DVD logging
Jun. 2nd, 2009 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAvatar the Last Airbender (through the end of season 3. What episode did I blog last?) - I have recently rewatched most of the series as Scott watched it for the first time. He'd caught a few episodes here and there as I watched it but hadn't previously been interested enough to sit down with me. Anyway, we both still like it. We'll probably eventually buy it. I very much doubt we'll see the movie unless the cast changes considerably.
I did find myself wondering, at the end, if Azula was being poisoned. She was definitely crazy before, and I doubt that losing her human stabilizers did her any good, but.... Scott found the insanity in character and not jarring. I wanted more justification.
Scott's favorite character is Sokka. Mine is Toph. We didn't dislike any of them, but we did dislike most of the romantic elements (okay, Zuko and Mai are great together).
I still highly, highly recommend this series to those who like fantasy and haven't yet seen it.
Ben 10 season 1 DVD 1 - It's been months, and I don't recall any strong reaction to this series. We'll likely watch more eventually because it wasn't bad and is in a genre that we enjoy, but we won't watch it soon because we didn't find a story arc or character arc to latch onto. Lacking that, there's no impetus to get the next DVD quickly.
This is a superhero story about a kid who finds an alien artifact that lets him change shape into set forms with specific special abilities. With help from his grandfather and cousin, he fights crime (and aliens and...).
Black Cat 1-12 - After reading a couple of volumes of the manga, I found the way the anime started disorienting. I can see the logic of the changed timeline, but I think I liked the way the manga did things better. I didn't need to meet Saya or to see either Train's transition from assassin to bounty hunter or the beginnings of his partnership with Sven. I rather like that the manga starts with them solidly partners. That makes for less uncertainty about whether or not they should be partners and less time spent on showing how they can be.
Creed comes across as even more insane in the anime. Somehow, seeing him move and hearing him speak adds to the sense of utter disconnection from everybody else's reality. I do maintain that much of what I've seen in fanfic about Creed probably owes something to the voice actor. Shinichiro Miki can make any character fascinating and sexy (and Creed loses a lot of power when viewed with the sound turned down or the English dub playing).
I would like to have a better explanation for Creed's obsession with Train, but I'm not convinced that that would fit with the characters. Creed's stuck on who he thinks Train is.
Case Closed: The Fourteenth Target - The folks writing the English script for this seem to have gone through some interesting stretches and gymnastics in their effort to justify the killer's choices of victims. As far as I can tell, the Japanese is based on numeric puns that don't translate. The English seemed based on trivia that bordered on the ridiculous. I'd have believed it more if it were revealed at the end that the killer assigned most of the numbers and then left it to investigators to find the connection after the fact.
That said, this was a reasonable Conan mystery. I don't think it will draw in any new fans, but it didn't alienate me (not that I'm an avid fan). It wasn't a bad way to spend my time.
Celtic Woman - Okay music. I didn't actually watch the DVD while it was playing, so I have no idea whether or not the visuals add anything. I suspect not as the glimpses I got during my occasional glances at the screen were all concert performance stuff. I don't find that watching a concert gives me much of anything beyond a sense of what the performers look like.
Chieftans: Down the Old Plank Road - Another one I listened to more than watched. I think I want to get the CDs. I also think that I like listening to step dancing a lot more than watching it. It's dull to watch, but I very much like it as an added percussion line.
Claymore 1-5 - We're going to wait a few months for more of this. It's too close to the manga, and it hasn't been long enough since we read that. We'll try another DVD in the series and then make a more solid decision. Right now, we're not feeling any attachment to the characters or the setting. I want to see more scenes with kickass women taking down monsters, just on general principle, but more than that would be nice. I'm moderately optimistic that there will be more given the manga, but anime/manga differences can be huge.
Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid 1-4 - These episodes support the rumor I'd heard that this series is more violent and less funny than the first series. We've got the next DVD a couple of spaces down in our Netflix queue, so we'll see soon how things balance.
I'm not sure I like the psycho villain at all. So far, he's kind of dull. I'm more interested in the two women who seem to be working for him. Scott was rather annoyed to see one of them kicking Mao around as he feels that she'd do better in combat than that. He especially felt that Mao would not lose her gun and would not hesitate to shoot.
I also missed seeing Sousuke in school. There was a bit of that, and it was wonderful, but most of the episode time was elsewhere, with him and Mithril in combat situations.
