Battleship

Spoiler Level: High

What the-- I'm breaking my blogging dry spell for Battleship?!? Why on earth would I do that when there's been so much other good stuff to talk about?!?

Well, because poor little Battleship needs a little love. Sure, I could rave about how much I liked The Avengers, but everyone's doing that. And while I can't honestly say I loved Battleship, it's not the utter drek everyone's treating it as.

Yes, there are some parts that made me want to groan. When the radar went out so they came up with a tracking grid, and started calling out their attacks ("Echo One-One! Foxtrot Seven!" "It's a miss!") I just thought to myself, I can't believe they actually went there. And the alien missiles actually looking like pegs as they smashed into the ships just made me groan inside as well... and I tried really really hard to overlook that, because the missile launchers revving up to fire them looked so cool. And lastly, the Hasbro logo coming up as a movie studio logo at the beginning of the film made me actually laugh out loud. I recognized the logo as soon as it started, because it's on my Japanese Collection Transformers DVDs (something else I hope to review someday). On the DVDs it makes sense-- a DVD is a consumer product, so I can understand Hasbro putting their stamp on their product. But putting it right after the Universal logo makes me feel like Hasbro is trying to say, "Look, we're a real film studio!" Now that takes some serious pegs.

But the thing is, those are all small parts of the movie. I went into this movie with the attitude that this was no different than Cowboys & Aliens, it's just Navy & Aliens. And I like me some good military-vs-aliens shoot-em-ups. And in that sense, this movie delivers-- there's lots of great hardware, both human and alien. And the scenes of the USS Missouri launching and joining the battle, with those great big guns swiveling and blasting away, warms my Yamato-lovin' heart. Very good eye candy, very exciting battle scenes. And they worked in a believable reason for why there's a Japanese Destroyer in the fleet.  And having the veterans come back aboard to run the Missouri with the younger generation worked great for me as well... I just loved seeing these octogenarian soldiers kicking butt.

And there's a lot of cool little in-joke homages to other science fiction, including Star Trek, Star Wars and X-Files. They're all subtle enough to make me smile and not so over-the-top to make me feel like they were trying too hard. (I would have even dismissed the Star Wars one as coincidence if it hadn't been the third one I caught.)

So that's what, three things I didn't like and five that I did? So it comes out two points ahead.

Battleship is by no means a great movie, but it's good enough. Heaven knows I've sat through much, much worse.

V - Season 2

Spoiler Level: High

I have to admit, I was very impressed with Season 2 of V. (Once I finally got to see it, that is.) Oh sure, I'm very disappointed that the "Let V no longer stand for Visitor; let it stand for victory" attitude was lost again after only one episode (and could there be any bigger perversion of the meaning of "V" than Tyler spray-painting a red V as a pro-Visitor message?), but in this season the show stopped trying to imitate the original and found its own voice, and as a result it was a much better show. And since it did have its own voice, I found myself being more content with what it was than being frustrated with what it wasn't.

For starters, we learned the real reason for them coming to Earth-- and it's got nothing to do with wanting to pillage the Earth for our resources. It's not to use the human race as food, but as breeding stock. Apparently they've been stealing DNA from different races, harvesting the best of every race in the universe so they become the genetically superior beings. And the human race is next on their list.

The way they go about it gets a bit convoluted; apparently Visitors and humans can interbreed with some scientific help. But the survival of the race depends on their queen, who is only fertile during a short period of her life. So they infiltrate a few decades earlier and set up test subjects to be containers of all the best DNA mankind has to offer. Then they show up with the smaller fleet, get into the planet's good graces, and the next Queen-to-be mates with one of the test subjects, thus ensuring new offspring with all the best DNA. Then they bring in their fleet en masse, round up all our women and turn them into baby factories (yes, this show could have been called Visitors Need Women), ensuring that their race continues. I'm a little hazy on how the two points connect, but that's it in a nutshell.

