Netflix (and other rental) Notes #2
Aug. 9th, 2005 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlThis is likely to be long for no good reason.
Ahem. Basically, as I was saying, we have a Netflix account now. (Well. We had one. The 'two weeks free' trial is up, and because some jackhole seems to have hijacked the wolf's credit card number we've frozen it until we can get a new one. I'm sorry, I'm sure I'd remember if we were exchanging US dollars for Swedish monies for some reason.) Anyway, we thought that since the Netflix queue is up around 200 films now, we'd go ahead and see if any of the anime shows were at our local store.
There were indeed a few.
Riding Bean - A few days ago we saw the movie 'The Transporter' on TV. If you twiddle some of the details... pair the bald guy up with a Totally Hot Chick, make the girl in the back seat younger, and make the bad guys weird underage lesbians, you'd totally have Riding Bean. Except that the hero's car could not possibly be cooler than the Roadbuster.
Riding Bean is essentially an anime about what happens when the Cool Antihero style of character decides to be the Cool Hero instead. It's got a lot of great driving moments, the single coolest car in the world, a hero who can shoulder-tackle -anything- into submission, and as with seemingly all actiony OAVs from this time period, lots of blood for no good reason. I heartily approve of this. Also our copy came with Classic Anime Trailers because it was an original-run VHS tape, reminding us of a time when all that was needed to sell anime was "Hey, it's got cute animated girls in it. Some of them have breasts. You like breasts, don't you?"
Those were simpler times.
They Were Eleven - On the opposite end of the spectrum from Riding Bean we've got this anime. Ten students were supposed to be selected for the Final Entrance Exam to the Cosmos Acadamy, left on an old abandoned space cruiser for 50-something days. Once they're alone and can manage a headcount they find that instead they have eleven. Questions instantly spring out of this, like "Why?" and "What are the eleventh's intentions?" and "Can we stop yelling and pointing fingers at each other and get some work done?" As more and more odd situations crop up they're constantly forced to evaluate how much they're being legitimately tested on and how much could be intentional sabotage.
Okay, I really liked this one. It was -all about- tension buildup and logical situations with a heavy dash of sci-fi weirdness tossed in. With a decent special effects budget this could be done in live action with no problems. Also, it made me think a lot.. .and I'm going to include spoilers, be warned.
One of the characters we're initially introduced to is played off as either a very pretty man or a girl. It turns out from a shower surprise later that she has elements of both, a hermaphrodite. On hir planet, when you come 'of age' you're given hormone injections mandated by the government to finalize your gender. Shi's longed all hir life to be a man, and has been constantly standoffish, trying to prove that shi's strong enough and good enough to be a male. If shi fails hir Acadamy exam shei'll be made to live as a female, married off and pumping out babies, barefoot and pregnant etc etc.
So shi's been struggling to prove hirself 'worthy' of guyhood, because being a man is so much better than being a woman, as she expounds at length. I squirmed through this part. By the end of the movie, though, shi's decided to live as a woman because shi's all In Luv with the main character. They're shown as being married in the "what happened to our characters" reel at the end.
I'm not sure -why- but this really plucked my gender issue buttons. The part with hir expounding on the superiority of malehood -really- made me uncomfortable to watch. Would I have reacted the same if it were a male-looking character talking about how nice it would be to be female? Of course I wouldn't. I'm not wired to object to -that-, I even approve of it. So I'm hypocritical, but... something about that speech rubbed me the wrong way and it shouldn't have, because clearly it was something shi really desired. That feels weird to me, knowing that I have a... doubt trigger there, for lack of a better word. It's not right and something I should examine.
Then there was the reversal of position, which I'm not arguing wasn't done WELL, I just felt that maybe it shouldn't have happened. If this anime were made today, I daresay the gender of the main character's lover being the same as theirs might not have been shied away from so quickly.
Did I really think that out any further? No. But I feel like I should at some point.
Anyway.
