New Year's 2011

I remember spending the eve of 2010 watching Part 1 of the 20th Century Boys movie with my family while waiting for the clock to strike 12. This year turned out to be slightly different, in a sense that we managed to avoid watching a sci-fi adventure movie; opting for a frilly romantic comedy that didn't leave you wondering what the hell happened to its protagonist. The best part of it was that it didn't have an apocalyptic spin to it, so we...

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Down the Rabbit Hole We Go - Part 1

"In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice." - Bruce F. Cummings, Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919) Let's face it, with the holidays in full swing, it's doggone impossible to sit down and write a decent blog entry, so I'll just throw in the towel and run with this little piece that came to mind after having another go at watching the...

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Holiday Buzz and Extra Clutter

Well, the holidays are here and I thought that I'd get more time to finish up all those draft blog posts I have had pending for a little over a month now but I could not have been more wrong in this assessment. As soon as December kicked in, life was abuzz with work, holiday preparations and Christmas shopping-- there simply wasn't enough time to mull over recent drama exploits especially when you're in the company of family and friends, let...

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Reinventing Sherlock

When I find myself in need of a break from watching Asian dramas or simply in search of respite from reading subtitles, I usually look on to the BBC to provide me with alternative entertainment. Most shows take anywhere from 3 to 13 episodes, so like your standard jdorama, it only takes a relatively short time to go through a season. Since I've had a good run with Merlin for three years now, I figured it wouldn't hurt to check out what they...

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Osamu Tezuka's MW

I don't normally read manga because I don't have the time and patience to leaf through volumes of an ongoing series generally designed to entertain people half my age, but I decided to give this one a shot seeing that  there's an official one-volume release in english by VERTICAL and because not being the type to leave well enough alone, I had a few issues to sort out after seeing its big screen adaptation. It's the first of three mangas by...

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Off a Bridge, Into the Mist

"It must be exciting to be a fighter, to be totally free."  Stuck in a hotel room out of town, without a laptop and any internet access, I ended  up watching a  documentary on cable entitled The Art of Action: Martial Arts in Motion Picture. Filmed in 2002, the said documentary provided a general overview of the martial arts genre-- tracing its origins and influence  back to the Peking Opera, citing iconic figures and...

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Bloody Backlog

Oh my poor neglected blog. Who would've thought that blogging would require so much work? It's rather hard to keep up when the world is so full of distractions... Guess it's high time I get my act together and finish all those pending reviews. Been working on bits and pieces without managing to focus  long enough on just one to bring it to completion. And  of course, September rolled in and I had to follow my weekly dose of Dexter...

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Snakes and Earrings

A young woman's quest for a forked tongue leads to a dangerous love triangle where pain is associated with pleasure, sex is meted out with violence and the desire to possess another culminates in murder. Director Ninagawa Yukio's film version of Kanehara Hitomi's Hebi ni Piasu is a faithful adaptation of the book which won its young author the Akutagawa Prize for literature in 2003, but there's just not enough  material in a  novella...

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Asian Drama Trade/Giveaway

As some of you may already know, I'm disposing copies of dramas that I've acquired through the years. I've gone and dug up a few more titles and updated the list I previously posted, so feel free to check them out and see if you might be interested to get a few of them off my hands. All the dramas listed below are in avi format unless otherwise specified and there's only one copy of each because I'm not in the business of doing any distro....

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Tajōmaru

Power, greed, lust and envy---this movie had all the ingredients of a Shakespearean tragedy but all it amounted to was a costume melodrama that came with a pop-rock soundtrack, capped off by a  perfunctory ending that's so silly, it's not even worth mentioning. Imagine Edmond Dantès heartbroken and depressed, walking away without exacting revenge on his enemies, if you will. Imagine Alexander Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo adapted on screen...

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Tokujo Kabachi!

An assistant administrative scrivener fights for justice and learns about the harsh reality of what it takes to survive in the legal profession, in this episodic and farcical shigoto drama which comes equipped with legal trivia, sentimental babble and comic strip special effects, served in a law-made-easy format for viewers of all ages. I'm afraid this is one of those dramas which can only be thoroughly enjoyed by fans of Sakurai Sho and...

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