Storytelling wise, this was revealed in a very even pace, much better than the first season. Each episode felt like it was advancing the story, and like we were actually getting answers. We also got to see the resistance movement finally grow, expanding both on their own and then finally hooking up with a world-wide network. Of course, it may have helped that I watched the entire season over two weeks on DVD instead of over ten weeks on TV.

And then there's Jane Badler, returning as Diana. Not the same Diana, of course, but at least the producers of the show had the sense to always dress her in red to hit the proper nostalgia buttons. This Diana is almost a good guy-- she's learned the value in human emotions and the soul, something that her daughter, Anna, doesn't agree with. It makes Diana an interesting character-- she's just as concerned with the survival of their species as Anna is, and her loyalty is definitely with her own species and not humanity, but what Anna sees as humanity's flaws and a risk to their survival, Diana sees as something that can improve their race, making them something greater than they were.

And then there's the finale.

Like most shows these days, V was canceled without enough notice for any kind of wrap-up. But the ending we're given here works for an ending. Not a happy ending in any way, shape or form, but still an ending.

* Diana's plans fail completely as Anna kills her in front of their entire race. Anna wins.
* Ryan's plans to rescue his daughter Amy fail completely as his daughter kills him when he tries to take her away. As far as she's concerned, Anna is her mother, and Ryan isn't fit to be her father. Anna wins.
* Lisa II mates with and then kills Tyler. Anna wins.
* Chad Decker's role in the Fifth Column is exposed and he's taken into custody by the Visitors. Anna wins.
* Amy helps Anna spread Bliss to humanity, enslaving the entire human race to the Visitors as the breeding ships move in. Anna wins.
* The only hope left at all is Project Ares, a secret military organization run by the world's governments hidden literally underground so they escaped the Bliss (and lead by none other than Mark Singer).

What a great set-up for Season 3. At last, everything is out in the open, and Project Ares would have had to fight a war against the Visitors to save their own people who wouldn't even want to be saved. As closure goes, this is The Empire Strikes Back-- a series of down endings, ultimately ending in defeat but with a hope for the future. Only in this case there will be no third act. And who knows, maybe it wouldn't have worked, but there is closure here for nearly all the characters, and the potential for what could have come next is fantastic.

I've said before that if they did any V novels or other media tie-ins with this show I'd give them a pass, but I have to go back on that now. There's potential here for a great story, either in prose or comics. I don't believe we'll actually get it, but if it happens, I'll check it out.  Otherwise, for me the ending of this story is what we got on screen-- the Visitors triumphant, with Erica Evans and Project Ares still out there fighting the good fight to save humanity.

Robotech Ratios [UPDATED]

The new Robotech Complete Series box set is out, and I have three questions before I commit to buying all of Robotech again. I'm posting this because my friend and fellow Robotech fanatic Lisa has offered to help answer them for me!

For those who don't know, Robotech was remastered several years ago. On the plus side, this remastering corrected a problem the video releases has always had: the image ratio was finally fixed. More on this later. On the negative side, they changed all the sound effects, and changed the opening titles. Instead of having one title sequence for all 85 episodes mixing all the generations together, they gave them three separate title sequences focusing only on one generation. I didn't like that; I like the way that showing all three generations made it feel like one big story. I liked the change in sound effects even less. This version was then collected in one giant box set called the Protoculture Edition, which has become a kind of shorthand for referring to this version.

Now the impression I was getting from the convention appearances of the Robotech staff this year is that with this new edition, they were able to recover the original, separated audio tracks, and so were able to restore it the sound to the original versions yet still keep enhance it for 5.1. However the sticker on the box in this picture posted by Harmony Gold from NYCC says it's the Remastered Extended Edition. So do they mean it's been remastered for this edition (as they made it sound at the cons), or is it the same as the previously released Protoculture Edition?

So, here's my questions (and anyone can feel free to chime in and answer):
UPDATED: Lisa's gotten back to me with the answers, so I'm sharing them here in case anyone else cares.



(1) Does it have the original, multi-generational opening and closing title sequences?


Original titles


Remastered Titles
VERDICT: No. This edition has the Remastered, single-generation openings and closings.


