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April 18, 2007 by

Did I miss this? Apparently, both live-action Death Note movies will be debuting at this year’s Newport Beach International Film Festival, according to a piece at Associated Content. A quick look at the festival’s schedule confirms it. I wonder who’s handling the U.S. distribution?

Dirk Deppey is an early adopter of Chika Umino’s Honey and Clover, so he’s understandably excited that Viz will preview the anime version at an event in Cannes:

“So what does this have to do with comics news? Well, there’s the little matter of anime/manga synergy; if Viz has acquired the animated version of this series, it may well be an indication that they have designs on the manga, as well. Could we be set to start reading one of the most entertaining soap-opera comics this side of Ai Yazawa’s Nana before the year’s out? If so, I can’t wait.”

The full release on Viz’s plans for Cannes can be found at ComiPress.

Speaking of josei, Publishers Weekly Comics Week’s Kai-Ming Cha interviews Mikako Ogata about new manga pub Aurora and its yaoi imprint, Deux. (How did they resist calling it Boyrealis?) The interview leads Simon Jones (whose blog is probably not safe for work) to ponder something that’s crossed my mind as well:

“Wouldn’t it be crazy if it turned out that yaoi is the anchor, the perennial tentpole product supporting the entire manga market?”

It certainly seems to be the most consistent performer of any of the various categories of manga, faring extremely well in the monthly Diamond figures and making its presence known in places like the Amazon bestsellers list.

What about shôjo? Well, MangaBlog’s Brigid Alverson makes her PWCW debut with an article on the second anniversary of Viz’s Shojo Beat anthology, and it’s packed with plenty of interesting tidbits. The one that really catches my eye is news that the magazine will climb on the Osamu Tezuka Love Train, if only briefly:

“Shojo Beat, Viz Media’s monthly shojo anthology magazine, will celebrate its second birthday in July with a special present for its readers: an excerpt from legendary manga-ka Osamu Tezuka’s 1954 manga Princess Knight, which has never been available in the U.S. before.”

I’ve been dying for someone to translate even a little of this series. I don’t know if a full licensing effort would be commercially viable, but most available sources cite it as an inspiration for the creators who would go on to revolutionize shôjo manga.

Oh, and speaking of girls and magazines, scholar Matt Thorn stopped by Anime News Network to comment on that Oricon survey of girls who read manga and their apparent love for shônen.

Filed under: Anime, Anthologies, Aurora, Linkblogging, Movies, Viz 1 Comment

Weekend update

March 4, 2007 by

Barnes & Noble was mobbed yesterday, which I found strangely reassuring. I don’t like wading through crowds to get to the cash register, but I do like to see people buying books, and they were buying lots of them. There were no children sprawled on the floor in the manga section; they were all clustered over in the game guides.

And those new collections of the Love & Rockets stories were there, and they are indeed quite handsome and a crazy value at $14.95. I went with Heartbreak Soup to start. I thought about getting both, but To Terra… beckoned.

We watched For Your Consideration yesterday. I always like Christopher Guest’s movies, and this one was no exception, but I’m glad we waited for it to come out on DVD instead of seeing it in a movie theatre. It just didn’t seem up to the standard of the others. The only really uproarious parts came from Jane Lynch playing, as near as I could figure, the reanimated corpse of Mary Hart. She was awesome.

And I’ve really got to break the habit of finding an author I really like and obsessively reading everything they’ve written to date. I should pace myself, or I’ll quickly run out of Nevada Barr novels to read. But they’re grisly mysteries set in national parks with a surly but likable woman of a certain age as protagonist! How can I resist? Ill Wind has the unfortunate side effect of making me want to be in the Southwest a whole lot.

Filed under: Bookstores, Movies, Mysteries 3 Comments

Violence! Violence!

January 14, 2007 by

Just got back from a trip to Washington, DC, where we saw two very different pieces about unsavory educators.

The first was the filmed version of The History Boys, an adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony-winning play about ambitious students trying to get into Oxford or Cambridge and the teachers who guide them. It’s packed with witty dialogue (which sometimes seems a lot like dialogue), and the acting is consistently good and sometimes superb (like Samuel Barnett and Frances de la Tour, who have the wittiest dialogue and make it seem the most real without sacrificing any of its bite). But Bennett seems to have been operating from the central thesis that no gay man can go into teaching without a crippling temptation to get into his students’ pants, which rendered the rest of the film’s appeal kind of moot.

