TV Series: Once Upon A Time

It's official, fairy tales are in and that led to a funny situation where last fall the US had two new, original property, fairy-tale based shows airing (and the US doesn't air nearly as many shows at once compared to anime), the other being Grimm. And of course this led to two things, people discussing how one show would probably end up killing the other (since you can't have two shows with the same concept airing at once!) and then people endlessly debating which show was "better." The shows ended up being rather different, and as far as I know haven't killed each other (I believe both even got renewed for a second season), and from the start I preferred Once Upon A Time over Grimm (which I believe I was in the minority for). Why was that? Well it's time for the review to elaborate!

Once Upon A Time

 
Summary: Once upon a time all the (western) fairy tales you can think of were real and lived in their own land. But the Evil Queen, feeling jealous and revengeful, cursed the kingdom and dragged them all to Storybrooke Maine where there was no magic and no happy endings. Or so she thinks, before the curse took hold the child of the King and Queen ("Prince Charming" and Snow White), one Emma Swan, was whisked away following a prophecy that she would be able to break the curse once she turned 28. Now 28 she's been contacted by her son Henry who she put up for adoption and ended up in the care of the Evil Queen (now called Regina and the Mayor of Storybrooke) and while she doesn't believe in magic or curses she does seem drawn to this small town and decides to stick around a bit longer.

The Good: Part of the reason I'm so skeptical about a lot of the fairy tale re-imaginings is because fairy tales are short, there's not a lot of material to start with. Here however the show melds quite a few western fairy tales (wish a dash of Greek mythology as well, basically the Disney canon) and while the timeline gets a bit confusing the stories work surprisingly well together and my hat is off to the writers for pulling that off. Obviously the more central characters get more backstory than the supporting cast but over a dozen characters were fleshed out and for just 22 episodes, which also had to deal with what was going on in the present day, that's quite impressive. I was worried that the ending of the season might be weak since it got picked up for a second season (ie, they didn't have to wrap everything up since they had more time) but, although rushed, it was surprisingly satisfying and left room for the second season. I do hope the show is completely wrapped up after the second season, simply because I get worried about American shows getting canceled or ending before the show can be completed, but I am really looking forward to the second season. 

The Bad: For me the first few episodes felt rather rough and many of the Storybrooke versions of the characters were rather dull before the story got moving. It makes sense why they were so flat, they've literally been living false, unchanging lives for 28 years before Emma came, but it still took a few episodes before the fairy tale and Storybrooke halves of the story felt like they were balancing each other out instead of one being much stronger than the ever. I do feel like the eventual "reveal" for August was a bit underwhelming*, the ending was a bit rushed, especially concerning Emma (although the writers had written themselves into a bit of a corner there), and it was just enough to make me wonder if they had to re-write it for a second season in a bit of a hurry, but overall I thought this was a pretty strong fantasy show by the end of it.

The Audio: These days I'm used to the music that accompanies the beginning and end of a show, whether it's a full sequence or just a 15 second clip, to sound wildly different from each other but here the pieces both sound like they actually came from the same series. Other than those two bits however I can't recall much of the music from this series and itunes only has four pieces for sale that I could find. I'm sure if I was to hear the pieces again I'd remember them but for this show I was more interested in what I was seeing on screen, not what I was hearing.

The Visuals: I had the pleasure of watching the early parts of this show while I was taking an intensive photoshop class so I found a lot of the early CGI, especially when it was used for backgrounds, a bit painful to watch. Either I got used to it or the CGI got better as the show went along, I suspect the later, and the show was good at knowing it's limits and rarely needed the tons and tons of CGI the early episodes (which had to quickly establish a lot of background information involving the fairy tale land). In retrospect it's impressive that the show never looked completely terrible, considering that just about every episode involved the fairy tale land in someway so that meant probably some CGI, more settings, more costume and make-up changes, this can't have been a terribly cheap show but it did well and never made it seem like the budget was strained.



All in all this show ended up being much stronger than I expected, honestly I was thinking that I would be dropping this and Grimm within their first seven or so episodes, and now I guess I need to figure out where to go for news so I know when to start tuning back into Hulu. Hulu has the whole show streaming, the problem is that only the last five episodes are avaliable for free users, all the others can only be seen if you have Hulu plus, and I do not believe the show is up on Netflix yet.


*partially this is because I had a rather fun fan-theory of my own and also after it was built up with twists and turns the reveal just seemed a bit, boring and seemed to go against some of the rules of magic that the series had already established. 

Movie Review: Captain America

Sorry this is late, it's finals week for me and the USB with projects for two of my classes exploded and had to spend a few hours fixing that, fun times. Also, Christmas is coming up really soon which means I'll be traveling around so the updates might be a bit wonky. I have plenty of things to type about it's just a matter of getting my computer to agree with the local wi-fi, fingers crossed that my laptop will be in a good mood.