(2) Does it have the original sound effects?
Here's a brief comparison from Episode 2, "Countdown"

VERDICT: No. This edition has the Remastered sound effects.

(3) Is the image in the correct ratio?
This is a tough one to explain. Some time after 1985 but before the Remastered Extended Edition, the show was tweaked. Some of the background music was altered for different scenes. However, something went wrong on the video side. The image was now zoomed in too close. It's still 4x3 (or 1.33:1), like a regular television image; it's just that the image has now been blown up, and parts are no longer able to be seen. I've put together a few examples below. Click on them to make 'em bigger.

 

VERDICT: Yes. This edition has the correct ratios (just like the Remastered Edition)

So all in all, this is the same as the Protoculture edition. It may be a Re-Remastered Protoculture Edition with some of the music restored to what it originally was in 1985, but it still has the same good points of having the correct ratio and added footage, and the same bad points of the changed sounds and openings. But on the plus side, that volume of bonus features sounds SWEET.

Thanks to Lisa for doing all the detective work to try to appease this cranky old fanboy!!

CBLDF Presents Liberty Annual 2011

Been feeling the itch to blog again.

I just got done reading this year's Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Presents Liberty Annual 2011. I always tried to make sure I was a member back when we ran Joy's Japanimation, because a lot of the cases where a retailer is being arrested for selling a comic book, it turns out to be a manga book. And these are always cases where the books are sold to adults. So being an anime and manga store, I always felt we were a prime target. I remember putting the CLBDF phone number in our rolodex-- I wrote on the bottom of the card, "Let's hope we never have to use it."

Since leaving the comic-selling industry, I've still made the occasional donation, usually at the urging of Peter David's blog. I bought More Fund Comics when it came out, but somehow never got around to Even More Fund Comics. It's still an important cause-- comic books are always a target because the public still views them as kids stuff, even though kids don't read comics anymore. (Seriously, according to a poll at Comic Book Resources, only 5.19% of comic book readers are under 17. The largest group was 30-40 year-olds. It's part of the reason that the comic book industry is shrinking-- there's been no new generation of readers since the 90's. But I digress.)

So I'll confess by saying I bought this comic because it has a new Grendel story in it by Matt Wagner. And yeah, it always feels good to know that I'm helping the CBLDF at the same time.

What I didn't expect was for it to possibly be one of the best anthologies I've ever read.

Seriously, there's not a bad story in the bunch. And while the main topic is of course about free speech, it covers such a range of related topics from Free Speech to Separation of Church and State to the "It Gets Better" campaign that it never gets dull. It actually felt downright inspirational.

For starters, I was pleasantly surprised to learn in Bob Shreck's introduction that he's bi too. Bob Shreck was art director for Comico, which means I always saw his name in the Robotech and Grendel comics back in the 80's, and from there he moved to Dark Horse (more Grendel for me) and Oni Comics (where I read various Kevin Smith comics). So his name is one that has always kept showing up in my comic reading history and that I've always associated with quality books. So as a bi guy, it makes me very happy that he's willing to casually out himself as part of this project. Hence the focus on the "It Gets Better" stories.

Extra points has to go to Carla Speed McNeil's piece "Dunce," which ties it all together very strongly, where she talks about the frustrations she's run into even trying to talk about her son who has Down's Syndrome, or Trisomy 21 as is apparently the new PC thing to call it. The problem is that terms used to describe people with learning problems immediately get turned into insults, so how can you talk about the problem when the words that weren't intended to be offensive now are? To me this is the comic that ties the entire book together, because it's shows how people being offended by words that have been twisted to bullying lead to both outside and self-censorship.

Another gem is J. Michael Straczynski & Kevin Sacco's "Separation of Church And State - The Best Friend the Church Ever Had!" where he explains that because the Founding Fathers specifically stated in the treaty of Tripoli that "the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion," it allowed for all denominations of Christianity to grow without the fears of conflict with each other such as the whole Catholic vs Protestant mess. We always hear about how Separation of Church and State has allowed all religions to practice here, but it never occurred to me that it also saved us from the infighting that Christianity has faced in the past in the UK. This piece should be required reading in schools.

