The Best* Opinions

The show's ability to shuffle events from canon into slightly new formations is once again astounding. From the moment they defeated Miss Goldenweak early (and GOD is she creepy!) I knew the final fight against Mr. 3 (ALSO much creepier than in original canon) wasn't gonna go down exactly the same way. And really, none of it does, and while there are some parts which are homages to the original (Zoro leaping from the fire with three burning swords to attack Mr. 5) I'm glad other things were able to play out differently (Vivi and Nami using a combo on Miss Valentine). The choreography really condenses down the original story in a way that keeps the beats without the exposition. I really appreciate the fights in this series, because they allow more moments for other Straw Hats to shine.

Usopp's arc about fear and bravery continues to play out. Obviously he gets a talking-to from Brogy who tells him fear is important, and then he has a heroic moment where he saves Luffy from Goldenweek. But hilariously, he's thrown into the deep end due to the circumstances of the fight, and has to prove himself a LOT braver (and cleverer) than he was prepared for. A familiar tune for me, but one with an unexpected flourish at the end.

Everything with Sanji, "Mr. Prince" and the Unluckies was top-tier, no notes. I was dying of laughter during his fight against Mr. 13, and Crocodile is a top-tier adaptation of the character, even in the small moments we're given.

And finally: Dorry and Brogy resolve their duel, and resolve not to duel anymore, but then remember WHY they dueled and resolve to duel more. Though we don't get the reveal of the Sea King skulls, I think the focus on the characters allows for a much funnier conclusion (and continuation) of their feud.

The shoot locations could use some quality control on this one. While the jungle of Little Garden was wonderful and astounding, sometimes the action gets moved to a forest that's clearly from a more temperate climate. You could maybe call it Grand Line bullshit but I don't think that's the case.

Beyond that, I still had a great deal of fun, re-meeting Dorry and Brogy. The tragedy of their conflict is played up a bit here (and they do some sneaky foreshadowing) which leads into the latter conflict with Mr. 3 and the Baroque Works agents that are working for him. I didn't think we'd be doing the wax statues bit again but that seems to be the case; at the very least, David Dastmalchian is doing a wonderful job. I know this because I hated Mr. 3 in this arc, and watching this episode re-awoke those feelings in me.

The island also has its charms, and most notably I loved the scene where Luffy and Vivi ride a dinosaur. It's a simple bonding moment, but really works. Vivi, notably, is allowed to keep her weapons instead of getting damsel'd, which I think an improvement to the source material.

Usopp also continues to be a standout, as he's learning here to be a great warrior. I can see the arc they're setting up for him ("Fear of death is what keeps us alive" to quote Dr. McCoy) but that doesn't make it any less special.

The bulk of the talk of this episode is going to be the excellent fight scene between Zoro and the 100 Baroque Works agents... and yeah, it's fucking great. It's like 15 minutes of screentime as the numbers climb higher and higher and you wonder if Zoro can do it after all. And he can! Amazing!

But beyond that, there's also some incredible acting for Igaram, Mr. 9 and Vivi, all being introduced to us again, the right way around this time. Mr. 9, in particular, delivers a rather savage and honest delivery of a man who won't betray someone close to him for the higher-ups, and I greatly respect Daniel Lasker for the task of delivering it in such a ridiculous costume.

I also noticed Vivi ugly-crying at the end after Igaram's death, which did my heart glad. One of the best features of One Piece is the way the characters cry, and allowing such heartbreak to mar her features is a brave choice. I was outright distracted by how hot she was, and then Charithra Chandran turned it around and managed to portray a nobility in rags that made me forget all that.

I know we won't be getting into it anytime this soon, but I'm getting so invested in everything Baroque Works and Alabasta. I'm having such a lovely time.

I'm beginning to suspect I'm not going to be a good judge of these episodes because I love the source material too much. But if I am being honest, I'm having a wonderful time with the changes this adaptation is making, and Laboon stands out as a strong example.

