Erik's Favorite Things: Millennium Actress

If you ever want to see me get really close to crying in public, ask me what it was like watching Perfect Blue for the first time.  I'll probably sit in a corner and gently rock back and forth, mutter to myself, and seem unresponsive to the outside world, but I can't promise there wouldn't be any tears.

What I'm saying is that the first directing work of Satoshi Kon messed me up pretty bad.  The fact that I keep going back to him for other projects he's worked on tells you just how amazing his works are as well, because I don't tend to go back to things that strongly disagree with me.

Millenium Actress was Satoshi Kon's second directorial project, the story of an actress who vanishes at the peak of her career, and the small documentary crew exploring her life to find out why.

Erik's Favorite Things: The Death Gate Cycle

Every nerd has their favorite fantasy-based book series.  For some, it's a classic like Tolkein's run of Hobbit-based books.  Maybe they were really into the Christian analogies of Narnia.  It could be something newer, like Harry Potter, or Percy Jackson, or, if they're like me, they got their start on David Eddings' Belgariad series, or perhaps Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance series.  There are so many series out there now, staring magical detectives, heroic knights, orphans with mysterious destinies, and twisted schemers that it can be hard for someone to pick just the right series to latch on to and claim as their "favorite."

I didn't have that problem, because my father was (and still is) a big-time reader, and introduced me to so many series that I had my pick of among some of the best.  He got me into David Eddings, Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist, Dan Simmons, and so many other authors, but I think (hope) he'd agree with me that the ones I loved the most to the point that I bought the pretty terrible video game tie-in would be The Death Gate Cycle, the seven book series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman that, for some unexplainable reason, isn't bigger than their Dragonlance stuff.

What The Heck Am I Doing With This Blog?

You know, sometimes I wonder what my goal is with this blog.

Originally I was going to review Succubus: Hell-Bent, a dopey-looking movie that came in a three-pack with Vampires: Out For Blood and Blood Angels.  I'll admit, the first movie was bad, but my having been a huge Vanessa Angel fan for years gave me an actual reason to want to watch it.  It was bad, but it was enjoyably bad.  I wasn't expecting masterful acting from any of the cast, but the movie actually managed to surprise me with a few clever ideas and gave some hints as to how it could be much better given a real budget, a few better actors, and some cleaner writing.

I realize that's like saying "Dirty Dancing 2 could have been The Artist with some better writing and an entirely different cast" but work with me here.

Blood Angels shook my faith in everything I'm doing.  It reached deep into me and left me lying in my bed in the middle of the night staring at my ceiling going "...is this really worth the time and investment I put into it?  Am I even really enjoying myself when I do movies like these?"  There were no actors in it I was eager to see, miserably awful writing, terrible special effects, and a plot that was so transparent it had to be kept away from areas where lots of birds would fly around, lest they die immediately on impact.

So why would I expose myself to that again?  I can't think of a single reason to, and now I find myself idly looking around for something to do so I can finish this month and move on.

Blood Angels, you made me start to hate Halloween.  I'll never forgive you.

Maybe...maybe I need to look back at something nostalgic, something that I loved when I saw it when I was little.  Maybe there's something out there that I can remember that helped me get more "into" Halloween, something that made me appreciate it more than just "that holiday where people get scared and then eat candy."  For a long time growing up I was so convinced that all "fear" was bad that it took my slowly exposing myself to different kinds of fear to understand what I liked and what I didn't like, and I can really only think of one thing that threw so many references at me that I was able to explore each and realize "hey, some of this stuff is really good."

That.  That is what I remember.

Erik's Favorite Things: The Haunting

In 1963, a movie came out that started to generate a lot of buzz as to how terrifying it was.  Movie theaters held contests to see who could get through a midnight showing of it.  Reviewers claimed that people they saw it with climbed out of their chairs in terror.  It wound up on the favorite horror movie lists of people like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and many other respected film-connected individuals.

And yet, if I tell you the title, you're going to remember a sub-par movie with Owen Wilson, Liam Neeson, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, because it came out in 1999 during a flood of lackluster horror remakes and it cranked up Catherine Zeta-Jones' sex levels to 11.

But we're not going to talk about that bucket of chum so rank and stale that not even a starving shark would be drawn to it, we're going to talk about the original.  We're talking about The Haunting.

Erik's Favorite Things: Koudelka

Okay, I've mentioned Koudelka before.  In fact, I think I spoke pretty highly of it.  If I was to keep talking about it, I might mention how, if I sat down and thought about it, it'd wind up on whatever my "favorite games of all time" list would wind up being.

But...just why do I love this bizarre little RPG so much?

Let's dig a bit deeper.

Erik's Favorite Things: eX-Driver

I am not a car person.  I have only the most basic understanding of how a car even works (key goes in hole, pedals and stick determines if car goes or not), and watching car movies like The Fast and The Furious, Days of Thunder, or most other car-centric movies bores me to tears.

