ZEITGEIST

I’ve finally caught up and finished the first season of Vampire Knight, and I’m Not Happy.

It’s not that I think it’s a bad series overall - I’ll probably watch the second season when it starts in October or whenever. The directing and animation are pretty crappy, the voice acting fairly one note and the rest of the production is nothing to really write home about, but it’s a fairly undemanding little show. It’s predictable as hell, and has precisely no character development, but it’s not BAD.

Except for one thing. That one thing which is a problem you don’t normally see in shoujo shows like this, but most frequently see in harem shows nowadays. The total pointlessness of the main character, basically.

Now, I know Yuuki has her angsty backstory about her family being killed by vampires or whatever it is (no doubt it’s wrong and we’ll have a twist later, hopefully something a little bit more surprising than the Maria arc that closes out the first series). She’s not a bad person, either, cut from the mold of a hundred shoujo heroines before her - not that great at work (not that you’d know apart from the last episode, given the almost complete lack of interest the writing has in the Day Class), a bit on the clutzy side, empathic to a slightly terrifying degree, the whole shebang. The problem is that she is barely ever allowed to do anything at all, and even when she does the focus of the scene is never on her, but on Zero or Kaname (mostly).

For instance (apologies for spoilers, but I don’t think anyone really cares), take the events of the Maria arc, which is the only real plot arc we get as the show spends so much time on setting up back stories and introducing characters. Maria/Shizuka gives Yuuki an ultimatum to stop Zero from becoming a Level E - either she brings her Kaname’s corpse or she lets Maria feed on her. Now, obviously she’s not going to kill Kaname, so she offers herself as food. Of course, this ends up being a moot point, as the choice is entirely taken out of her hands when Zero busts in to kill Shizuka later on in the series, and Kaname has his own plans entirely. Whatever Yuuki does, she’s just a pawn, an object to either be manipulated or loved. She’s got a great big electrified stick, and yet every time she gets in danger she needs a dashing bishounen to come in and save her…

Speaking of which, I know, girls like pretty boys. But would it hurt to give the female vampires something to do - other than have an evil one turn up halfway through the series? I don’t know any of their names. I don’t know if they have magic powers like the main male vampires seem to. All I know is one of them has a parasol, and I don’t know which one.

Anyway, the point of this is that Yuuki ends up like so many interchangeable harem leads. She doesn’t matter - it’s just the fact that there are guys fawning over her in some manner that seems to be the point. It’s like Angelique, but with vampires and a lot of black digital paint. What’s the point of giving your central character a mysterious past and SEEMING to make the show partly about her when it’s never about Yuuki at all?

Perhaps the second season will focus on her. I don’t think that’s a reason, however, for the first season to have virtually nothing to do with her except endless, mind-numbingly repetitive flashbacks to her childhood with Zero and Kaname - most of which was explained five times over the course of the first few epiosdes. Flashbacks are lazy, and here they tell us nothing at all because everyone acts in the same way they did four years ago!

I’m not really very angry about all this, as I say I’ll still watch season 2. The show really just needs to make Yuuki have more of a point to her. Make her more pro-active - rather than just pottering around going “oh, Kaname-sama!” and stumbling into situations that impact on other people, she should be trying to find ways herself to cure Zero’s vampirism (or at least stop him from becoming a Level E), or at least appearing to do something other than attend the occasional lesson, worry in her bedroom and hold back fangirls from time to time. I’m sure this is all wishful thinking, but what is a man without his dreams?

A brand may be birthed by individual inspiration, or it may be the product of a small collective of like minded individuals. Reflecting the look and feel of a brand however, takes a village. In this episode, we want to shed some light on the network of contractors responsible for the process of creating the photographic reflections of our brand.

Marcus Swanson and his crew at Swanson Studio, here in Portland are the talents behind our studio photography (above left). Going into the studio allows us to show every detail of every product in a highly controlled environment. These guys are masters, blending artistic sensibilities with state of the art imaging technology.

When we head out into the field, we rely on a small group of shooters that can capture the experience of moving effortlessly between urban settings and the wild. Ben Moon, Daniel Sharp, Jimmy Chin, Tim Kemple, Gabe Rogel (shot on the right, above) and Anthony Georgis have been helping us to evolve our look and feel, each contributing their individual perspectives to form a mosaic of a more integrated outdoor experience.

Herding all these cats, both in the studio and out in the field, has been the job of our director of photography, Eugénie Frerichs. After Nau closed its doors last May, Eug took off for the U.K. She’s been cycling throughout England, Wales and Scotland. (Look for her photos in an upcoming post).
Luckily enough, we’ve been able to talk her back to Portland for a few weeks to help us work through the process of rebuilding our image program for Fall.