While the resolution to the plot is basically the same as in the manga/anime, we get to see some characters who will be very important later on, and the way Luffy communicates with Laboon is not through fighting, but singing. Hinting very much that fighting won't always be the solution to fights.

Before I get into my notes, I have to say: it's absolutely fucking astounding that they pulled this off. A live-action anime adaptation, produced by Netflix? Astoundingly, this was not a recipe for disaster, but for an excellent show: Matt Owens and Steven Maeda ran a tight ship and made a very good show for me to talk about over the water cooler with my coworkers. I loved it, and I've been excited for season 2 for some time now.

Now that I'm back in, I have to say: I've missed this so much. The banter between the crew, the weird costumes, these threatening villains, the foreshadowing (and also some characters I didn't see for several hundred episodes the first time round) and the fights are all here. The manga is good, but there's something to having it injected straight into my veins over an hour at a time.

Spoilers for Primal season 2.

After Spear dies at the end of season 2, his body has been laid to rest. But a necromancer with some fiendish purpose for him raises his body and sets him on his enemies. And yet, necromancers may die, and their creations left untethered...

It was not as bad for me, but I know the ending of season 2 left a lot of people feeling cold. For one, having Mira have sex with Spear while covered in burns just looks ridiculous, and for another the finale has a timeskip showing their daughter growing up, seemingly as the next protagonist. I don't know if the writers did that because they thought they weren't getting a season 3, or if they wanted to move onto a new protagonist; in either case, the fact they started off this season by resurrecting Spear was odd to me, that said they weren't sticking to their guns.

But the story we get is quite compelling. It almost feels sacrilegious to talk about it using words, since Primal is a show almost entirely about a setting where we, the viewers, can't understand the characters, but that narrative rule is pushed to its limits here. There are some fairly heady topics brought up and laid out without words, like cults, belonging, family and memory. Even as the first half of the season is slow and meandering, it feels compelling for the journey Spear is going on to recover his memories. And for a trope I'm not too fond of, the amnesia is treated well enough that I didn't mind it.

Mira's journey to track down Spear was also fun to watch, not least because she's pregnant for a lot of it and still remains a badass. Her relationship with Fang also gets a spotlight here that felt natural, a mutual grieving with someone who's a friend of a friend. I quite like that Fang does not like Mira at all, and has to take some time to get used to it.

Everything surrounding these plots are mostly just fine. There's no enemy that felt compelling enough to stand out, and especially with Spear's change into a zombie, there's no enemy that can hurt him for long. The fights with the other characters are more tense, and any fight where Spear's goal is not to kill the enemy, but these don't happen too often. There's a notable good fight in the finale, but the rest blur together.

Two twin brothers, name of Smoke and Stack, come back to their old haunt in the Mississippi Delta after a crime spree in Chicago. They've got money to burn, a location to advertise, and musicians to hire for the juke joint they're setting up. But they've got eyes on them, and some of those eyes glow in the night.

Yeah okay fine everyone's seen this already. In my defense I did the same thing with Knives Out and I don't intend to change; not even the Academy Awards would shift my timetable, because not even I know my own timetable! And yet, I still should have watched this earlier!

I struggle to talk about anything with this movie because just about everything's been said. I could gush at length about the bloody good action, the creepy cinematography, the music (GOD THE MUSIC), the acting, the themes of community, assimilation segregation, there's so much to dissect in this picture. And thankfully for meatheads like me, there's layers to it, so you can get really deep with it. Just off the top of my head I can see themes about culture and cooperation, with "I Lied To You" being an example with the integration between different times, cultures and even continents. But it also feels like there's more I can't quite grasp right off the bat; I keep coming back to the widescreen/fullscreen camera transitions, one used for close-ups, one for nature shots, and I feel like that's saying something I just don't get. But I do love mulling it over in my head.

If I can highlight two things I found interesting:

The way the vampires behave in this movie. They feel mostly human, but their synchronization is so complete it becomes creepy. Every typical weakness comes back and is utilized here, but that doesn't stop them from being monstrous, powerful, deadly and frightening. Even the invitation proved to be one of the most unsettling scenes in the movie. Ryan Coogler understood that, though we've grown used to vampires and their lore can be stale, the heart of the tales can still terrify and entice.

