. "JUST REMEMBER THE KIDS WHO'VE GOT NOTHING . . ." – Happily caught a BBC Classics broadcast of the Kinks' Old Grey Whistle Test Chistmas Concert last night on Classic VH-1. The concert was from 1977, so three songs from the then-current Sleepwalker were showcased – along with the expected medley of hits and a wonderful version of the band's seventies concert staple, "Skin And Bones." Show was capped by Ray Douglas Davies in a Santa suit doing "Father Christmas," with the song's final line about remembering those less fortunate replaced by the singer in favor of an entreaty to once more give it up for the band! Ah well, even when he messes with it, it's still a great Xmas song . . . # | Thursday, December 07, 2006 ( 12/07/2006 10:06:00 AM ) Bill S. WIMMEN THEY BE DIFFERENT FROM MEN – Now, I know there was a time when Christopher Hitchens was considered a witty guy with a sharp way of wielding a contrarian opinion, but every time I tried reading his "provocative" Vanity Fair space-waster, "Why Women Aren't Funny," I found myself thinking, "Strip away the VF prose, and these are the words of a man who finds Larry the Cable Guy hilarious." # | ( 12/07/2006 09:29:00 AM ) Bill S. HAIR PLUGS ARE SO 1980’S, SEAN – The former Eunice Tate, Jennifer Salt, in her capacity as writer/producer for fx's nip/tuck, takes us back to the glory days of Chuck 'n' Bob with this week's episode (aging ventriloquist Willy Ward asks Sean for a face-lift so he can still look like his wiseacre dummy). Don't know the identity of the actor who played the over-the-hill voice-thrower, but I mentally kept visualizing Jay Johnson in the role . . . # | Wednesday, December 06, 2006 ( 12/06/2006 03:15:00 PM ) Bill S. "POWER SUPER/SUPER POWER" – For our mid-week music vid, what could be better than a rampaging multi-eyed monster, the Powerpuff Girls and the Apples in Stereo? A new album's coming out in '07? I'll believe it when I hear it . . . # | ( 12/06/2006 12:59:00 PM ) Bill S. PHEW! – Somehow, I don't know how, the template for this yere blog got flummoxed a coupla months ago, and I've only now gotten back to working on it. The list of reviews from 2003 – which I could've sworn was alphabetized – got all out of order, while 2002 disappeared altogether. So I spent some time today reordering '03. Nuthin' like going over a list of crap that you wish you could forget reviewing in the first place (I really sat through an episode of Threat Matrix!) to make you question the need for an index in the first place . . . # | Tuesday, December 05, 2006 ( 12/05/2006 10:50:00 AM ) Bill S.  "THIS GUN IS MY OTHER PARTNER" – (A Sixty-Minute Manga Excursion): Train Heartnet, the title lead of Kentaro Yabuki's Black Cat (Viz), is a boyish young man with wild hair, a belled collar on his long neck and a Roman numeral XIII tattooed on his chest. A former assassin for Chronos – a shadowy organization that controls 1/3 of the world's wealth – Train now works as a "sweeper" with his partner Sven Vollfied. Licensed bounty hunters, the duo travel the globe looking for miscreants with big rewards attached to 'em. In Book One's first character-establishing commission, they attempt to bring in a former gangland accountant who has both the law and the mob looking for him.Train faces off against the mob hitman sent to silence the accountant, and we get our first glimpse of his abilities and personality: like his feline namesake, he can leap amazing heights and is able to play a variation of bullets-&-bracelets with his especially crafted "orichalcum" pistol. Though impulsive and filled with boyish enthusiasms (for good food, for instance – being one of those characters who can eat anything and still keep his catlike figure), he's also capable of killing his ruthless adversary with a small smile on his face. Chain-smoking Sven is the pragmatic half of the partnership. Wearing an eye-patch and the kind of peach-fuzz facial hair that make him look like he only just recently passed into pubescence, he's the one who handles the business end of things, though he also gets to show his soft side when the pair hook with a little girl who also happens to be a programmed killer. What starts out as a fairly straightforward action series (for the first two contracts at least) quickly morphs into familiar Shonen Jumpy science-fantasy formula. Commissioned by a young woman named Rinslet Walker – a professional thief-for-hire prone to form-hugging outfits that flatteringly show off her gams – to travel to the Republic of Sapidoa (one of those countries that seems to perpetually have a big festival going on its streets) to bring in a crime boss called Torneo Rudman (love these names – are they Yabuki's or translator Kelly Sue DeConnick's?), they learn that Rudman is trafficking in the development of human weapons. His foremost creation is an orphaned twelve-year-old named Eve who has nanobots in her system that allow her to change body parts into anything she wants: like transform an arm into a long, body-impaling blade. Our heroes wind up freeing her from Rudman's clutches in Volume Two, and she quickly becomes part of the bounty hunting team. Not so Rinslet, who one suspects will waft in and out of our heroes' lives whenever it suits her own selfish purposes. Some dames are like that. The Rudman contract leads our team into first contact with Creed Diskenth, a former Chronos assassin like Train, and the man responsible for the death of the Black Cat's "dearest friend," a lady sweeper named Saya. Creed is an androgynously pretty figure with a major thing for Train; plotting to double-cross and overthrow Chronos, he attempts to enlist the sweeper, but our footloose hero wants none of it. With the appearance of Creed and his underlings, the sci-fantasy elements get upped even further: each one, we learn, has the ability to manifest their chi in powerful ways. One henchman, for instance, is capable of creating bee puppets that can sap your will when they sting and put you under their creator's control. Much of this talk of chi sounds very similar to the mystical gobbledegook that fuels Naruto's fight sequences – not much different than the catch-all of "mutation" used to buttress Marvel's X-books, actually – though when you get down to it, all the whys-&-wherefores are less important than the sight of a swarm of mechanical bees honing in our hero. Yabuki's art (as with other manga digests, we get to briefly meet his three art assistants in a set of one-page strips appended at the end of each volume) is clean and cartoonly in places (as with other manga series, he thinks nothing of rendering bumps on the head that at almost as big as the character's head itself), crisp during the action sequences when it needs to be (I found the fight sequences much easier to follow than, say, some of the dust-ups in Naruto) and serious when it needs to be. Though the series' tone is predominately devil-may-care, it occasionally strikes a tone of melancholy, most typically when Heartnet recalls his doomed dearest friend Saya. If Yabuki's protagonists look too fresh-faced to carry the weight of the world, it's a small quibble; his crew is deft at rendering appropriately debauched or careworn secondary characters. There's a Creed henchman who steps forward in Volume Three, for instance, who looks like he could be a young goth updating of Will Eisner's Mr. Carrion. His chi power: to take the dripping blood from his body and transform it into a gloppy weapon that he aims at his enemies. Now that's an out-there super-ability . . . Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Monday, December 04, 2006 ( 12/04/2006 03:46:00 PM ) Bill S. SECOND SEASONINGS – Worth noting that another Master of Horror, this time Dario Argento, has followed up his shaky debut offering with a superior second season tale, an adaptation of F. Paul Wilson's (unknown by me) short story "Pelts," starring Meat Loaf (now apparently calling himself Meat Loaf Aday). This tale of the evils of real fur was about as grisly as you could get – with some truly cringe-worthy moments – but, considering the subject matter, I can't fault Argento's decision to show as much as he did. (The face in the leg-hold trap was a truly startling moment – even when you know it's coming.) No dumb teen subplots in this 'un, thankfully, just grown-ups doing (and paying for doing) truly reprehensible things. Good bad times, beautifully lensed . . . # | |
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