Tag: Movies

I’m probably just about the last person to mention this… but Darth Vader has a blog! It’s a well written blog taking an rather different sort of look inside the world of Vader. The references to other movies and books that the author works into the blog are rather funny and really, this quote just rocks:

Shape up or sputter to the floor unconscious — that’s my motto.

I’m a bit of an anime fan. I’ve bought many a VHS tape, Laser Disc and DVD in my time and I plan to buy many more… unless the anime studios shutdown the fansubbers. For those of you who might not be familiar with the world of fansubs; here’s the definition of a fansub from Wikipedia:

Fansub – short for “fan subtitled”; a copy of a foreign movie or television show (most often anime) which has been subtitled by “fans” into their native language. This has been done to provide shows that would otherwise be unavailable in one’s native language, but with the growth in the popularity of anime, fansubs’ purpose has expanded to include programs that would be commercially unviable (I.e. older or niche appeal market titles.) in one’s country or simply to reduce the amount of time one would wait to see a particular program. Also, many American anime viewers feel there is too much censorship of anime broadcast on TV, especially in scenes related to nudity, which is common in Japan (even in children’s shows) but is typically considered inappropriate in the United States.

I mostly get my fansubs from online sources via BitTorrent1. This allows me to:

  • Judge if a series will be worth the money to buy once a U.S. distributer starts selling it here.
  • See some of those niche shows that no distributer will bring over.

Given that I quite often am not fond of the “mainstream” anime that is brought over and that my budget is limited; being able to view the series completely via fansubs is a vital part of my process for deciding what series I will buy. If the anime studios force the fansubbers to stop their work; then I’ll be forced to spend my money elsewhere. Harsh, but I’ve already bought my share of crappy anime and I’m not willing to shell out ~$20/disc in the hopes that a given series won’t suck.

Oh and in case you were curious, this article over on C|Net prompted my post.

1 If you’re interested in more info on this; leave a comment and I’ll see about writing something up.

The next Marvel Comics movie, the Fantastic Four is due out 1 July 2005 and their official website went live sometime today. Apple has a trailer up for the movie and as I expected it looks like crap. What makes me doubly annoyed is that the choose to use one of the coolest super villians of the Marvel universe1 but it appears they’ve “modernized” him. One of the cool things about him was that instead of using his superscience to make a perfectly human looking mask; it had those old-school rivets & cast-iron look to it. From the brief glimpse of him that we get during the trailer, it appears they’ve taken away all the rivets and completely smooth over the metal of his mask. Ah well, I’ll probably still end up going to see it (or at least renting it at some point). After all, it wouldn’t be fair to completely lamblast it without watching it once. 😀

1 Who? Why that would be Dr. Doom of course! *sheesh* That was a silly question.

On the advice of a friend (Pukka), a while back I began to read Wil Wheaton‘s blog. Though I’d seen Stand By Me and Toy Soldiers, my firmest memories of Mr. Wheaton were of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was one of the few sci-fi shows that my parents were willing to watch and I have to admit while I enjoyed parts of that show (Picard rocks!); I hated Wesley. He always struck me as this smart ass; who’d lucked out his way into working on a starship. Of course, probably what really irked me about it was that it was him and not ME! Even so, that initially made me reluctant to visit the blog, but Pukka has a habit of sending me interesting links. Since he’s rarely wrong (unless I’ve already seen what he’s sent); I checked out Mr. Wheaton’s site and have been faithful reader ever since. Then back when I ordered my copy of Ghosts in the Snow from Amazon.com; I had one of my oddly, cheap moments.
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