Stratu Comics a Reality?

I saw a movie today but tonight I've been writing back to my Tasmanian comics friend Simon James. Remember him? He said he wanted to make comics out of some of my blog stories, like the ones about the women reading on the bus. Well, I got another letter from him today and he says that he's involved with some zine workshop (he calls it 'Zine Idol' because it's a competition) and whoever makes the zine or comic that gets judged the best will win. And if they win, the prize is that 500 copies of this comic or zine are made and sent all over the place. And guess what? The project he is going to do is the 'Stratu Comics' project. So can you blame me for being excited and neglecting my movie reviewing duties? No you can't, because these things do not happen very often so I am naturally excited about it and wanted to write back to him immediately, tonight, meanwhile shamefully neglecting my movie reviewing duties.
But the movie I saw today was called The Devil's Rejects and it is Rob Zombie's sequel to House of A Thousand Corpses and it was very good and even very funny at times although sometimes quite nasty, but that was OK. People are getting upset by horror movies again. At last people are again making movies that have some nasty elements of real terror, unlike those lame Scream movies, and people are getting all upset and indignant. But you know, you must know, it was just a movie and these things did not really happen to real people. They were in fact actors who walked away after it all, with money in their pockets, quite unscathed. And you are supposed to be horrified by what is happening on screen anyway. That is why it is called a Horror Movie.
And I like horror movies, and this was a pretty damn good one.

Gantz 2

Last Monday I watched the first volume of Gantz and wrote about it here. I really liked it a lot. So today after work I jumped off the bus early again went back to the video store and got the second volume. I just finished watching it. Well, now I'm addicted to it. I'm addicted goddam it and can't wait to watch the third volume. There's something about this crazy show that's put a great big hook in me. I don't know if it's the quick jumps from a scene of brutal violence to one of exaggerated heart-wrenching emotion, or a jump from a gratuitous nude scene to one of stark psychological torment. It could be both of those. But could it be the characters, with their many and obvious flaws, but also their history of PAIN that is slowly being revealed? Yes, it could be that too. That for sure could be part of it. The excellent soundtrack and voice acting plays a part too. Even that power ballad at the end of each episode. It may be a little cheesy I guess, but I love it!
I am a Gantz fan now, I'll admit it. It's hooked me in a big way. And it's killing me that the third volume isn't right here in front of me so I could slam it into the machine and smash PLAY on the remote.
It's KILLING me.

A Survey of Some Recent Blogs IX

Well, I think it's time for another survey. I can't think of anything else to write about, so it must be time for another survey.
Let's take a peek, bracing ourselves for another barrage of stinking adblogs.

1. Dusty Busty - What the hell is this? A porno blog? No. A closer examination reveals that it's only another sneaky adblog. See, they put that piece of a sex story up front to get you hot and drooling so like a sucker you will rush to join this stupid Adult Friend Finder website.
2. Nos Media - A boring Portuguese political blog, by the looks of it. Predictably, even the pictures are boring. Snore.
3. Casamento Manoella - A Brazilian blog, the sole purpose of which appears to be displaying photos from some wedding. Who are these people? I don't know, but some of the women are HOT.
4. Greener Magazine - Hemp shirts, electric cars, panda bears, rainbows, tofu burgers, eco warriors, and all that jazz.
5. Nochalantme - Good grief, it's a blog written in verse form. And it's not Dylan Thomas either, but a 21 year-old Muslim girl. Is there any entertainment value here? Is the moon a tomato?
6. Snowy Land - A blog by a Singapore girl. Here you can read many entertainment-free tales of her work life in the office and with other people in the office, and text messages between her and them. It occurs to me that when you read blogs like this, you could be forgiven for wondering if blogging technology is in fact some kind of Satanic invention designed to make you gouge your own eyes out from unbearable despair.
7. Aventuras en America - You only need to know that this person, when writing about how hard he or she is going to study for some exam, uses the words "110% effort".
Meanwhile, I am only going to use 100% effort in navigating away from this snooze-inducing blog as fast as I can.
8. Dock Ellis - You only need to know that this blogger's most recent post announces that today is the thirteen-month anniversary of his iPod ownership. But look out your window and maybe you will see the fireworks going off in honour of this great milestone.
9. Sounds Like Trouble - OK what is this one all about then? Well, this chick Saskia visits Spain and goes shopping. That's about it. Sounds like trouble? Sounds like boredom.
10. Pensees Delicats - Hey, another Asian pork chop. She sure looks like a cutie, but they all do. Every one of these young Asian girl bloggers is so damn cute but their blogs are all so damn dull and boring. They could at least include photos of themselves at the beach. At a nude beach, preferably. We must have the Yin and the Yang! Is that too much to ask? Is it too much to ask for some reward for reading this boring stuff? Of course it's not.

