Back in the 90s, I became quite used to being the only non-Asian guy in the local Japanese bookstore and the only guy, period, in the shojo manga section.  I’ve been the guy who got to the Software, Etc early on release day to pick up his copy of “Dead Or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball” and I will defend the cinematic glory of “Super Mario Brothers: The Movie” to anyone who will stand still to listen before they suddenly remember that they have somewhere to be.

I have no taste, no class, and (most importantly) NO SHAME.

It was therefore an unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensation to find myself walking past the “My Little Pony” aisle in my local toy store trying not to look like I was looking down the aisle.

Here’s what brought me to that sad state: I spent the week after Christmas sick as a dog.  With little energy or ambition in me, I spent most of that time on the couch in front of the TV.

At one point, I decided that I would see what all the hype was about “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic”.

(This is the sort of decision I make when I’m hopped up on cold medication, you see.)

After three episodes, I wasn’t really seeing the reason for all the online enthusiasm surrounding the show, but I was also too addled to think of anything else to watch.

After a few more episodes, I couldn’t stop watching.

After 37 episodes, I found myself haunting the toy aisle looking for pony merch to make my own.

I am buying this for my niece, I decided, that’s what I would tell the cashier. She has a birthday in January, I would say if asked, an excellent reason to explain why a grown man might be shopping for his alleged niece after Christmas.

The cashier did not ask questions, so my elaborate fiction was unnecessary. She simply rang up the cotton-candy-pink box without question or comment. Perhaps she’d seen it all before, perhaps she simply didn’t want answers to the questions gnawing on her mind.

Once my new treasures were home, freed from their suffocating plastic shells to join a shelf of figurines dominated largely by catgirls and maids and catgirl maids and other figurines of dubious standing, I had time to reflect on what I had done and why a show about, well, magical ponies had kept me so glued to the television.

My first answer was, well, it’s a fantastically funny show. It has a good mix of slapstick and subtle humor – if you want to see a unicorn getting hit with an anvil, it’s got that (yes, really an anvil, always good to see an old Looney Tunes classic brought back for a modern cartoon), but it also rewards careful attention to dialogue and has enough background detail to reward judicious use of the pause and slow advance buttons.

It also has a lot of horse related puns, so your enjoyment may be directly tied to how many of those you can tolerate. Some of them are subtle enough that they will fly right past someone not raised in a pun-friendly household, anyway.

That was a start, but not really a complete explanation.

My next explanation was that it was, simply put, a change of pace.  I’m a bit of a cynic on my best days and I can get downright gloomy given half a chance, so by all rights I should be writing off a show like this as a unabashed cash grab, designed to separate the parents of little girls from their hard-earned dollars.

And, well, it kind of is a cash grab, but it’s also an unrelentingly optimistic and positive show with a good message, something it somehow pulls off without crossing the line into preaching.  There are a couple of early episodes where the obligatory moral of the show is hammered in with a lack of subtlety – and generally with a new character whose only purpose is to be a bad example – but those stand out because they are exceptions.

Tl;dr version: even if – especially if – you’re fundamentally bitter and cynical, sometimes it’s nice to watch something upbeat.

And then we have the online fandom, the “bronies” as it were, who stand out in online fandoms as being, well, nice. Downright civil, even, though I confess that I haven’t delved deep into the murky depths of the community and I’m sure that it has a few jerks scattered around.

Much of this general civility can be tied, I think, to the absurdity of it all.  It’s hard to take things too seriously when you’re expressing your admiration for the exploits of a character named Fluttershy after all.

Just so we’re clear, though: Twilight Sparkle IS Best Pony.

I’m going to rank this somewhere between “faith in humanity failing” and “well, civilization has had a nice run, don’t forget to turn off the lights and lock up when you leave”

Many years ago, when I was a small child, I remember watching and enjoying episodes of Dr. Who on PBS.  This was episodes from the Tom Baker years, with the improbable scarf and the robot dog and sets made from the finest cardboard.  I loved the robot dog.

I have never gone back to re-watch these episodes, because I think that it’s probably one of those shows best experienced through hazy childhood memories, or by actually being a child.

So a few years ago, when I became vaguely aware that there was a new Doctor Who series on the air, I didn’t exactly run out and start watching it.  I did catch an episode late one night while riding a stationary bike in the exercise room of my apartment complex, and it made no bloody sense whatsoever.

For the record, it was “World War III”, and I came into it about 10 minutes late.  If you are a Doctor Who fan, I recommend going back to that episode, fast forwarding to about 10 minutes in, pretending that you do not know who any of the characters are, and trying to follow along.

Some while later, a friend gave us the first four seasons of the show to watch, and I made it through the first two episodes before putting it aside for later.  I had the vague sense that I should probably watch it eventually because it was getting an awful lot of attention, but I didn’t have any real motivation to do so.

