TV Series Review: Grimm

As I mentioned two weeks ago with Once Upon A Time, when the fall crop of American tv shows premired it seemed like everyone was expecting one or both shows to kill each other, taking sides, and that's not what happened. I've been watching a bit of Supernatural recently and that seems more Grimm's "rival" than Once and frankly Hulu had the right idea of trying to promote each show to viewers of the other and they've both gotten renewed for a second season so it seems like it all worked out. However, while both of them ended on a cliffhanger for the second season, one of them did it better than the other....

Grimm

Summary: Nick Burkhardt is a police on the homicide beat in the Portland Police Department and is more than a little surprised when his aunt, the one who raised him after his parent's deaths, shows up on his doorstep and tells him that he is the latest in a line of "grimms" people who can see the supernatural as it walks among us. Soon enough Nick is seeing strange creatures everywhere he goes and his life has taken a dangerous turn.

The Good: While Grimm certainly borrowed themes from dozens of classic fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Rapunzel, it had interesting takes on them and many times it didn't even use a fairy tale as a basis for the story and instead introduced just a legendary creature instead. Since the vast majority of fairy-tale inspired stories I've seen lately have been merely retellings this was nice and I especially enjoyed the aforementioned two stories for their creativeness. On the more human side of things, I've joked that if Once had all the female leads that Grimm was lacking that Grimm seemed to make an effort to have multiple People of Color characters with large roles that weren't stereotypes. Actually, Hank (Nick's police partner) and Monroe (a "blutbad" that Nick ends up becoming friends with) were much more likable characters and Monroe at least seemed like a more well-rounded character as well (although considering how uneven Nick's character "growth" was and how even his actor wishes that he would be a bit more active next season that's not necessarily saying much).

The Bad: Once also ended on a cliffhanger but where that one gave some closure to that season's "arc" this one provided a completely out of the blue twist with no foreshadowing, one so sudden I was convinced that this show was going to have a 23 episode season instead of 22*. Also, in the end this show didn't have an over-arching arc/theme to tie together all the episodes together (which shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer regularly employed to create a sense of cohesion) and since this is a story ideally every episode included should have fleshed out the characters, a plot, the setting (or been a red herring about one of these) and I could point to each episode and say "that is the reason why this story was included." It's true that television isn't always that tightly scripted but thinking back I really can't tell why a lot of these episodes were included since they did nothing overall and I didn't get that nice pay-off in the last episode of seeing a story through to the end. The show has created a good sized cast of major and minor characters so I can see why those characters all got so much screen time but again, in the end there wasn't even a reason tying together the whole season so I still feel like all that time carefully building up that side cast was all for naught.

The Audio: Much like Once (and apologies I've had so many comparisons to it, this should be the last one), while Grimm did have some distinct themes, both for the opening/ending credits and in the background, I can barely recall any of them only about two weeks after the show ended and that's not a good sign. I don't recall any specific instances where the music didn't fit the mood reasonably well (and I would have recalled that) but perhaps I've just been spoiled by all of the anime and movie soundtracks I've heard which are much more memorable.

The Visuals: The story was filmed as well as set in the green city of Portland and loves to show off it's scenery with many scenes shot in the woods and it does look rather pretty. But the big thing about this series is the copious amount of CGI is used to morph the actors into the various creatures which by and large seemed to work well. It helps that the characters generally look monstrous for only a few seconds at a time, both for the fact that there's less time for the audience to think it's weird and so they can spread out the budget overall, and again I would say that overall the effects were well done (except the part where Monroe sometimes looked more like a deranged ape than a were-wolf but oh well).


So, I will not be catching the second season of this show when it airs (I believe the trailers said late summer, August perhaps?) since in the end the first season didn't go anywhere and that cliffhanger reaaally ticked me off. Plus, I have multiple seasons of Supernatural on Netflix plus friends to discuss it with so if I want normal-ish people hunting down supernatural baddies I'm all set!


*the best comparison I have is that it's almost the exact same twist as the ending of the first season of Tegami Bachi/Letter Bee which only worked because I had read past that part in the manga so I knew what was coming next.

