Dai Guard is a computer drawn anime series with a familar theme. Slacker and friends repeatedly save Tokyo from under sea creatures by piloting giant Gundam-type robot. I find the computer developed anime garish, the block colours seem harsher and flatter than work by the likes of Production IG. Up to this point, Dai Guard [...]
Lupin the Third: The Secret of Mamo is the first film based on a manga series originated in the late 1960s by Kazuhiko Kato under the Monkey Punch moniker. It was swiftly made into a Japanese childrens show, but this was the first anime installment to make it to a cinematic release. The film was [...]
I am not a great fan of dubstep, but occassionally you get artists who climb above the limitations of their genre to take their sound to a wider audience like Roni Size for drum and bass, Benga is such an artist and Diary of An Afro Warrior is his debut album. The opening track on [...]
For those people that think cartoons are only as smart as the Korean-produced toy franchises of the 1980s, Hanna-Barbera saturday morning fodder of my youth or the Looney Tunes shorts from the golden age of cinema by Warner Brothers, stop reading right now. Anime is an extension of Japan’s manga culture. Manga is more than [...]
I managed to see Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights at the beginning of the year in Hong Kong. The film is an entertaining non-linear tale of love lost and a journey of self-identity in the US. The film visits familar ground for the director, (all be it in a very different geographic location) and [...]
Imagine a modern-day Ealing Studios type comedy, throw in the politics and intrigue of Dilbert. Set the story inside a department store in modern-day Spain. Pepper the plot line with a suave hirsute anti-hero and a bevvy of passionate women. That’s the premise for The Ferpect Crime; a Spanish dark comedy that features Guillermo Toledo [...]
Quality of Life is an indie produced film that focuses on two San Franciscan generation-Y slackers (Heir and Vain) that work as house painters during the day and do graffitti at night. The actors have the fluid style of experienced graff artists and it was nice to see the posh areas towards Pacific Heights, the [...]
El Lobo (The Wolf) is a film based on the true story of Mikel Lejarza. Lejarza was a Spanish Intelligence Service agent who penetrated the Basque separatist movement ETA at the end of the Franco regime in the early 1970s.A kind of Spanish Harry’s Game, despite its documentary content the film is a beautifully shot, [...]
During the technology bubble the media suddenly caught on to the riveting back stories in the tech sector that Bob Cringely and Co. had been banging on about for years. HBO came out with a particularly good adaption of one such back story – Steven Paul Jobs versus William H Gates III. While purists may [...]
I managed to obtain a Hong Kong issued DVD of 2046, rather than going to see it at the cinema, I watched it three times before writing this review. 2046 is a visually complex and beautiful story; as a high concept imagine Brief Encounter and Alfie meets Bladerunner on acid with art direction by Terry [...]
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