Later, we went to see the revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Kennedy Center. The initial appeal of seeing it was to watch Kathleen Turner suck all of the oxygen out of the room as roaring Martha, but the show belongs to Bill Irwin as George. As many times as I’ve seen the play, I’ve never seen an actor make George so essential to the proceedings. Irwin is absolutely stunning, finally creating a George who makes complete dramatic sense, embracing unimagined qualities that leave the audience not only believing that he’d marry and stay with Martha, but that he loves her in his own way. Where there’s previously just been a shouting match, albeit a gripping one, Irwin and Turner create a dynamic that’s both deeper and scarier. Someone really should capture this performance on film.

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Slice and dice

November 21, 2006 by

I haven’t seen For Your Consideration yet, but I know what movie I want Christopher Guest to make next: something about celebrity chefs. In the most recent episode of Top Chef, the competition centered on a luncheon being hosted by the wonderful Jennifer Coolidge, and it all just became so obvious.

Catherine O’Hara as a frosty, control-freak Martha Stewart type… Parker Posey eviscerating perky Rachael Ray… Coolidge sloshing her way through a parody of Paula Deen… I would watch it a hundred times.

Filed under: Movies, TV Leave a Comment

Night and day

September 20, 2006 by

Sometimes my weird sleep cycle is irritating. I didn’t mind waking up stupidly early this morning, because it happened just in time for an airing of Desk Set on AMC.

I love this movie so much. I know it’s not considered the best of the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy collaborations, but it’s certainly my favorite.

Hepburn was around 50 when it was released, and Tracy was closing in on 60. When I think of the likelihood of two fifty-somethings cast as leads in a contemporary romantic comedy, it seems almost impossible. (Well, a fifty-something man would get cast opposite a twenty-something woman.) Women in their 30s barely ever get cast in romantic roles anymore, unless it’s going to be presented as some last-chance miracle story.

But Hepburn, as funny, confident and sexy as I’ve ever seen her, gets to have a (mostly) satisfying work life and two men vying for her favor, not because she’s hot and pliant and winsome (though her character’s name is Bunny, of all things), but because she’s smart. She’s the head of a research department for a television network facing job insecurity when Tracy’s character is brought in to install… gasp… a computer.

Bunny and Tracy’s Richard are intellectual equals and they spend the film sparring with each other on the relative merits of human ingenuity versus labor-saving automation. Poor Bunny’s boyfriend, handsome young Mike (Gig Young), doesn’t stand a chance, but nobody going into a Hepburn-Tracy movie would suspect otherwise.

So many movies seem to operate on the premise that dumb is funny, and I guess that’s fine if you like that sort of thing. But Desk Set is a really delightful reminder that smart can be funny and sexy too.

Filed under: Movies, TV 7 Comments

Halfway there

September 13, 2006 by

What is it with Marvel reminding me of Heathers? Anyway, when reading Ray Randell’s scathing summary of the final issue of Marvel Team-Up (found via Postmodern Barney), I couldn’t help but think of that funeral scene for the jocks. “I love my dead, gay son!”

That great black comedy rightly makes Entertainment Weekly’s list of the 50 best high-school movies ever made. Alas, Saved does not, which is just wrong.

To assuage me, EW provided a profile of the endearingly bitter Rachael Harris, who is set to appear in Christopher Guest’s For Your Consideration. The prospect of watching Harris improvise opposite Parker Posey makes me even more excited about the movie.

At Yet Another Comics Blog, Dave Carter provides the promised additional comparative data on Tokyopop and Viz release trends. In the comments on the first post, Jake Forbes notes another point of comparison: that Viz has a reliable source of longer manga series, while Tokyopop has to work with smaller publishers who tend to put out shorter stories.

Forbes, who provides fluid, literate adaptations for Fullmetal Alchemist and other series, weighs in on the alteration of a sequence in the eighth volume of FMA over at MangaBlog.

And thanks to Lyle for ensuring that the theme music from Paranoia Agent will be in my head for at least three more days. More, if I keep compulsively clicking on the video clip.

Filed under: Linkblogging, Marvel, Media, Movies 3 Comments
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