#It's really weird. english not my first language. yet I find those in my lang circle intimidating with a different set of etiquette

[mofffun]

Hi! I have a difficult time reaching out to people and, when I do, I feel the urge to disappear and then just delete my account. I don't know why I can't handle talking to people but I thought I would just send this anonymously since that is the case

You always seem so lovely and kind and it's really fun seeing someone so involved in toku! I don't enjoy twitter very much... so I don't see people going to the live shows or anything like that. Reading through your days when you went to see the Kingohgera was so amazing, I felt like I was there!! I won't ever be able to travel there, so it's wonderful reading other people's experiences.

I really, really appreciate your translations and I enjoy reading your theories/general opinions! I wish I could be as open with my thoughts as you are here. I hope that you are having a good day, and I wish you all the best in life! Moffun hugs! 🤗

[This ended up a bit long😅]

Your message is so warm 🥺 thank you for taking the time to write this! I can understand the uneasiness of expressing oneself so thank you and good job for taking the step to reach out! It's okay, just do what you're comfortable with.

I'm glad you enjoy my babblings :D I love toku and I LOVE the Kingohgers. I love the familiarity of toku (sentai in particular) and you can just always count on it to feel like a child again. The sense of community. The creators paying homage but always aiming to refresh this genre with a long history. I just want more people to know how wonderful this show and the cast is! After 3 years of Ups, there may not be a sentai for me to be this invested in ever again. Besides, there's only NOW we have them with us! 😭

I can't believe my words have that power🥹 just know that i went partly wishing to be a "reporter" for my buds here. I wish I had written down more but I was way too tired and only had some voice notes and more photos to organise. I really should dust off those drafts. Or at least make a group chat/discord (next time 😏)

One day, one day you'll get there! I never imagined myself being there on my first toku trip either. It was surreal to visit the locations from TV and watch the locals just go by what we fans consider holy ground. and I only get to go from being in the right place at the right time. very spur of the moment but grateful 🙏

I'm too tumblr-old for twitter too so I'm staying in my comfort zone 😅. I also feel a duty because the english fanbase seem to be on the short end with bonus content or cast news that I thought was standard for a fandom this size or necessary context/fun bts (for example Racules *cough cough*) It's great practice to do translation too.

I had my doubts sharing my toku thoughts here at first, so I made this sideblog to balance things out. And it was SO freeing that I got to choose how much I'm comfortable to share.

Above all, I'm really happy toku tumblr is so tight-knit and I've made a lot of first steps because of kingoh this year. It was there for me during a rough time as well. I'm not leaving regrets in order to spend an excellent year with it.

So take your time, if you're being earnest with your passion, I think you'll be gladly accepted! As the great Carrie Fisher said, Stay afraid but do it anyway. Take a page from Himeno and shape the future the way you want! This is what Erica wished to convey with Himeno and the experience made her more assertive too. The power of Heroes™ 🥹

Have a good day! 🫶 Moffun hugs ⊂(・人・)⊃🤗

[arecomicsevengood]

Watching Movies In Self-Isolation, Part Two

L’Assassin Habite Au Rue 21 (1942), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot. Clouzot is better known for directing The Wages Of Fear (the movie William Friedkin remade as Sorcerer) and Diabolique, but this is the first movie he directed. It’s a pretty effective comedy, as well as an Agatha Christie style murder-mystery thriller. It’s really cool to watch these things that feel like they are just “movies,” before a bunch of genre conventions got built up and put in place. This one’s also eighty minutes long, super-short. The premise of the movie is there’s a serial killer on the loose, leaving a business card on every dead body. A dude passes along to the police that he found a stash of the business cards in the attic of a boarding house, so the killer must live there. A police officer goes undercover as a priest moving into the boarding house to investigate the residents. His wife, an aspiring singer, has made a bet with him she can solve the crime first, and in doing so become a celebrity that will be hired to perform places, so she also moves into the boarding house, partly to annoy him. The stuff at the boarding house is basically the film’s second act, while the first and third act are more typical murder-mystery stuff, although the tone of comedy is maintained throughout, despite all the cold-blooded murders.

All These Women (1964), dir. Ingmar Bergman. Kind of dumb sex comedy directed by Ingmar Bergman, but with gorgeous Sven Nykvist cinematography, bright jewel-toned pastels, and sort of theatrical staging in spots seeming to foreshadow Parajanov’s The Color Of Pomegranates or eighties Greenaway stuff. About a critic who visits the palatial estate of a famous cellist to write a biography of him only to find a harem of women; the whole thing unfolding from the cellist’s funeral a few days later. The winking humor is both music-hall bawdy but in a way that feels self-aware or “meta” in the context of a sixties film.

