Everybody's doing it so why don't we?

I bought a Sony SA32 online (for a wicked good price) the other day. Got it delivered to work, it turned up yesterday.

I had joked to people that it was bigger than my house - it is a CRT, so isn't compact by any means.

Turns out that the joke was on me. The box it came in was too big to fit through any of the (standard-sized) doors in my house. I'd got an obliging colleague to help me lift it off the trailer (too big to fit in the car as well), so he helped me to take it out of the box and bung it on the living-room floor.

I wasn't keen on leaving it on the lawn for the afternoon - not that anyone could have stolen it without a crane and a medium-size truck!

The thing will be temporarily installed in the lounge while we either: (a) decide that it's far too big and trade around for a 28-inch; or (b) get so attached to it that we keep it. Hopefully I can be sensible about this and get the smaller one, but my track record at being sensible isn't great, especially when it comes to expensive electronics.

Unfair review #2

Went to Howl's Moving Castle at the Film Festival on Tuesday night.

I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm fairly new to the Anime (or whatever you young bastards call it) genre. In fact, I was always biased against it, relying solely on what I imagined it to be like. I was particularly annoyed by the terrible animation (i.e. seemingly 1 or 2 frames a second) that is a feature.

Thankfully, a more enlightened and pretentious person forced their Cowboy Bebop DVDs (the series) on me. These are fantastic, and have opened up a whole new world to me.

So, I bought my tickets for HMC and Steamboy (you can read what I thought about that in the previous post) at this year's Film Festival.

I'd sat behind a guy at a film earlier in the week, whose answer to a friend's, "What was HMC like?" was, "Weeeell . . . it looked nice." He then added that Disney had fucked it, particularly with the voice talent, and that the last half was pure Hollywood bullshit.

He was a dick (obviously), although he was at least partly right. HMC looks fantastic! The opening scenes of the lumbering castle are pure CGI magic, and their immediate juxtaposition with a hideously animated scene (of a flock of blob-like sheep) only make them better.

I can't speak for whether Disney shat all over it - by lucky mistaken coincidence, I had booked tickets for the non-overdubbed version.

The last five minutes are most definitely the low point of the film though, in terms of plot at least, but despite being tied up all too neatly and quickly, those few scenes aren't enough to detract from the film as a whole.

The characters in HMC are great - interesting, flawed, contradictory. I tend to compare everything to Cowboy Bebop as it's my first real point of reference, but the characters are similar.

I went into the cinema feeling tired, and expecting something pretty and vacuous, but emerged feeling refreshed, energised and entertained. I think there must be something wrong with me.

Unfair review #1

Went to Steamboy at the Film Festival last night.

I'm sure there were some fantastic graphics, but I couldn't see them through the gloomy brown tone of the film.

Likwise, I'm certain there were some innovative plot elements, but again, they were obscured by the usual anime plot of "young boy/girl is thrown into strange situation, overcomes odds to become PURE ENERGY" (to paraphrase a colleague of mine).

Perhaps I'm a bit new to the genre, but I felt that setting the whole thing in Victorian London and Manchester may have been overreaching somewhat. This may have been that most unusual of things - a foreign language film that would be improved by overdubbing.

I can't believe it's not bugger!

Lorem ipsum dolor etcetera . . .

Historical first blog entry - it's not gonna be up to much. Today is one of those days where everything I try to do doesn't work out. A fair part of this can probably be attributed to increased stupidity - like I say, just one of those days.