Revenge is Best Served with Red Eye Shadow

Last night's tweets;

Feet are too short to kick a funky skull.
Purple soul heats a fine lady ninja.
Tiny skateboarders orbit a snack bowl.
Hope Keanu Reeves is back on ganja.

I watched Sympathy for Lady Vengeance last night, the final film in Chan-wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy. It wasn't bad, though I didn't like it nearly as much as Oldboy. I think Oldboy benefited from being based on a manga, and the fusion of the comic pulp with the extreme tragedy was a perfect mixture. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance doesn't have the boring leads Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance suffered from, but while Geum-ja's personality is oddly adorable and she and the characters around her were painted with a rare insight into human nature, I wasn't quite as drawn to her oversized sense of guilt as I was sort of entertained and charmed by Dae-su's.

The beautiful woman with red eye shadow and the title call to mind the classic revenge film Lady Snowblood, which is another thing that might lead one to expect pulp, but Sympathy for Lady Vengeance turns out to be an essay advocating capital punishment, with a large portion of the film's latter segment focusing on the meeting of a group of parents and relations of children who were murdered by the man who framed Geum-ja for one of his crimes. And it seemed clear to me that Park really couldn't make the sort of noir I described yesterday, about a person who's done genuinely bad things he/she feels guilty about. I suspect he's one of the few people who watched Double Indemnity and wanted to see Walter Neff in the gas chamber. He's a good filmmaker, but I suspect I wouldn't want him in charge of a country.

I read on AICN yesterday that Funimation has licensed Dance in the Vampire Bund, which I guess is why people are afraid to sub it now. Funimation is known to throw fits, one of which even got the useful anime torrent search engine, Tokyo Toshokan, taken down for a while (lately I've been using Jishaku Toshokan as well). And, according to the AICN article, Funimation is planning to censor episodes of Dance in the Vampire Bund it's broadcasting on its website, which only has up to episode 8 right now, making it a week behind Japanese broadcast schedule. So thanks, Fuckermation, for making us wait for watered down episodes which you might restore for DVD release at an even later date.

I hope they don't get in the way of Arakawa Under the Bridge, Shaft's upcoming seinen series I'm looking forward to.



Yes, that is a trailer to the anime series I just mentioned.

Lately I've been rewatching Ranma 1/2 with breakfast. Ranma 1/2, particularly its first season, remains a wonderful anomaly, though it's often been imitated. Nothing else has quite so successfully combined sex, genuinely good action sequences, keenly humorous artwork, and Rumiko Takahashi's talent for writing entertaining play among a large group of well defined characters.