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Saturday, July 26, 2008 ( 7/26/2008 05:36:00 PM ) Bill S.  "GIVE LOGIC THE BOOT!" Two new anime import series debut on Sci-Fi Channel's "Ani-Monday" import block this Monday: Gurren Lagann and Now and Then, Here and There. Was recently given a sneak peak of the two premieres, and while the 27-episode Lagann perhaps arrives with the greater advanced fan buzz, to my eyes, the 13-ep Now looks like it'll be the more evocative series.Both shows deliver the goods, especially if you like your s-f anime with big honking machines. Though each one centers on young male heroes, Lagann comes across as the more boyish creation: filled with characters spouting bravado and Kirby-esque robots. Set in an underground village and narrated by Simon, a young boy who is part of the isolated village's brutalized child work force, the series opens on Simon and his rambunctious friend Kamina's desire to escape the oppressive community by climbing to the surface world. Kamina tries to rally his friends by creating Team Gurren - all the while shouting a series of inspirational slogans to the skeptical villagers. But it isn't until the digging Simon comes upon a glowing green "treasure" while drilling that the boys are able to find their way to the top. The glowing treasure proves to be the key to a robot creature called a "Gunman," and when another Gunman shows up to plow its way through the village, guess who gets to commandeer the first one? Even better, it turns out that Simon's found machine has drills on its hands and the top of its head: "That's your kinda weapon!" Kamina unnecessarily tells our narrator, after christening the machine the Mighty Lagann. Also showing up: an ultra-curvy redheaded warrior babe named Yoko, who hails from a nearby underground village. Though Kamina is scornful of Yoko's origins ("Jeez, you're a pit chick!" he moans. "Get moving, thunder thighs!"), you know this is just the start of some serious sexual tension. At one point during the Gunman attack, Simon lands with his face right between her breasts, eliciting happy shouts from the most of the 'tween-age boys in the audience. The presence of the Gunmen and the existence of the underground villages is somehow connected to an aboveground intergalactic conflict, though we're only given an unexplained glimpse of this in the pilot's opening. Future episodes, presumably, will provide more background, but for now, just getting our trio to the surface in the Mighty Lagann suffices. If the first episode of Gurren Lagann is loudly boisterous, Now and Then, Here and There is more comfortable with slices of scene-setting quiet. The story of a young city boy named Shu who is accidentally transported to a war-torn dimension, it's filled with small, well-chosen images: whether of a bright sunset over the city river or of our hero picking his nose as he talks. Shu gets into his predicament after climbing to the top of a factory smokestack to get away from it all. When he sees a lavender-haired girl sitting on a neighboring smokestack, watching the evening sky, his curiosity is piqued. But before he can find out anything more than her name - Lala-ru - a third party appears with a squad of giant snaky robots. They capture Lala-ru, in a wonderful sequence featuring our hero leaping for his life from collapsing smokestacks, and take both her and Shu back to their world. "It's only debris that got transported with us!" Lady Abelia, the uniformed villainess responsible for the abduction believes. You'd think, after all this time, that futuristic baddies would learn to comb through their garbage. If the heroes of Gurren Lagann are pointedly proletarian (as they digdigdigdigdigdigdig their way through the ground), our boy Shu's more middle-class. We first see him with his family, complimenting his mother for a "gourmet breakfast," then taking Kendo lessons at the Seidokkan Dojo. As a student, he's the object of ridicule by his fellow students for his "slapstick moves," though he doesn't particularly seem to be bothered by this fact. In fact, Shu comes off a fairly easy-going sort in the opening episode, but from the looks of the world in which he's landed, that good nature will be sorely tested. At heart, both shows are essentially telling the same basic story: young boy ventures into a new and dangerous world that could stand in for basic adulthood. Of the two, Now approaches this storyline in a less cartoony fashion - no pneumatic uber-babes in this 'un - but they both contain their share of crowd-pleasing action. One of the major