| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Sunday, March 07, 2010 ( 3/07/2010 01:53:00 PM ) Bill S.  “YOU WITH A COMPULSORY EXECUTION UNIT?” A crisp “Mature”-rated sci-fi horror series, Tsutomu Nihei’s Biomega (Viz Signature) doesn’t waste any time plunging us into the action. Set a thousand years in the future, it opens on Earth’s “first manned flight to Mars in seven centuries.” Why so long between trips? We’re not told in the first volume, though it could have something to do with the virus that the space travelers bring back home. Called the N5S infection, it quickly spreads across the planet, transforming most of its carriers into droopy decaying zombies with extra bits of this-and-that dangling from their bodies. Cut to six months later, and we're following Zouichi Kanoe, a motorcycle riding agent for Toa Heavy Industries as he tries to navigate his way through the wasted city of a Pacific island, looking for a girl named Eon Green.In addition to Kanoe, young Eon is also being pursued by agents of the Public Health Service, who appear to have sinister designs. Eon, we learn, is an “Accommodator” of the N5S virus, which means she has it but has not transmuted into a mindless “Drone.” As a carrier, she also appears to have the ability to rapidly regenerate parts of herself: small wonder that competing interests wanna get a hold of her. Protecting her from both groups is a talking Russian bear(!) named Kozlov Loewic Grebnev. He carries Eon to a castle-like Maxi-Security Containment Facility, but her presence draws the zombie Drones as well as the blank masked agents of the PHS. There’s not much more plot than that in the first volume -- though we’re given hints of a third player called the Data Recovery Foundation which may know more about the N5S virus than it’s telling. Instead, Nihei provides a series of visually arresting action sequences and grotty looking zombies, as Kanoe careens his motorcycle though Nihei’s sinisterly towering architectural landscape. There are a lotta extended wordless sequences in this manga -- the most striking features Kanoe’s rescue of Kozlov from the exploding Containment Facility -- but not much character detail in this opening entry. The only two figures who display even a fraction of emotion in the first volume are the bear and a distraught newsman who provides much of the exposition. Our cycle-straddling hero largely remains a cipher in the first book, though we’re given hints that he, too, is somehow “enhanced.” Nihei’s handling of his imposing future landscape, kinetic skirmishes, and quirky plot details commands our attention so strongly that you don’t really mind that you haven’t been given a whole lot of solid information in the first book. (The faceless PHS agents are a particular enigma.) Whether he can maintain this over the course of multiple volumes remains to be seen, but his handling of the opening is slick enough to get lover of horror action coming back for the next few books at least. Me, I’m hoping for some of that bear's back story. Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Saturday, March 06, 2010 ( 3/06/2010 11:23:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Unsuccessfully tried to take a good pic of our two dawgs wrestling this afternoon, but none of the action shots came out. Instead, here's Kyan Pup and Dusty in repose (and, if you look carefully, you can see our foster cat Bailey edging along the bckgnd).  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Friday, March 05, 2010 ( 3/05/2010 05:44:00 PM ) Bill S.  “TOO CRAZY TO EVER BE A TAMER.” Eight years after he burst onto the moviemaking scene with Diva, French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix gave his audience another obsessive youth, this time far removed from the rarefied world classical opera. In Roselyne and the Lions, we’re introduced to Therry (Gerard Sandoz), a Marseilles high-schooler who gets swept up in the world of circus lion taming. As the movie opens, the young man is a bored mischievous student who happens on a geezerly animal tamer/instructor while ditching school. It’s a toss-up as to which draws him first -- the cats or the tutor’s angelic looking student Roselyne (Isabelle Pascoe) -- but, either way, he's hooked.The movie minutely charts Thierry and Roselyne’s growth from students to performers at a high-class German circus. It’s a long (nearly three hours) trek, yet somehow Beineix keeps things interesting. What we’re basically seeing here is the growth of two artists: we shown the two as they first learn to work with bull whips and big cats at a modest local zoo, then as they negotiate the nearly-as-treacherous world of their fellow performers. At times, the director almost seems to be following the path of an old-fashioned show biz partnership flick -- wherein the more talented member of a struggling duo is shown out-stripping the other -- but this ultimately doesn’t prove to be the case. When Diva first hit American shores in the early eighties, the movie’s canny promoters trumpeted it as a new kind of French “new wave.” If that magnificent break-out was Beineix’s pop paean to Jean-Luc Godard, then Roselyne is his homage to François Truffaut: a humanistic coming of age movie set in a much less plastic world than Diva’s pulpish Paris. While the first flick gave us elegant opera singer Cynthia Hawkins as its musical center, the visually earthier Roselyne provides us with a plus-sized alcoholic gospel singer; instead of the punk-inspired gunsels of the former film, there’s a caustic circus dwarf named Li’l Prince and a self-absorbed strongman. The movie even includes a Truffaut-like idealized speech from Thierry’s teacher about the true mission of education. Pascoe and Sandoz are appealing leads, though neither one is as colorful as the case of carnival-esque eccentrics surrounding ‘em. Beineix is not afraid to make each of his attractive protagonists unlikable at times, however. During the film’s final third, Thierry becomes particularly bullying as the duo work up their set: a hectoring director in his own right. In a bonus disc documentary provided with Cinema Libre’s DVD edition, “Le Grande Cirque,” Beineix gives a glimpse of his own personality as a creator and moviemaker. When one of his actors asks the director why he’s making things more difficult for them, he replies quite simply, “Complications are my business.” A decent tagline for this great French moviemaker’s oeuvre, come to think of it. Labels: classic cinema # |Wednesday, March 03, 2010 ( 3/03/2010 07:05:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Some hard-core fanboy fantasizing with the Old 97's, "Dance with Me:" # | Tuesday, March 02, 2010 ( 3/02/2010 12:23:00 AM ) Bill S. STRUGGLING WITH PENMANSHIP: I just belatedly realized that this here blog is eight years old. If we were in elementary school, we'd be attending third grade now . . . assuming we'd successfully passed our first two years, of course . . . # | |
|
|
