More Anime...and Black KKKlansman
Aug. 18th, 2018 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. I'm continuing to stream anime on Netflix, which has a great collection, but apparently removes shows after a couple of months or years, replacing them with new series. This explains why a show I saw advertised on Netflix last year, suddenly is gone this year.
Anyhow...here's Geek.com's list of the best anime on Netflix.
True. In the olden days, I had to comb the back shelves of many a video store to get my hands on anime. And it was a mixed bag, also not always in the best of conditions. I also made friends with comic book store and video store owners to get bootleg copies. That's how I saw Battle Royale, not anime, but a live action adaptation of a magna (note Kill Bill borrowed heavily from it, so too does Hunger Games and The 100, it predates all of them by about ten years.) Cowboy Beebop the Movie, Robotech, Voltron, Sailor Moon, Castle Calistroka, Akira ( I think I saw that in the movie theater though), Ghost in the Shell (and the sequel, there was a sequel), and a lot of others.
I'm loving Netflix. I also have Hulu, Adult Swim, and Amazon. Hee.
There's another list which mentions "The Devil is a Part-Timer". Right now, I'm watching Durarara!! which is amazing, I also think one of the people doing the vocal work is the same one voicing Melodious on Seven Deadly Sins. The art is closer to Cowboy Beebop and Harukami's anime. It takes place in a city, has various points of views, and about gangsters, high school students, a black russian sushi cook, and a headless Irish fairy hunting her head. Violent, but varied, with great art.
See Polygon's list of best netflix anime shows, which is very similar to the above list.
I'm four episodes into S1. Am impressed so far. It's varied. Everyone doesn't look alike. And it has more of a diversified cast. Also more adult than the prior two shows.
Finished Seven Deadly Sins -- it only had the first season and the first half of the second. The art was rather uneven and so was the vocal work. Also whoever is writing it has a massive boob fetish. (Japanese animators have a boob fetish that I find bewildering. Maybe because I have big boobs and I don't see the appeal? I mean I'd rather be flat chested. Most Japanese women are tiny with small boobs...so that may be why? God knows.)
But, it weaves character narratives with an action plot and fight scenes astonishingly well. Also the back stories for the fairy King and the bandit Ban are very good. There were episodes in there that blew me away. However, I found it to be uneven and the second season episodes rather annoying.
I'll watch it, and may jump to either Violet Evergarden, Fullmetal Alchemist:Brotherhood, or Your Lie in April. Also considering Gungan Langan or Devil Crybaby. This stuff is addictive.
2. Just saw Black KKKlansman by Spike Lee, starring Adam Driver, John David Washington, Topher Grace, Laura Harrier, and Michael Buscemi...with my movie buddy, cjlasky. This is an adaptation of the 2014 memoir by Ron Stallworth. Set in 1970s Colorado Springs, the plot follows the first African-American detective in the police department, who sets out to infiltrate and expose the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
Standouts? I went to Colorado College in the 1980s, so I really enjoyed the fact that the Colorado College Black Student Union is featured and they brought the Black Panther leader to speak.
Also there's a hilarious bit about how David Duke and various white cops sincerely believe they can tell someone's race by just listening to them on the phone. (You can't. Although you can usually tell where someone has lived most of their life, unless of course they have broadcast journalist midwestern accent -- then not so much. And most of us that accent in the United States. If you went to college, you have the midwestern standard American accent. I can however tell if someone lived on Long Island all their life by listening to them talk. They talk through their nose, roll the rs, and say idear.)
And, Lee shows how film has entertainment and film have indoctinerated people. He really knows how to critique propaganda and use it. Cecil De Mille's Birth of a Nation, which he has the Klan show its followers, and Harry Belafonte as a guest speaker, Jerome Turner, explain in detail how it resulted in increased violence against black men and women... De Mille was an anti-semitic, bigot. John Ford is famous for standing up to him and tearing him to pieces. I've never watched Birth of a Nation nor do I want to. Another film -- Lee shows is a scene from Gone with the Wind, in fact Black KKKlansman opens with the scene from Gone with The Wind...where poor Scarlette is hunting among the many many bodies for her loved ones in Atlanta. And the camera pulls back to show how many died. The film pulls back from this clip slowly to show Alec Baldwin as Dr. Kennebrew Beaureagard, one of the heads of the Klan, who uses it and other clips to show how horrible the black man is, and how superior white non-Jews truly are. Later, in conversation with David Duke, David Duke talks about how he cried when his black nanny died who was like Mammy in Gone with the Wind, and he was basically Scarlett.