Remmick as a villain. You could make a whole argument about him as the self-appointed white savior, but for my money I want to focus on him as an Irish victim. Most of the information about him online claims he's over a thousand years old, a pagan from Ireland that was forced out by the oncoming Catholic conversion. This is an old bone of mine to pick, as I did so once with The Child Thief by Brom. Ireland had a rather peaceful transition between religions, and while I'm not expert I did double-check a few places after the Wikipedia article to make sure I wasn't making anything up. There's a lot of places you can pick up old religions being put down by Christianity, and Ireland is one of the few exceptions to the practice (though the practice did start because Rome conquered Ireland, first). But! One of the things I did stumble across was the English conquest and colonization of Ireland, which was bloody and violent throughout. There's a good chance he was one of the Catholics being cast out by Protestants, and this would align with history. So where does that leave us? What we get of Remmick in the movie isn't exactly clear; he's for sure Irish, he was displaced from his home by Christian men, and he adopted the faith himself for a time. Beyond that, everything is in doubt. Even the coins he uses are (in real life) prop coins, meaning they could be anything from Spanish doubloons, or money from the Celtic Gauls or Britain, to the Roman aureus, or any number of historical gold coins. I doubt Remmick himself would be forthcoming with the details, and ultimately, he's an enforcer of the system of racial oppression in the United States, even as he's also a victim of it.

The Sky Corps Academy: the best of the best, brightest of the brightest, tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties. Once a year, they receive mechs who land and choose their pilots, who stand ready to defend should the dreaded Sharg ever return.

Stanford Yu is... not one of these cadets, much as he'd like to be. As Olivia Park, the highest ranking cadet can tell you, he's "just the help". But a stray mech finds Yu anyway, and the two bond, and as there's no way to break the bond (and Skip Tanaka, the hero of the Sky Corps, is backing him up) Yu will have to join the academy and prove himself a proper pilot.

I am not a fan of mech stuff, not usually; it's just not something I got into, and I usually prefer straightforward superpowers, at normal sizes. But at its best, the genre can be just as important as any other, and heightening war material into giant mechs makes anything it has to say about war stand out more. But then again, giant robots are sometimes just cool, and that's what we've got in this series.

One thing that stands out about this series is that the mechs are also characters. You can't understand them, but they have roughly the temperament and morality of the Iron Giant (with a design that threads the needle between cute and badass, a personal favorite), and they bond with their riders and protect them. This is true for both the original mechs and the artificial one that the military made, implying you couldn't make these machines without giving them empathy. But more than that, it makes the violence they have to go through stand out more, since we grow fonder of these big metal people as the series goes on.

But thankfully the humans also get a good angle. I do like that nobody is outright evil, but they do some shady things for "the greater good" and everybody has a limit they can hit; it's telling that the shadiest character in the series is left without allies once their scheme is revealed. There's also an element of class warfare going on, with mechs being used in both engineering and warfare, but the former being elevated and having bigger egos. The fact Yu was a janitor and is a good mechanic never quite goes away, and it becomes important to the way people think about and act on things that happen to their mechs.

Speaking of: Yu and Park are the two main pilots, and they slot pretty neatly into shounen protagonist and shounen rival, respectively. Yu has the mentality of a mechanic, though, which plays out obviously and subtextually throughout the story, and his relationship with his mother proves to be a wonderful through-line. And Park is, once again, a fascinating individual with daddy issues, and we're never quite sure whether her desire to be loved will be tilted in favor of her jerkass father or her new friends. I do wish we had got a little bit more into the other two pilots on the team, Sanchez and Olivetti, as they mostly get character moments specific to them only towards the end of the comic.

The action is also good to great. It can devolve into giant robots punching things, but there's some strategy to it, and we don't just get into fights in the mechs. The pilots will freely step out if they need to for an advantage, and they're not so helpless out of the mechs that they can't throw hands.

