A few more fun bands from Japan for you to check out. A lot of these folks have albums released in the US and UK as imports, although they can be pretty hard to find (hint: Amazon and the like are good places to look if your local brick and mortar doesn’t carry them). First up this time is a favorite band of mine, Uplift Spice with her song Omega Rythm. The second band is another favorite, Scandal, doing a live version of Shoujo S, which is the opening song for Bleach. The final tune this time around is Psycho x Letter by Aicle, a Visual Kei band. As with all Visual Kei bands, it is a bit difficult to tell which band member is what gender, but the music is great.
Terrestrial Human
According to the folks at Topless Robot, you can now buy Imperial Stout Trooper beer, if you live in a small selection of states in and around New England, and, for some reason, the state of Florida. The original alert may have come from the Beer Advocate team. I don’t actually have a category for food and beverages, so I will tie this post to the Movie category.
The folks over at Eepy Bird have a mission: to take everyday objects and turn them into something extraordinary. This time around the ordinary was Coke Zero and Mentos, and the extraordinary was the rocket car they built using them. This is actually the Model 2 version, which gives them greater speed and range than their original soda powered rocket car. This is the kind of scientific research that gives me hope that the world might be a more fun place in the future.
If you need something to wrap your mind around, look no further… this is the actual Jedi Ninja Trailer from the folks at GakAttack. Enjoy while you get ready to face the future!
Not really; the only new release this week that comes close to being genre is the no-budget horror flic The Devil Inside, which even by horror standards appears to be a yawnfest. Perhaps you could better spend the time assembling some of those items you received for x-mas but have not yet managed to identify. Congrats to all of us who survived into 2012! I hope the new year has some excitement and surprises in store for you.
If you are reading this, congratulations! You made it to 2012! And nowhere in today’s list will you find any movies about how the world is going to end in 2012; everyone who made one of those made sure to release it in 2011, so they would have time to spend the profits before Armageddon. The movie we do have is Red: Werewolf Hunter, in which Felicia Day is the heavily armed descendent of Little Red Riding Hood, out to keep the werewolves under control. Normally I love Felicia Day, but I am not sure this one is a noticeable improvement over any of the 2012 Armageddon films. Mostly because it was made by the old crew of made-for-TV Syfy channel movies production house, who brought us such classic turkeys as Mansquito and Sharktopus. Their new production house is a joint venture between Syfy and Universal Studios, and I have high hopes for their first contracted film, Wild Cards.
In TV, no new releases, but Fringe: Seasons 1-2 is being released in a combined box set at a reduced price, always worth noting. The various sales sites that have it listed (WB does, Amazon does not, for example) are rather vague about it with no cover image or description of extras, which I find a bit strange. It tends to give me the impression that the studio isn’t really certain if they will release it or not.
In anime, My Bride is a Mermaid – The Complete Series is genre, but the title doesn’t quite tell the whole story. The girl in question is not only a mermaid, but the daughter of the local Mer Yakuza boss, and now that the boy has learned their secret his choices are marry her or sleep with the fishes. This one is a definite comedy. Also a comedy, And Yet the Town Moves – Complete Collection is cosplay in a wanna-be maid cafe, and I think the writers may have seen a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream a few too many times. I say this because of the twisted convolutions layered into who is lusting after whom, which is the dynamic which drives the story here. Although both the ghosts and the aliens do bring their own spin to the series.
In Sekirei 2: Pure Engagement the MBI has declared the super powered combat lovelies as terrorists and intend them and their masters to fight each other to the death until only one pair is left standing. That’s pretty much all the plot line you get, but it is good enough to fuel the entire sequence of fight scenes that make up the rest of season 2, as the girls beat the clothing off each other.
For re-release this time around we have the classic X – The Complete Series, where a young psychic has to decide if he will save the world or destroy it. We also have GUNxSWORD – The Complete Series in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means if you shop around you can pick it up for less than $20. Gun X Sword is a wild west combat mecha from orbit tale of murder and corruption versus condiment-guzzling justice. It may be a bit difficult to describe in a way that makes sense until you see it, but this is one of the better animes of the last decade or so.
Finally, the original girls with guns and LOTS of collateral damage are back with the Dirty Pair OVA Series. This was probably the first anime I watched all the way through back in the ’80s, laughing my butt off as episode after episode they did more damage to the communities they were assigned to protect than the bad guys they were there to protect people from did.