EX Driver - Okay, now THIS was refreshing. Two cute girls and a cute boy in shiny shiny cars doing fancy driving, because in a future where most people trust all their confidence to AI driving programs they're the few and proud who still do it by hand. This was a quick-moving, funny, FUN show with the nicest vision of the future I've ever seen. I want to live in the world of EX Driver because it's a cozy place, seems nearly utopian from the views we get of it, with a lot of really cool technology. For a six-episode OVA run (plus a movie, which wasn't rented, yay Netflix), this was a great ride, except for the fifth episode which introduced some -real- villains and darkened the tone of the show a lot. By episode six though things were okay again. Totally sold me on the concept of "cute girls plus cars". Not a lot more to say.
RahXephon the Movie - ... Holy crap. Okay, we're renting the series now. Dude. Just... god DAMN. DUDE. And the ENDING! What a -great- ending! Yes. Okay. [EDIT] Slightly more to say on this one actually. The design of the Dolem pilots, for example. All vaguely feminine-looking Muians, wearing ancient-clay-looking helmets with their mouths perpetually exposed and hanging open... that really got to me. Then there were the sound effects for the RahXephon's and Dolem's weapons, the odd 'pipe organ plus musical note with harsh harmonic resonant overtones'. That's been making me shivery since Super Robot Wars MX. I also love the visual design of this series, it's realistic without being -too- realistic. Finally I have to say that the characters, particuarly Ayato, are going to stick with me. He takes a very logical character evolution and... thank gods, he really is a good man at heart. I respect that.
...also the Goodbye scene from Asahina nearly left me in tears. Ow.
Iria Zeiram the Animation - Mmmm. Iria has always been a heroine of mine, from half-remembered episodes on the Sci Fi Channel. It's still worth a watch, but it's -very- disjointed and jumpy. There's a good bit that you watch and say "That was neat. ... Wait, what?" Still a fantastic show though, with Iria's Batman-style gadgets everywhere. I dug watching it again.
And the 'elevator music' I remember from the last battle wasn't so bad now that I'm used to Asian music stylings. How about that?
Anyway, that's it. Now when we get out Netflix account back (and our credit card back) we should be looking at ... Let's see. Father Ted Series 1 (Hey, something non-animated!) and Hyper Police disc 1.
Ahem. Basically, as I was saying, we have a Netflix account now. (Well. We had one. The 'two weeks free' trial is up, and because some jackhole seems to have hijacked the wolf's credit card number we've frozen it until we can get a new one. I'm sorry, I'm sure I'd remember if we were exchanging US dollars for Swedish monies for some reason.) Anyway, we thought that since the Netflix queue is up around 200 films now, we'd go ahead and see if any of the anime shows were at our local store.
There were indeed a few.
Riding Bean - A few days ago we saw the movie 'The Transporter' on TV. If you twiddle some of the details... pair the bald guy up with a Totally Hot Chick, make the girl in the back seat younger, and make the bad guys weird underage lesbians, you'd totally have Riding Bean. Except that the hero's car could not possibly be cooler than the Roadbuster.
Riding Bean is essentially an anime about what happens when the Cool Antihero style of character decides to be the Cool Hero instead. It's got a lot of great driving moments, the single coolest car in the world, a hero who can shoulder-tackle -anything- into submission, and as with seemingly all actiony OAVs from this time period, lots of blood for no good reason. I heartily approve of this. Also our copy came with Classic Anime Trailers because it was an original-run VHS tape, reminding us of a time when all that was needed to sell anime was "Hey, it's got cute animated girls in it. Some of them have breasts. You like breasts, don't you?"
Those were simpler times.
They Were Eleven - On the opposite end of the spectrum from Riding Bean we've got this anime. Ten students were supposed to be selected for the Final Entrance Exam to the Cosmos Acadamy, left on an old abandoned space cruiser for 50-something days. Once they're alone and can manage a headcount they find that instead they have eleven. Questions instantly spring out of this, like "Why?" and "What are the eleventh's intentions?" and "Can we stop yelling and pointing fingers at each other and get some work done?" As more and more odd situations crop up they're constantly forced to evaluate how much they're being legitimately tested on and how much could be intentional sabotage.
