Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep

Another Fall, another Kingdom Hearts game, another stupid-sounding title.  Yay, life!

So we all already know that Kingdom Hearts has been awesome for years now, that needs no further explaining.  If you aren't aware of the amazing appeal of Kingdom Hearts, please stop reading this review right now and spend the next week or so shut off from the rest of the world blasting through at least "Kingdom Hearts I" and "Kingdom Hearts II".  I can wait...  (Dum dum dum da dum)  Okay, its a week later.  Awesome right?  Yeah, I thought so.  And I bet you want to play more of this series, huh?  Well, that's why Square Enix decided to create "Kingdom Hearts:  Birth by Sleep" for you, a game definitely of equal measure to the other two games listed above.  Only one problem... its on the PlayStation Portable.

Not that anybody is going to be surprised by this judgment call, but the PSP has clearly lost the battle against the Nintendo DS.  Everybody on Earth has a DS, I'm probably the only for miles who has a PSP.  Yeah, the PSP certainly has the stronger graphical and memory abilities - its graphics blew me away the moment I bought it and still continue to surprise - but its definitely a flawed piece of machinery (for one its too darn fragile).  And I don't think any one title reveals all the PSP's successes and failures better than "Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep".  For one, the graphics are amazing.  This game looks as good as "Kingdom Hearts 1" did on a console half a decade ago.  Unlike "358/2 Days", the DS Kindom Hearts that came out last year (my review), this game doesn't shrink Kingdom Hearts down into a smaller mobile form, it is a fully fledge title of massive scale and scope.  However, in order to fit all that action and awesomeness, there are load times.  Huge ones.  And tons of them.

Books Don't Burn

Books don't burn.  This is a curious position to take, since books are very often extremely flammable as you can easily demonstrate with even the both basic of lighters.  Yes, the pages that a book is written on can be torn and torched, the ink can be washed away, and the entire object can be destroyed in countless ways.  However, the book itself is eternal.  Setting them ablaze will not make them go away.  This is why book-burners are always the most preposterous of the many lunatic fringes this world has to offer us.  Ideas live on, even if in just a minute cultural consciousness, and you, the burners, will be left more the fool for thinking you can trample thoughts you disagree with*.  In end, that's a battle you're going to lose, if not tomorrow then centuries from now.  If just one person remembers the words of your book, if just one of them writes it down, in even a fragmentary form, you've lost your battle forever.  The book burners always lose, and its only thanks to this that the modern world can exist at all.

When you torch a book, even if in the name of modernity or "moving the world forward", you castrate the very philosophy you're trying to protect.  No matter how pure your intentions may be, you will forever be known as ignorant, intolerant, and ultimately incredibly stupid - which is all true.  No matter how many people - or how few - people stand behind you, what government is giving you support, what religious figure has given you God's blessing, your cause is hopeless.  Because, again, books don't burn.

Pastor Terry Jones* is only the latest in a very long tradition of book burning that easily must go back as far as books have been written.  His scheme today was to burn several copies of the Qu'rans, essentially just to piss every Muslim in the world off.  He didn't go through with it, because the entire thing was a publicity stunt, perhaps saving him from the title of fool, but in turn opening him to the new title of fraud.  The sad thing is that Terry Jones is not alone in his lunacy, book-burning has an extremely long historical tradition amongst Christians:  simply look at the number of lost Greco-Roman and other pagan texts thanks to the religious fervor of the first Christian who call consider themselves "authorities".  He wasn't the first, he won't be the last.

Last Exile

"Last Exile" is one of those great unappreciated anime series.  Exactly why is largely unknown is a complete mystery to me, it has all the ingredients that an anime needs for greatness:  amazing beautiful landscapes, awesome airship battles, all the episodes are named after famous Chess moves, and the hero is voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch.  What more do you need?  Its rather confusing to me*.  So obviously I need to step in and save the day!