So now as we head into August, we’re sitting down with the folks above who’ve produced photos for Fall ‘08, and just like the process with the factories and fabric partners we talked about in an earlier post, we’re hoping to purchase a selection of the assets that were produced. The shots above are samples of the great Fall imagery that you can expect to see in the coming months.

Kyrie, Toppy and Morte run out of gas so they hitch a ride with a travelling boatman - Kyrie also has strange dreams about Morte’s past, rather bizarrely, but I’m sure those will get revisited when the show deigns to reveal Morte’s backstory to us. It’s somewhat contrived that neither Kyrie nor Toppy has forced her to tell them exactly what’s going on, but it’s just one of those massive logic holes that I’m going to have to overlook.

Anyway, they end up on a pleasure ship where a cat girl steals the Destruct Code to barter to free her father from debter’s gaol. Hijinks ensue, as Morte gambles against a member of the World Preservation Committee and gets into a fight with his half-dragon sidekick (who appears to have a thing for Kyrie).

I don’t know why I’m so tolerant of this show when you couldn’t get me to touch Slayers Revolution with a barge pole this season. World Destruction is fairly uninspiring stuff really - it’s not on the generally average level of Erementer Gerad, but it certainly doesn’t have the polish of something like Scrapped Princess despite the Production IG team working on it. It’s not very funny, it’s not very dramatic so far, it’s just quite good fun really. Kyrie IS a bit annoying at times, and I have no idea what the point of all this is going to be, but I think Morte’s a relatively interesting female lead for this type of show at least. At this stage, though, I guess it’s too early to tell whether it’s going to bore me to death in the end.

Ken is back - and he’s all angsty now, bless his heart, because he thinks everyone abandoned him. I’m not quite sure how he’s managed to age so much since it’s not been very long since the train explosion, but he seems to have grown a good half a foot and sports a nifty pirate’s eye patch to boot.

Anyhoodle, Shunka spends most of the episode getting in the way with her marbles and disguises while Chiko has to do the dirty work, and the storyline hammers into our heads that THE WAR WAS REALLY REALLY BAD before Chiko sees one of Nijuu Mensou’s treasures in a film trailer so decides to take a little holiday.

I’m a little worried about Shunka (and Tome). I know the show is all about Chiko and how awesome she is, but if Shunka exists solely to make Chiko look good and Tome runs around saying “Ojou-sama!” constantly for the rest of the show I shall be a little annoyed. Still, we learn a bit more about Shunka and Ken’s re-appearance is a good thing - and the island trip sounds fun.

I give up. The rest of the world is right - Monochrome Factor is crap, and unfortunately it’s no longer crap enough for me to enjoy for fun. It’s not even really worth talking about what happens in this episode, it’s by-the-numbers filler crap that’s not particularly funny and is shoddily executed. If it was only 13 episodes I could take it, but there’s no point in watching this for 24 episodes of ugly emaciated character designs, hyperactive squealing from voice actors who should know better and an almost totally non-existent plot beyond “there are monsters. We must destroy them!”.

Good riddance, I say.

With the various Dadas under his control, Popo starts to put his final plan to take over the planet in motion - by getting Neiro to kill Kaiba and vice versa. Having brainwashed Neiro (and Cheki, after she tries to convince Neiro not to go through with it), the two ex-lovers confront each other as Popo eggs Neiro on - and not even a last minute intervention from Kichi can stop tragic events from unfolding…

Well, except for two things. One, it’s not very tragic - we already know that the Kaiba!Warp body is invincible, so “blowing him up” isn’t going to be very effective (although I can’t remember if Popo knows that - I don’t think he does, especially as he tries to poison Kaiba). Two, Kichi’s big impassioned speech to Neiro to get her to remember the truth is rather contrived - I’ve watched this episode a couple of times and it really doesn’t hold up as a dramatic device (as we have debated in the glorious AnimeSuki thread). Why Popo sits there and lets Kichi spout off is something of a mystery - he doesn’t have a weapon, but surely he could get Neiro to shoot him? Kaiba does help to jog Neiro’s memory when he draws funny pictures in the air - something which makes a lot more sense after you’ve seen episode 10, as does a lot of the stranger imagery from this episode - but I don’t think that’s enough.

Despite this, getting to this point of the show is probably the dramatic high point thus far, and episode 10 looks to do a great job of filling in the blanks for what happened to Kaiba and Neiro before the first episode. On rewatching, there’s one rather ominous line that Fake!Warp utters, though - something about “the Fan” (which is part of episode 11’s title). And what’s with the strange machine that seems to be having problems that occasionally pops up in between scenes? It would be nice to know exactly what’s going on, after all…

Review by Kyu Hyun  Kim

    The Good, the Bad, the Weird

Chang-yi (Lee Byung-heon), a dandy hit-man with a perpetually bemused, go-ahead-call-me-a-psycho grin on his face, is hired to retrieve a certain map currently in the hands of a Japanese banker. Unbeknownst to him, meanwhile, bounty hunter Do-won (Jung Woo-sung) is sent by the Korean independence army for the same mission. To their irritation, however, the map is snatched by train robber Tae-gu (Song Kang-ho), who is convinced that it leads to the fabled treasures of the fallen Qing dynasty.