Get Smart - I liked this a lot more than I expected to. An awful lot more. It was funnier and less cringe-inducingly embarrassing. The hero came across as selectively brilliant with large gaps in his understanding of people. This is another one that we watched a while back and that I don't have much memory for what I meant to say about it. Recommended for those who like spy comedies.
Hancock - I did have a disconnect when Mary talked about how Hancock lost his memory. She never mentions race as a factor in the beating, and I kept thinking back over the dialog because I thought it should be there and wasn't sure if viewers were simply supposed to see it by implication (70 years ago, Florida, black man and white woman holding hands in public, sudden and vicious assault, him hurt very badly and her either not at all or not badly, her not allowed in the ambulance with him, etc.) or if it was being glossed over so as to let white viewers ignore it or if I was misinterpreting the whole thing.
Handsome Siblings 1-5 - I'm currently viewing this series as a comedy with angst. That view may change as things go on, but a lot seems to revolve around humor right now. Little Fish is a trickster raised by crazy people and can't seem to do anything without making it a joke, even when he treats it seriously.
The separated twins story both fascinates me and makes my head hurt. That has to be the most convoluted revenge plot I've heard of. Then again, I get the impression that the character who suggested it wasn't really serious about revenge. She mainly wanted an excuse not to kill the babies and hit on one her sister would agree to. I might be wrong, but I wonder if she didn't think that fifteen to twenty years of raising a child would soften her sister's anger.
Then again, I also didn't think the twins' father was all that. I'm not sure why anybody got obsessed with him. Perhaps she (I can't remember her name) would have gotten obsessed with any reasonably attractive warrior who wandered through. I'm glad the actresses playing these characters are good and that this one in particular is excellent. It makes the ridiculous easier to swallow.
Little Fish is growing on me, especially now that I've seen his backstory. The actor has good timing and a good sense of what his body is doing all the time. I'm still, however, intrigued by Flawless Flower. I'm not sure how much of that is knowing that his backstory must be angsty as all get-out and how much is looking at him as eye candy (which surprises me because it's not something I'm prone to as a general rule). I suppose later episodes will modify my opinions.
Justice League: The New Frontier - This was a bit too depressing for me. Using McCarthyism and the Cold War as a backdrop for a superhero story does make for interesting possibilities, but I felt that the story was spread between too many characters so that each got too little time. The character who got the most time (Hal Jordan, I think) was in the middle of his origin story, and I don't like origin stories.
All of that sounds like I hated the movie. I didn't. It just was only peripherally my sort of story. Maybe I'd have liked it better if I were more of an avid DC Comics fan.
Kyo Kara Maoh 45-63 - Wow. It's been a long time since I blogged DVDs. It took me months to get the fifth DVD of the second season from Netflix. Oops.
Still silly. Still charming. I'm only vaguely tracking the larger plot about collecting the pieces of the MacGuffin. I've forgotten why they're doing it, and I wish I could remember. Of course, this is one of those rare series where story arc isn't such a big deal.
Oh, and Yuri's mother is scary.
Louisiana Blues Musical Documentary - I wish I'd liked this better. I loved the music. I was simply bored by the documentary bits (that they were largely in French didn't help). I think I simply need to check some CDs out of the library and give up on DVDs like this one.
Man From UNCLE season 1 DVD 1 - I was bored. Scott was bored. This was vastly disappointing as I know many people who love this series. Does it improve? Are the first handful of episodes simply weak or is the rest like this? I suspect that some of my problem is that I'm not very interested in episodic stories. I want arc.
Northanger Abbey - I think I need to stop trying these Masterpiece Theater Austen adaptations. I don't have the patience for them and end up pausing them repeatedly as they set off my embarrassment squick. Maybe no romatic comedies of any sort for a while? At any rate, this was not a winner for me. I stopped a third of the way through and sent it back to Netflix. I didn't see the point in torturing myself further. I expect it would work well for someone not-me.
Once Upon a Mattress - We watched this with Cordelia. I'd gotten it from Netflix for me (the year after I graduated high school, the school had a play for the first time in a decade (at least) and did Once Upon a Mattress. I didn't see the production but have been curious about the play ever since), but it occurred to me that it would be reasonably child safe and might appeal to her.