Then, Lee shows posters from black exploitation films in the 1970s, which two of the characters are discussing...Superfly and Shaft, Coffey, Cleopatra Jones, etc. Through this, Lee shows the power of film on a culture.
My only difficulty with the film is it is at times heavy-handed with the emotional manipulation and the message. Less is more in this regard, I think. Lee does like to get up on his soap box. It's a problem I have with a lot of his films, sometimes he's more interested in the "message" than the story or plot, which is what happened here. OTOH...Black KKKlansman is funny in places, it does contain Lee's special brand of absurdist humor, and the ending is effective. He shows newsreel clips from what happened in Charlottsville, VA, where a Klan sponsored hate march resulted in the death of an anti-violence, anti-Klan protestor.
However, at times, the Klan and bad guys feel a bit too much like caricatures, although for the most part their portrayal felt realistic. I've met these people here and there...if an act of God removed them from the face of the earth? We'd be better off. The Black Power group also felt a little caricatured as well. They all looked a bit alike, with their clothes and hair styles. Which made the film feel at times like a satire. (It's not. This actually happened.) Actually the bad guys in this film reminded me of the bad guys in I, Tonya, as portrayed by Dumb and Dumber. Deadly. But Dumb.
Standout performance by Adam Driver, who blew me away. I barely recognized him.
Anyhow, I recommend the film, but with the caveat that it is definitely a Spike Lee film and as a result a bit heavy-handed in places.
Anyhow...here's Geek.com's list of the best anime on Netflix.
In the olden days, getting access to anime was a tremendous pain in the ass. For every series that got dubbed and aired on American television, there were dozens if not hundreds more that only made their way over on quasi-legal videotapes or bootleg DVDs. Fans of Japanese animation learned to work around it, but the advent of fast, reliable streaming video changed everything.
Netflix’s initial anime offerings were pretty scarce, but they’ve noticed the demand is there and beefed up their selection considerably. Here’s our list of the absolute best series to watch.
This might change as the service gains the rights to new shows and loses the rights to others, so bookmark the page and come back often.
True. In the olden days, I had to comb the back shelves of many a video store to get my hands on anime. And it was a mixed bag, also not always in the best of conditions. I also made friends with comic book store and video store owners to get bootleg copies. That's how I saw Battle Royale, not anime, but a live action adaptation of a magna (note Kill Bill borrowed heavily from it, so too does Hunger Games and The 100, it predates all of them by about ten years.) Cowboy Beebop the Movie, Robotech, Voltron, Sailor Moon, Castle Calistroka, Akira ( I think I saw that in the movie theater though), Ghost in the Shell (and the sequel, there was a sequel), and a lot of others.
I'm loving Netflix. I also have Hulu, Adult Swim, and Amazon. Hee.
There's another list which mentions "The Devil is a Part-Timer". Right now, I'm watching Durarara!! which is amazing, I also think one of the people doing the vocal work is the same one voicing Melodious on Seven Deadly Sins. The art is closer to Cowboy Beebop and Harukami's anime. It takes place in a city, has various points of views, and about gangsters, high school students, a black russian sushi cook, and a headless Irish fairy hunting her head. Violent, but varied, with great art.
Durarara!! (2010) and Durarara!!x2 (2015)
Durarara!! is an ambitious series that is more about a fictional iteration of Tokyo’s bustling Ikebukuro district than any of its main characters. The series begins when high school student Mikado moves from the countryside to Ikebukuro to attend school with his childhood friend, Masaomi. From this humble beginning, new characters and plotlines are introduced, of which the most prominent is the headless bike rider Celty, an Irish Dullahan (a type of headless fairy) on the hunt in Japan for her missing head. The series rotates through characters, with Mikado and his friends or Celty taking prominent roles throughout the series while others filter in and out. This kind of storytelling in which the characters play second fiddle to the narrative of the city itself is what sets Durarara!! apart. Durarara!!x2 is the continuation of the first series and works primarily to tie up its loose ends. Luckily, both series are available on Netflix in their entirety (24 episodes in Durarara!! and 36 in Durarara!!x2) in both English and Japanese with English subtitles. — PH
See Polygon's list of best netflix anime shows, which is very similar to the above list.