Well, that brings us to the end of yet another Survey. What have we learned from this excursion?
On the one hand, there was only one adblog, but even that had some pictures of naked women, so while it was naturally a hideous and foul creation, at least you got a peek at some boobs.
On the other hand, the real blogs seem to be getting more boring. Are people actually getting more boring in this day and age? It seems so.

Flies and Mosquitoes

Three days ago I noticed two things. Flies are back on the scene and so are mosquitoes.
I was walking over to Market City to get lunch and flies started buzzing up into my face. They were everywhere. I looked and everybody was waving their hands around their heads, swatting flies away. The flies don't give up easily though, they come back and come back, like it's a game. At these times I always think of those people you see who let the flies sit on their face. They don't try to swat them away, in fact they seem calm and not irritated by those little bastards. Are they Buddhists? I've seen those Buddhist priests who walk along with one of their junior burger acolytes sweeping in front of them as they walk, sweeping any ants away so the priest doesn't step on the ants and screw his karma up, or whatever. Do those Buddhists let the flies sit on their face? I couldn't do it. I have to swat them, and I'll admit sometimes they drive me so bananas I get enormous satisfaction by squashing them, I'll admit it. But today I was reading something about these flies, and an expert said one reason they like to hang out on your face is for your sweat which contains salt and proteins - food for them. Another reason they do it is so they can meet up with their mates. How about that? Your face is a kind of singles bar for flies. At the bar your sweat is the pretzels and peanuts. Even if you are one of those Buddhists, would you put up with it knowing that? No you wouldn't. You have to draw a line.
Was it enough with the flies? No it wasn't. That night I saw a mosquito in my room. But it's different with the mosquitoes because that means I get to use mozzie coils again. I LOVE the smell of mozzie coils. Last summer one day at work I reached down for my backpack, had to get something out of it, but when it got up close to my face I could smell that mozzie coil smoke. Perfume! I like it so much that I was still burning those coils two months after the mosquitoes had headed north for the winter, or hibernated, or whatever they do. If I was a Buddhist I would save money because instead of having to buy mozzie coils and incense I would only need the mozzie coils.
Give me a mosquito summer with a crate of mozzie coils.
It's the simple pleasures for me.