I could go on and on, but really, you should just buy this comic and read it. Heck, I'd buy this as a monthly book. I'll certainly be buying every CBLDF Liberty Annual from now on, and that'll help give me that reminder to donate to the cause as well.

And incidentally, the CBLDF is currently handling a case where a guy entering Canada brought a hentai manga comic with him, and was arrested at customs and is now facing a prison term of up to one year. I can't imagine being jailed just because someone objected to what you were reading. The CBLDF is paying for his defense and they could use help. You can make a donation at cbldf.org. It doesn't matter how small, every bit helps.

Green Lantern

Spoiler Level: Medium

Sorry I've been away so long.  I burned out on blogging and it's been a busy summer. But I didn't want any more time to go by without posting my real review of Green Lantern, especially since I went to so much trouble to do my April Fools fake review.

I loved it.

The movie's been completely trashed by fans, and I just really don't get why. This is everything I wanted a Green Lantern movie to be, and I've wanted a Green Lantern movie for a long time.

I was worried that the power rings would only be used like laser guns.  Nope-- the constructs are here, and lots of 'em, and they look great.

Oa is absolutely breathtaking. I was worried that with the crowds of CGI Lanterns that they would all look too much alike; I needn't have worried. Lots of great alien Lanterns stood out, including ones I didn't expect to see, like Chaselon and Olapet.

The story worked great. There's lots of outer space action, balanced out with a very human Hal Jordan. (The scene where Carol meets him in costume for the first time is priceless.) Some people have complained how the action cuts back and forth between Earth and Oa, but that didn't bother me at all. I liked the way Sinestro was handled a lot, and I hope with all the energies of a Blue Lantern that there will still be a sequel so we can see the development of the Sinestro Corps. Hector Hammond's new origin works great with the layout of the movie, and his hyper-intelligence is still alien based, so that's close enough for me. He's the perfect embodiment of Hector Hammond's character, getting creepier and more disturbing as his powers increase and his body decreases.

Just to be fair, there are three things I didn't like about it:

1. The ending of Hal's first battle with Hector Hammond was confusing; I'm still not exactly sure what happened there.

2. Hal sees the helicopter is crashing, runs off to become Green Lantern, and then the helicopter spends a good minute or two crashing and sliding around before he shows up.  What happened? Did he have to recharge the ring first again?

3. While on Oa, Hal recites some information the ring downloads into his brain about Tomar Re's Sector, and how it contains multiple galaxies, which makes perfect sense if you're dividing the entire universe into 3600 sectors.  However, we then see a later scene saying something along the lines of "Sector 1234: The Edge of the Milky Way Galaxy." Well that doesn't work at all. If each sector needs to cover multiple galaxies, then shouldn't the Milky Way be completely in sector 2814?

So there! See, I'm not giving the movie a free pass just because I'm a huge Green Lantern fan.

What I am is a very grateful Green Lantern fan.  I wanted a live action Green Lantern that was able to use today's special effects to make Green Lantern come to life on the big screen just like the comics, and this movie delivered. From Oa to the Corps to the constructs to Parallax, this movie was everything I wanted to see. I'm disappointed that it's doing so poorly that even if it does get a sequel it's unlikely to get the money it would need to look as good as this one, but at least we got this one.

Dressing Up for the Movies

I have no idea how the idea of doing this came to me, but once it did it somehow took over.

The important part to know going in to the video is it starts in the middle of me saying "I'd like to purchase a ticket," and the woman in the ticket booth responding "2D or 3D?"



I almost backed out at the last moment, not out of any sense of real fear of embarrassment (after all, a Green Lantern must learn to overcome fear, right?) but more out of a sense of "I'm getting too old for this." I mean come on, I'm 42, I got a kid... isn't this a little juvenile?

