KILL BILL
Yes, I did like
Kill Bill much better than I anticipated, but I don't care enough about it to want the fully-loaded special edition version(s) due out in the fall and am quite content with the bare bones version with the black-and-white "House of Blue Leaves" segment*, and I only cared enough to buy the previously-viewed version from Blockbuster.
It took at least a week longer for the copies of
Kill Bill to start hitting the "Previously-Viewed" shelves, for some reason. I suppose I could have waited a month or so more for the price to drop to $14.99 and then $9.99, but, what the Hell? I payed the top price, $19.99 (which seems a little high for "Previously-Viewed", I know, but these are Canadian dollars).
I'm happy that I didn't get the copy of the DVD which I rented the other week which freezed up during the "Blood-Splattered Bride" sequence, but there was a tiny problem in that I don't think the Blockbuster employee that was putting the price on was paying attention to the case.
They were all like that. Fortunately, the sticker peeled off easily.
I'm happy that my local Blockbuster in Pincourt sells previously-viewed DVDs in their original cases with all the inserts still inside. Apparently, in some areas, they just sell the DVDs in the Blockbuster cases, at least according to what I read in Rotten Tomatoes. (The other Blockbusters that I can remember buying used DVDs from, on Sainte Catherine's near Fort and on Parc above Mount Royal boulevard also sell them in the original case, so it appears to be a pretty standard thing, at least at Blockbuster locations in the Montreal area.)
* Which, I think, probably works better in B&W anyway; it makes the carnage more "abstract"; colour when Beatrix Kiddo is slicing and dicing the Crazy 88s would be overkill, no pun intended.
FREDDY VS. GHOSTBUSTERS UPDATE
Hank Braxtan's Braxtan Films fan-made production,
Freddy vs. Ghostbusters, is finally available for download in both Windows Media and Quicktime formats, thought they're ZIP files, so you have to fully download them to watch them.
I downloaded it a little earlier, but I'm writing a couple of things today, so, since I want to be fair to this production and give it the attention I think it deserves, I'll watch it tomorrow afternoon and should hopefully have some sort of review by Monday evening (which I'll put in my
Rotten Tomatoes Journal but link to here).
MY DVD COLLECTION, PART ONE
I haven't used the
Photoblog for a while so I got the idea that, to give you a better glimpse of my tastes, I'd scan the spines of my entire DVD collection and write a short little blurb, not really a review, about each DVD.
I'm doing this in installments, with each installment representing the amount of DVDs I could cram together onto the scanner bed at once taking into account that I must leave a small amount at the sides to be safe.
Here's the first installment.
The second installment will be coming within the next few days. I've already scanned it, just the first installment took me longer to write than I had anticipated, so I don't know if I can promise that these will be daily.
PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE
I'm sure there are 3 other guys in America who know just how you feel...
Yeah, one of my new heroes is Pierre Bernard, a graphics designer for
Late Night With Conan O'Brien, who now has a regular segment on the show entitled "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" in which he, looking slightly nervous, rails against something minor which slightly bothers him, and it's always something relatively esoteric, like Marvel stopping some specific
X-Men novelization series, and Conan always compliments him by saying that there are three other Americans out there who know exactly how he feels.
A
View-Master fan site has
this entry, from whence I stole the picture, about an April installment of "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" wherein Pierre complains about the expense of making one's own View-Master reel, and you can download that particular installment in either Windows Media Player or Quicktime format, in case you don't watch
Conan but are interested in seeing what this segment is like.
Anyhow, in April (well, a different day than the View-Master one), Pierre complained about Dr. Daniel Jackson, the character played by Michael Shanks, on
Stargate SG-1, who Pierre Bernard finds annoying. He apparently was killed off in Season 5, but, somehow, came back from the dead in Season 7. You can read a complete transcript of the bit
here. Apparently, the
Stargate SG-1 Production company was so tickled by the bit that they invited Pierre to come to the set in Vancouver, and they showed the video of that last night. He got to tour the
Stargate Atlantis set (the new spinoff, which, as you may recall, my brother, John,
did some film clip time logging on for a couple of weeks), and filmed a brief cameo, as Master Sargeant O'Brien, to be seen on the next season of
Stargate SG-1, and he chatted with Richard Dean Anderson about the quality of the food from the catering service.
I don't have time to write much more, but you can read a blow-by-blow account of what happened
in this Google Groups post. (EDIT: A more complete transcript is
here, though they leave a few lines out.)