The 40 Year-Old Virgin

I left work early today to go see a movie. I like to see a movie at the movie house on Tuesday because it is Budget Price Tuesday. These days I pay eight bucks to see a movie when every other day of the week it is fifteen bucks fifty. Does $15.50 sound like a lot of money to pay to see a movie to you? It does to me. I have never paid $15.50 to see a movie and can't see it ever happening. It's funny because I'm not a person who is obsessed with getting a bargain price on everything. I don't listen to somebody tell me they bought some pants for fifty bucks and laugh and say well my pants were on special they only cost twenty bucks. I don't live my life worrying about that stuff. I like to throw the money around if I got it. Who cares. It's only money. Oh yeah, you say, only money. It's only money when you got it hey, but when you ain't got it, it ain't only money. You got a point there, I'll admit it. But I didn't always have money. I've had my share of nights eating chilli sauce on toast and it wasn't fun that's for sure. But this is going off the track a bit. What I was going to say was that even though I am not obsessed with getting a bargain for every damn thing, I will only go and see a movie on Bargain Price Tuesday. Maybe it is an obsession.
Anyway, the movie I went and saw was called The 40 Year-Old Virgin.
When I walked into the theatre and found a seat in a perfect position, right in the middle with my eyes about level with the vertical middle of the screen, I sat down with my vanilla choc-top. I used to always buy the coffee choc-tops but since that episode with the collapsing cone I have been getting vanilla choc-tops. I think what it was was that not many people buy those coffee choc-tops so they get old there in the freezer and the cone loses its structural integrity. I seem to be terrified now of buying another coffee choc-top to find the damn cone all floppy.
Well, I sat down with my vanilla choc-top and a funny thing happened. I heard people giggling all over the place. I thought yes for sure I am about to see a comedy movie, everybody is already giggling like schoolgirls and the movie hasn't even begun yet. These were obviously hardcore comedy fans, people who laugh all the time about God knows what, but everything is funny. I got a big smile. I thought it was pretty funny myself, this crowd. They were all laughing at God knows what, but it seemed to be funny as hell. Maybe they had heard about my coffee choc-top phobia.
Oh yeah, the movie. I guess anybody who was reading this for the movie review is long gone, so here it is for my hardcore readers. God bless you!
The movie is about a guy called Andy (Steve Carell who I saw recently in another funny movie called The Anchorman) and he is 40 years old and has never had sex with a woman. Most people probably have sex by the time they are 13 these days so Andy's case must seem pretty bizarre to most people. Andy works in an electronics store, like a Dick Smith Powerhouse here in Australia. He lives by himself and collects action figures that he never removes from the box, plus he reads comics. Not only all that, but he also rides a bicycle to work! Yes, he lives in Los Angeles (it must be Los Angeles because every American movie is made in LA) where if you don't have a car you are a bum or a nerdy bicycle rider like Andy.
When the other guys at work find they are a man short for a poker game they reluctantly ask him if he wants to join them. During the poker game they are all telling stories about sex experiences when it gets around to Andy's turn. The more he says, the more the other guys stare in amazement at the nutty things he is saying. Then he compares a woman's boobs to bags of sand, so that's when they know he is still a virgin. So they take it on themselves to get Andy laid.
I'm about to pass out so I'll wrap this up as fast as I can. This movie was very good. The cast was excellent, every one. It was very funny and even though there were gross-out gags - like Andy getting up every morning with a boner, then one morning sitting down to take a dump sits down with that boner and starts pissing up into his own face - the movie had a lot of heart, to put it in a corny way. All the characters were very likeable and funny. There were a lot of big laughs in the movie, it was very funny. It was so good that I am looking forward to seeing it again. I could watch it again next week and be excited about seeing it again.
It was a good movie, and very funny.