Then, we started planning a trip to the UK and were trying to plan some touristy things to do, and my wife ran across a mention of a Dr. Who-themed attraction, which sounded neat in a geeky sort of way but that also didn’t sound like it would make much sense without actually seeing the new stuff, so we went back to season 1, episode 3, and started watching from there, putting in a couple of episodes a night.

This meant that we caught up to the currently airing shows with only 3 episodes left in season 6, which was pretty good timing inasmuch as our departure for the UK was only a week after the end of season 6 was to air.  This is a pretty good way to watch the show, in my opinion, because while it turned out to be quite fun to watch when taken as a whole it does have some terribly, terribly bad episodes.  If I’d been watching it week-to-week, I’m not sure I would have made it through the Daleks-meet-1920s-showgirls episode, just as a for-instance.

What genuinely surprises me about Dr. Who is not just that it’s quite popular in the US, but that it seems to have become the king of the hill when it comes to science fiction.  Part of this, I think, is that Paramount did its level best to run Star Trek into the ground before giving it some well-deserved time off, the Star Wars franchise is under the thumb of a maniac who is trying to run it into the ground and shows no sign of giving it any time off, and Stargate, well, Stargate had a good run and then the producers looked at the numbers the new Battlestar Galactica got and we got Universe, which was one of those shows where running it into the ground might have been a mercy had it happened sooner.

That’s not to say that there are no good sci-fi or fantasy shows from this country.  Fringe and Supernatural come to mind, but Fringe is, for all its weirdness, relatively grounded; alternate Earth may have dirigibles and buildings trapped in amber but it’s still modern Earth and Supernatural started off as a monster-of-the-week show and has gone on to dance a merry jig through the weirder bits of the Old Testament.

When it comes to flying about in space, meeting aliens and blowing stuff up, the mantle seems to have been, well, ceded rather than formally passed I suppose, but passed to a quirky British show about a man in a blue box abducting innocent bystanders and trying to get them killed.

Or, in the case of Rory, turning them from a helpless geek into concentrated Awesome.

PS: The robot dog has been back a couple of times and I cannot properly express how annoying he is now, which is just another indication that I should not go back and try to relive my youth by watching the old stuff.

Anyway, I didn’t find any software.  I did find a SMAP album for 4 bucks, and I figured 4 bucks was worth it for an hour of Japanese boy band music.

Don’t judge me.

I also found these six DIVX movies.

Now, this isn’t the Divx we all know and love; rather, they’re simply evidence of a brief dark period in history when Circuit City thought that they could make their own format of almost-DVDs.  If you don’t remember, the shtick with DIVX was that you’d buy a disk for 3 or 4 bucks and then watch it once and then pay another 3 or 4 bucks the next time you wanted to watch it, which met with massive market rejection for so many reasons.  I think a couple of companies have tried similar things since then, and they’ve also met with massive market rejection; they combine all the problems of physical media with all the annoyances of pay-per-view.

Anyway, the system shut down back in 1998 or so, rendering all DIVX discs utterly useless, which brings me back to my original quandary – I’m not sure what’s more amazing here: That someone actually bought a DIVX player to begin with, that they bought this many movies, or that they actually took 13 years to get around to dumping them on Goodwill.

They were five bucks each, by the way, which is pretty expensive as far as coasters go.  I thought about buying one just for the novelty, but that’s a lot to pay for the privilege of owning a piece of utter failure.

Oh, dear, that’s really not much better.  Let’s just get on with things.

I quite liked “Man, Woman, and the Wall” when I watched it a couple of weeks ago, so when Netflix recommended that I should check out “Siren” as a related move, I figured I’d give it a go.

I have to admit, I didn’t have very high expectations.

The description on the Netflix site made me think that it was going to be a standard direct-to-video horror movie with some gratuitous nudity thrown in rather than what it turned out to be, which was a, oh, let’s call it an “homage” to Reservoir Dogs with some light supernatural elements, much less violencel, 100% less 70s rock music, and, yes, some gratuitous nudity.

On the other hand, a quick browse through wikipedia taught me that the lead actress – who was also in Man, Woman, and the Wall, explaining the Netflix recommendation – actually spends a good bit of her career making straight-up adult videos, so doing a movie where she’s actually dressed 90% of the time is probably a bit of a change of pace.

Anyway, to get back to the movie: I quite liked it.

The description on the Netflix site rather gives away the setup – you have these five bank robbers, they realize that an innocent bystander has seen their faces, they kidnap her so they can kill her somewhere else, she turns out to be more than she seems, insert ominous music and so on and so forth – but it’s well-executed.  It never bogs down ( it’s barely over 70 minutes ), it doesn’t crowd the screen with unnecessary characters, there’s just enough character development to give the bank robbers a bit of individual personality but not enough that you ever really feel bad for them…

It also gets points for picking an unconventional supernatural beastie; zombie and werewolf movies are a dime a dozen but it’s rare that screenwriters go browsing the “S” section of the Monster Manual.