And then I thought, Hell yeah. As the Doctor once said, what's the point in being grown up if you can't be childish once in a while? And really, the fact that I am 42 is what makes it work.  It wouldn't be nearly as funny if I didn't have that middle-aged gut hanging over the underwear.

Kudos to my daughter for having a sense of humor about it and being willing to film it even though she was embarrassed by her old man (and rightly so), and to the ticket woman for being a good sport. 

And yeah, sometimes I do scare myself.

Green Lantern 2-XSteL

2-XSteL, the smartest toy robot of Sector 2814!  In brightest day, In blackest night, no answers shall escape his sight! 

Couldn't make the midnight screening of Green Lantern tonight, but I'm excited enough about a real GL movie finally being here that I couldn't resist putting this picture together of my favorite toy joining the Corps.  I got the idea a month or so ago when I got the 3D mask with an action figure and stuck it on my 2-XL, and 2-XSteL was born!  Note that he's carrying The 8-Track of Oa.

To everyone who was interested in having me continue with the blogging, I just haven't been able to get myself motivated.  I think I need (needed?) a break.  Hopefully this is the start of me coming back to it.  Thanks for your patience!

Any requests?

I've decided I'm going to scale things back a bit.  I've been posting an average of one review a day for the last six months now, and while that's been fun, it's getting to be a bit exhausting reviewing everything I watch. (Plus the laundry keeps backing up.  You'd be amazed how cranky people get when they don't have clean underwear.  I keep telling them, just turn them inside out, then they're good for five more days, but that doesn't seem to satisfy them.)  So I've decided to only dedicate myself to continue the posts I've been having the most fun writing:  Doctor Who, K9, Star Trek, movies and books. I'll probably still do the occasional review of other stuff as it strikes me, I'm just not dedicating myself to reviewing every single episode of everything.

That is, of course, unless you want me to.

I'm grateful to each and every one of my nine loyal readers (and yes, I'm counting you too Evan-- Scott Gordon is a second account for one of the other eight, which brings me back to nine), and if there's a specific series I've been reviewing that you've been enjoying reading about, I'd be willing to keep doing that one too.  The thing is, when I check my stats, the majority of the hits I get are for this picture:

1,948 hits out of 8,202 hits in May were for this picture.

...so I don't have a clear idea of what people might be enjoying.  So if you'd like me to continue with my reviews of Primeval, Transformers, Tiger & Bunny, SGU or Survivors just leave a comment and let me know.  I live to serve.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to folding underwear.

AVP-R Aliens vs Predator - Requiem

Spoiler Level: High

I was totally prepared to not like this movie.  It's hard to find anything good said about it on the web (but you know my feelings on that-- "I am fanboy, hear me bitch,") and to be honest I wasn't thrilled with the premise.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Aliens and Predators fighting it out, but I don't want it to be on present-day Earth. These are freakin' Aliens with a capital A and alien Predators. I want to see them fighting it out in their natural habitat of outer space. I went along with the contrived concept of a Predator-built Alien Tomb on Earth in the first one because I really wanted to see a bunch of Predators and Aliens have it out, and since that was all I wanted from the movie I enjoyed it enough.  My complaint wasn't that it was only rated PG-13 and not violent enough; my complaint was that it wasn't set in space in the future.  And so this film comes along, and not only is it still set on modern-day Earth but now in a town and the big deal seems to be that it's now rated R, so it can be much more violent!  So I never got around to seeing it when it came out.

But now Predators is out on DVD and I want to see that, and since AVP-R is the only movie I haven't seen from both franchises I figured I'd watch it first.

And you know what?  It didn't suck!

Maybe my standards were low.  Maybe fandom's standards are too high.  Maybe I'm too easily pleased.  Maybe it's all of the above.

For starters, I didn't expect it to be a direct sequel to Alien vs. Predator. I didn't expect it to follow up directly on the Predator-Alien we saw hatch at the end of that movie, so I found the fact that it was to be very cool. It also made sense why it would take place in an American town on Earth, since the "Predalien" makes the ship crash and all the face huggers escape. (Although I'm a little hazy on why the drop ship left Saturn and headed back to Earth in the first place.)  So again, while I'm not thrilled with the premise of an Aliens movie taking place on modern-day Earth, they way it came about made more sense to me than in the previous film.