The Touch (1971), dir. Ingmar Bergman. Bergman’s one of my favorites, many of his canonized classics resonate deeply with me, but he was also astonishingly prolific, with a bunch of movies of his blurring together in my mind, and even more that I didn’t know existed, like this English-language one, starring Elliott Gould. Gould’s another favorite of mine, being in a bunch of great movies in the sixties and seventies, but damn, he’s unlikable here. Unlikable characters “hit different” in older material because I’m not sure if you’re supposed to sympathize with them according to the sexist cultural attitudes of the day. Here he’s “the other man” Liv Ullman is cheating on Max Von Sydow (RIP) with, but he’s pretty emotionally abusive, just a shit to her, extremely demanding of her in a relationship he did nothing to earn, though it does feel like the movie is kind of treating him as a romantic lead.

The Anderson Tapes (1971), dir. Sidney Lumet. This is heist movie, starring Sean Connery as a dude fresh out of prison, planning to rob his girlfriend’s apartment building, costarring Christopher Walken in his first film role. It contains all the plot beats of a typical heist thing, all the satisfying “getting the gang together, planning things out in advance, chaotic elements interfere” stuff but also a totally superfluous bit of framing about like constant surveillance, video monitoring and audio tape. All this dystopian police-state stuff seems, implicitly, like it would make a crime impossible to execute, the criminals are monitored every step of the way, by assorted agencies. But then the punchline, after everyone’s arrested for reasons having nothing to do with that, is that all this recording is illegal and all the tapes should be erased as the high-profile nature of the case makes it likely the monitoring agencies will get caught. Sidney Lumet directs a good thriller, even though I don’t find Connery (or Dyan Cannon, who plays the girlfriend) particularly compelling.

The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (1933), dir. Fritz Lang. I watched this years ago, after reading Matt Fraction praise it, particularly how skillful the transitions between scenes were, and I really enjoyed it, but didn’t remember much about it and was excited to rewatch it. It’s got a lot going for it: An exceedingly elaborate criminal plot whose only goal is to wreak chaos, low-level criminals caught up in something they’re morally unprepared to reckon with, a charismatic police detective interviewing a bunch of weirdos, Fritz Lang following up M by continuing to be a master of film and sound editing very early stitching it all together. The Mabuse character was previously the star of a silent film I haven’t watched, and here he’s mute, which is a clever choice I didn’t register until writing it out just now. He’s gone completely insane, but is nonetheless writing a journal filled with elaborate crime plots, and his psychologist is completely insane and following these directions, in a commentary on the rise of Nazism in Germany at the time.

House By The River (1950), dir. Fritz Lang. I watched this in the pre-Quarantine days, but it totally rules. Again, it feels sordid in part because of how old it is and my assumption you’re meant to identify on some level with the completely loathsome protagonist’s sexual desire and anger at getting turned down. It’s so creepy, he’s listening to the sound of his maid showering at one point. All the characters seem very fun to play, they’re all pretty cartoonish. This guy murder his maid, and then gets the idea that he should write a book about the murder when someone explains the idea of “writing what you know” to him, and he is then surprised when his wife reads the book and puts together that it’s a murder confession, saying something like “Really? I thought I disguised it pretty well.” The film functions as a dark comedy because every character is completely mortifying. Lang’s work becoming less ambitious and more reduced in budget during his time working in America is pretty sad but this movie feels legit deranged.

Midsommar (2019), Ari Aster. Heard good things about Hereditary, but haven’t watched it yet, having been put off by the plot summary of Aster’s preceding short film, about a kid who rapes his dad. This is like a longer version of The Wicker Man, basically, starring Florence Pugh, who I had heard was like the new actress everyone’s enamored with, but didn’t think was that compelling in this. A bunch of Americans go to a Swedish village, one of them (played by Chidi from The Good Place) has studied their anthropology extensively, but all are unprepared for the fact that their whole culture seems to revolve around human sacrifice and having sex with outsiders so they don’t become totally inbred. There’s a monstrously deformed, cognitively impaired child who’s been bred specifically so his abstract splashings of paint can be interpreted as culture-defining profound lore, which I took away as being comparable to the role Joe Biden plays within the death cult of the DNC.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2019), dir. Bi Gan. This got a lot of acclaim, but I am almost certain the main reason I watched it is because the director made a list of his favorite movies and included Masaaki Yuasa’s anime series Kemonozume on it. Does a sort of bisected narrative thing, where half of the movie is this sort of fragmented crime thing, a little hard to follow, and then you get the title card, and then the second half is this pretty dreamlike atmospheric piece done in a single shot, with a moving camera. I’m not the sort to jerk off over long shots, although I appreciate the large amount of technical pre-planning that goes into pulling them off. The second part is pretty compelling though, enveloping, I guess it was in 3-D at certain theatrical screenings? I’m a little unclear on how my fucked-up eyes can deal with 3-D these days and I was never that into it. The first half is easy to turn off and walk away from, the second half isn’t but I’m unsure on how much it amounts to beyond its atmosphere.

