Movies > Books: Casino Royale

“Bond… Silhouette Bond.”

Every time a movie comes out that’s based on a book, people always shout, “LOL BUT TEH BOOK WAS SOOO MUCH BETTER LOL!” Well, sometimes the movie can be better than the source material. In some cases, drastically so. Just because the source material is a book doesn’t mean the book is not a huge steaming pile of shit. Here’s an example:

In case it wasn’t already known, I am a huge fan of the James Bond film series. I have watched them all, own them all, and eagerly anticipate the release of each new movie. The successful franchise is based on a series of popular books. Since I’m illiterate I had never read any of the books, but I figured, what the hell, I should give one of them a try. Going in chronological order made sense, so I figured I’d start at the beginning.

The first book in the James Bond series is Casino Royale. It was written by Ian Fleming and published in 1953. He pretty much made the espionage genre of literature and films popular with this single work. There have been countless imitators since then, but there is only one James Bond. There was no way I was going to dislike this book. It was the first James Bond novel! It was going to be awesome! I sat down to read, and…

…holy shit this book is fucking terrible!

Speed Grapher Doesn’t Have Speed or Graphing

The series’ animation doesn’t look nearly this good.

Speed Grapher, the 2005 anime series from Studio Gonzo, features neither speed nor graphing. The reason for the title remains a complete mystery. I suppose it should be chalked up to LOL ANIME and the medium’s penchant for giving things ridiculous names (e.g. Marmalade Boy, Cream Lemon, Tantei Opera Milky Holmes — it also seems they like to give their titles food-centric names as well). This series is an incomprehensible mish-mash of genres and themes, of half-baked ideas, and with, at best, half-assed execution. It has all the trappings of a terrible B-movie. Typically, when an anime or movie has crappy animation, crappy acting, crappy storyline, and crappy directing, it will get a score of Shitty. However, there is the rare occasion when all the elements come together to create something so terrible that it rises above its crappiness to become awesome. That is precisely what Speed Grapher does. It’s a perfect, shining example of a B-anime that’s so bad it’s good.

The premise of the series is that there is a virus that infects certain people, and when it becomes activated (activation involves getting kissed by a prepubescent loli — it’s Japan, remember) the virus allows a person’s deepest desire to come to fruition. Of course, everyone’s desire is to become a super-powered killing machine, but hey, if a virus gave me those kind of powers, I’d want to get infected, too. Our first taste of a desire come to life (referred to as Euphoria), is a photographer who can blow up anything he takes a picture of. If I was a photographer, I would want to blow up everything I took a picture of, too. In fact, as a blogger, I’d want every post I write to explode. But I digress…

Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0, the Dub Review

Another helping of delicious Eva-flavored Doritos

In honor of the second Rebuild of Evangelion movie being released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the U.S., I thought I’d post my thoughts of the dub. I tried to catch the dub theatrically, as I did for 1.0, but the theater near me only played it in Japanese. So, I had to wait until acquiring the Blu-Ray to check it out. Here’s a quick recap of my final thoughts of the dub from 1.0:

While I don’t think this cast will ever surpass the original Japanese actors, Funimation did a damn good job. This time they had a real director instead of motherfucking Matt Greenfield, and that payed off in spades. Spike and Allison have had years to improve their skills, and with a competent director, were able to turn in great performances. Overall, the dub was good, and I can entertain the idea of watching it again in the future. While the original Japanese is still the best, this English dub is a vast improvement over the ADV dub.

Well, with that little refresher, let’s move on and see how 2.0 fared…

Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0, the Dub Review

Delicious Eva-flavored Doritos

In honor of the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie being released on DVD in the U.S., I thought I’d post my thoughts of the dub. My dub review comes from a theatrical viewing of the dub a few months ago, and is not representative of the DVD. But they should be identical anyway.

First of all, I completely loathed the original Evangelion dub (and I hated the original movie dubs even more). It had one of the worst assembled casts of all time. Worse than the people in “Manos: The Hands of Fate.” Not to mention one of the shittiest directors, Matt Greenfield, ever. Basically, he just cast a bunch of his no-talent friends, and had them ham it up. The original dub is on par with what you’d find in a middle school drama class. It is fucking awful. A testament to why you should never watch a dub. And just in case any of you think I “hate all dubs,” let me explain something else. There are some anime dubs that I loved, and watch those shows exclusively in English (e.g. Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Outlaw Star, and Fullmetal Alchemist — just to name a few). Anyway, my expectations for the Rebuild of Evangelion dub were extremely low. I was expecting a turd on celluloid. So, how did it hold up?