advantages of anime: where so many live-action s-f shows load their pilots with a level of budget-busting images that they're unable to maintain over the long haul, animation has no such constraints. I'm thinking that these two imports'll find their fannish audiences on Ani-Mondays, though when it comes to future episodes, I'm personally setting the DVR for the more contemplative Now and Then. # | Friday, July 25, 2008 ( 7/25/2008 01:20:00 PM ) Bill S. PIGEONS ON THE GRASS, ALAS: So I'm home for lunch, and Becky has Headline News on the tube, and they're discussing the day's near air catastrophe wherein a Qantas jumbo jet managed to safely land despite a big ol' massive hole in its fuselage, and the newsreader tells us that "alas, there are no fatalities." Alas?!?! At first I'm not sure I hear this right, but then I see from the closed captioning that the word "alas" really was used. Yeah, it's so disappointing that we didn't get to see a tarmac strewn with charred and bloody bodies . . . # | Thursday, July 24, 2008 ( 7/24/2008 06:21:00 AM ) Bill S.  "IT SEEMS THAT DOMINIC ENJOYS STIRRING THE POT!" Both cast and writers have clearly hit their stride in the third season of the Canadian forensic procedural, Da Vinci's Inquest, which has recently been issued by Acorn Media as a four-disc DVD boxed set. Our title hero, Coroner Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell) remains, in the words of one character, a "bit of a prick," but you can hardly blame him. In season three, our man gets passed over for the Chief Coroner's position in favor of a numbers cruncher (Gerard Plunkett) and sees his proposal for a safe injection site get shot down. His relationship with his daughter Gabrielle (Jewel Staite, about to leave for more prominent roles) is so strained that we only get to see her for about ten seconds the entire season. In the season closer, our hero even finds himself attacked in court for being one of the few remaining coroners in Canada without a medical background. "I'm an anomaly and an anachronism, but I'm not alone," the former cop snaps at the attorney badgering him - and we wouldn't have it any other way.The rest of the series cast - most particularly Donnelly Rhodes and Ian Tracey as partnering homicide detectives Leo Shannon and Mick Leary - have all settled into agreeable rhythms. Of all the supporting characters, Leo gets the most attention this season: dealing with an ailing wife whose periodic dementia gets her wandering the neighborhood, starting up dance lessons with an attractive lady instructor. In one of the season's funniest subplots, a distracted Leo's police car is stolen by a suspect. "They're never gonna let go of it," he grumbles in a later episode after one of his colleagues makes joking reference to the incident. Leo's partner Leary gets less to do outside the job this season, though there are hints that his relationship with pathologist Sunny Ramen (Suleka Matthew) will be heading into creepy territory somewhere down the pike - perhaps at the hands of Mick's Borderliney ex-. He does have some memorable moments in "You See How It Happens," directed by Rhodes: struggling to tamp down his disgust as he questions a former Guatemalan policeman injected with a slow-acting poison by one of the émigré victims he once tortured. Midway into Mick's investigation, the focus shifts from uncovering the murderer's identity to getting the victim to reveal the whereabouts of the men and women he helped "disappear." Unlike the first two seasons, there are no big crowd-pleasing serial killer storylines in this set. Instead, creator Chris Haddock and his writers work to cram each episode with several cases, resolving some and leaving others open. If at times, it feels as if the writers are attempting to push the open-ended tactic as far as the audience's patience will allow (perhaps most frustratingly in a story involving a pregnant mother who might be responsible for the death of her first two children), in most cases, the approach adds to the series' naturalistic tone. In one of the season's more affecting plotlines, for instance, a grieving father who is unable to accept the verdict of accidental death posted on his cokehead daughter reappears briefly outside Da Vinci's office in two later episodes, still looking for different answers. To the families of loved ones who've passed suddenly and unexpectedly any explanations are going to be woefully insufficient. Haddock and his writers are often content to raise the issues brought up by their stories than definitively answering them. In "The Sparkle Tour," a