So here it is, the last movie I'm watching on campus for the year and there's not much else to say to introduce it. This is the last Marvel movie before The Avengers coming out this summer (it even has Avenger in the title) and was meant to introduce the last big member of the group (since the Black Widow and Hawkeye only got cameos in Iron Man 2 and Thor and no one knows what's up with Nick Fury, I've heard that even Joss Whedon, who directed the movie, knows his backstory) and it did that pretty well.

Captain America: The First Avenger

Summary: It's World War II and Steve Rodgers just really wants to go to Europe to fight Nazis on the front lines. Trouble is that he is a 4F, completely unfit for combat, and keeps getting denied until the scientist Abraham Erskine decides that he might be just the kind of man they need for their new combat project to create the perfect soldier.

The Good: I was pleasantly surprised that plot wasn't as straightforward as "Steve Rodgers becomes Captain America and goes to kick Nazi ass," it was actually a bit more complicated to get to that point and it actually worked well both logically and for the plot. I was also surprised that again there was a prominent female side character who was very competent at her job and, since her job is being a British secret agent, she also gets a chance to kick ass. In this respect Captain America is a bit more like Thor than the Iron Man movies since both of them have a bigger side cast that gets a chance to be more fleshed out, something the movies really didn't need to do since, well, if The Avengers is set in the modern day you can already guess the ending.   

The Bad: While the plot progression worked and was logical there were times it just felt too slow to me in the early parts of the movie. It probably wouldn't feel as slow a second time around but for a while I was wondering how they were ever going to get to Nazi Germany. There were also some scenes that seemed too over the top and unrealistic, even for a superhero movie (mostly the parts involving Hydra, the actual villains of the movie) and at times Red Skull was just so hammy that i couldn't help but roll my eyes. The movie wasn't my favorite of the Marvel superhero films but it was a solid entry regardless.

The Audio: One again the music in this movie stood out much less to me than the visuals. The only piece that really stands out to me was a scene towards the end where there is a radio playing in the background and I liked how the sound people had gone to the trouble to make it sound like an authentic 1940s transmission (and considering nothing jerked me out of the movie they must have payed the same amount of attention to everything else).

The Visuals: The CGI in this movie didn't look as sharp to me as it could have and some of my friends, who had seen the movie once already, noticed the same inconsistent bits in places. It's a given that a superhero movie is going to need CGI to achieve quite a few scenes but with movies as high budget as these the CGI doesn't seem to be quite top of the line. For the traditional bits on screen I rather liked them, I'm fond of 1940s clothing and style and the movie did a good job at making these things look both historically authentic and like real set pieces or articles of clothing. Nothing looked shiny and fresh, they looked aged and used which was a very nice touch. And of course, the CGI used to make Captain America's actor look like a super scrawny person at first was exceedingly well done. I was really curious to see how well this turned out since I know of another movie in the planning stages who want to use this same group for body modification CGI and now I really want to see what else they can do. 

Tangentially related to this, the other night my friends and I marathoned the two Iron Man movies back to back and after seeing this and Thor relatively recently we noticed something interesting. In Thor we are introduced to both a seemingly magical device called the tessecrat (or apparently the cosmic cube according to wikipedia) and one of the characters also figures out that the "magic" of the gods is in fact highly advanced science. This tessecrat appears in Captain America (it's the little blue device that Red Skull obtains from the monastery that powers one of their weapons and Howard Stark experiments with it) and then in the stinger in Thor (I think they had just recovered it from Captain America's plane). My friends figured out however that whatever the tessecrat is is the new element that Tony Stark created in the second Iron Man movie and it was based on plans that his father had left behind. I think this is a really neat little subplot that Marvel has woven through their movies and it also took care of some of my issues with Iron Man 2 so kudos to Marvel so putting in some serious thought for how to connect these movies in more than just a superficial manner.   

TV Series Review: The Three Doctors

Wow sorry guys, I had a friend staying over yesterday and I thought I would have a chance to write this up but when I finally remembered it was one am, my computer was off and I was about to hit the sack, whoops. I know in the past when I've forgotten to review something (coughSacredBlacksmithcough) usually that means it was a rather mediocre show that just doesn't leave a lasting impression but that's honestly not the case here. Here is The Three Doctors, one of the multi-doctor Doctor Who specials featuring the second and third doctors and the first doctor in a smaller role hence the title. In a bit of a change from The War Games, this is during the time frame when the Doctor was stuck on Earth (aka, the BBC had even less budget than before), drove a yellow car named Bessie instead of the TARDIS and was working with UNIT, the UNified Intelligence Taskforce which reappeared in Nu Who (yes the UN part did originally mean United Nations) which means that one of Doctor Who's best known side characters, the Brigadier, is present and the Doctor's current companion is Jo (as well as another UNIT member, Sergeant Benton who also acts as a companion in this serial). Okay, enough set-up, onto the show!

