Saturday, April 19, 2008

What nonsense I accomplished during the break Part One

Ah, the break is ending, and housemanship orientation starts next Monday. The thought of having to wake up early again makes me wilt in dismay, and looking at the notes we have to study for ACLS is not doing much to alleviate the heavy heartedness. Add on the realisation that most of my close friends are with NHG (meaning I'll be sitting pretty much alone at the Singhealth lectures sans my usual gang), and dark clouds hang over my head almost perpetually. Haha. I dramatise excessively.

The break has been pretty good to me, and I feel quite recharged and having completed quite a significant proportion of my to-do list. The rest of the post will be reviews of various animes and dramas I've completed or that I am currently watching. As always, spoiler alert!



Gundam 00

Finally finished the series after waiting almost forever for Menclave to release their subs of the last 2 episodes. I have this obs-comp thing about sticking to one fansub group because of consistency, so I try as far as possible not to switch sub groups. I watched episodes 20 to 25 consecutively and it was simply mind-blowing. I wasn't very prepared for the body count in the last few episodes though, and was a bit battered by all the deaths. Sad.

Lockon's death was the worst, and it wasn't even justified (not that death can really be justified) by the death of Ali-Al Saachez. I was pretty much disgusted when he appeared in the ending sequence of episode 25 because his survival just about repudiated the death of Lockon as having accomplished something. Oh well, plotbunnies. The death of Christina and Licht was also horrible and done with just a bit too much drama, what with Christina appearing well and then the camera showing a shard of debris in her back. It makes their deaths really hit home, rather than just add meaninglessly to the body count as in too many other animes.

The last episode was just typical Gundam fight sequence, with Exia facing off against that ugly Alvatore. I should have totally expected it when the robot form appeared, but I didn't, and I felt thrown off. The design of the Alvatore just doesn't seem to fit in with the intricate detail of the rest of the mechas in the Gundam universe, and it felt totally out of place, like an import from a wannabe mecha anime (like Code Geass lol - I'm going to get struck by Geass-lighting XD) Maybe it was just all that gold-ness that hurt my eyes. And after the death of Alejandro, you barely have time to wonder now what's happened to Graham Aker and his GN-fitted Flag when he appears, with that awfully hilarious dialogue about love. In a fitting climax worthy of Gundam, the two mobile suits decapitate one another, remove a number of limbs, and then proceed to impale one another on fiery beam sabres - and yet, somehow, the pilots will still survive. I am too mad about this series to roll my eyes.

I thought the part with Allelujah/Hallelujah added something new to the usual fight sequence, especially when he flipped up his hair and showed both his eyes - that move somehow compounded the eerie juxtaposition of Oguri Shun on Alle/Halle that has been haunting my mind for quite a while now, especially since with hair slicked back, Alle/Halle looks like Shun in Crows Zero! o_O; I was really hoping he'd kill Soma Pieris, but that would take quite a lot of fun out of the second season, now wouldn't it. Especially with the weird "Marie" sentimentality and Hallelujah departing ?for good - yet another spanner the writers decide to throw in to screw with our minds.

And of course, that ending montage 4 years later. What with Tieria having a hairstyle that looks exceedingly like Marina Ismail's adviser and Louise standing behind him(?her), and Tieria smirking evilly. Graham and that simply awful-looking mask, argh. They could have given him something nice-looking a la Zechs or Raww, but no. Nena with what looks like Tieria-in-Veda eyes. I half expected Marina to walk into a room and the camera pan to show the back of someone who looks like an adult Setsuna, but no it didn't happen heh. I think the writers have screwed with our minds enough.

I was wondering if I have a favourite mobile suit among the four Gundams, which is quite difficult for me to decide because each has its own appeals - this indicates good mecha design on the creators' parts I suppose, since they have integrated abilities that appeal to all mecha fans in each Gundam. If you force me to choose I'd have to say Exia, mainly because there's something about the sword-fighting that is primitive and so unlike the heavy firepower of the Gundams, and that is its appeal. And I like blue. :P Second favourite would be the Nadleeh form of Virtue, just because it's cool, haha. I actually do like those pink hair-like cables.

Now I just can't wait for the second season to start.



Ouran High School Host Club

Now this is another anime that really made my break. After watching it I added this to the list of best animes I have ever watched, among which are Fruits Basket and Gurren Lagann. It's amazing how this anime with not much of a storyline (until the ending) manages to keep you riveted every single episode, and make you laugh and cry and feel for its characters. I really loved all the shoujo manga devices like the comical facial expressions, pop-up boxes and over-the-top antics of the characters, especially Tamaki, and every time they appear I'd just laugh without fail. Runge and her high-powered motor is just ridiculously funny, but after a while it lost its comic effect, mainly because Runge's O-HO-HO-HO routine gets really annoying. It's really hilarious how Ouran pokes fun at itself. And yet, it's not a completely frivolous anime because after some episodes the backstory of the various characters are revealed and you see how all these diverse characters are brought together into the Host Club, the most interesting of which has to be Kyouya who doesn't let on about a lot.