When I walked out of the first AVP film, some of my friends were talking about how disappointed they were with it.  I said "I just wanted to see some Aliens and Predators fight.  I'm happy."  In that sense, I'm just as happy with this film, as the one lone Predator who received the ship's distress call has to face off against an infested town full of Aliens, a super Predalien, and the planet's locals (ie, the human stars of the movie).  That makes for a cool movie of Aliens and Predators fighting.

On the down side, once that's all established it becomes every other horror movie of some alien menace picking off townsfolk one by one.  The only thing it has going for it here is that the menace is Aliens and Predators. Not long into the movie I started playing the Scream game where you figure out who's going to die and who isn't based on horror movie rules.

The other big drawback is the movie is shot so dark that it's really hard to tell what's going on a lot of the time. When you're only going by shadows it becomes hard to tell if the dreadlocks you're seeing belong to the Predator or the Predalien.  That frequently got very frustrating.

But those elements notwithstanding, I think I actually enjoyed this one more than the previous movie, since it doesn't take place in a tomb but in a wider environment with Aliens running around everywhere.  But then again I always did like Aliens better than Alien, for pretty much the same reason.

I also liked the way it was handled.  The locals start to realize they're in over the head and call in the National Guard.  The National Guard gets wiped out, and after reviewing their camera footage the military decides the only way to contain the infestation is to nuke the city. So now they have the only three survivors in custody, a Predator weapon, and footage of the Aliens. That's got potential. Will it have any impact on Predators, or will that film ignore this film entirely?  Beats me, but I'm glad I watched this one first, just in case.

---

Primeval - Series 1, Episode 6

Spoiler Level: High

A very cool episode, as the stakes are upped and we get some wonderful timey- wimey goodness. The latest Anomaly incursion is not from the past, but from the future! And the future doesn't look too bright, since it's got giant killer intelligent bat-monkeys.

I question the wisdom of burying the killed soldiers in the past.  Why not bring their bodies back through the anomaly and bury them in their own time?  The obvious answer is because this way they've created the encampment they found, giving us a cool time loop.  Which I have to confess is cool, but it nags at me that it has to defy common sense to happen. It would make more sense if the Anomaly closed, the team had to spend a few weeks or months or years (or even just days) in the past so they would have to bury their dead, then the Anomaly to get home opens up so they jump at the chance to get through it and abandon their equipment.

I'm also curious how the few baby bat-monkeys escaping into the past has affected the timeline so much that Claudia is no longer there.  I'm assuming it's a consequence of something larger having happened to the timeline, which we'll find out about in the next episode.  (Or I'll find out about, anyway, since I'm years behind on the show. You probably already know.) It's interesting that Claudia started seeing her reflection as an Anomaly before the timeline was changed.  Maybe the timeline change was meant to happen?

And speaking of Claudia, I rather liked the character development this episode.  As I said in my last Primeval review, at most Helen may have been declared dead thus making Nick single, and at the very least Nick & Helen can definitely be considered to be separated at this point, so I have no real issue with Nick & Claudia falling in love.  The look Nick shoots Helen after Claudia kisses him goodbye is great.  "See?  I've moved on.  You want to leave me for eight years, I'm not going to sit around pining for you forever." And then Helen's got to be all bitchy and throw out that she & Stephen had an affair before she left. 

Which should make me think less of Stephen, but the poor guy's so bland that all I can think is that it finally gives his character a little depth.  He's Nick's loyal right-hand man and the object of Abby's affections, but that's been pretty much it.  Now his loyalty makes a bit more sense; it could have been out of guilt.  His explanation that telling Nick what happened after she disappeared just seamed pointless does make sense.

So all in all, a great debut season.  Looking forward to finding out more about the new timeline next episode!