Book Review: The Shadows (The Books of Elsewhere #1)

For a long time the only book-related blog I followed was one called The Enchanted Inkpot, then on livejournal, which isn't a book review blog but a few times a month would have an interview with a recently published author and I really liked the questions they asked which were generally more about the setting or the research that went into the book than the book itself. In an odd way those interviews managed to give me a really good impression of the books and I tried out quite a few books based on those interviews which I had initially disregarded or had just plain never heard of. Earlier in the year they moved from their livejournal blog to an independent one and held a giveaway to celebrate and I was one of the winners of it. They had three prize packs to choose from and sadly the one I wanted was already taken so I went in knowing none of the 8 books in it (actually, come to think of it I think I only received six of the books, ah well, I've already got enough to read) and started reading them in the order they came in. As of now I've read five out of six of them and again, go check out The Enchanted Inkpot since it's a really nice site.

The Shadows (The Books of Elsewhere number one) by Jacqueline West

  
The cover, at least on the paperback version, is actually shiny on the gold bits which is a nice touch and the cover art matches the illustrations inside. Yes, there are some illustrations here and, since I can't find an illustrator credited anywhere I believe Ms. West must have done those as well. They don't especially add to the story but I'm a visual person, I like having pictures in my books regardless.
 
Summary: 11 year old Olive Dunwoody and her math loving parents have recently moved into the old  Victorian mansion and it's last owner died and Olive notices a few strange things about it. She can't find the attic, there's a mysterious cat in the basement and all the paintings are fastened to the walls and seem to move when she's not looking at them. She soon learns that the paintings are magical with a dark history behind them, a history that seems to be coming to life again and threatens her and her family. 

The Good: "Kid moves to strange new house/has to stay at strange new house" is practically it's own sub-genre within fantasy (bonus points if they have to do it without any close family members, which is not the case here) and it works well here. Olive is inquisitive and smart but yet not genius and acts like an 11 year old girl. She has a fairly good relationship with her parents, something which I find rarely in stories, in short she's realistic, likable, and sympathetic from the start and I never found myself getting frustrated by her. The plot was paced well and was more complicated than I initially expected it to be, overall the whole book was much better than expected and I really did enjoy it.

The Bad: While I can partially see how this is simply the first volume in a series, on the other hand I'm not sure what's left to cover in further books. So I suppose it's both a strength and a weakness that the book works very well as a stand alone, honestly I won't be on the look-out for the next book but that's because it's a middle grade book and I'm just too old to enjoy middle grade books as much as I enjoy young adult or adult fiction books. I suppose that's another weakness of the book, while some books have that almost magical quality of being enjoyed no matter what the reader's age is this book just doesn't have it and I don't see this as a book someone will pick up years later for a reread and still enjoy just as much. Again, this book doesn't have any real flaws and it's certainly not a bad book but it's not as strong as other examples in the medium and that really limits who I can recommend this to.

So in the end, what to do with a book I enjoyed, thought was good, but have no intention of re-reading or doubt that I can loan out to friends? (plus have absolutely no room for on my shelves) Normally I'd sell books I don't like to a local used book store for store credit but that didn't seem right here so I inquired and found that the library near my school did take donations so I dropped this one off and hopefully it is enjoying a happy second life as a library book (or has been sold in their book sale and is still being happily enjoyed, I'll be content either way).
 

Manga Review: Sakura-Hime The Legend of Princess Sakura

So by now I have moved back home for the summer and that means I have two totally different libraries to get my books from, although sadly for one of them I've been checking out books from their comic section for almost five years now so there's not a lot of stuff left. This one is one of the new titles they seem to have picked up since last August or so which made me happy since I checked out the first chapter preview on Viz's manga site and it seemed not fantastic but alright. Now, was that first impression an accurate one?

Sakura-Hime: The Legend of Princess Sakura by Arina Tanemura

 

Summary: Sakura is an orphaned princess with no living family and so, as much as she hates the idea, will soon be married to her finance, second Prince Aoba. However it turns out there more to Sakura that meets the eye, her grandmother was the legendary Princess Kaguya and she has inherited some of her powers and the perils that come with them.

The Good: There was an interesting twist in this volume (not in the first chapter or I would have mentioned it) did set the series apart from other standard magical girl shows (actually, while the twist is very dissimilar it does remind me a little bit of one of her other works, Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne) in a good way. It provides different conflicts and does genuinely make me want to read more, although sadly my library doesn't have any of the other volumes and there are enough things that I don't like that I'm hesitant to blind-buy the rest of the volumes.