(Note: according to this reading order, you might need to read #27 as well, but I didn't and wasn't confused).

While the tournament for the prize of the Omega Crown is ongoing, the Titans set to work to evacuate Earth before Darkseid can arrive. But with a week to go, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

This story is fine. It's equal parts Titan drama and dealing with the evacuation; I found the previous part unbearable the first time around, and the second more interesting. I do like the angle of dealing with villains with the appropriate amount of force necessary (which, in some cases, is none) and the fact this story in a comic I found unbearable is fine? That's something.

The competition for the Heart of Apokolopis geared up, and Batman, of course, used his prep time to cheat. But the Heart didn't like that, and when he died, it punished him by sending him through realms of torturous possible futures, and he was able to see what his sons would become: Dick, the great optimist; Jason, the bird with clipped wings; Tim, the eternal detective; and Damian, the pessimist. What kinds of worlds will he have to experience - what twisted versions of his sons will he see? - before the Heart is done with him?

This is the book that turned the Robins into DILFs, if you were unaware.

I didn't know what I was expecting for a tie-in book, but this was something else. Like Radioactive Spider-Man before it, the book has stakes and is affected by the event going on, but the stakes are rather personal, and it pushes Bruce to reconsider some things about himself and his sons, the things he taught them and the wrong lessons they could have taken from them. Each of the futures of Gotham Bruce sees feel believable if the characters go astray from what we know them for, for all the good and bad they can do.

In between the Tom King storylines (apparently the most hated of all Wonder Woman writers) we have this section by Stephanie Williams, about Diana coming back to Themyscira to find some clarity in meditation. But while the other Amazons keep an eye on her daughter, Trinity, discord watches from the shadows...

It's a woman next to a car, with lights streaking down. Simple. But to me:

Writer: Joseph Greene

Penciler: Martin Nodell

Inker: Martin Nodell

Doiby Dickles is sent on a mission by the US Army (he and Alan were enlisted as this time) to discover the lost country of Exilia, famed for its natural resources which can help the war effort. But they're not the only ones with an interest in that country...

I haven't been at this for awhile. The last Green Lantern issues I read were so off-putting that I took a break from it, and I'm going to stick with a slower reading schedule from now on, but I'm still going to make an effort to keep going. The fact these issues take 30 or so minutes to read is definitely hampering my motivation to get through them; I'm looking forward to whenever I get to the Silver Age and the issues trim down in length.

The plot kinda forgets what the main bad guys are halfway through; it's confirmed at the beginning they don't know where Exilia is, only for one of them to be revealed as from Exilia.

In addition, Exilia is a land of exiles, where people cast out from their countries can go. In theory, you'd think this would be about marginalized people, but in practice it just means it's a land of ethnic and national stereotypes, with all the grossness that entails. Although I do love that the king of Exilia looks like a King of Diamonds, which is a nice bit of foreshadowing for what he really is.

Speaking of grossness: Green Lantern brainwashes someone! Yikes!

Besides all of that: the issue was disappointing. It started pretty well, with Green Lantern and Doiby tracking some rogues who had attacked a doctor, but it greatly declined as it reached the end. Also, they've forgotten Alan's oath again.

Tanzaburo Tojima was inspired as a child by Kamen Rider to become a Kamen Rider, but Shocker, the evil organization from the show, does not exist in the real world. Even with training from hell that puts you into peak fighting condition, there's not much use for it in the real world beyond being a great construction worker. So on the day he turns 40, Tojima sells his Kamen Rider merch and vows to become an actual adult, yet still unable to give up on his dreams even as he knows they cannot be fulfilled. Until, that is, some common thugs wearing Shocker masks show up at a local festival, and he finally has a chance to live out his fantasy, to his utter joy. But he's not the only one who wants to be a Kamen Rider, and (spoilers for episode 2) it turns out Shocker is actually real, after all!