The Three Doctors

Summary: The Doctor, working as a scientific adviser to UNIT, is having a fairly normal day when an independent researcher comes by with some strange readings and the Doctor finds that a blob monster has started chasing him around. The monsters are actually sent by Omega, a Time Lord gone renegade after he figured out how to create time travel, and when the Doctor calls on other Time Lords for help he discovers that they are too busy with their own problems to help. So instead they break a few laws and send the second and first Doctor (who gets stuck in a time eddy along the way) to the third Doctor where they can all team up and defeat Omega.

The Good: Even without knowing these Doctor(s) very well it makes perfect sense that they immediately start bickering with each other and those arguments are one of the highlights of the special (that and watching the companions deal with all of it which is also fairly amusing). The special assumes that the viewer is familiar with the above mentioned companions but even without knowing much about them they're pretty interesting, prove themselves to be capable* and Doctor Who is always much more fun when the companions can hold their own. Jo turned out to be a particularly fun character to watch (initially, before her name was mentioned, I wrote her off since she was wearing such ridiculous clothing but she seems to be just another companion who wears less than practical/fashionable clothing and manages to be awesome anyway) and, like Zoe and Jamie, I would love to see more of her in other episodes.

The Bad: The Brigadier wasn't as interesting a character as I had hoped him to be sadly (he's built up so much in the fandom to be one of the best side characters) and he actually seemed a bit stereotypical and flat, especially when compared to the other prominent UNIT character in the special, Sergeant Benton. Omega was also a flatter villain than I was expecting (then again, I usually find villains with a God-Complex dull) and the plot just wasn't as engaging as The War Games was. The plot did come through at the end of the episode but for some reason, even with the interesting characters and all the bickering, this just didn't draw me in as much as I was hoping.

The Audio: The special uses a slightly different variant on the main theme that The War Games does (not surprisingly, the theme usually changes just a tiny bit every few years) and other than that there's a ton to mention. There were a few problems with the sound in The War Games but none here, the sound effects are still pretty cheesy and for such a big and intimidating guy, Omega doesn't have a very deep voice at all, a bit of vocal dissonance there.

The Visuals: The War Games made a smart choice that the setting of the serial didn't require that many special effects, aside from one of the sets needing a more futuristic look, so that serial looked quite decent yet this one feels like a step down. Shot in color, which looks grainier than a lot of the black and white film used in The War Games, this just feels like a lower budget serial and, given that this was a special, that's probably not the case (makes you wonder how the regular episodes looked, as stated in the opening, this was when the BBC had even less budget for the show). The sets don't look as exciting (at one point it looks as if they have simply found an abandoned quarry somewhere in the UK which is probably exactly where they shot it) and Doctor Who's legendary bad rubber suit monsters make an appearance. Part of what makes the costumes so bad is that they move like, well, people wearing a ridiculous suit with limited mobility, it's almost a reverse Uncanny Valley (you just can't believe that they aren't human since they move in such a human fashion) and it's baffling why they would even bother using special effects like this and then halfway through simply stop caring about how they look. 


So the special is hardly bad or even mediocre, for some reason it just didn't click with me quite as much which could very well be because I'm not as familiar with these doctors. Not that that's going to stop me from watching even more Classic Who out of order, already have a few more waiting for me at my local library and hopefully I can get through all of them before the end of summer!



*I'm starting to think that the Classic Who companions were required to get into even more trouble than the Doctor does, at times they seem a lot more adventurous than some of the new ones. 

Webcomic Review: Galaxion, Get Job, Girls with Slingshots, Gunnerkrigg Court

Whoops, this is a bit late isn't it? I have a crazy number of things to do over spring break so I'm going to take a short break and post the next reviews (two for the letter H, yay my favorite!) on Thursday instead of Wednesday so I hope this doesn't throw anyone off too badly!

Galaxion
One of the few sci-fi webcomics I read (I totally need to read more), this is the story of a crew on a strange ship that just got a bit, stranger. You see, sometime in the future humans have begun to colonize the stars but their ships are still rather slow and take weeks to reach the farthest colonies. So the two great space exploring factions have joined up to test out new technology that, if it works, would dramatically cut down the amount of travel time needed. Three guesses which ship they stick it on and three guesses how well it works, should I mention that these engines failed the first two times? This comic is out of the introductory stage but, with only one update a week, the pace moves slowly and it's easy to forget exactly what happened from week to week (thankfully the creator provides links to the beginning of each scene for when this happens). But, if you find that happening to you, I'd advise going through the archive and browsing through the various short stories (all of them are pretty short but really help you to remember the characters better), I still need to read the original version of the comic she has posted actually. This one does have one volume out in print now (hoping volume two will come out later this year) and I'd get it since the comic is certainly worth a reread!