The ending was a bit rushed I felt, but still moving enough that I bawled my eyes out. I'm glad that some form of feeling beyond platonic friendship is suggested between Tamaki and Haruhi, if not explicitly; it felt like a good ending even if it wasn't a very definite one. And I totally feel like watching it again! I am so going to download the manga to read, but I may not have the time to do that before work starts sigh.



Galileo

This Jap drama is pretty formulaic, being one of those crime-solving contraptions involving Fukuyama Masaharu's genius physics professor Yuukawa Manabu helping Shibasaki Kou's police inspector Utsumi Kaoru solve bizarre cases with the aid of his scientific knowledge. The stories aren't really all that fantastic, and the sequence where the professor gets hit with enlightenment and starts scribbling science/maths formulae all over some convenient surface and then coming to a conclusion is so formulaic it hurts, since you obviously know that it's ridiculous to have formulae for every single phenomenon in the world, especially when it's something as simple as writing in marker on soluble starch sheets and floating them on water to give the appearance of floating letters on water. It's awfully pretentious and makes my hair stand. But the reason that I managed to get through the ten episodes of this drama is the excellent chemistry between Shibasaki Kou and Fukuyama Masaharu, with Shibasaki playing the slightly ditzy, emotion-driven inspector as a foil to Fukuyama's coldly logical professor. shibasaki is really excellent here, and Fukuyama is just effortlessly charming. As with all dramas like this some feelings grow between Shibasaki's and Fukuyama's characters as they interact, and by the end of the series they come to realise some part of these feelings, if not explicitly. It also adds to the unbelievability of the drama that a physics professor should be also excellent at squash, rock-climbing, boxing, and have impeccable dress sense and perfectly styled hair. Haha, so he bucks all the stereotypes, but it also makes for eye candy. It's a Jap drama, what do you expect?



Honey and Clover

I've only watched five episodes of this, so just a little bit of a mid-series review; I'm sure more developments will occur in later episodes that will render what I say here meaningless heh. On first watching it actually doesn't have very much to draw the average viewer in, since it is not a hyperbolically hilarious kind of drama like Nodame or Hanakimi, nor does it have a riveting storyline - in fact, a story about multiple love triangles can turn some people off really fast. But somehow I'm just drawn in by the way it seems like a cut out of real life. That, and I'm a sucker for melodramatic love triangle storylines. :P

Ikuta Toma is here playing a character that is remarkably similar to Nakai from Hanakimi - he's a bit of a bumbling fool who doesn't really know where he's going and doesn't dare to express his feelings for someone he really likes. And, he likes to pretend to talk to his mother after digging various objects out of a box haha. Despite the similarity, his character Takemoto is really quite endearing because of his earnest-ness and lack of courage - something many people can relate to I guess.

I find Narimiya Hiroki's Morita Shinobu character extremely obnoxious, though I can't really place my finger on why. I just get turned off my his cavalier-ness and the way he takes advantage of situations and bullies Takemoto (see, I'm feeling for Takemoto already -__-;). I can't imagine how Takemoto never gets angry at the way he is treated by Morita, because it's just awful being bullied like that. It's weird because Narimiya was so different in Ima, Ai Ni Yukimasu and Karei Naru Ichizoku, and his smile in Honey and Clover seems to have lost much of its earnestness. In fact it reminds me of Bleach's Ichimaru Gin's rather feline and sinister smile. I think I'm really reading too much into this.. >_<

For some reason the Yamada Ayumi-Mayama Takumi thing really moves me quite a bit (maybe because I can put myself in the shoes of Yamada haha). Not to mention Mukai Osamu who plays Mayama really looks quite dapper in glasses and his usual shirt-and-sweater attire. :P 真山のアホ！

The ending theme of the series, Canvas by Hirai Ken, is just unspeakably awesome. I always get moved by very strong emotions when I hear the song being played at the end, and even without the ending sequence video I can see in my mind all these images of friendship and camaraderie flashing by as the song goes on. It's a really amazing song, as expected from Hirai Ken heh. There are also lots of small cute things about the series, like how the starting sequence always looks like the same messy art table but actually the items change to match things that appear in that particular episode, like in episode 4, where the strips that the characters tie to the Christmas tree appear, and episode 5, where Takemoto's lucky charm from his mother and Mayama's new spectacles are seen. And there's always this part in the episodes where something really lame (really don't know how to describe it, except using the Chinese expression 冷), usually with that weird teacher who has family problems, and you'll hear a crow cawing slowing in the silence. Mildly amusing touch.

I'm reminded that the flowerpots outside my home are currently luxuriant with clover growth; not sure how they got there but I think my dad has been plucking random wild plants up from the roadside and trying to grow them in our flowerpots as some bizarre horticultural fun. They're weeds! But clover is fun, during the exam period I would occasionally go look for a four leaf clover (for good luck, obviously) and after I told my mom about the four leaf clover she has started looking for one too. Mwahaha.



Erm haha I think I've written too much for one entry, but I've done most of what I wanted to review so I shall end here, I guess. I will review other things, like food (Haato, fish and chips at Fisherman's Wharf, and most importantly, McGriddles Sausage McMuffin with Egg!) and books (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) in another post. Heh. Enjoy the weekend!

Avaris / 4/19/2008 10:21:00 PM

0 consumed