There are exceptions, of course.  I loved Duel, but that was more psychological terror than "car" movie.  Bullitt has one of the best car chases in history.  And yen here's one of my all-time favorite animated series to come from Japan, a series that I honestly can't even explain why I like so much, because where Moribito broke every single stereotype it could find, this series embraces a ton of them.

But anyway, here's my adoring, gushy love letter to eX-Driver.  Watch the opening theme then click to read more.

Erik's Favorite Things: Scott Bradlee And Postmodern Jukebox

I first discovered Scott Bradlee back when this little video appeared on YouTube:

People who know me know that I love music that's twisted, altered, or straight up remixed.  Hearing how others interpret music and add their own creative spin to an industry that, let's face it, can sound pretty stale and repetitive when you listen to the "pop" genre gives songs that might be forgotten in a few months a new life and something to make them unique.

It makes them "pop" in other words.

I lost track of Scott Bradlee for several years until recently, when I discovered Postmodern Jukebox and went "hey, that "just woke up hair" at the piano looks familiar."

Erik's Favorite Things: Mythbusters

Let's look at the definition of science:

sci·ence

ˈsīəns

noun

1. 1.

   the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

...um, yeah.  Let's go with an easier definition.

sci·ence

  [sahy-uhns] 

noun

1.

a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically  arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences.

2.

systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and  experimentation.

3.

any of the branches of natural or physical science.

4.

systematized knowledge in general.

5.

knowledge, as of facts or principles; knowledge gained by systematic study.

Now, I'm quick to admit that the Discovery Channel isn't always the best source of "science" in the world.  Considering they appear to have several "docudramas" that are "dramatized television movies/series based on actual moments" and some appear to be done the same way The Possession was, namely, someone heard something once and decided to make up a whole bunch of lies around it.

But the channel still has enough of my respect to keep me coming back for programs such as Planet Earth, Life, and others.  Plus, of course, there's Mythbusters, a show that I think has done more for getting children and adults interested in science again since... well, since Bill Nye went off the air.  Or maybe even more than that.  Maybe not since people started wondering if MacGyver could really do all that stuff we saw him do.

So let's look at Mythbusters and see if two guys blowing stuff up can really count as "science."

Erik's Favorite Things: Ghost In The Shell: SAC

There seemed to be a time, back in the early to mid-2000s, that animation and comics coming from Japan was huge.  It was overwhelming non-major cable channels, book stores had to completely reorganize themselves for floods of manga about the most mundane and ridiculous subjects coming in, and there were loooooooooooooong debates on the Internet about whether or not downloading anime was okay as long as a) it wasn't licensed for release in the United States yet, and b) it was taken from the Japanese broadcast and had subtitles added on by fans.

I'll freely admit, I watched some fansubbed anime.  Okay, I watched a lot of fansubbed anime, but what started as simply trying to soak it all in like some bizarre sponge that needed speed lines and wacky hijinks to survive instead of water, I slowly found myself becoming more and more choosy about what I watched.

It wasn't that the shows that were coming out weren't still good.  It's just that I realized there were certain formulas for stories that I could predict as a series went on.  It's the same reason I fell out from your standard hour long crime dramas, I didn't need evidence to solve the case, I just had to figure out the formula.

Plus, I kept feeling that there were some really great ideas that Japan seemed scared to explore further than I ever got to see.  Every now and again a series would touch on something that I really wished it explored further, because it seemed like a great idea for a culture to explore itself and its own social issues in a way that audiences could understand.

I mean, look at shows like The Simpsons, South Park, The Boondocks, and so many others that are able to address controversial issues in a way that the audience can understand, and while it might feel ham-fisted at times, they can often approach it in such a way as to leave you thinking about it afterward.

Sadly, whether it was an exploration of how modern society further encroached on their traditions, an attempt to understand specific cultural matters from their perspective, or even a simple explanation of things that people in other cultures might find strange and/or bizarre (say, the sheer number of sex clubs devoted to specific fetishes, or simply just why so many things are sold in vending machines).

But my discussion of series that I don't think really got a fair shake is a story for another time.  For now, let's look at one that I think did manage to do just what it intended to and explore social issues that would affect both now, in the future, and even explain some of the past.

Erik's Favorite Things: Pacific Northwest Ballet's Nutcracker

Everybody has things that mean a lot to them.  It might be the book they've read a hundred times and can recite from memory, the movie that they know every bit of trivia about including who the replacement grip was during a scene shot in a hallway in a real office building, or a television show they always stop at when a rerun comes on because it fills them with a warm nostalgic glow.

Sometimes the source really is something as good as they remember, but sometimes the only thing that fuels that fondness is a blindness to the flaws something has as time progressed and a refusal to admit that something they find precious isn't the greatest thing ever invented.

You know, like Final Fantasy VII.

I'm just as guilty of it as other people, I'll admit.  But hey, this is my blog, so I'll talk about what I want to talk about (see: episode synopsis of Mighty Max episodes), and I'll let my readers decide if I'm right or if I'm just too lost in fond memories to see straight.

So let's look at something that's maybe a bit holiday related.  What have you got for me, magic Internet voice?

Sweet!