Native Peoples activist is found dead after two Vancouver cops drive him out of town and leave the guy out in the country to walk back without his shoes. (The title refers to the sight of stars that the victim sees as he hobbles back home.) Though Dom and we know what occurred, the two uniforms responsible prove to have covered their tracks too well to get punished for their deed. There are no last-minute C.S.I. styled forensic discoveries to tie it all up neatly. Which is not to say that Dom and company don't get their share of heady forensic victories - they do, though the means by which they get there aren't always as tidy as we see on American forensic procedurals. Crime and death are messy, a point that's made repeatedly in "All Tricked Up," an episode that contrasts two mysterious deaths with the more explicable magic tricks of Harry Houdini. What matters is returning each day/season to do the job - even if doing it can turn you into "a bit of prick" like Dom. # | Wednesday, July 23, 2008 ( 7/23/2008 06:35:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: What could be better in the summer than an old old video of the Beach Boys from the Pet Sounds era, doing "Wouldn't It Be Nice"? (Longer posts are on the horizon!) # | Tuesday, July 22, 2008 ( 7/22/2008 06:00:00 AM ) Bill S. BRENDA LEIGH: Is it me or are we seeing more of a half-clothed Deputy Chief Johnson this season on The Closer? # | Sunday, July 20, 2008 ( 7/20/2008 07:04:00 AM ) Bill S. PROMOS FOR NEW SHOWS THAT PRETTY MUCH CONVINCE ME I DON'T WANNA WATCH THE SHOW: Example Two - the pudgy guy in a diaper for Worst Week. Didn't I already see this on C.S.I.? ("Are you a drinker or a stinker?") # | ( 7/20/2008 07:02:00 AM ) Bill S.  "FRIGGIN' YANKEE WANKER!" First thing you can't help doing when confronted with the title of AiT's new graphic novel, Aces: Curse of the Red Baron, is mentally visualize Snoopy on top of his doghouse, the Royal Guardsmen singing in the background, the inevitable "Curse you, Red Baron!" thought balloon hovering over our hero's head.But Shannon Eric Denton, G. Willow Wilson & Curtis Square-Briggs' (lotta complex names there!) GN turns to be something else again: a sci-fi buddy actioner featuring a mismatched pair of Yank and Britisher pilots who both claim to have felled the Bloody Red Baron. One of the twosome, dapper Englishman Heath Bennett, is in possession of a map he believes leads to the German ace's hidden treasure, and he convinces skeptical American Frank Grayson to help commander a plane in search of the uncharted island where it's supposedly hidden. What our scoundrel heroes don't know, of course, is that the Red Baron is still around and pissed that someone else has his map. He's soon pursuing our wisecracking flyboys in a ghostly plane that appears and vanishes mysteriously, as our heroes search for a seemingly unfindable Isle of Isdrinn. A series of hairbreadth escapes, naturally, ensues. It's all connected to the Black Hand, the organization responsible for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and a dark haired German beauty named Wolf 1. It's not giving away too much to note that the explanations behind all this prove more science-fictional than supernatural - or that the Red Baron's "treasure" proves to mainly be a Macguffin. All this happy foolishness'd would play well on the big screen, where, hopefully, the right pair of actors could breathe more life into our somewhat monochromatic leads. Artist Square-Briggs, utilizing brush and wash, bathes his panels in blacks and shades of gray. Even his dogfights take place in cloud and smoke, while a simple panel of our heroes standing casually in an airfield is also spattered with what looks like black ash. It adds to the period feel and what turns out to be the story's central clash between the smoky reality of early twentieth century Europe and a more mysterious future. If at times the artist's propensity for dark shadow comes at the expense of his characters' expressiveness, Aces moves with sufficient zip to keep you from worrying about it. As a comics company, AiT has carved a niche for itself as a sharp purveyor of high-concept genre work. While Aces isn't up to the line's best material (see publisher Larry Young's densely satisfying Black Diamond, for example, which has recently been issued in a trade paperback collection), it still remains an entertaining lark. Snoopy, that imaginative WWI fighter pilot, could've gone far mentally playing with the material in this entertaining graphic novel. # | |
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