Okay, I really liked this one. It was -all about- tension buildup and logical situations with a heavy dash of sci-fi weirdness tossed in. With a decent special effects budget this could be done in live action with no problems. Also, it made me think a lot.. .and I'm going to include spoilers, be warned.
One of the characters we're initially introduced to is played off as either a very pretty man or a girl. It turns out from a shower surprise later that she has elements of both, a hermaphrodite. On hir planet, when you come 'of age' you're given hormone injections mandated by the government to finalize your gender. Shi's longed all hir life to be a man, and has been constantly standoffish, trying to prove that shi's strong enough and good enough to be a male. If shi fails hir Acadamy exam shei'll be made to live as a female, married off and pumping out babies, barefoot and pregnant etc etc.
So shi's been struggling to prove hirself 'worthy' of guyhood, because being a man is so much better than being a woman, as she expounds at length. I squirmed through this part. By the end of the movie, though, shi's decided to live as a woman because shi's all In Luv with the main character. They're shown as being married in the "what happened to our characters" reel at the end.
I'm not sure -why- but this really plucked my gender issue buttons. The part with hir expounding on the superiority of malehood -really- made me uncomfortable to watch. Would I have reacted the same if it were a male-looking character talking about how nice it would be to be female? Of course I wouldn't. I'm not wired to object to -that-, I even approve of it. So I'm hypocritical, but... something about that speech rubbed me the wrong way and it shouldn't have, because clearly it was something shi really desired. That feels weird to me, knowing that I have a... doubt trigger there, for lack of a better word. It's not right and something I should examine.
Then there was the reversal of position, which I'm not arguing wasn't done WELL, I just felt that maybe it shouldn't have happened. If this anime were made today, I daresay the gender of the main character's lover being the same as theirs might not have been shied away from so quickly.
Did I really think that out any further? No. But I feel like I should at some point.
Anyway.
EX Driver - Okay, now THIS was refreshing. Two cute girls and a cute boy in shiny shiny cars doing fancy driving, because in a future where most people trust all their confidence to AI driving programs they're the few and proud who still do it by hand. This was a quick-moving, funny, FUN show with the nicest vision of the future I've ever seen. I want to live in the world of EX Driver because it's a cozy place, seems nearly utopian from the views we get of it, with a lot of really cool technology. For a six-episode OVA run (plus a movie, which wasn't rented, yay Netflix), this was a great ride, except for the fifth episode which introduced some -real- villains and darkened the tone of the show a lot. By episode six though things were okay again. Totally sold me on the concept of "cute girls plus cars". Not a lot more to say.
RahXephon the Movie - ... Holy crap. Okay, we're renting the series now. Dude. Just... god DAMN. DUDE. And the ENDING! What a -great- ending! Yes. Okay. [EDIT] Slightly more to say on this one actually. The design of the Dolem pilots, for example. All vaguely feminine-looking Muians, wearing ancient-clay-looking helmets with their mouths perpetually exposed and hanging open... that really got to me. Then there were the sound effects for the RahXephon's and Dolem's weapons, the odd 'pipe organ plus musical note with harsh harmonic resonant overtones'. That's been making me shivery since Super Robot Wars MX. I also love the visual design of this series, it's realistic without being -too- realistic. Finally I have to say that the characters, particuarly Ayato, are going to stick with me. He takes a very logical character evolution and... thank gods, he really is a good man at heart. I respect that.
...also the Goodbye scene from Asahina nearly left me in tears. Ow.
Iria Zeiram the Animation - Mmmm. Iria has always been a heroine of mine, from half-remembered episodes on the Sci Fi Channel. It's still worth a watch, but it's -very- disjointed and jumpy. There's a good bit that you watch and say "That was neat. ... Wait, what?" Still a fantastic show though, with Iria's Batman-style gadgets everywhere. I dug watching it again.
And the 'elevator music' I remember from the last battle wasn't so bad now that I'm used to Asian music stylings. How about that?