I have mixed feelings about both the script and the production. A lot of the script relies on the idea that women *need* to marry and on the evil of the Queen. In terms of the two romances in the story, I found neither 'hero' at all appealing so that my main response was, 'How sad that these ladies can't do better,' combined with an impulse to see the heroines walk away. Admittedly, the pregnant lady-in-waiting was in a serious mess that wouldn't be helped by walking away, but her True Love was a self-righteous bore who I think would make a miserable husband.
As to the production, Carol Burnett, Tommy Smothers and Tracy Ullman were fantastic. (My only quibble with Ullman-- and it is a quibble-- was that she looked too old. It wouldn't be an issue in a stage production, but it is an issue in a film.) I'm bothered by having a black man, the only black man with a speaking part (I think there were two others in the chorus, but I never got a good enough look to be sure), play the Court Jester. He played the part well and with dignity, and the character was the only male character that didn't make me want to smack him, but...court jester.
Patriotic Knights 1-8 - Oh, dear. I waited too long to write about this. I remember nothing at all about the story except that I was having fun. I've got another DVD coming soon, so I'd better hit Wikipedia and hope for a good summary. How embarrassing.
Penelope - I found this cute but not hugely memorable. I definitely wanted to smack Penelope's mother for idiocy, though, and I can tell that I was supposed to want to. I did run into the problem of not thinking that Penelope's pig nose was all that noticeable most of the time. I suppose that was part of the point.
We found this movie on the shelves in the kids' room at the local library. I can't say that it's not appropriate for kids, but Cordelia would have been bored by it because a lot of it wouldn't have made any sense to her. Of course, the teen room doesn't have a DVD section, so it had to be shelved either in the kids' room or in the adult section.
Romance of Red Dust 11-30 - Three fridgings. That's too many. One is too many, really, but three.... I suppose one of them arguably isn't because she doesn't die and doesn't seem to be permanently traumatized, but that's the one that offended me the most, so I'm counting it.
In the middle of the series, attention shifted off of Hong Bi/Chu Cheng (I never quite figured out why different characters used which name. I decided that it didn't matter as long as I remembered that they were the same person) and onto the men around her. That shift made her a plot token in their stories. She seemed to stop having dilemmas and challenges of her own so that the men's difficulties could be about her.
I was disconcerted by the fact that the subtitles consistently called one of the three competing princes 'Emperor Quin' or 'King Quin.' He quite obviously wasn't emperor then given that he was in a vicious power struggle with his two brothers and that their father was in charge. I can only assume that there's some convention of Chinese historical fiction involved here.
A lot of my big issues with where the plot went are spoilers. I want to talk about them, but I'm not sure here is the right place. If I write about the series in a separate entry, will anybody care?
Speed Racer - I was rather yeah-whatever on this one. I suspect that part of it is that I never watched the original. This was my introduction to the characters and story. The other part is probably that portions of the movie simply moved too fast for me to even see them. Migraine inducing special effects don't endear a movie to me.
Sword Stained With Royal Blood 26-30 - I felt that the intersection of real history with this story weakened the story. That is, history got into my fiction, and I didn't think the combination worked. The real events that needed to happen didn't connect with the hero's story properly. He didn't want to be involved in anything like them, but the story wasn't about him not being involved (or about him being involved).
I was glad of Wikipedia and the links to historical events for this series. I'd not have understood the Princess' story arc otherwise, and it made me view her differently to know the history and that she's a popular character in literature beyond this story.
I don't think this is going to be one of my favorites in the long term. Right now, I'd put it at the bottom of the Chinese series I've watched to the end (all, what, three of them?).
Teen Titans seasons 2-4 - I'm not sure I can quite explain why I like this series so much, but I do like it. I don't always pay a lot of attention to the episodes while they're playing, but I enjoy the character interactions and the insane humor. The downside is that it's very episodic without long running arcs. Usually, that drives me crazy, but I find it sort of charming here.
The villains are insane. The heroes are close to insane. The world sometimes breaks in interesting ways. Superhero stories are something that both Scott and I enjoy. Neither of us are insanely enthusiastic, but we can have fun with them.
I just wish I knew what it is that makes me like this better than series with similar levels of story that are pitched at the same age. Hm. Maybe the ensemble cast? I do like those a lot. I like having at least five characters who show up almost all the time.
Thirty Day Princess - Screwball comedy fluff. This one wasn't great but also wasn't awful. An actress hired to replace an ailing princess who's trying to raise funds for her country to modernize (electricity and plumbing are desirable, yes?) falls for a newspaper man who's trying to prove that she's a scam artist. Cary Grant is charming as always.