There was a lot going for this show from the first episode, and that episode might actually be the best standalone watching experience for this show. It's the purest form of love of a thing pushing you to act in ways you wouldn't normally, in Tojima's case to act as a hero, and his counterpart Nakao to act as a monster of Shocker. After watching that episode, I was filled with a great, childlike whimsy and desire to go out and do something similar myself; there's no Green Lantern corps, but if I were to do this, would I wear a tool belt in green and help those who need it? I could almost imagine writing a story based on just that alone, and I was primed to continue watching the show with that theme in mind.

Episode 2 was where I started to see the cracks, though. We get introduced to our second Kamen Rider wannabe, Yuriko Okada, who was inspired by Tackle in Kamen Rider Stronger to become Tackle II, named to honor the ill-fated female fighter. Ostensibly, her arc is about being so traumatized by Tackle's death that she trained to be the strongest and make sure Tackle would never die again. But she's also the show's revelation that it cannot take female characters seriously. (not to mention everything with Masao Asano, who is this show's Mineta and who I will loath to my grave).

There are (off the top of my head) eight or so female characters introduced at the spot I stopped, the end of episode 13. Six of them have big boobs and are used for fanservice, Yuriko and Yukarisu (the other main female character) most of all. Of the remaining two, one of them is Futaba, the sister of two of the other main characters (both men) and Futaba's grandmother. Futaba has a fairly normal body type as these things go, but Granny Shimamura was a giant of a woman whose footsteps caused the earth to tremble, as broad as a house and taller than doors. For all that I was amused and delighted by this character design, it still annoyed my greatly that all the others were thin and busty. There is a later character I didn't get to who eschews this body type, and these characters tend to have diverse personalities, but they tend to bounce and were distracting. In almost every instance, while they tried to take themselves seriously, the show does not.

But I can get used to some anime bullshit, right? I've read all of One Piece, I can get used to some jiggle physics. What's the fightin' like?

For the first half of what I saw, the fightin' is pretty good. The gradual reveal of the enemies our heroes have to face means that stakes escalate quickly into seriousness, but not quite so quickly as to be unbelievable. There's a good on-boarding process to what a real Shocker should be like, including the monsters, and in a world where Kamen Rider is not real but Shocker is, normal humans have to do a lot of work to get on a level with them.

But the second half of what I saw is where it started to go downhill. After a bad fight our heroes set up a mini tournament arc, not something I'm particularly thrilled by under normal circumstances (I'm a shounen heathen, sue me) where the show started to lose me. The first real fight in the tournament arc is between brothers, and while I didn't love the way it was playing out, it ended well. The fight between Yuriko and Tojima is also excellent, and then the final fight between Yuriko and Mitsuba is... there. Anticlimactic. And it knocks Ichiyo out of alignment and gives him a crush on Yuriko I found highly embarrassing and unnecessary. We already had a couple where they were cheesy and in love and that was the gag; I didn't need to see the same thing play out except it was played straight.

And we come back to Futaba. In the show, she's an embarrassed middle child who had to grow up with two brothers who had seen Shocker kill their grandparents and didn't believe them. She's got a lot of depth available as a character; introduced as angry with her brothers, and why wouldn't she be? Her grandparents were murdered and her brothers are talking about Kamen Rider. Of course she'd find them cringe and annoying. But that anger is the only emotion she's shown to feel, and it flattens what would otherwise be an interesting reveal into just... a fight.

I should get into that. There's a lot of fighting in this show; notably, Nakao, a Yakuza member and a fan of villains in tokusatsu shows, shows up a few times to fight our heroes, and in some of his own fights. In a better show, it would be interesting to watch the bad guys have their own arcs and adventures, like the Phantom Troupe in Hunter x Hunter. But because the cast is so tightly focused he doesn't really get to do much, and the sprawling story feels cramped and small. 13 episodes in, we've met two monsters in Shocker and two named Combatants (their lowliest soldiers). Expand this to the rest of the show, and the same people fight multiple times. The emotional stakes which were there at first fade away into meaningless punches and bruises. Things just don't happen.