Black Sun (1964), dir. Koreyoshi Kurahara. This one’s about a Japanese Jazz fan and dirtbag squatter who meets a black American soldier who’s gone crazy and AWOL. He loves him because he loves Jazz and all Black people, but the soldier is pretty crazy and can’t understand him anyway. Jazz is, or was, huge in Japan and this is a cooler depiction of that fandom than you get in Murakami novels but it’s a fairly uncomfortable watch, I guess because the black dude seems so crazy it feels a little racist to an American audience? Maybe he wasn’t being directed that well because there would be a language barrier but it’s weird.

Honestly the thing to watch from sixties Japan on The Criterion Channel is Black Lizard (1962), dir. Umetsugu Inoue, which I watched shortly after Trump’s election in 2016, when all the Criterion stuff was still on Hulu, and it cheered me up considerably in those dark days. It feels a little like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, but with a couple musical numbers, and is about a master detective who thinks crime is super-cool and wishes there was a criminal who would challenge his intellect. Then the Black Lizard kidnaps someone. It’s a lot of fun, with a tone that feels close to camp but is so knowing and smart it feels more genuinely strange and precise. One of those things you get fairly often where the Japanese outsider’s take on American genre stuff gets what it’s about more deeply and so feels like it’s operating on a higher level. I really love this movie.

I had this larger point I wanted to make about just feeling repulsed by genre stuff that self-consciously attempts to mimic its canonical influences and that might not be all the way present in this post. Still, something that really should be implicit when talking about movies from the past is that they are not superhero movies, and how repulsed I am by that particular genre’s domination of cinema right now, and how much of cinema has a history of something far looser and more freewheeling in its ideas of how to make work that appealed to a broad audience, and how much weird formal playfulness can be understood intuitively by an audience without being offputting, and the sort of spirit of formal interrogation connects the films I like to the comics I like (as well as the books I like, and the visual art I like), this sense of doing something that can only be done within that medium even as certain other aspects translate.

[burnouts3s3]

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, a review

(Disclaimer: The following is a non-profit unprofessional blog post written by an unprofessional blog poster. All purported facts and statement are little more than the subjective, biased opinion of said blog poster. In other words, don’t take anything I say too seriously. Just the facts 'Cause you're in a Hurry! Publisher: Sega Developer: Sega CS1 Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP): 59.99 USD How much I paid: 59.99 USD Rated: M for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes How long I played: 12 Hours to complete the story mode (while watching the cutscenes) on Easy Mode. Microtransactions: An alternate Skin that is free if downloaded between October 2nd through October 16th. Pre-order bonus of 6 Destiny Talismans, equipable items that boost stats or other effects, all which are earnable in-game. Dual Audio: Yes. Both the Japanese and English Audio is available. English Cast: Robbie Daymond as Kenshiro, Sarah Williams as Yuria, Greg Chun as Shin, Allegra Clark as Xsana, Imari Williams as Jagre, Kirk Thornton as Toki, Kyle Hebert as Rihaku and Patrick Seitz as Raoh. What I played on: A Regular PS4, not a PS4 Pro Performance Issues: For the most part, Fist of the North Star runs very smoothly, with little to no hiccups that’s beautiful even to look at, even on a regular PS4. One instance of a game pausing for a brief moment before transitioning to a quicktime event. My Personal Biases: I only recently got into Fist of the North Star and have to say I quite enjoy following Kenshiro and his many adventures in the wasteland. My Verdict: Get ready to say “ATATATATATATA!” as you kick, punch, slap, and brutally kill any bandit you come across. While the open world element doesn’t offer anything new in terms of revolutionizing the genre, there’s such a plethora of content, mini-games, challenges and sidequests that even after the short campaign is finished, you’ll be busy mixing drinks, playing baseball with steel girders and managing your own nightclub. It maybe a Yakuza game reskinned as a FOTNS game, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a whole lot of fun. Buy it! Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, a review

