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One of the finest anime made in recent years, Emma: A Victorian Romance is also a testament to the care RightStuf/Nozomi Entertainment takes with their releases. While season one is available only as a box set, it doesn’t much matter. I’m pretty sure no one can watch Emma without wanting to follow this powerful love story to its conclusion.

The series opens in a middle-class household in Victorian London. Emma is a maid for Mrs. Stowner, a retired governess. The pair have been together many years- Mrs. Stowner hired Emma when she was just a child, and has educated her to a level most lower classes of that time could never hope to attain. Mrs. Stowner’s care has created a model young lady: intelligent and observant, unfailingly polite and quiet, and sharply conscious of her place in society.

And then William Jones shows up.

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About midway through Sebastian Gutierrez’ entertaining vampire flick Rise: Blood Hunter, the lead bloodsucker asserts something to the effect of “Sex and murder are the only real pleasures man has left.”

But in the world writer/director Gutierrez creates, those are actually the only pleasures left to vampires, much to their cost. They can’t eat food, hold no love for their fellow creatures, are cut off from their families (due to their being, you know, dead) and must hide their true natures from unsuspecting humanity. And, of course, there’s the little matter of an irresistible craving for human blood.

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Some time ago, Douglas Adams wrote a short story entitled ‘The Private Life of Genghis Khan ‘ which lifted the curtain on the legendary conquerer’s civilian existence to humorous effect. The Great Khan breaks into a woman’s yurt, forcing her to treat him with all the banality of a middle-manager arriving home after a long day at the office. Later in the story, the Khan is pestered by his son to commence World Domination who in turn is treated to an endless litany of prior engagements that dissapointingly have nothing to do with conquering the known world. In the end (and I hope I’m not spoiling anything - skip ahead if you’ve not read it) it is only after being insulted by Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged that Genghis Khan is motivated enough to storm his way to Europe.

While Adams’ story is, on the face of it, preposterous it does raise an interesting question - what exactly did Genghis Khan do with his free time?

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The fact that there are lesbians in Kannazuki no Miko shouldn’t be a big deal. This is the 21^st century after all, and I live in America, a >cough< enlightened country. And if sales of yaoi manga are any indication, anime fans are especially enlightened concerning homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the girl-on-girl love in Kannazuki no Miko is a big deal- but only because the unusual love triangle is the only thing the show has going for it.

The series opens in one of those fantastic, elite prep schools that doesn’t actually exist outside of anime. Himeko, one of a vast legion of orphaned anime characters, stays in the school dorms. She is the sort of girl we’re supposed to love: quiet, kind, timid, unbearably sweet. Except to a jaded old lady like me, it’s all too easy to see why her classmates feel contempt for her; she simply won’t stand up for herself. One of Himeko’s classmates doesn’t participate in tormenting her, however. Chikane is beautiful, kind abd good at everything, from archery to playing the piano. She’s the object of every girl-crush in the school, and is expected to marry Ohgami, her equally perfect male counterpart. But Ohgami actually likes Himeko…and so does Chikane.

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A supremely skilled fighter wanders the Earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, looking for the ultimate battle in Death Trance, a rip-snorting action film directed by Yuji Shimomura, action director for Versus, and featuring Versus lead Tak Sakaguchi as action director and leading man. The 2005 film is available on DVD in the United States courtesy Media Blasters.

Sakaguchi plays Grave, a mysterious man of few words who raids a hidden temple for a coffin the local monks had been guarding for a century. Rumor has it that the coffin will grant a person a wish. But when a Ryuen, young apprentice monk (Takamasa Suga), returns shortly after the raid, the head monk warns him that opening the coffin will release the Goddess of Destruction. He hands Ryuen a sword with an amazingly phallic handle and urges him to track down the thief with the sword. Unfortunately, many others are also after the coffin for the power it contains.

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The boys are off to GenCon, and there’s not much going on in Asia today, so here is a repost of a review I did a while ago!

Familiarity can be a comforting thing. Children drag their favorite stuffed toys everywhere. Family pets are disturbed by changes in routine. Even adults have their favorite bathrobe, mug or recliner. But familiarity isn’t always good. Take, for instance, the anime Venus versus Virus. Every element of the show has been done before, not once but multiple times in other anime series. V3 is a blend of well-worn ideas, and the result is worse than bad- it’s mediocre.

Sumire is a typical anime schoolgirl- meek, sensitive to the point of near-constant hysteria, kind, apparently orphaned etc. She has recently moved from the dorm of her Tokyo prep school to an apartment behind the antique shop where she holds a part-time job. She lives with Laura, a little girl whose sole joy in life seems to be acting as annoying as possible, and her ice queen boss Lucia (pronounced Loo-see-uh), a beautiful but cold woman with a dark and mysterious past, deeply-buried traumas etc.

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Not much happening in the world of Asian news today, so here’s some reviews from the old site. Hopefully you’ve forgotten them so they’re like new!

Japan’s Studio Gonzo has something of a reputation (whether it is deserved or not) for creating visually impressive anime with weak stories and flat characters. Using one of Western literature’s most enduring tales as a basis for a new show is probably one of the smartest things they could have done. Gankusuou is a sci-fi retelling of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel The Count of Monte Cristo and, somewhat surprisingly, it works.

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Before you read this review, in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I am not a vampire person. I think they’re way overdone these days. However, there are lots of vampire fans out there, which is why I’m a little surprised that Black Blood Brothers has slipped under the radar in America.

In Black Blood Brothers there are two kinds of vampires: the regular kind (think Anne Rice) and the Kowloon Children. The Kowloon Children are a recently-emerged bloodline; their point of origin is the now-deceased Kowloon King. Kowloon children differ from regular vampires in two significant ways: they can convert humans and other vampires to their bloodline simply by biting them (regular vampires have to convert people the old-fashioned way: by feeding them some of their own blood, and they can’t convert other vampires) and they exert mind-control powers over their ‘children’. Also, while the earliest generations of Kowloon Children (direct descendants of the Kowloon King) seem relatively reasonable, later generations are raving lunatics with one impulse: to chomp whoever is in sight and turn them to Kowloon Children as well.

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One of the nice bonuses of 2007’s Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez tribute to low-rent cinema, Grindhouse, was a flurry of DVD releases of exploitation movies.  One notable set was a batch of “Welcome to the Grindhouse” double feature DVDs by BCI / Eclipse, which offered similarly themed genre pictures along with a “grindhouse experience” of titles and trailers.  

Along with horror and women-in-prison flicks, “Welcome to the Grindhouse” offers up some old chop socky films, and what better than the public-domain exploits of badass extraordinaire Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba and his Japan Action Club, featuring the lovely, talented and deadly Etsuko “Sue” Shiomi.  One such title features the 1976 films Dragon Princess (Hissatsu onna kenshi) and Karate Warriors (Kozure satsujin ken) (Another release features Chiba and Shiomi in The Bodyguard and Sister Street Fighter.)

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Here it is – the film that launched the kung fu movie craze in the United States.  Before even the rise of Bruce Lee, King Boxer (Tian xia di yi quan, 1972), also known as Five Fingers of Death, was a surprise hit on the drive-in and grindhouse circuit. 

In June 2007, Dragon Dynasty released a superbly presented DVD as part of its growing Shaw Brothers collection.  The result is a classic example of chop socky history and an excellent kung fu flick in its own right.  Its relatively complex plot combines popular themes of honor, betrayal, revenge and the handing out of righteous beat-downs.

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