Blood and Chocolate

I just finished listening to the Elvis Costello album Blood and Chocolate for the first time in many years. It's better than I remembered it being, but it's still not very good.

Diary of the Dead: suspension of disbelief

I just watched George Romero's latest (I think) film Diary of the Dead, in which he reboots, so to speak, his long-running series by going back to the first appearance of zombies but setting it in the near-present, as opposed to 1968 when Night of the Living Dead appeared. Reviews may have been mixed, or so I surmise from the obscurity of the sources of the blurbs on the DVD box. But I enjoyed it, though it has its flaws: in particular, some of the "meaningful" dialogue comes off as pretentious. (I'm unusual, though, in that I preferred Night of the Living Dead to Dawn of the Dead.)

But there's one major aspect of the film which I have a hard time suspending my disbelief for. As I said, the film takes place in the present, as the role played by the Web makes clear. And the protagonists are film students who, as the film begins, are making a horror movie. But nobody ever mentions any of Romero's films, although they would be the first thing that would come to anyone's mind if they began hearing reports about the dead returning to life and eating the living. What's more, nobody ever even says the word "zombie." Now, I understand the convention by which, for example, the South Park doesn't exist in the South Park universe, although shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy do. But flesh-eating zombies are now such a major part of our popular culture that to simply "delete" them doesn't work, at least not for me.

Stuff I don't like as much as I'm supposed to, Part 2: More TV

The Sopranos
Wire
Deadwood
Lost
Battlestar Galactica
Seinfeld
The Simpsons

Stuff I don't like as much as I'm supposed to, Part 1: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Well, this should be an inexhaustible source of posts when I can't think of any other topic. The subject is just what the title says: stuff that other people say I should really like, but which I don't like that much (or at all). These won't be reviews because I won't be trying to be fair. It will be just me sounding off.

SPOILER WARNING: This post has spoilers for season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; also for the first arc of Sailor Moon the manga.

The premiere of this series is devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series, of which I have watched on DVD the first episode and what I gathered were the best episodes from the second season. (See what I mean about not being fair?) The first episode didn't interest me enough to watch any further. First of all, it didn't strike me as being like high school. Rather, it was like a Hollywood version of high school, where even the "plain" characters are pretty or handsome by non-Hollywood standards and everyone is constantly being witty (that's the writers' intent, anyway). Second, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to buy the whole defeating-vampires-with-martial-arts shtick. And third, like I said, it just wasn't that interesting to me.

Some months later, after encountering a bunch of intelligent people who were fans of Buffy on the internet, I decided to give the show another try. This time, I wanted to see the series at its best. And as far as I could tell from reading books, websites etc. it was at its best in Season Two, and the best episodes from that season were the two-parter where Angel reverts to Angelus and the two final episodes, plus one other which I don't remember too well now. Again, I just wasn't that interested. I was particularly annoyed with the finale, because 1) the setup for Buffy killing Angel just after he's turned back from Angel is so obviously and ridiculously contrived, and 2) the teenage girl killing her boyfriend because he's possessed scenario was done better in the first arc of Sailor Moon the manga (which is otherwise pretty forgettable).

And I'm not even going to get into the plot's obvious illogicalities (some of which, to be fair for one second, may have been explained in the episodes I didn't see).

Nocturnes follow-up

If there perchance happen to be any readers of this blog who are wondering what happened after this post, the results of my rereading of Nocturnes can be found here.

Princess Tutu again

I just finished watching Princess Tutu (against my own advice) and the ending (most of which I had forgotten since my first viewing) was good enough to make up for any feelings of disappointment with the rest of the series. A lot of anime flub the ending, but here the ending is the best part. I will say that in retrospect the series feels somewhat padded, but this is probably true of most 26-episode anime.

Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei

I gave the manga comedy Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei a lukewarm review in a recent Comics Journal. But I've been watching the anime, which is remarkably faithful to the manga, and it's one of the funniest anime I've seen. I'm not sure what accounts for my differing responses. Part of it is that the anime has a much higher density of gags, many of which go by too fast to be seen clearly. But I think the main reason is that the anime has that anarchic spirit which the manga lacks, as I noted in my review.