The Bad: With only three or four chapters in the volume it seemed to go by very quickly and I felt like not much actually happened by the end of the volume. The volume was the average, 180 pages length but I wish the pacing at been a tad bit faster (especially since I had already read the one chapter preview on Viz’s website, which is great but means that even less of the story was new to me), the last chapter could have easily been three-fourths/two-thirds as long as it was and nothing would have been missed. Also, aside from that twist and it's implications on the plot, nothing is making me want to hunt down more volumes (abet that is a pretty convincing reason). The characters feel flat so far, the setting is more than simply cliched, and this is at least the third magical-girl (kinda) series Tanemura has done*, there's not much new territory covered here. For that reason I'd only recommend this manga to either people who are big fans of magical girl series or someone who enjoys shojo but hasn't read a ton of it (so 15 year old me I suppose). 

The Art: Even after enjoying a few of her works I still find Tanemura’s work a bit jarring, she draws the eyes too large and the faces too pointy for my tastes and I suspect I’m not the only person who feels that way. Everything else about the art fine, everything seemed to flow well, characters looked distinct enough from each other (within the series, compared to all of  her other characters it's hard to tell them apart), and the artwork also remained consistent enough. I would hesitate to recommend this series because of the art since it is very, very, modern shojo-y, but I expect it won’t bother people who are familiar with her other works or series like say Fruits Basket.

So that's it, I'd read more if given the chance but, since I don't, I won't sweat it. Starting to get a little worried since I thought there would be more manga at my public library I'd like but at least I still have the entire section at the college library to get through, I only just began to browse that last year and hopefully that will last me a few more months.



*if you would like to get technical, Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne is the only truly magical girl series she's done but I also count this as Full Moon o Sagashite/Seraching for the Full Moon since that involved magical transformations and there are other series that are considered "magical girl" shows that involve the main character transforming primarily to become an idol (it's also my favorite out of all her works and I was quite disappointed in how the anime made it less tragic).  

Anime Review: The Future Diary

I noticed that starting last year I always seem to be watching at least one action-y, gore-y show a season (which sometimes is horror like Blood-C and other times really isn't like Deadman Wonderland). Currently Zetman is filling that slot for me and back in the fall and winter The Future Diary which I had read the first volume (of the manga) a few years earlier and surprisingly managed to avoid all spoilers for the show as it was airing (well, except for one which sounded more like a promise of awesome than a spoiler and didn't make it into the show anyway). With a show that's so heavily twist-reliant I really recommend trying to avoid spoilers but I recommend avoiding spoilers for any series anyway (and as usual I shall try to keep this a spoiler free review, if I have to spoil anything it'll be in the footnotes).

The Future Diary

 Summary: Deus, the god of space time, is dying and with his death reality will collapse as well unless he can find someone to replace him. To determine his successor he selects twelve people, gives each of them a diary that can predict the future (based on how each of them used their own diaries), and the last person standing is the new god. The quiet, anti-social Yukiteru Amano isn't too happy with this turn of events but quickly finds that it's fight or be killed and teams up with another with another participant, the stalker-ish Yuno Gasai, to try and survive the game.


The Good: I was surprised that some of the side characters ended up being fleshed out and rather likable characters, even if they were still completely nuts. The pacing worked well and the twists certainly kept the show entertaining, and sometimes their ridiculous implausibility made the show quite entertainingly, although I suspect the story wasn't going for comedy in those instances. The best way to sum up this series is that it was entertaining in the way a summer blockbuster film is entertaining, fun but in a few years time you'll have seen so many others that you won't remember much about this one.

The Bad: Despite the fact that I grew to like some of the side characters more than I expected I could never get myself to care about any of the characters the way I normally do with a show. Almost everyone became so crazy that they almost stop being characters and are reduced to plot devices so it's a good thing that the plot was interesting. That said, the show is so twist heavy that I wonder how much re-watch value the show has. Yes it can certainly be fun to go back and see things be foreshadowed but so many of these twists came out of nowhere I simply don't see if there would be that much entertainment and for me my favorite shows are ones I want to re-watch because I can always find something new in them.

The Audio: Funimation sadly did not translate any of the opening and ending songs and when I tried translating the first ending song, piecemeal and with google translate, it just turned out to be a very odd love song (which makes more sense in retrospect) so this is one of those odd cases where I liked how the songs sounded more than what they meant. But overall none of the music left a really deep impression on me, if I had watched the show on DVD I would have skipped both of them after the first few times and none of the background music really grabbed me either.

The Visuals: As odd as this sounds when talking about a story in a visual medium, none of the art or the animation left an impression on me, good or bad. Everything was simply there, the art wasn't stunning but it wasn't the cheapest I had ever scene and all of the designs (sets/backgrounds, characters) were like that as well, they didn't add or take anything away from the overall product. And I suppose that is a bad thing, stories should be told in the medium that fits them best and, if the art wasn't contributing to the story, I wonder if I would feel any differently about it if it had simply been a novel instead.