I'm four episodes into S1. Am impressed so far. It's varied. Everyone doesn't look alike. And it has more of a diversified cast. Also more adult than the prior two shows.
Finished Seven Deadly Sins -- it only had the first season and the first half of the second. The art was rather uneven and so was the vocal work. Also whoever is writing it has a massive boob fetish. (Japanese animators have a boob fetish that I find bewildering. Maybe because I have big boobs and I don't see the appeal? I mean I'd rather be flat chested. Most Japanese women are tiny with small boobs...so that may be why? God knows.)
But, it weaves character narratives with an action plot and fight scenes astonishingly well. Also the back stories for the fairy King and the bandit Ban are very good. There were episodes in there that blew me away. However, I found it to be uneven and the second season episodes rather annoying.
I'll watch it, and may jump to either Violet Evergarden, Fullmetal Alchemist:Brotherhood, or Your Lie in April. Also considering Gungan Langan or Devil Crybaby. This stuff is addictive.
2. Just saw Black KKKlansman by Spike Lee, starring Adam Driver, John David Washington, Topher Grace, Laura Harrier, and Michael Buscemi...with my movie buddy, cjlasky. This is an adaptation of the 2014 memoir by Ron Stallworth. Set in 1970s Colorado Springs, the plot follows the first African-American detective in the police department, who sets out to infiltrate and expose the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
Standouts? I went to Colorado College in the 1980s, so I really enjoyed the fact that the Colorado College Black Student Union is featured and they brought the Black Panther leader to speak.
Also there's a hilarious bit about how David Duke and various white cops sincerely believe they can tell someone's race by just listening to them on the phone. (You can't. Although you can usually tell where someone has lived most of their life, unless of course they have broadcast journalist midwestern accent -- then not so much. And most of us that accent in the United States. If you went to college, you have the midwestern standard American accent. I can however tell if someone lived on Long Island all their life by listening to them talk. They talk through their nose, roll the rs, and say idear.)
And, Lee shows how film has entertainment and film have indoctinerated people. He really knows how to critique propaganda and use it. Cecil De Mille's Birth of a Nation, which he has the Klan show its followers, and Harry Belafonte as a guest speaker, Jerome Turner, explain in detail how it resulted in increased violence against black men and women... De Mille was an anti-semitic, bigot. John Ford is famous for standing up to him and tearing him to pieces. I've never watched Birth of a Nation nor do I want to. Another film -- Lee shows is a scene from Gone with the Wind, in fact Black KKKlansman opens with the scene from Gone with The Wind...where poor Scarlette is hunting among the many many bodies for her loved ones in Atlanta. And the camera pulls back to show how many died. The film pulls back from this clip slowly to show Alec Baldwin as Dr. Kennebrew Beaureagard, one of the heads of the Klan, who uses it and other clips to show how horrible the black man is, and how superior white non-Jews truly are. Later, in conversation with David Duke, David Duke talks about how he cried when his black nanny died who was like Mammy in Gone with the Wind, and he was basically Scarlett.
Then, Lee shows posters from black exploitation films in the 1970s, which two of the characters are discussing...Superfly and Shaft, Coffey, Cleopatra Jones, etc. Through this, Lee shows the power of film on a culture.
My only difficulty with the film is it is at times heavy-handed with the emotional manipulation and the message. Less is more in this regard, I think. Lee does like to get up on his soap box. It's a problem I have with a lot of his films, sometimes he's more interested in the "message" than the story or plot, which is what happened here. OTOH...Black KKKlansman is funny in places, it does contain Lee's special brand of absurdist humor, and the ending is effective. He shows newsreel clips from what happened in Charlottsville, VA, where a Klan sponsored hate march resulted in the death of an anti-violence, anti-Klan protestor.
However, at times, the Klan and bad guys feel a bit too much like caricatures, although for the most part their portrayal felt realistic. I've met these people here and there...if an act of God removed them from the face of the earth? We'd be better off. The Black Power group also felt a little caricatured as well. They all looked a bit alike, with their clothes and hair styles. Which made the film feel at times like a satire. (It's not. This actually happened.) Actually the bad guys in this film reminded me of the bad guys in I, Tonya, as portrayed by Dumb and Dumber. Deadly. But Dumb.
Standout performance by Adam Driver, who blew me away. I barely recognized him.
Anyhow, I recommend the film, but with the caveat that it is definitely a Spike Lee film and as a result a bit heavy-handed in places.