Anime Syracuse

It has not been going well lately…

Posted by Merrow on Oct 20, 2009 in Angst, Anime, Anime Cons, Anime Syracuse, Blog, Daily Life, Fandom | 0 comments

But surprisingly I’m not in a bad mood. Let’s review the past week and a half… On Wednesday I came down with a cold that I’m still suffering with. Been to the doctor’s, it’s not strep, pneumonia, or the flu (swine or other-wise..). It’s just a really horrible cold that. won’t. go away. On Friday I popped a tire and scratched up the side of my car. On Sunday my anime club, Anime Syracuse, had it’s Fall mini-con. Attendance was disappointly low and even worse… $200 went missing from our cashbox. To top off the evening, when taking down the a vendor’s display one of our helpers managed to clock me in the eye with a wire rack display. Now I have a black eye.

I should be wallowing under the blankets somewhere, shouldn’t I? But actually I’m in a pretty good mood. For one, even though I popped a tire (and am still driving on a donut…) I have road-worthy tires in my garage just waiting to be put on. Even though the Sunday event had low attendance, everyone there seemed to have a blast! And the Monday free Funimation screening was very well attended compared to last time. Also, the event provided an excuse to have the Neko-jin Girls  (Kit and Neko of Neko-jin designs) up, and we had a fun night talking shop, manga, and bizarre yahoo japan finds. We are already making plans for them to come up just for fun some time this winter during school and job downtime.

Today my cold hit me pretty hard, so I pretty much crawled into bed the moment I got home. I decided to marathon the rest of the first half of “Big Windup” (warning link takes you to site with an auto starting video, but it also has free episodes to watch). I’d won it at our first free Funimation event, and we’ve watched some episodes of it at club. I really love it. I am admittedly biased. While I can’t stand to actually watch a real sporting event, I have something of an obsession with fictional baseball. I have just about every baseball movie out there from the Natural, Field of Dreams, A League of their Own, The Sandlot… you name it I probably have it or have at least seen it, same goes for books. Sadly, the only baseball manga I can think of that came out in the west was an OEL called Boys of Summer… but I’ve read scanlations for Touch, H2, CrossXgame… So when I heard there was a baseball anime, licensed and available for sale and everything… well I knew it would be mine. And obviously it was destined to be as I won it before I even had the chance to plunk down money for it.

But the first box set ends at episode 13 (of 26) and at an AWFUL place. It could be worse, it wasn’t a cliffhanger but they were just about to start a game! Now I have to wait until November to buy it.

No I don’t have Swine Flu…Just a movie addiction.

Posted by Merrow on May 1, 2009 in Anime, Anime Cons, Anime Syracuse, Blog, Comics, Fandom, Movies | 0 comments

Image by Chesi – Fotos CC via Flickr

I’m back from Mexico! And have been for a week. It was a lot of fun, and I luckily all I came back with was a horrible sunburn. (Which thanks to my Irish heritage has now peeled away to reveal the normal glaring white complexion beneath.

No, the only reason I look like death warmed over at work is because I keep insisting on going to late movies during the week. First L: Change the World (the third Death Note movie) last night and now the Wolverine movie premiere tonight.

L: Change the World was about what you would expect for a third movie in a series adapted from a manga. As my friend Jess put it, you know going into it’s it’s going to be fan service, and a lot of it. And there was a lot of L doing what people like best, being charmingly weird and quirky. The plot of course was horrible, and a for some reason they seemed to think the best direction was to turn the pasty-faced, emo, sugar addict L into an action hero. We spent a lot of time giggling every time they had him do something new like run (still hunched over), ride a bike,  or stand up straight. He even, at one point, stands up straight AND walks.

We joked that the promo should have been “See L run, run L, run,” because really that was worth the price of the admission. The cheesy viral weapon storyline wasn’t what sold the movie, it was the weirdness like the hot pink Angel Crepe van that is apparently L’s version of the batmobile. (And yes we did sit in the back row and go da-na-na-na-na. like the old Batman TV show every time he got in it.)

I’d like to say that the new Wolverine movie, X-men: Origins, was a lot better… But also being a movie based on an overused character it suffered from a lot of the same flaws, only with a much bigger budget. It was a lot slicker, but it was still mostly fanservice for the comic crowd who just can’t get enough of those claws. When I’m more awake maybe I can give a better review.

But I will say, there were several naked Hugh Jackman scenes, so I didn’t leave unhappy.

Oh, and by the way… did I mention I was helping to put on a one day anime event on here in Syracuse? Well I am… which is one of the reasons I went to both of these movies, to hand out fliers promoting Anime Syracuse, which will be held on May 9th at the Palace Theater. I’ve got advance sale tickets set up in my shop if you’re in the area and are interested in coming. (We’ve got vendor space left too, if anyone wants to come and sell stuff.)