Kim Jee-woon, who has an impressive track record of having successfully tackled a wide range of genres, from sports comedy (The Foul King) to horror (A Tale of Two Sisters) and European-style film noir (A Bittersweet Life), now turns his sight on the western. As one can surmise from the title, the movie is intended as a conscious homage to Sergio Leone's Eastwood triptych. Like Bittersweet Life, which invoked the cool, nonchalant exterior and existentialist attitude of a Pierre Melville rather than the original American film noir, The Weird passes over the concerns and themes of classic westerns (individual freedom vs. commitment to community, and so on) and focuses on the stylistic vocabularies of the genre. Viewing The Weird is, in other words, a lot like watching a witty pastiche of great westerns, a la My Name is Nobody, rather than a great western itself.

Perhaps I am overly harsh with Kim, who might have never intended his film to be anything more than an affectionate send-up to the mythic grandeur and marvelous vistas writ in a Leone film. He certainly knows how to entice his viewers with visual language, staging complicated shoot-outs and tense mano-a-mano duels with the aplomb of a master stylist. From the opening credit sequence with gliding birds of prey trailing the names of the cast like I.D. Tags; to busy shootouts in a rain-drenched marketplace, in which a Robot Monster-like diving helmet finds an unconventional usage; to the final confrontation that exactly copies the Leone original's set-up but goes for a typically bloody, excessive resolution, Kim and his technical staff (cinematographer Lee Mo-gae, production designer Jo Hwa-seong, and composer Dalparan) are fully in control of the film's aesthetic and technical elements.

The Weird's main weakness is the screenplay. Granted, Leone's works don't exactly have Oscar-caliber dialogue or entirely sensible plots either (although some fine directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento have been involved in writing them), but Kim Jee-woon and co-scribe Kim Min-seok fumble in throwing the three main characters in sharp relief, either as archetypal, mythic beings (this is something Leone and his writing team excelled in, even though it had very little to do with the real, historical "west") or as sympathetic flesh-and-blood characters. Their efforts to introduce lively details and narrative twists more often than not fizzle out; for example, the revelation of the ultimate reason for Chang-yi's pursuit of Tae-gu elicited a "So what?" response from me (It certainly can't compare with the famous "harmonica" scene between Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West). I have had problems with Kim Jee-woon's lack of control over the narrative flow and resolution of Tale of Two Sisters and Bittersweet Life before, but at least I was willing to defend their characters as worthy of emotional investment on the part of the viewers. I am not so sure about The Weird, even though Lee Byung-heon and Song Kang-ho still provide plenty of entertainment value, relying on their patented tools of the trade. Jung Woo-sung by default leaves the weakest impression, although it is not really his fault that he sounds like a guy from an outdoor sportswear commercial.

As for the claim that the movie marks a significant departure from Korean nationalism, sure, Song Kang-ho does mumble something about how the yangban aristocrats and Japanese colonizers are hardly different from one another as rulers, but it really has nothing interesting or worthwhile to add about Manchuria as a multicultural, potentially subversive (fictive) space. In the end, The Weird reduces the Japanese opponents (along with Chinese bandits) to straw figures to be mowed down, especially in the extended My Name is Nobody-meets-Road Warrior climax in which Jeong Woo-sung gets to play the hey-look-ma-I'm-Steve-McQueen trick reloading his rifle.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird is, all things considered, quite entertaining and Kim Jee-woon's reputation will not be sullied (if not significantly enhanced) by this latest exhibit of a "Manchurian Western," (a genre that has a checkered but surprisingly long history in Asian cinema). I must confess, though, that my (perhaps unrealistically high) expectations about it were not met, except in the gorgeous production/ cinematography department.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

This is probably my favourite episode of Nabari no Ou since the beginning. Being something of a well-animated action junkie I have been a little disappointed to see that drop off - even though it doesn’t return at all for this episode, instead we get a lot of different plot threads that start to converge on the same point - namely the face-off between Raimei and Raikou, and a little bit of explanation of what exactly is going on in Miharu’s mind as he confesses to Kumohira about his intentions regarding Yoite. It’s surprisingly complicated and rather refreshing for it - you don’t see a lot of shows doing this kind of thing, but it works very well.

I’m sure that Raimei and Raikou won’t finish off their little feud in the next episode, but it’ll be interesting to see. Why, though, does Raikou have pink hair when everyone else has normal hair? Aside from Aizawa who is clearly A Bit Weird, that is.