Tsubasa: The Princess in the Birdcage Kingdom - This movie simply wasn't memorable for me. That means that I've got very little to say. I remember that I liked it and that parts of it were charming. It didn't make as much of an impression as the xxxHOLIC movie which I watched close to the same time did. I think I'd recommend this for those who like Tsubasa but not necessarily otherwise. Fortunately, I mostly like Tsubasa.
Tsubasa 15-22 - I have difficulty paying attention to this series. It's charming, but at this point it's still too episodic to hold my attention. I'm sure I'm missing clues and foreshadowing, but my brain keeps wanting to pay attention to something else. This is another case where I think it's me rather than the series. Still, the manga's better.
xxxHOLIC: A Midsummer Night's Dream - This was utterly surreal in a way that I rather liked. The changing images and the places the characters passed through felt very dream-like. That is, they were very like the things that happen in my own dreams. The plot wasn't much, but that didn't matter. I was busy enjoying people trying to make waking sense of a world that simply didn't work that way.
I did find myself wondering, at the end, if Azula was being poisoned. She was definitely crazy before, and I doubt that losing her human stabilizers did her any good, but.... Scott found the insanity in character and not jarring. I wanted more justification.
Scott's favorite character is Sokka. Mine is Toph. We didn't dislike any of them, but we did dislike most of the romantic elements (okay, Zuko and Mai are great together).
I still highly, highly recommend this series to those who like fantasy and haven't yet seen it.
Ben 10 season 1 DVD 1 - It's been months, and I don't recall any strong reaction to this series. We'll likely watch more eventually because it wasn't bad and is in a genre that we enjoy, but we won't watch it soon because we didn't find a story arc or character arc to latch onto. Lacking that, there's no impetus to get the next DVD quickly.
This is a superhero story about a kid who finds an alien artifact that lets him change shape into set forms with specific special abilities. With help from his grandfather and cousin, he fights crime (and aliens and...).
Black Cat 1-12 - After reading a couple of volumes of the manga, I found the way the anime started disorienting. I can see the logic of the changed timeline, but I think I liked the way the manga did things better. I didn't need to meet Saya or to see either Train's transition from assassin to bounty hunter or the beginnings of his partnership with Sven. I rather like that the manga starts with them solidly partners. That makes for less uncertainty about whether or not they should be partners and less time spent on showing how they can be.
Creed comes across as even more insane in the anime. Somehow, seeing him move and hearing him speak adds to the sense of utter disconnection from everybody else's reality. I do maintain that much of what I've seen in fanfic about Creed probably owes something to the voice actor. Shinichiro Miki can make any character fascinating and sexy (and Creed loses a lot of power when viewed with the sound turned down or the English dub playing).
I would like to have a better explanation for Creed's obsession with Train, but I'm not convinced that that would fit with the characters. Creed's stuck on who he thinks Train is.
Case Closed: The Fourteenth Target - The folks writing the English script for this seem to have gone through some interesting stretches and gymnastics in their effort to justify the killer's choices of victims. As far as I can tell, the Japanese is based on numeric puns that don't translate. The English seemed based on trivia that bordered on the ridiculous. I'd have believed it more if it were revealed at the end that the killer assigned most of the numbers and then left it to investigators to find the connection after the fact.
That said, this was a reasonable Conan mystery. I don't think it will draw in any new fans, but it didn't alienate me (not that I'm an avid fan). It wasn't a bad way to spend my time.
Celtic Woman - Okay music. I didn't actually watch the DVD while it was playing, so I have no idea whether or not the visuals add anything. I suspect not as the glimpses I got during my occasional glances at the screen were all concert performance stuff. I don't find that watching a concert gives me much of anything beyond a sense of what the performers look like.
Chieftans: Down the Old Plank Road - Another one I listened to more than watched. I think I want to get the CDs. I also think that I like listening to step dancing a lot more than watching it. It's dull to watch, but I very much like it as an added percussion line.
Claymore 1-5 - We're going to wait a few months for more of this. It's too close to the manga, and it hasn't been long enough since we read that. We'll try another DVD in the series and then make a more solid decision. Right now, we're not feeling any attachment to the characters or the setting. I want to see more scenes with kickass women taking down monsters, just on general principle, but more than that would be nice. I'm moderately optimistic that there will be more given the manga, but anime/manga differences can be huge.
Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid 1-4 - These episodes support the rumor I'd heard that this series is more violent and less funny than the first series. We've got the next DVD a couple of spaces down in our Netflix queue, so we'll see soon how things balance.
I'm not sure I like the psycho villain at all. So far, he's kind of dull. I'm more interested in the two women who seem to be working for him. Scott was rather annoyed to see one of them kicking Mao around as he feels that she'd do better in combat than that. He especially felt that Mao would not lose her gun and would not hesitate to shoot.
I also missed seeing Sousuke in school. There was a bit of that, and it was wonderful, but most of the episode time was elsewhere, with him and Mithril in combat situations.
Get Smart - I liked this a lot more than I expected to. An awful lot more. It was funnier and less cringe-inducingly embarrassing. The hero came across as selectively brilliant with large gaps in his understanding of people. This is another one that we watched a while back and that I don't have much memory for what I meant to say about it. Recommended for those who like spy comedies.
Hancock - I did have a disconnect when Mary talked about how Hancock lost his memory. She never mentions race as a factor in the beating, and I kept thinking back over the dialog because I thought it should be there and wasn't sure if viewers were simply supposed to see it by implication (70 years ago, Florida, black man and white woman holding hands in public, sudden and vicious assault, him hurt very badly and her either not at all or not badly, her not allowed in the ambulance with him, etc.) or if it was being glossed over so as to let white viewers ignore it or if I was misinterpreting the whole thing.
Handsome Siblings 1-5 - I'm currently viewing this series as a comedy with angst. That view may change as things go on, but a lot seems to revolve around humor right now. Little Fish is a trickster raised by crazy people and can't seem to do anything without making it a joke, even when he treats it seriously.
The separated twins story both fascinates me and makes my head hurt. That has to be the most convoluted revenge plot I've heard of. Then again, I get the impression that the character who suggested it wasn't really serious about revenge. She mainly wanted an excuse not to kill the babies and hit on one her sister would agree to. I might be wrong, but I wonder if she didn't think that fifteen to twenty years of raising a child would soften her sister's anger.
Then again, I also didn't think the twins' father was all that. I'm not sure why anybody got obsessed with him. Perhaps she (I can't remember her name) would have gotten obsessed with any reasonably attractive warrior who wandered through. I'm glad the actresses playing these characters are good and that this one in particular is excellent. It makes the ridiculous easier to swallow.
Little Fish is growing on me, especially now that I've seen his backstory. The actor has good timing and a good sense of what his body is doing all the time. I'm still, however, intrigued by Flawless Flower. I'm not sure how much of that is knowing that his backstory must be angsty as all get-out and how much is looking at him as eye candy (which surprises me because it's not something I'm prone to as a general rule). I suppose later episodes will modify my opinions.
Justice League: The New Frontier - This was a bit too depressing for me. Using McCarthyism and the Cold War as a backdrop for a superhero story does make for interesting possibilities, but I felt that the story was spread between too many characters so that each got too little time. The character who got the most time (Hal Jordan, I think) was in the middle of his origin story, and I don't like origin stories.
All of that sounds like I hated the movie. I didn't. It just was only peripherally my sort of story. Maybe I'd have liked it better if I were more of an avid DC Comics fan.
Kyo Kara Maoh 45-63 - Wow. It's been a long time since I blogged DVDs. It took me months to get the fifth DVD of the second season from Netflix. Oops.
Still silly. Still charming. I'm only vaguely tracking the larger plot about collecting the pieces of the MacGuffin. I've forgotten why they're doing it, and I wish I could remember. Of course, this is one of those rare series where story arc isn't such a big deal.
Oh, and Yuri's mother is scary.
Louisiana Blues Musical Documentary - I wish I'd liked this better. I loved the music. I was simply bored by the documentary bits (that they were largely in French didn't help). I think I simply need to check some CDs out of the library and give up on DVDs like this one.
Man From UNCLE season 1 DVD 1 - I was bored. Scott was bored. This was vastly disappointing as I know many people who love this series. Does it improve? Are the first handful of episodes simply weak or is the rest like this? I suspect that some of my problem is that I'm not very interested in episodic stories. I want arc.
Northanger Abbey - I think I need to stop trying these Masterpiece Theater Austen adaptations. I don't have the patience for them and end up pausing them repeatedly as they set off my embarrassment squick. Maybe no romatic comedies of any sort for a while? At any rate, this was not a winner for me. I stopped a third of the way through and sent it back to Netflix. I didn't see the point in torturing myself further. I expect it would work well for someone not-me.