Finally, it wins points with me for being very low key on the gore & violence. There’s some blood, a few gunshots, a couple of brawls, that sort of thing… but for the most part there’s nothing to make you wince.

I’ve not an expert on J-horror by any means, but I have watched a fair amount of it and I’ve found it to be a genre that is, bluntly, VERY hit-or-miss. Siren is one of the hits.

It’s just bloody hard to find safe-for-work artwork to lead off a post about. 

The movie has an awful lot of Gun Porn in it.  All the characters have their Signature Guns, there are lots of close-ups and Improbable Action Shots and it’s got the requisite Storage Shed Full Of Guns.

You know what’s crazy?  There’s no Tvtropes page for “Storage Shed Full of Guns”.  You’d think there would be.

Now, I don’t own any guns myself, but I’ve played a fair number of pen & paper RPGs and even more first-person shooters, so I can occasionally identify what a gun is from sight and my wife often asks me to do so when we’re watching one of these sorts of movies.

As an aside, I don’t have anything particularly against guns or their owners, but I live in a fairly safe city so don’t feel I need one for self-defense, I don’t go hiking anywhere too far off the beaten path, and as much as I think I might enjoy going target shooting someday, I’m too cheap to go out and buy one if that’s my only justification. 

Anyway, back to Red.

John Malkovich’s character has a Damned Big Revolver, and my wife asked me if I knew what it was.

I hadn’t a clue, but just for the hell of it I threw some search terms at Google, and this site popped out.  It’s an entire site devoted solely to answering the question of “hey, what gun WAS that in that movie?”, with lots of screen captures and some really detailed discussions along the lines of  “this is an X gun with Y option fitted and a custom Z which normally wouldn’t be on this model but was added for the movie.”

It’s one of those sites that I didn’t know about, didn’t know I needed to know about, and now will probably use on a fairly frequent basis when watching action movies, even if it – sadly enough – has rendered me just a little more obsolete. 

I have two midterms this week, so naturally it seemed like a great idea to sit down and watch movies most of the weekend.

I really have the Six-Weeks-And-Out syndrome thing going on.

On the other hand, it meant that I got some couple time with my wife, which is always a good thing.

Together, we watched Red, Inception, and Pi, and I watched Lorelei, Witch of the Pacific by myself after finally getting around to studying and then getting utterly sick of that.

Red was probably my favorite movie of 2010. It’s funny, things blow up on a regular basis, and it really feels like the cast had an awful lot of fun making it. We saw it in the theaters in second run and were honestly a little worried that it might not hold up on another viewing – if anything, it was more fun the second time around.

Inception was, well, it got a lot of hype and I’d put off seeing it maybe a little too long. It was quite good, and I’m kind of curious to watch the first 20 minutes or so over again, but I think I went into it with excessive expectations.

Pi was a film we bought sight-unseen on DVD because it was quite cheap and we’d heard that it was a film you Ought To See.

It really isn’t. It’s got some funny bits and a couple of thought-provoking moments, but those only account for about 5 minutes of the movie. The remainder is spent wanting to cover your ears – the main character suffers from chronic headaches and it seems the director wanted the audience to share in the experience – and wanting to give said main character a good slap.

Put even more simply, it fails my “Bloodrayne: The Movie” test; I’d sooner sit through Bloodrayne again than re-watch this.

Lorelei, to wrap up my weekend and this post, is a Japanese war movie with a “What-if” of “What if we had a super-advanced prototype Nazi submarine at the end of WWII?”

Of course, they manage to shoehorn a cute and ambiguously psychic girl, a tragic-puppydog love interest, and a massive right-wing nationalist conspiracy into the thing.

Definitely not for everyone; it’s been accused of trying to paint Japan as the victim rather than the aggressor in WWII and there’s certainly some of that. I quite liked the characters, however, and the effects were worth a watch. I have to question some of the physics involved; some of the underwater combat scenes were close to dogfighting and I don’t think subs actually move like that, but if you can turn off your sense of disbelief and ignore some of the political overtones, it’s a fun couple of hours.

If I were to say to you that “Man, Woman, and the Wall” was “kind of like ‘Rear Window’, only in Japan and with an awful lot of nudity”, you might be tempted to slap me upside the head.

One, after all, is a suspense classic about a guy who spies on his neighbors and discovers a horrific crime, and the other is, well, actually kind of similar, just with a hefty dose of “Oh, JAPAN”.

Rather than being laid up with a broken leg and spying on his neighbors with binoculars, however, this particular voyeur simply moved into an apartment with extremely thin walls, and as a result becomes aware of every detail of his neighbor’s life, then obsessed with them to the point where it honestly becomes rather creepy and you’re wondering if you’ve accidentally rented a horror movie instead of a comedy.