Anyway, that's it. Now when we get out Netflix account back (and our credit card back) we should be looking at ... Let's see. Father Ted Series 1 (Hey, something non-animated!) and Hyper Police disc 1.
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Date: 2005-08-09 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-08-09 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-09 02:47 pm (UTC)The Wolf's Take on Flix (Part One)
Date: 2005-08-09 02:05 pm (UTC)But as for my take on the videos:
(Oh yeah, a few spoilers here too)
Riding Bean:
Although the sqrl tends to talk about this as an anime classic, I was hit almost overwhelmingly by the similarity of Bean to an experienced shadowrunner - the high-end equipment that's almost certainly not street-legal, the near-future setting, the grimy mercenary with a heart of gold, the ability to do REALLY outrageous things (and survive) .. and, of course, a firmly entrenched Bad Attitude.
They Were Eleven:
I don't know if I agree that this could be done today. I mean, the setting and strange variety of races and all could be done with a good costume and makeup team, but... the movie industry seems really settled into selling things with sex and violence, and those elements are almost COMPLETELY nonexistent. If it weren't for most parents' quibbles about letting their kids know there even IS such a thing as a hermaphrodite, let alone letting them think about which gender they'd like to be if they could choose, it'd be, what, PG-13, tops?
The thing is, that was what sold me on it: it's a feature that's ENTIRELY driven by plot, character, and mysteries being revealed through the actions and words of the eleven. It's even mentioned at one point that almost all of the eleven come from worlds that have taught them to abhor violence. It's an excellent choice to watch, though, because there's plenty of dramatic tension - although they only squabble with each other, the situation they're in really will kill them if they don't manage to team up and do -something- about it; something not any one, or even five, of them could do alone. Although I guessed some of the plot twists, and the sqrl others, neither of us (nor even both together) had guessed all of them - and by now we're pretty good at it, so I think this'll surprise all but the most jaded at least a few times.
To Be Continued...
The Wolf's Take on Flix (Part Two)
Date: 2005-08-09 02:06 pm (UTC)EX Driver:
The 'dark' part of the plot of this really doesn't get a lot of airtime, even when the obvious fact is revealed that someone's CAUSING the AI to malfunction in people's cars. They needed a villain mostly to have a clear idea of something to be in conflict with; the world they live in is simply too peaceful to justify an EX Driver budget otherwise, and (as I think Lisa pointed out) then they wouldn't be able to drive their really cool cars really fast anymore. That's all they really want out of life, y'know... well, that and to manage a passing grade in school.
RahXephon:
Wow. That's some really messed up shit right there.. and I mean both what the RahXephon type units can DO (sir, she just wiped out the entirety of the third fleet with one shot.) and what happens to our poor helplessly confused protagonist. I have to admit, I don't think I'd know quite what the appropriate response to my mom being the head of an alien invasion of earth.. which was being launched from an alternate-reality earth.
Iria Zeiram:
The sqrl is always comparing Iria to Alys from PSIV: an extremely competent, downright badass mature woman who is a bounty hunter, and good at it, and takes no shit from anyone. I can kinda see that, but what Iria reminds me most of is Samus. She zips around in her own little space-ship, she has ALL the best toys including her own gun/missile launcher combination, she can jump and grapple her way up, down, or around almost any obstacle (ground floor to the top of the largest building in the capital city in one go? SURE!) and although she starts out looking rather underpowered, by the end of it it's obvious that she can kick the CRAP out of anyone that gets in her way, invincible space monster or not. In fact, how she managed THAT little trick involved several instances of both myself AND the sqrl going "OOohh..that looked like it SUCKED." If you know the sqrl, you know he doesn't go in for that kind of comment often. As naive and wussy-ish as she is at the start, by the end of the show I was won over: Iria's a complete badass.
Next on the list:
(after a short intermission while I take care of the credit issue)
Father Ted: Catholic Comedy? This I have gotta see to believe.
Hyper Police: Catgirl AND Kitsune. With breasts! This'll be excellent.