Get Job
Poor Get Job, since I have it bookmarked in a funny place (stupid firefox not letting me have bookmarks in multiple places) I find myself forgetting about this comic and each time I remember it I don't know why. It's a fairly new comic but I feel like I already know our two characters (who are avatars of the team behind the comics, it's a semi-journal, semi-fantasic webcomic I believe, like Enjuhneer) which is a huge accomplishment since each strip is only three or four panels long.  Not much else to say about the comic since it is so new however, but it's a pretty amusing comic about two dudes going through life that I'd recommend, especially to people who don't want to read through tons of archives. 


Girls With Slingshots
For some reason this comic really reminds me of Questionable Content, and I meant that in a good way! Large cast of 20-somethings and following their lives as they get drunk, work (or try to find work), fall in and out of love, and just have lots of problems (plus a talking cactus).  Despite the aforementioned surrealism (talking cacti and ghost cats eh?) the comic still manages to feel rather realistic, in a very snarky mature sort of way* that usually gets a snicker out of me. This one has a number of volumes out in print now (the comic is over 1000 strips long at this point so some backlog bingeing is in order for new readers) but I'm not sure if the comic has enough reread value for me to buy the books. Maybe, I'm sure I could loan them out to my friends and be a hit with them. Finally, it occasionally crosses over with All New Issues (which I wrote about here), funny enough the cats cross over more than the humans and I think some of the cats are from another webcomic all together, so if you do blow through 1000+ strips check over there next!


Gunnerkrigg Court
Not much to add since my last review of this series, any more plot would be spoilerific, although I will say that there are now an awful lot of Chekov's Guns in the series, the art has of course gotten better, and yes I still want to buy the books (haven't yet since there on the expensive side for me but I've heard rumors that they're going out of print, ack!). So, go read it, it's one of the best written webcomics I currently follow and has fantastic art to boot.


Like I said above, no post tomorrow, a quick H one on Thursday and then one on the letter J (since I don't follow any webcomics that start with I, odd) on Friday, see ya then!



*So no mature warning on this comic like FreakAngels yesterday but a word of caution for under 16s reading it. Let's just say that between this and Questionable Content I learned a lot about sex toys, heck, we have a character who works in a sex shop so that shouldn't be surprising here.

Manga Review: xxxHolic

Initially, and this was years ago (geeze, probably about four years ago now) I started reading Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles but didn't start reading xxxHolic until things started getting confusing in TRC. I ended up enjoying Holic more, probably because it had a less confusing plot line, but now that the series is done I'm really not sure what to think about it. Sure I enjoyed a lot of the series but at the same time it had quite a few issues as well.

xxxHolic by CLAMP


Summary: Watanuki not only has the ability to see ghosts, spirits, and other things that regular humans cannot but they are also attracted to his blood and try to eat him a regular basis. He impulsively wishes once that this would stop happening and happens to say this in front of Yuuko, a shopkeeper whose store grants wishes. Ever since he's been doing errands and chores for her to work off his debt and meeting a truly wide variety of humans and yokai.

The Good: Despite what I say below, xxxHolic did have a stronger ending than TRC did (that's a pretty low bar though). I loved the series when it was either standalone chapters or short arcs that showed strange situations and the characters growing up. Plus, I love stories containing spirits and other beasties (as long it doesn't involve a lot of romance mind you) and xxxHolic kept me perfectly satisfied in that respect. Some of the smaller crossovers with TRC did work well (I loved the crossovers in the early days where you would just see items passed between the worlds) and I really want to see someone else pull off the crossover series trick, just with a bit more planning please.

The Bad: I'm reviewing xxxHolic and xxxHolic Rou here and I don't think that Rou was even needed. If the story had actually done something with the plot that wouldn't be the case but there is no change in Watanuki between the end of Rou and the regular series. I'm still annoyed that CLAMP wasted a good opportunity to tie up some of TRC's plot threads* and really, only one of the characters got a good wrap up. xxxHolic was at it's strongest when it only had minimal crossover with TRC because once that series got crazy xxxHolic stopped making a lot of sense as well.

The Art: The art doesn't translate well to animation but as stills it's gorgeous art. This was during CLAMP's streched out people period and their art looks way better than that style should. Each chapter page and cover illustration is meticulously detailed and the artbook spreads will cause enterprising cosplayers to tear their hair out for generations to come. Again, the art didn't translate so well to the anime (hence why I haven't seen much of it) but in still form, once you get used to it, the art fits the series perfectly.




This is a story I want to own someday, and in print too, but I might just hold off buying the Rou part for a long time. Now, I wonder if there are any artbooks for this released stateside....


*Apparently both stories got away from them and ran for much longer than they planned, I know a few members of the group said they needed to re-read Holic to get the ending, never a good sign if you're the co-creator.