Books
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Stephen Chow’s Forbidden City Cop begins with a confrontation between several famous swordsmen and a police officer. It is a parody of popular story about a famous duel between master swordsmen. The comedy lies in the fact that the officer does not believe the swordsmen are famous heroes because the are so plain looking. One…
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It would have been too easy to include the trailer or a clip from the move adaptation of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events at the beginning of this review. Cary Grant’s “Hoodoo” skit in The Bachelor and the Bobbie Soxer does a better job at describing the subtle wordplay and humor in Snicket’s…
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It’s chapters are easily divisible by the mock news clips she provides to give you a quotient of interconnected episodes from a series about a woman on trial for murdering her husband. … Regarded as a classic, the discriminating observer cannot ignore that the story pushes the boundaries of coincidence: Kim Novak’s character happens to…
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WARNING! Possible SPOILERS! The Soul Eater anime put out by Funimation was my introduction to the work of Atsushi Ohkumbo. I was immediately drawn to the idea of weapons being human and able to transform at will from their human form to their weaponized form. For example, the main character, Soul, is a tough talking…
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This year Otakon celebrated its 20th anniversary and I celebrated my first Otakon! According to Wikipedia, Otakon is “one of the longest-running anime conventions in the United States, and the second largest North American anime convention as of 2012.” That’s a great achievement but what I think is a greater achievement is that (according to…
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The Meteors playing “My Daddy is a Vampire” to clips of Christopher Lee (my favorite Dracula). WARNING: SPOILERS! The fifth volume of Scott Snyder’s American Vampire comic book series reminds you that time has been passing with each successive volume. It’s easy to forget because vampires are immortal, so they are drawn the same page…
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This animated film by Charlie Ramos is one of my favorite portrayals of Gregor. WARNING: SPOILERS! Where Kafka’s Gregor struggled with his new life as a bug, Tezuka’s Toshiko Tomura fully accepts her life. Granted she is depicted as an attractive woman that men are fatally drawn to and not a repulsive giant cockroach (as…
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In Sugar Weather, Lisa Simmons sows the imagination with the seeds of a great gothic romance (in the English Lit sense of the word, not the pop). She gives us Lucy who, like Catherine Earnshaw (from Emily Bronte’s famous book, Wuthering Heights ), is strong-willed and passionate but also contemplative and composed (refined). As I…
Vincent Young 