Gantz

Today at work I took a break from my dedicated activity to check out the upcoming DVD releases for November. I always do that at the end of the month. It usually takes me a million years to get around to things, but I'm pretty good at this DVD pre-order biz.
Anyway, scrolling down the list I saw something called Gantz, a Japanese anime and it was rated R. There aren't many animes with an R rating. In fact I don't think I've seen one since Legend of the Overfiend, and since I can't help these occasional surges of *prurient interest*, as they call it, I felt a strong urge to check this Gantz out. I called my video store and the girl told me they had the first four parts (It is a 26-episode series with four episodes on each disc.) I got the bus home jumped off early near the video store went in and rented the first volume.
I just finished watching the first four episodes. This shit is wild.
It starts off with a shoolboy Kei and he is daydreaming in class. He pictures the female teacher and students all naked and gets a boner. Other kids in class notice this and torment him about it. He gets embarassed. Then after school he goes to the train station to get a train home. All the while we hear his thoughts and he is thinking things like man she is hot I wouldn't mind giving it to her, and goddam that stinking bum why don't ya go and have a bath and get a job.
At the train station that bum he saw wanders up smelling bad then stumbles and falls down onto the tracks. Nobody on the platform goes to help, instead we hear their thoughts, making excuses why they can't help, and even some looking forward to seeing the train run over the poor guy.
Kei has noticed another guy, he used to go to school with this guy, his name is Masaro. Well, Masaro jumps down onto the tracks to help the bum. Oh my God, somebody actually does something to help this guy. It's unheard of. But there is Masaro down on the tracks yet he can't lift the guy by himself, and that's when he sees Kei. Naturally he asks Kei to come down and help him, but Kei is going aw man, why did he have to notice me, I don't wanna go down there, we might get hit by the damn train, and all that jazz. But he is shamed into going down eventually.
They manage to get the bum back on the platform before the train comes. The problem is they can't get back up there in time and they get hit by the train. Heads fly off and blood spurts. The end.
No, not the end. They reappear in a room with a big black sphere in the middle of it. It looks like a big wrecking ball. There are also some other people in the room. There's a goofy schoolteacher, two Yakuza guys, a loud guy with long blond hair and a strange sinister looking dude sitting in the corner, and a dog.
Where are they? Are they dead? They can't get out of the room. There's a force field or something preventing them from opening the door or getting out to the balcony.
Suddenly a girl (Kishimoto) begins to appear - a laser transports her into the room gradually so you see the inside of her body as she is being recreated. She arrives naked and groggy and one of the Yakuza guys, a big brute of a bastard, takes her off to rape her. We hear her screaming. Kei does nothing but Masaro rushes in to save her and there's a big showdown between him and the nasty Yakuza. Masaro succeeds in saving her but as she is sitting sobbing against the wall, the dog comes up and starts molesting her with its tongue. What a crazy show!
Anyway, back in the main room some text appears on the big black sphere saying, basically: I OWN YOU ALL NOW AND YOU WILL DO WHATEVER I SAY. What the hell?
The sphere splits open to reveal all kinds of hardcore-looking guns and a uniform for each person. They all get transported down to what seems like a regular suburban town with an order to kill a Green Onion Alien. Built into their suits is a radar so they find the Green Onion Alien pretty fast. This little green guy, all he wants to do is eat his green onions. Why do they have to kill this poor little guy? What kind of rotten cruel horror have these supposed dead folks been placed in?
But it's the Yakuza guys who shoot the little Green Onion Alien. Masaro is horrified and disgusted and sick, starts crying and wailing what have you done! But then an enormous guy comes along and he is obviously a relative of the little Green Onion guy. He rips the Yakuza guys to pieces, also the schoolteacher who tried to shoot him.
Well, in the end it's only the three of them who survive - Kei, Masaro and the girl, Kishimoto. That weird sinister dude who was sitting in the corner appears and it turns out that he has been there for a long time. In the room, that is. He has seen dozens of people come through and die on these missions. So he seems to know about this Gantz sphere, did I say the sphere is called Gantz? Well that's what Gantz is. That's where the name comes from. And there's a guy in the sphere, a sick green guy with his eyes closed and he is plugged into the sphere. It's all wild and crazy man. It's violent and gory and there's nudity. I guess this was made for teenage Japanese boys. So why do I like it? Have I not grown up yet? Have I not progressed to the next level or something? Oh well. But there's more than just sex and violence going on here, you know. And this is only 4 episodes out of 26, after all.
The theme songs are excellent as well. The opening theme is a fast drum'n'bass/breaks type of tune Japanese style ('Super Shooter' by Rip Slyme) and the closing theme is a Japanese power ballad ('Last Kiss' by Bonnie Pink).
Gantz has really sunk a big hook in me and I will be zooming off to the video store for the next four-episode disc very soon.

No Damn Subtitles

A funny thing happened when I was watching the special features on The Grudge DVD yesterday. You know The Grudge. It was a Japanese horror movie (originally called Ju-on: The Grudge)written and directed by Takashi Shimizu. Sam Raimi saw it and thought it was so damn awesome that he wanted to remake it. He knew that the only way Americans would watch it would be if it was remade with American actors. But he got Shimizu to direct this new American version starring Sarah Michelle Geller and Bill Pullman.
So what was the funny thing that happened? It's coming up, I promise.
I was watching the 'making of' featurette (A Powerful Rage) and they spent a lot of time talking about how tricky the language problem was. They were shooting in Tokyo with a Japanese director and crew, so everybody needed translators. Also, when they made notes and changes to the script, these had to be translated back and forth between English and Japanese. So you see, language translation was a big deal with this movie, you could say one of the BIGGEST deals.
Which gets us at last to this funny thing that happened. In this making of thingo, the director Takashi Shimizu and the Japanese guy who plays the detective, were talking away in Japanese, but there were no subtitles, and there was no person doing a voiceover translation of what they were saying. So unless you knew Japanese, you couldn't understand what they were saying. This was pretty frustrating because I wanted to know what they were saying, but it was amazing because it was such a big deal with this movie, the language translation. They really made a big deal about it, and it must have been quite tricky, but how tricky would it have been to subtitle these short little speeches by the director and the actor?
Anyway, in the commentary they were also saying that a Director's Cut would be coming out sometime because the censors made them cut out a bunch of stuff so they could get a PG13 rating, so hopefully they will sort it out for that.
If anybody reading this has The Grudge on DVD, could you tell me if yours is the same?