Comics Review: Kiva Volume 1
“The tsunami wrecks the town and Kiva barely escapes. Lost, far from home, and not understanding the magnitude of events, Kiva sets out on an arduous journey to find his beloved Toru.”
Book Review: Phantasm Japan edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington
Occasionally, I read something and don’t particularly want to review it so much as say, just read this. Or produce a review consisting of nothing but quotations from the text: let the evidence speak. Phantasm Japan, a 2014 anthology edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington, is such a book. Pardon me while I spend the next several hundred words embarrassingly fangirl-gushing about it. There are a few different ways to measure an anthology’s success. The one that is used most often is determining how many of the stories the reader liked versus how many they didn’t. While there’s nothing wrong with this as a metric, it’s not the primary one I use. My favorite anthologies shift my perception in some fundamental way, whether by some of the stories taken individually or by the aggregate body. Phantasm Japan does both. Considerably. Of course, producing a collection that’s bold and smart is not without risk; two or three of the more cerebral stories in this anthology sailed right over my head. There were several more that blew my mind in the best possible way.
#18. Summer Wars (2009) w/ Daniel Huddleston — #WorldSFTour
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/ShootTheWISB18SummerWars2009WDanielHuddlestonWorldSFTour/Shoot%20the%20WISB%20%2318%20–%20Summer%20Wars%20%282009%29%20w%20Daniel%20Huddleston%20–%20%23WorldSFTour.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSRogue A.I., family troubles, and MMO-run civilizations, oh my! To celebrate Japanese cinema, we’re joined by translator Daniel Huddleston for a discussion of Mamoru Hosoda’s 2009 film, Summer Wars. You may be familiar with Hosoda’s other excellent work, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time; Summer Wars is also an excellent work. We hope you enjoy the episode! Spoiler Alert: the following podcast contains spoilers for the film being reviewed; if you wish to see the film without having it ruined for you, download this podcast and save it for later. Download the episode here. [audio http://archive.org/download/ShootTheWISB18SummerWars2009WDanielHuddlestonWorldSFTour/Shoot%20the%20WISB%20%2318%20–%20Summer%20Wars%20%282009%29%20w%20Daniel%20Huddleston%20–%20%23WorldSFTour.mp3] Show notes (info about our contributors can be found on the about page): Summer Wars (IMDB) Mamoru Hosoda (IMDB) Daniel Huddleston’s translation work: Virus by Sakyo Komatsu Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Endo by Miyuki Miyabe Speculative Japan 3 Comment away!
#16 — Godzilla (1954) — A Shoot the WISB Discussion
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/ShootTheWISB16Godzilla1954AShootTheWISBDiscussion/Shoot%20the%20WISB%20%2316%20–%20Godzilla%20%281954%29%20–%20A%20Shoot%20the%20WISB%20Discussion.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSKaiju classics, Tokyo destruction, and mad science, oh my! Shaun, Julia, Paul, Mike, and Kaiju Master David join forces to tackle Ishiro Honda’s 1954 classic, Godzilla (or Gojira), for the World SF Tour! Question for everyone: What is your favorite kaiju movie and/or favorite kaiju? Spoiler Alert: the following podcast contains spoilers for the film being reviewed; if you wish to see the film without having it ruined for you, download this podcast and save it for later. Download the episode here. Show notes (info about our contributors can be found on the about page): Godzilla (1954)(IMDB) Godzilla (Criterion Edition on BluRay, DVD, or Digital) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNKPY3LkotE
A (World) SFF Film Odyssey: Mutant Girls Squad (2010) and Anime’s Excesses
Warning: there are some graphic images in this post. NSFW. Not too long ago, I set myself the goal of viewing every SF/F film released in 2010. It figures that the first non-American film I decided to view would be one of the most ridiculous, violent, and bizarre films I have seen in a while. After being bullied by her classmates, high school student Rin (Yumi Sugimoto) returns home to discover that her father is actually a humanoid mutant known as a HILKO (or hiruko — the subtitles use HILKO, but descriptions of the film use “hiruko,” so I’m not sure which one is correct). But before she can take in this surprising news and its implications for herself, she and her parents are attacked by an anti-HILKO military unit. What follows is an all out bloodbath as Rin tries to escape not only the military, but the blood-thirst of her home town. Later, she is picked up by other HILKO members and trained and indoctrinated into a violent counter-revolutionary force run by Kisaragi (Tak Sakaguchi), who believes his pack of teen girl HILKOs are the perfect fighting force for making Japan a human-free zone.
