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The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses ep1 The two or three shots with the egregious camera movement and the borked perspective seems to be really fuelling the discussion on social media right now, but memes notwithstanding, I think this seems like a perfectly competent, if unremarkable romance...

Final Run (1989) Honest Hong Kong cop Kwok-Keung Cheung flees to Thailand after being framed for murder, following his refusal to accept a bribe from a powerful drugs gang who have infiltrated the HK police, in another above average HK crime/action piece. The plot gets awfully over-complicated...

Ooku: The Inner Chambers ep1 A period-piece positing an alternative 18th-century Japan in which an epidemic has decimated the male population, leading to a matriarchal society lead by a female shogun, this didn’t really do anything I wasn’t expecting, but it was perfectly engaging. It...

Ranma 1/2 ep30-32 It suddenly occurs to me to wonder if, with Mousse being a Chinese character, his name is intended to be a pun on Moo Shu? Skip and Loafer ep11-12 [end] Yeah, that was nice. I think it handled the characterisation well overall, but as others have remarked, it would have...

Lupin III: Bye Bye Lady Liberty (1989) [English dub] Following his successful theft of a computer trained to predict all his movements, a burnt out Lupin has gone into semi-retirement, living in a run-down part of New York, but after his gold-digging American girlfriend wracks up huge debts in...

Close Escape (1989) An above-average HK genre piece, this one sees a dying diamond-thief (Kiu-Wai Miu) taking on a job from shifty businessman Dick Wei in order to fund his younger brother's (Siu Chung Mok) education. Both Mok and Aaron Kwok as a sympathetic copper are perfectly fine in their...

Skip and Loafer ep9-10 Dead Mount Death Play ep8 That sure was 20 minutes of exposition. The derpy magician guy seems fun though, shame he doesn’t have more to do. Violence Jack: Hell’s Wind Well, it does what it says on the tin, I guess. This may play differently if you’re familiar with...

Kinda wanted to do something like an Akira Toriyama splash page, with the little stubby car. After a 1991 Escada advert, original model Tatjana Patitz. Definitely a stand user.

Angel’s Mission (1989) Another directorial offering from that Titan of (terrible) Hong Kong genre cinema, Godfrey Ho, seeing Japanese cop Yukari Oshima coming to Hong Kong to search for missing Japanese girls who may be mixed up with a brothel run by her mother, while ex-gangster Dick Wei looks...

City Hunter: Goodbye Sweetheart [aka City Hunter: The Motion Picture] (1996) City Hunter: Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba (1999) Friend was showing some more City Hunter TV specials, this time the later ones from the 90s (I arrived too late for Secret Service, although I have seen that...

Konosuba: Explosion Edition ep3-5 Birdie Wing ep13-15 Think I'll take a break from Birdie Wing for a little while. I'm invested enough to want to see where it'll go, but I still find the lack of dramatic tension frustrating, particularly with Aoi's character. Maybe it'll change as we go into...

The Legend & Butterfly (2023) A sumptously shot and highly sympathetic take on the Oda Nobunaga myth, this time focusing on Nobunaga's relationship with wife Nohime (about whom far less is known), this film may upset anyone looking for historical accuracy, but it makes for a very appealing...

My gut reaction was to think ‘Was there really any one point or was it not more likely a gradual buildup from various breakout successes over the years vs waning interest in other prolific pop culture standards’, but then again, yeah, if you wanted to point to a particular moment, maybe Netflix...

Gintama ep9-13 Hell’s Paradise ep8 I slightly wonder if they’ll walk any of this back as time goes on. In a short form series, the sudden character deaths would make sense, but assuming they want this to run for a while… eh, I dunno. At the very least, I’ll be surprised if the blonde...

Birdie Wing ep12 This is perfectly pleasant, but sometimes I do struggle to get a read on what exactly the goal is with the story. After Eve joined the fancy-pants academy, I expected cattiness and a series of hard-fought battles with rival students, but everyone is incredibly cordial and our...

I still think about Babylon sometimes, but I gave up before the end and can't summon up the effort go back and finish it.

In part, I think it was just because I was looking for examples of how to draw bullet hits, but I’ve been reading through the Hellsing manga lately. I’ve read a bit of it before, but never the whole thing - it’s quite a different experience from the two anime adaptations. The Ultimate anime is...

Hell's Paradise ep6 So glad that they gave Sagiri something to do again besides scream and be ill, she’s my favourite character in this. Konosuba: Megumin X ep2 Is it just my imagination or, given the inevitable absence of Kazuma, are they trying to force Megumin into his role this time...

Justice, My Foot! (1992) Stephen Chow and Anita Mui star in this oddball comic period piece about a ratty lawyer and his kung fu-master wife, whose opulent, but seemingly cursed, life is thrown upside down after she takes pity on a young pregnant woman whose husband has been murdered. This is...

Kamikatsu ep5 Oh dear. When this was a big dumb trash fire, I was kind of onboard with it, but it feels like it’s trying to be clever now and doesn’t seem to have the requisite grasp of narrative logic to achieve what it’s aiming for. It wasn’t so bad as to be offensive to me, but this...