So a nerd with a dream can make a difference... well, if he has a recurring televised segment on a network programme, at least.
Which reminds me of something. As a blogger who likes to occasionally include pictures such as the one seen above, I appreciate the free image hosting service from
Photobucket offers, giving me 100 Mb of disk space and 2500 Mb of bandwidth a month, which is very generous for a free service. However, when you upload a photo, you are given a direct link, an HTML link, and a message board link, and the HTML link is missing the quotation marks around the URL of the picture, which I have to add manually for it to work. Sometimes I forget to add the quotation marks, and I am forced to edit the entry to get the picture to show up.
Bottom line, America, Photobucket should fix the HTML link option to include the quotation marks so I don't have to add them manually.
Labels: Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage
GOD BLESS YOU, ZAC BERTSCHY!
The anime series
Fullmetal Alchemist has been licensed by
Funimation Productions, Ltd., about the only domestic anime licensor which does both edited TV dubs for "kidvid" syndication and bilingual uncut DVD releases for the anime purist niche market. (The other kidvid syndicators, if they decide to release an uncut version at all, release them through other companies like ADV or Geneon (formerly Pioneer).) As usual, some of the... shall we say, less pragmatic elements of anime fandom are
shreiking to high hell about this because it's been licensed by FUNimation and FUNi is TEH DEVIL because of what FUNi did to
Dragonball Z to make it suitable for the general childrens' audience in North America, even if every other series FUNi has licensed is available uncut on DVD, and FUNi's now releasing uncut DVD versions of the earlier stuff they edited. (Thanks to
shoiryu for
giving the link over at Fandom Wank.)
Stepping into the fray,
Zac Bertschy,
Anime News Network's semi-retired
"Answer Man", wrote a brilliant post entitled
"Sick of the entitlement kiddies", making fun of the sort of fans who think they are entitled to uncut versions of their favourite shows and also complain when a show is licensed by anyone so that fansubs theoretically stop being available (the point addressed by
Thesis 15 of the 95 Theses Against Fandumb, "Nobody owes you versions of your favorite shows presented in a manner according to your exacting specifications. Lack of availability of such versions does not give you the right to steal, either.").
Zac would probably get angry at me if I cut-and-pasted the entire post without his permission, and I'm already pushing it with the title of this entry (heh heh), so I'll just post the 2½ paragraphs with the gist of his point.
1. Every time FUNimation licenses something, every 15-year old militant anime "fan" comes crawling out of the woodwork to complain en masse on message boards across the internet. They coalesce in huge, festering piles of misinformed, illogical hatred and proceed to spew their venom all over everything, usually for a few weeks.
2. Then they go away.
I think it's important to remember #2 and also remind ourselves (I myself am guilty of doing this) to not feed the trolls. Arguing with them is a fool's errand, as I have discovered countless times; they refuse to listen to reason. They've been indoctrinated into a blind sort of hatred, and, as I stated before, they do go away after a relatively short period of time.
His 2 points are right on the money... well, they go back to their own boards when they realize it's futile to whine about such things at ANN... but I don't know if I can avoid "feeding the trolls" since baiting them is ever so much fun.
Zac is also on a roll today with
this other post spoofing the sort of fans which make certain Japanese children's cartoons, violent by North American kidvid standards but still children's cartoons, out to be more "adult" and "dark" then they actually are. He's done 8 posts over the
Fullmetal Alchemist brouhaha, pushing his post count up to a magic 777. ;)
EDIT: Incidentally,
Fullmetal Alchemist is one of the trinity of shows whose licensing by FUNimation will set off a cavalcade of whining by the anti-FUNi fanboy factions, the other two being
Naruto and
One Piece, both of which, I expect, will be licensed by FUNi by the end of the summer. From what I've read, while I'd give all of them a chance if they showed up on YTV or Teletoon, none of them are quite my bag, though
Naruto yaoi doujinshi, which is only beginning to flood the yaoi pages, is infinitely more pleasing on the eye than the scourge of
Digimon yaoi doujinshi (WTF?) and is less monotonous than
Gundam Wing yaoi doujinshi. Also regarding FUNi and licensing, I had previously made
this "out on a limb" prediction over at ANN: "Toei wants to consolidate future North American releases and rereleases of Sailor Moon through a single company, which is why they aren't renewing the rights with ADV and Geneon/Pioneer, and their new distributor shall be FUNi, who will also announce a subtitled-only release of Sailor Stars (too problematic for North American TV) starting this fall."
"Full Metal Alchemist", just for the Google searches.