And I almost didn't write this review because something did start happening! Spider Man (not that guy) is coming around to kill Futaba's martial arts master, the Tiger Master. I almost watched the next episode just to see what happens, but I checked the Wikipedia page to find out the fight ends inconclusively again. Just when we're about to get somewhere, we get another fight that doesn't mean anything.

And when I say it doesn't mean anything: a fight in fiction is meant to do one of three things: imperil (when a character needs something and this is endangered by an enemy), promote character development (show us, through the fight, what's going on with them internally) or demonstrate prowess, or the Cool Factor. Having recently watched Ballerina I am spoiled for all three, but with even one I could be persuaded to tag along. But the prowess isn't here, I'm not afraid for the characters' lives or goals, and the character development just isn't there. You can look up people punching each other in YouTube videos, and that's even excluding fiction!

And now we get into the portion where I'm just going to complain. I'm not a fan of Kamen Rider, which is to say, I haven't watched any. I don't hate it, but it's unimportant in the face of the show, because I can see Tojima likes it and that pushes him to act. I think it's a little self-indulgent to have this be an official Kamen Rider project, but I can stand with it if something interesting is done.

At first, having Shocker be real was a turn for this more interesting angle. The power difference between four normal-ish humans and Shocker, organization of monsters and combatants, seems like a frightening thing to introduce. But as the episodes go on, we only get brief glimpses into the organization, and while some of it is interesting (Thunder Raiko is an enforcer who kills Combatants who snap out of the brainwashing) it's not shown. Shocker is, on the whole, an unknown entity, even as we get to see the POV of monsters and Combatants alike. How big are they? How much of a threat? We know one of their members was killing folks decades ago to hide the conspiracy, but that guy is someone our heroes fight in the present, as well. It's something like twenty or thirty people we see in total, and that's including members added over the course of the show. Why is Shocker real? If Shocker is real, why is Kamen Rider a show? You would think this is the obvious question to answer but no! we must have a shot of the character breasting boobily as she kicks someone in the face! Vital to the story, you see!

In the city of New Orleans, where magic is encoded into the very buildings, a detective is at work hunting down a dangerous serial killer. And along the way, she'll learn about a mysterious figure from the shadow side of New Orleans: the figure known only as the Shadowman.

There's a lot of cool ideas introduced here. From the monkey mayor to the werewolf cop to the magical division of the NOPD, we get a lot of sense for what's normal in this world by what's unremarkable to the characters. And the art is truly wonderful, a twisted, grim view of the monsters that dwell in the dark.

Bloodshot is a super soldier, a man infected with nanites that repair his body, working for a Black Ops group so secret they erase his memories after every job. He's in Japan, fighting vampires. Wait, wha-?

I read a lot of Valiant Comics when they were coming back in 2017-2018, and while I enjoyed a lot of what I read, I found the declining quality to be off-putting and eventually tapped out. But even still, Valiant has a few interesting characters that skirt the line between good and evil I haven't seen a lot of Marvel or DC characters do, and even if Bloodshot is the poster child for the darkness of the 90s, he's the face of it because his stories were good.

This book is fine. This Bloodshot is a different guy and has a different attitude. If you looked at him and said "Hey he looks like Lobo" he kinda feels like Lobo, too, sitting neatly in the middle between Lobo's immoral violence and the original Bloodshot's detached brutality. The book, as well, is not about the dehumanizing aspect of being a super soldier, but is instead about yakuza vampires.

Two arcs: first, Batman and Robin have to go after a demon that has a connection with Bruce's past. Second, they have to go after a man who is planning to kill a number of mob bosses in Gotham, for reasons his own...

I wasn't sure about this one, at first. Joshua Williamson's run was pretty mediocre all the way through, and the fight against Memento wasn't anything I'd write home about, but the ending was great, so I thought I'd stick around.

The last arc is pretty good, and I like that it's an arc that focuses on someone - in this case, the Quiet Man - having enemies in Gotham besides Batman; his arc and motivation have nothing to do with Batman until the Caped Crusader starts messing with his plans.