What lies beyond the sky?  Flyboy Claus Valca (played by Johnny Yong Bosch, so he's the hero) and female mechanic, Lavie Head work together as couriers for a aerial delivery service, together chasing their (separate) parents' dreams of being a top pilot and mechanic respectively.  Together they live in the world of Prester, a world of clouds and strange clearly artificial land, which is dominated by airship battles between two nations, while a mysterious third faction, the Guild, watches over in seeming omnipotence.  One day Claus and Lavie find a crashed plane, or "Vanship" if we're to use the series' terminology, and discover a mysterious little girl named Alvis, who like all mysterious females in Japan, will inevitably hold the key for the survival of the universe or something like that.  This leads Claus and Lavie to join the crew of the legendary sky Battleship, Silvana, led by the emotionally distant but serious badass captain, Alex Row, a man bent for revenge.

At this point the series really starts to switch gears, as its no longer really about Claus and Lavie's relationship, and it becomes a huge ensemble piece with dozens of characters all hanging around and inevitably vying for Claus's affections.  And of course, the entire world of Prester is turning into a massive war zone filled with chaos and such.  But even though Claus is essentially the hero thanks to his plot role, the real star of the show is just the sky itself.  The animators can never stop themselves from making amazing scenery for their production, almost to the point that you start to wonder if the amazing art design is somehow sucking energy from the story.

Batman Beyond: the Movie

Now that "Inception" has racked up something like half a billion dollars and thirty-five cents, its pretty clear that director Christopher Nolan can do just about anything on Earth that he wants to in film, and Warner Bros will pay for it.  If he wants to make a movie about a purple elephant running for President, he's going to get not simply the greenlight, but hundreds of millions of dollars the pick of Hollywood's best actors to bring his strange vision to reality.  Right now, Nolan is working on "Batman 3" and apparently has been put in charge of the Superman movies*.  So that's at least a decade's worth of steady work right there.  And in a recession, that's not bad.

For better or worse, "Batman 3" will be the last Batman movie - at least created by Nolan.  We all know there will be Batman movies until the day the art of cinema is lost forever when the aliens from Dimension X land and destroy our civilization in order to turn Earth into an intergalactic theme park (laugh now, but when your corpse is being used as fun house dummy, you'll know I was right).  Anyway, the fact of that matter is that Nolan wants to end his series.  But how does one go about it?  There's tons of material here that needs to be sorted out in one grand finale... that is absolutely certain to satisfy no one.  "The Dark Knight" is a movie that is much to big to follow up without incurring the wrath of film and comic book nerds worldwide.  Its hopeless.  Which is why I won't even try.

Anyway, in my usual presumptuous way, I will now tell Christopher Nolan how to do his job.  In today's episode of Fanwank Corner, I throw around my idea for a very different kind of Batman movie.  And that idea is none other than:  "Batman Beyond", the live-action movie.

Virginia Madsen Horror Films

Virginia Madsen is a blond actress, more than reasonably attractive, and nearing fifty.  If you've never heard of her, that's perfectly reasonable.  But its your loss, since she's astoundingly beautiful, even now.  However, there are dozens of astounding beauties in Hollywood - even ones that are years older than Madsen.  What makes this actress special is a two movies she made in the early 90s, which strangely enough happen to be two of the very best horror films in the history of well, ever.  And since I can only fantasize about being even barely tangentially related to even a forgettable film, I have to take a step back and honor Mrs. Madsen, an all-too-brief Scream Queen.

The two movies she happened to take part were none other than "Candyman" and "The Prophecy", which makes her a great transition in order to discuss both films.  Despite being intensely frightening, brilliantly shot, and superbly well-acted, for some reason or another these two horror films just seem to have faded into the wind.  I'm not even sure I can say that these movies truly have faded, since they both got respectable reviews and several far lesser straight-to-home video* sequels.  I'm pretty sure that most horror fans have at least a vague idea what "Candyman" is about.  "Candyman" as a franchise is truly dead, and last year a complete rip-off of "The Prophecy" was released under the title "Legion" and nobody but me batted an eyebrow.  How tragic.  And soon enough a new slew of bad "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" films are on the way, and the entire world will eat them up.

This will not stand!  The greatest moments of Virginia Madsen's career cannot be forgotten.  So in today's post, we'll now be doing a brief double-review of "Candyman" and "The Prophecy", both of which are hugely worth a rent.  (Plus at least one of them has her naked in two scenes, if you're into that kind of thing.)