Once Upon a Mattress - We watched this with Cordelia. I'd gotten it from Netflix for me (the year after I graduated high school, the school had a play for the first time in a decade (at least) and did Once Upon a Mattress. I didn't see the production but have been curious about the play ever since), but it occurred to me that it would be reasonably child safe and might appeal to her.
I have mixed feelings about both the script and the production. A lot of the script relies on the idea that women *need* to marry and on the evil of the Queen. In terms of the two romances in the story, I found neither 'hero' at all appealing so that my main response was, 'How sad that these ladies can't do better,' combined with an impulse to see the heroines walk away. Admittedly, the pregnant lady-in-waiting was in a serious mess that wouldn't be helped by walking away, but her True Love was a self-righteous bore who I think would make a miserable husband.
As to the production, Carol Burnett, Tommy Smothers and Tracy Ullman were fantastic. (My only quibble with Ullman-- and it is a quibble-- was that she looked too old. It wouldn't be an issue in a stage production, but it is an issue in a film.) I'm bothered by having a black man, the only black man with a speaking part (I think there were two others in the chorus, but I never got a good enough look to be sure), play the Court Jester. He played the part well and with dignity, and the character was the only male character that didn't make me want to smack him, but...court jester.
Patriotic Knights 1-8 - Oh, dear. I waited too long to write about this. I remember nothing at all about the story except that I was having fun. I've got another DVD coming soon, so I'd better hit Wikipedia and hope for a good summary. How embarrassing.
Penelope - I found this cute but not hugely memorable. I definitely wanted to smack Penelope's mother for idiocy, though, and I can tell that I was supposed to want to. I did run into the problem of not thinking that Penelope's pig nose was all that noticeable most of the time. I suppose that was part of the point.
We found this movie on the shelves in the kids' room at the local library. I can't say that it's not appropriate for kids, but Cordelia would have been bored by it because a lot of it wouldn't have made any sense to her. Of course, the teen room doesn't have a DVD section, so it had to be shelved either in the kids' room or in the adult section.
Romance of Red Dust 11-30 - Three fridgings. That's too many. One is too many, really, but three.... I suppose one of them arguably isn't because she doesn't die and doesn't seem to be permanently traumatized, but that's the one that offended me the most, so I'm counting it.
In the middle of the series, attention shifted off of Hong Bi/Chu Cheng (I never quite figured out why different characters used which name. I decided that it didn't matter as long as I remembered that they were the same person) and onto the men around her. That shift made her a plot token in their stories. She seemed to stop having dilemmas and challenges of her own so that the men's difficulties could be about her.
I was disconcerted by the fact that the subtitles consistently called one of the three competing princes 'Emperor Quin' or 'King Quin.' He quite obviously wasn't emperor then given that he was in a vicious power struggle with his two brothers and that their father was in charge. I can only assume that there's some convention of Chinese historical fiction involved here.
A lot of my big issues with where the plot went are spoilers. I want to talk about them, but I'm not sure here is the right place. If I write about the series in a separate entry, will anybody care?
Speed Racer - I was rather yeah-whatever on this one. I suspect that part of it is that I never watched the original. This was my introduction to the characters and story. The other part is probably that portions of the movie simply moved too fast for me to even see them. Migraine inducing special effects don't endear a movie to me.
Sword Stained With Royal Blood 26-30 - I felt that the intersection of real history with this story weakened the story. That is, history got into my fiction, and I didn't think the combination worked. The real events that needed to happen didn't connect with the hero's story properly. He didn't want to be involved in anything like them, but the story wasn't about him not being involved (or about him being involved).
I was glad of Wikipedia and the links to historical events for this series. I'd not have understood the Princess' story arc otherwise, and it made me view her differently to know the history and that she's a popular character in literature beyond this story.
I don't think this is going to be one of my favorites in the long term. Right now, I'd put it at the bottom of the Chinese series I've watched to the end (all, what, three of them?).
Teen Titans seasons 2-4 - I'm not sure I can quite explain why I like this series so much, but I do like it. I don't always pay a lot of attention to the episodes while they're playing, but I enjoy the character interactions and the insane humor. The downside is that it's very episodic without long running arcs. Usually, that drives me crazy, but I find it sort of charming here.
The villains are insane. The heroes are close to insane. The world sometimes breaks in interesting ways. Superhero stories are something that both Scott and I enjoy. Neither of us are insanely enthusiastic, but we can have fun with them.