Sega is at it again. After their successful Yakuza series getting prominence in the West, the same developers decide to do the same thing, but using the Fist of the North Star license. Will they succed the same way they did with Yakuza? Let’s find out in this review of “Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise”! The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic alternate timeline Earth. After a nuclear war, the oceans have dried up. Kenshiro, a successor of the martial art Hokuto Shinken, was defeated by Shin, who proceeded to kidnap his fiancée, Yuria. Kenshiro thus travels through the wastelands to find his beloved. He eventually hears rumours that a woman called Yuria could be found in the city of Eden - he makes his way to Eden to find Yuria. Newcomers don’t have to worry about being lost as the game takes place in an alternate continuity and explains all the events occurring so they can catch up. So while the series’ iconic villains, such as Shin and Raoh, and familiar faces, such as Bat and Lin, make an appearance, the game’s narrative changes the context of such settings to fit into the world of Fist of the North Star and the new land of Eden. The city of Eden itself might alienate fans of the original show. Eden is a fully working city with services, guards, food and currency. It’s such a departure of one usually expects from Fist of the North Star. But, if you’ll give it a chance, you’ll find yourself loving the city but also invested in its characters. Things actually get less interesting outside of Eden. While the Wasteland is vast and allows for lots of exploration in your buggy, it’s mostly empty save for the occasional group of enemies and item to be found and sold. Occasionally, defeating an enemy will unlock a treasure map, markers that show valuable loot on the map. But most are under a timer so Kenshiro will have to drive fast before it’s lost for good. Combat is the game’s strength. While it doesn’t evolve much between light and heavy attacks, the variety of foes and situations he can use his abilities always surprised me. Just when I thought it would get tedious, Kenshiro finally pulls off a move that has my jaw dropped to the floor. Should a foe be in a staggered position, players can press the circle button to active a quick time event, leading to a cinematic kill. Sometimes Ken punches an enemy 100 times. Sometimes, he uses both thumbs to make the enemy’s head explode. Should Kenshiro use the circle button to ‘channel’ at just the right time, it leads to an instant death of the enemy, causing them to explode into gooey bits! And what Sega open world would be complete without mini-games? Remember that manga chapter where Kenshiro played some arcade games? Or worked as a bartender? Or used his healing ability to treat the sick? Or managed a nightclub and had to deal with troublemakers? That’s right, in this game you get a plethora of sidequests (called ‘substories’) where Ken can earn experience and money by playing mini-games. Working at the hospital activates a rhythm mini-game using timed button presses. Managing the nightclub means having to manage your ‘girls’ put them in the right table and manage their money, the customer type and their energy levels. Of course, if you’re feeling up to something more manly, you can fight off waves of enemies at the colosseum. (My personal favorite is using a large steel girder to play baseball against incoming motorcycle gangs and hitting their bikes away).   Completing story missions, doing substories or playing minigames will earn Experience, causing Ken to level up and gain Destiny Orbs, blank orbs that can be used to progress the game’s skill tree. In the colosseum, he can earn Battle Points and use it to buy Technique, Body or Mind orbs to progress your tree. The skill progression is surprisingly varied, allowing for different branches to explore and can give significant boosts or techniques in combat. Ken soon learns that in the city of Eden, Yuria has locked herself into the sacred chamber, a mysterious room that somehow provides power to all of Eden. But invaders and combatants would soon loot Eden for its resources and Kenshiro finds himself teaming up with the city’s guard to stop the bandits before they destroy everything. The game’s plot is serviceable. Granted, much like the source material, it relies more on coincidence than character action and reaction. (It find it a bit odd that many of the main players just ‘happen’ to know each other) as well as the reliance of weird rules to generate stakes (when you find out why certain plot devices work, you’d have to question the logic of what the architects and engineers were thinking). It’s too bad the game’s main story is all too short and the game attempts to hinder speedrunners by scaling the enemies to ridiculous amounts of levels so that players will have to grind mini-games and coliseum fights or be overpowered. What’s surprising is that the English dub of the game is actually very well acted. Robbie Daymond  (who voiced the English Goro Akechi from Persona 5) manages to capture the cold yet gentle nature of Kenshiro (though I think my favorite will always be Lex Lang in the old dub). At first, I thought Daymond would be too young and high pitched for Kenshiro but he actually delivers at the moments that matter the most. And it’s great to hear voice acting veterans such as Kyle Hebert, Patrick Seitz and Kirk Thornton voicing the NPCs. But praise should be put on Allegra Clark. Bioware fans (what few are remaining) will recognize her as Josephine from Dragon Age: Inquisition and Nakmor Kesh from Mass Effect: Andromeda, but she’s also done some anime work (such as in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure) and she does a really good job as Xsana, growing a scared girl who doesn’t know what to do to a leader willing to leader her people into prosperity.   THE JAPANESE VOICES ARE AVAILABLE TO THOSE WHO PREFER IT. CAVEAT: Fist of the North Star is by no means a revolution or an innovation to the open world genre. Like Yakuza, it’s a polished, well-made entry that offers a lot to both fans and non-fans alike. A lot of critics are going to say that the open world element feels restrictive or that the level scaling is attempting to make up for the short campaign or that the combat, at times, feels repetitive. While all those criticisms are true, I still had a great time with the game. It’s a game that’s more about style than substance, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have one helluva style! Verdict: Buy it!