Yay media consumption! :)

So just a few notes on things I've been consuming...

Movie: Casshern - This was a movie that Jeremy showed me the trailer for, and I was excited to watch. However, since it's in Japanese with English subtitles, I had to wait for a time when I wasn't crocheting while we watched it. I ended up having to split it into two halves, though, because I got way too tired watching the first half. Oddly, I was also falling asleep during the second half. But that was because I was just tired, not because the movie was not holding my attention.

The movie is alternately an awesome steampunk wonderland with over the top action sequences, and then some weird commentary on the state of society or something. The ending was just plain odd... (Jeremy's response: "It's Japanese. What did you expect?" :) ) Overall, though, I enjoyed it. Might watch it again another time if English dubbing is available, just because I feel like I missed something every time I looked away from the screen for a moment.

Book (Graphic Novel): Northlanders - This was a graphic novel that Jerome picked up and loaned to me. It's about Vikings, sorta, and who doesn't like Vikings? :) I thought it was pretty good, though not great. The art was a little sketchier than I tend to like in a comic, and I found it hard to really LIKE the main character. Which kind of makes it a little hard to care about what's going on as much as I would if I liked the main character.

Music: Gogol Bordello - GOOD stuff. It's Gypsy punk, which is way too much fun. I started ripping the CDs while I was cooking dinner, and ended up dancing back and forth between my computer and the kitchen while I listened to the music. :) Might just be what it takes to get me back into belly dancing. :)

I've got a near constant stack of Netflix, graphic novels, and CDs to get through, so expect more posts like this in the future. If you've seen/read/listened to any of this, or end up doing so, let me know! :)

Hmmm...

I wanted to write a rant yesterday about comic book to movie adaptations, and why no one can seem to get it right. They never can just stick with the plot, always got to diverge either a little or a lot. However, I wasn't feeling ranty enough to do it, and then in light of Heath Ledger's death yesterday afternoon, I definitely wasn't feeling up to the challenge. (For those who don't understand the connection, Heath Ledger will be The Joker in "The Dark Knight" (new Batman movie) which comes out this summer. They had already completed filming, so it will be his final role.)

So now the focus of my rant has shifted a little bit. There were some very early reports that this was a suicide, brought on by having played such a disturbing character (namely, The Joker). So the comic book genre suddenly is blamed for someone's death. Later reports seem to suggest that a) it may not have been a suicide, and b) that it wasn't just the role of The Joker that may have been preying on his mind. Heath Ledger also recently finished making a movie about Bob Dylan, and he was quoted as saying that the Dylan role had also been rough on him, to the point where he wasn't sleeping well.

I REALLY wish people would not try to blame things like this on comic books, however. That goes for any mass media, really. Movies, video games, music, whatever the case may be, generally speaking aren't going to make a normal average person do something crazy. Generally speaking, if someone does something crazy, they were probably not entirely stable to begin with. The influence of the mass media is not likely to have been the tipping point. Seriously.

I know this isn't the case for everything, but too often mass media becomes the scapegoat. While there are definitely portions of mass media that bother me, even those parts don't necessarily deserve the bad rap that they so often receive.

All this being said, I think that Heath Ledger's death, whatever the cause/impetus, is a tragic event, just as the death of any person would be a tragic event. We just see the tragedy up close and personal when it's a celebrity, whereas when a random person dies, we don't see it as much.

(*steps off soapbox*)

Awww... and I wanted to be a cat like Assie... :(






*clever*


What fuzzy creature are you?


(You have to pick out of the list of quizzes to get this one... and it's called "Cute Creature Quiz" I think...)

Spent the better part of yesterday thinking about and working on a comic that Gabe is drawing and I'm helping to write... hopefully it'll be ready to be scanned and posted in a couple more days... suffice it to say, it's really wrong... but this is what you get when someone has entirely too much free time, and another someone has entirely too much of a twisted imagination... :)