That’s about when he discovers that the neighbor he’s spying on is actually in danger, and thus begins a quite clever scheme to a) save the girl and of course b) get the girl.

Having a main character who’s essentially a stalker makes for a difficult movie to sell. Amelie, to pick another stalker-hero-movie, pulled it off by having a thoroughly charming main character, and this film does more or less the same; the guy may be a bit of a manboy, with a cluttered apartment and action figures for decoration, but at least he’s employed and can cook, which is pretty good for a guy.

As mentioned previously, the female star of the movie does spend an awful lot of time with her knickers off for the camera, so it’s not exactly one to watch with the folks, even if your folks are into bizarre Japanese romantic comedies, but it’s a pretty good way to spend 90 minutes.

For a whopping $9 total, we took in Knight and Day, Iron Man 2, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

I was a bit worried going into Prince of Persia (You’ll forgive me if I leave the subtitle off from now on, I hope), because I’d played the game and quite enjoyed the story of it and was rather afraid that they were going to throw most of the game’s story out of the window and whatever was left would be terrible.

In fact, they DID throw most of the game’s story out of the window, but what was left was actually pretty good.  It keeps the important events from the game but replaces the “running around a booby-trapped palace while slowly building a rapport” bits with “running around the countryside while slowly building a rapport” and replaces sand-fueled zombies with, uh, some kind of Persian ninja assassin guys.

And, to be honest, that makes a lot more sense for a movie.  As a gamer, I didn’t mind that the game consisted of 10 hours of dodging whirling blades and spikes, but I can see how two hours of dodging whirling blades and spikes might be kind of dull to a movie audience.

It’s a rare video game move that you can say “it was quite good” about, without adding a “for a video game adaptation, anyway”, but this was one.

I am a little vexed, I admit, that the movie’s release has delayed – or perhaps put off forever – any sort of sequel to the 2008 PoP game, so we’ll be waiting longer for a resolution to that cliffhanger, if one comes at all, but it DID bring us a new game set in the Sands of Time timeline that comes between The Sands of Time, which was one of the best games ever, and The Warrior Within, which was dire.

So I bought that, and I may even play it at some point in the next year.

Oh, we saw those other movies, too.  Knight and Day was quite good, Iron Man 2 was not as good as the original but not as bad as, say, Spider-Man 3, both were easily worth the cost of admission granted that the cost was actually quite slight in this case.

For something completely unrelated, I ran into an interesting site while googling a game title I didn’t recognize: Lijakaca’s Otome Gaming Blog. I’m not exactly a fan of games chock full of attractive-yet-vaguely-androgynous men, but it was kind of neat to see an English-language site aimed at  women who are fans of visual novels and similar genres.

Some people would say that I should read reviews BEFORE buying games, but I prefer to make purchasing decisions based on the character designs and whether or not they have cool box art.

OK, that’s not ENTIRELY true.  The main reason I avoid reviews is that there are an awful lot of reviewers out there who don’t seem to care about spoiling major plot points, and I really hate being spoiled.  I recognize that my habit of playing games five or more years after release means that I really don’t get the right to complain when I DO get spoiled, mind you – I’m not THAT irrational.

Anyway, after finishing Bloodrayne, I went looking for reviews and ran into a bit of a problem – an awful lot of the search results that popped up in Google were reviews of the movie rather than the game.  One in particular caught my eye, because in addition to denouncing it as a horrible film, it took pains to point out that it was morally offensive in the extreme.

I’m not used to reviewers actually questioning the morality of a film, so I thought this was a particularly interesting perspective.  Unfortunately, it had an effect on me that was probably the exact opposite of that intended – I found myself actually curious as to what was so bad about the film, and I realized that I was in the position of being able to find out firsthand.

See, a few years back, I bought a copy of “Bloodrayne: The Movie”, because it came bundled with the second game and was actually cheaper than buying the game by itself.  I’d never actually intended to watch the movie, but I’d never gotten rid of it either.

So, I gave it a spin.

It’s not a great movie, or even a good movie.  It’s heavy on really unnecessary gore, the plot doesn’t really seem to follow from one scene to the next, and there’s a bit of gratuitous and uncomfortable sex thrown in.  In those regards, it was an awful lot like the game it was based on.

OK, I suppose that there’s no actual nudity in the game, just a bit of bounce and jiggle, but there IS an awful lot of over-the-top-gore, and the movie has that bit down.

Would I watch it again?  No.  I mean, if I was told that I had to watch one of, say, this movie, “Knowing”, or the second Aliens Vs Predator movie, I’d probably go for another round of Bloodrayne, but that’d be a pretty horrible choice to have to make.