I just wish I knew what it is that makes me like this better than series with similar levels of story that are pitched at the same age. Hm. Maybe the ensemble cast? I do like those a lot. I like having at least five characters who show up almost all the time.
Thirty Day Princess - Screwball comedy fluff. This one wasn't great but also wasn't awful. An actress hired to replace an ailing princess who's trying to raise funds for her country to modernize (electricity and plumbing are desirable, yes?) falls for a newspaper man who's trying to prove that she's a scam artist. Cary Grant is charming as always.
Tsubasa: The Princess in the Birdcage Kingdom - This movie simply wasn't memorable for me. That means that I've got very little to say. I remember that I liked it and that parts of it were charming. It didn't make as much of an impression as the xxxHOLIC movie which I watched close to the same time did. I think I'd recommend this for those who like Tsubasa but not necessarily otherwise. Fortunately, I mostly like Tsubasa.
Tsubasa 15-22 - I have difficulty paying attention to this series. It's charming, but at this point it's still too episodic to hold my attention. I'm sure I'm missing clues and foreshadowing, but my brain keeps wanting to pay attention to something else. This is another case where I think it's me rather than the series. Still, the manga's better.
xxxHOLIC: A Midsummer Night's Dream - This was utterly surreal in a way that I rather liked. The changing images and the places the characters passed through felt very dream-like. That is, they were very like the things that happen in my own dreams. The plot wasn't much, but that didn't matter. I was busy enjoying people trying to make waking sense of a world that simply didn't work that way.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Random thoughts:
Date: 2009-06-02 03:00 pm (UTC)2) Yay, "Get Smart"! It was so much fun!
3) Yeah, I like Teen Titans for many of the same reasons, and I think you're right--it's the ensemble cast that makes this show work. (I don't think "The Robin Show", for example, would work as well.) I think it also helps that the writers are quite willing not to take things so seriously.
4) Yay, the Holic movie! I really liked the rooms of collected items--that was weird and beautiful. There's a good balance in this movie between the ghost story motif and the usual wacky banter between the characters. It was particularly nice to see Yuuko be so cool at the end.
Re: Random thoughts:
Date: 2009-06-03 01:13 pm (UTC)Is it awful that one of the first things I think of with Case Closed/Detective Conan, apart from the fic, is the nasty arguments on Wikipedia?
2) Get Smart so thoroughly exceeded my expectations that I was thrilled. Exceeding my expectations wasn't that hard since they were pretty low. Getting an enthusiastic thumbs up and recommendation.... That was harder.
3) I like Robin's competence, but he's only fun because of the other characters. I like that they all have personality traits that aren't part of the plot but that matter to the characters. Now that I think about it.... Robin has the least in the way of personality. He's not utterly lacking, but I get the impression that he doesn't let himself have quirks because they're exploitable. Which I suppose is personality in itself.
I've actually been tempted to buy the DVDs and think about writing fic for the show. I'm just scared of the comics canon and the weight of the DC universe. Plus, there won't be money for DVDs for a while, and I'd rather buy Avatar.
4)I was surprised not to see more positive reviews of the Holic movie on Netflix. I liked it a lot. Watanuki's search for the bathroom was a classic dream sequence (in the sense that it's something that I could see turning up in one of my dreams rather than in the sense that it's part of a tradition of dream sequences). Most of the time, when I see dream sequences, they make too much sense.
Yuuko being cool is something we need more of. I find her fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-02 03:31 pm (UTC)Northanger Abbey was, by far, the worst of the Masterpiece Theater productions. Staggeringly bad, in fact--so very eighties it made my eyes cross.The Emma and the Mansfield Park were quite good.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-03 12:57 pm (UTC)Emma as a story makes me cringe because I don't have the stomach for embarrassment and emotional train crashes. I've never managed to get more than a few chapters into the novel. I've also not managed to read Northanger Abbey. I was hoping that seeing a production of it would help me.
I don't think I'll go further with Man from UNCLE. If Scott were interested or if I were watching with someone else who were interested, I don't think I'd mind it, but I'm not quite that desperate for DVDs in English. (I'm trying to alternate one DVD in English with every one in another language. The ones not in English require more work on my part, but I'm having better luck finding stories I love there. Thank goodness for Netflix!)
Black Cat
Date: 2009-06-04 07:19 pm (UTC)