In short, this felt like a series I watched and, while it wasn't bad, simply don't feel the need to purchase or rewatch. I can probably recommend it to a some of my friends and for anyone who is curious in checking it out Funimation has it streaming for the US and Canada and has licensed physical media rights as well (I believe both DVD and BRs). 

TV Series Review: Sherlock (season two)

Compared to the rest of the internet I'm rather late here but, considering the last episode only aired (legally) in the US last Sunday I'm not doing too bad actually. When my mom and I first heard that there was going to be a five month gap between the BBC and American showings (and I'm rather unhappy at their "we have to edit it to fit American format" excuse, the show is on PBS which doesn't even have commercial breaks!) we guessed that we probably wouldn't be able to wait and did watch the first two episodes in March but weren't able to get to all three because of their length (each episode is a long, hour and a half long), thankfully PBS has them legally streaming on their website for now (abet cut down by eight minutes or so for each episode, I really don't understand why they can't at least leave the full episodes online where there are no time restrictions on it AND they make money off of the commercials).

Sherlock (season two)

Summary: Following last season’s harrowing cliff-hanger, Sherlock (with John in tow) tackle three more mysteries, based and expanded upon the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon, but with Moriarty afoot there might be some things that even Sherlock cannot work out in time.

The Good: I'm not fond of villains like Moriarty, I like them to have more of a motive than what boils down to "I was bored" but here he was just so insane underneath it all, although his last scenes of the season felt a bit contrived, like Moffat and Gatniss had been written into a corner and didn't have a really good way to get out. All of the mysteries were interesting and stayed true to the spirit of the original stories and the new elements worked in well (especially in the case of the Baskervilles) and Sherlock's explanations for the cases make enough sense to be plausible. In short, if you liked the first season (and if you haven't you really shouldn't watch this one first) you'll enjoy this one quite well.  

The Bad: While Sherlock is far from the first mystery series to have this problem it was tiresome after a while to see just how dumb and incompetent everyone around Sherlock is and they don’t even seem stupid by comparison, it really seems like the London police force has exceedingly low standards for general intelligence among it’s employees*. I had issues with Irene Adler as well, mainly since she deviated so much from the original canon (where she was a clever and quick thinking woman who was the one person ever to catch Holmes off guard, here whatever cleverness she has is buried under UST with Sherlock^) and I’m also tired of the “sexually confident women can wear skimpy clothes because they’re that happy with themselves!” idea, it just rings like a hollow excuse for fanservice and that was supposed to be a plot point early on.

The Audio: This may be just me but whenever I hear one of the main themes played in Sherlock I always feel as if it’s drawing inspiration from other Sherlock Holmes adaptations. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all, and it’s possible that I’ve seen so many series I’m trying to see connections that aren’t there (by my own count I’ve seen roughly 60 hours of Sherlock Holmes tv series/movies), but the music for this series has always seemed like a perfect and seamless fit here.

The Visuals: The show has created a very distinct looking style of cinematography with many quick shots, overlaid with text to give the viewer insight into Sherlock’s methods, often in close-up with a very shallow depth of focus, combined with some tilt-shift shots of London every now and then as transition shots, which serves to re-emphasis that Sherlock has a strange mind that sees the world in odd ways. As I believe I mentioned last time, I’ve seen a few of these quirks appear in various Doctor Who episodes but never with the frequency that they are seen here and they do keep the show interesting in a unique manner.

One thing that does puzzle me is that I saw a lot of praise for Molly online once the show finished it's British run and I'm not entirely sure why. People mentioned a speech of hers and I'm wondering if that was part of the 8 minutes that were cut, she did have a speech but it just didn't seem, well, strong enough to merit that much discussion I saw. My mom and I feel like a scene with her was also cut for a few other, spoilery, reasons, if anyone has a list of the cuts made to the US version (for any of the episodes) please share since I would love to know.

*I feel like I’ve had this problem with Moffat’s work before too, he loves to build up his main characters but doesn’t quite seem how to flesh out the side characters as well 

^funny enough I don’t have a problem with Sherlock being interested in her, mainly because being asexual does not mean you can’t have romantic feelings for someone and Mycroft says point blank in that episode that Sherlock was a romantic. Holmes originally was certainly both asexual and aromantic but, possibly this is after seeing the two recent American Sherlock Holmes films and how they played with Irene Adler I’m willing to give the series a pass on that point