The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.
Thursday, January 07
K-On! Movie Pre-Review
Hirasawa Yui is my spirit animal.
Update: The big problem with watching any K-On! is that their songs are terrible earworms. I now have Rice is a Side Dish stuck in my head.
(Couldn't find a clip of them actually performing this song, though they do it once in the TV series and again in the movie. This is the movie version, where Yui does an unscheduled One more time! and the other girls go Whut? but manage to jump back in.)
My favourite has to be Listen, the season 2 first-half ending, featuring cake-fairy Mio:
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, January 07 2016 07:08 AM (+rSRq)
2
Took me a while to watch, because it comes between episodes 22 and 23 in season 2, and I couldn't remember how far I'd got in season 2.
So I started from the beginning...
Having seen almost all of it now, I'll say what I said before: If you like Yui in episode 1, K-On! is for you. If you don't like Yui in episode 1, it's probably not.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 07 2016 02:59 PM (PiXy!)
3If you like Yui in episode 1, K-On! is for you. If you don't like Yui in episode 1, it's probably not.
I've read a scanslated version of the K-On! manga at one of those "free" online manga sites*, and I thought Yui was tolerable in moderate doses--a bit like Tomo from Azumanga Daioh in that regard. Is her latent annoyance factor higher or lower in the anime? (For comparison purposes, my favourite member of Afternoon Tea Time is Mio, but my favourite character of the entire manga is Nodoka, who in turn is similar to Yomi from AzuDai.)
*As an aside...yes, I do feel like a dirty pirate, and I have half a mind of making what Steven den Beste would call a guilt buy. How good is the Yen Press translation of the K-On! manga?
Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Friday, January 08 2016 12:42 PM (XC8ds)
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The characters are pretty much identical in the anime; they didn't fiddle around with that. But KyoAni really hit it out of the part with the production quality of K-On! Everything about the show is exactly right, and it makes the story so much better.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 08 2016 02:44 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, January 09 2016 05:01 AM (XOPVE)
6How good is the Yen Press translation of the K-On! manga?
Very. Better than any scanalation of the series I've seen.
...my favourite character of the entire manga is Nodoka...
I have her figma... along with Mio, Ritsu and Azu-nyan. Don't believe what it says, the guitars don't come with straps. Easy to make one out of the vinyl off a three-ring binder, though.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, January 09 2016 03:23 PM (zAcee)
7
Nodoka is great. She's the backup "only sane man" once you realise that all the girls in the band are crazy in their own way. (Mio is the sensible one... Oh. Mugi is the sensible one... Oh. Azu-nyan is... Oh. Sawa-chan... Oh.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2016 10:53 AM (PiXy!)
I have nothing bad to say about this film. Four stars.
I was going to suggest that perhaps Lucille's accent wanders a bit, but I checked, and she's played by Vanessa Paradis, who is French, from Paris, and plays the role in both the English and French versions, the only major cast member who did so.
1
I found that movie by way of your linking the "La Seine and I" video, and found it delightful, mainly in the rather small scale of it, because I am getting a bit tired of everyone always wanting to save the entire universe lately. (Yes, I know that's a bit of an exaggeration.)
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 06 2016 02:25 PM (FvJAK)
2
Yes, that's definitely part of it. I expecting something larger scale, and was absolutely charmed by the way it played out.
I stumbled over that video just clicking around on Youtube after watching that Moses Supposes animation Wonderduck found a few weeks back. I'd never heard of the film before; I don't think it got a theatrical release here in Australia.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 06 2016 03:33 PM (PiXy!)
I'm toying with the idea of Tintin as an anti-hero, like Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné, so completely obsessed with getting the story (no matter how trivial) that he is entirely unaware of the disaster he leaves in his wake.
This film did not grab me. There is one part that is very, very, very good, but that's a few minutes of honey in almost two hours of cold porridge.
1
Are you a Tintin fan, out of curiosity? Or did you go into the film cold?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, January 05 2016 12:33 PM (zAcee)
2
I've read a bit, years ago, but it's not something I grew up with like Asterix and Obelix.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 05 2016 01:04 PM (PiXy!)
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Gotcha. I learned to read with Tintin, but I've only read a couple of Asterix books. I'm the only person I know IRL who routinely uses the word 'menhir', though.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, January 05 2016 04:38 PM (zAcee)
A menhir is a standing stone (as in Stonehenge), typically used to comically squish Roman legionaries. In the Asterix series, Asterix's best friend Obelix is a menhir-maker.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 06 2016 10:48 AM (PiXy!)
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Or did he just deliver menhirs? Can't remember; it's been a while.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 06 2016 11:57 AM (PiXy!)
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Delivery man. Who makes the menhirs he delivers is a mystery I don't remember.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, January 06 2016 01:43 PM (zAcee)
In which Pixar takes Dennett's "Cartesian Theater" perhaps a little too literally.
Cute film, and yet a stronger story than Brave. The model of mental processes is almost the diametric opposite of reality, but I'm willing to let that slide.
1
I remember, very vaguely, a cartoon, probably Warner Brothers, where there are two individuals in people's heads driving them around. At one point the emotional, impulsive one gets the woman to pig out on sweets and all the graphs of her body and figure virtually explode. I absolutely do not know the title of it, so I have never been able to find it.
Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, January 05 2016 12:42 PM (5Ktpu)
2
That sounds like something Bob McKimson would have done.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, January 05 2016 01:01 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, January 04 2016 10:39 AM (+rSRq)
5
Next year I'll pick movies based solely on their value for making puns in review titles.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 04 2016 11:06 AM (PiXy!)
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I just looked it up in IMDB. What a stupid conceit! There's no way such a drug could exist! Sheesh...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, January 04 2016 11:20 AM (+rSRq)
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The IMDB synopsis is what the main character thinks the drug does, not what it actually does.
It's more that the poison is going to kill him no matter what, but that elevated levels of adrenaline delay the process - so he may have a few hours to live rather than the expected half an hour.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 04 2016 12:13 PM (PiXy!)
1
There's something very strange about the cat in this video. He doesn't seem to mind the monkey suit (unlike other cat-in-costume internet sensations, where the cat is obviously wishing a painful death on the person who dressed him up), and he also likes bananas.
Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Saturday, January 02 2016 10:17 AM (XC8ds)
2
Monkeycat, monkeycat, does whatever a monkeycat does.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 02 2016 08:10 PM (PiXy!)
