Where else can you get more TarsTarkas.NET than TarsTarkas.NET? Try Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!, where I have a guest post up, a review of Bikinis Y Rock! It’s the story of clothing company rivals, hippies, and bands playing covers of songs while teenagers writhe their bodies. Also Bikinis are involved.
Do you want Search?
Random Post
Search
Search
Nuigulumar Z (ヌイグルマーZ) with Rina Takeda as a fighting pink teddy bear hits trailer!
Gothic Lolita Battle Bear is the subtitle for Noboru Iguchi’s latest flick, Nuigulumar Z (ヌイグルマーZ), and that is accurate as the day is long. For that pink bear becomes Rina Takeda and faces will be kicked! Plus, it looks like the bear comes to life as a puppet, which means this could easily have been directed by Minoru Kawasaki!
Nuigulumar Z is based on an novel Hōsei Ningen Nuigurumā by Kenji Ohtsuki, which is based on a song by his band Tokusatsu called “Tatakae! Nuigulumar”.
Shoko Nakagawa will play Yumeko Ayukawa, nicknamed Dameko, a lolita-wearing girl who merges with her teddy bear Buusuke to form Nuigulumar. Rina Takeda will play the merged Nuigulumar, complete with pink bear costume. In addition, Takeda also will play a villain character named Kill Billy. Which means we might see Takeda battle herself! Who will win…
Wang Leehom Wang is Chinese superhero Annihilator
Movement lines…ATTACK!
Taiwanese singer/actor Wang Leehom has signed on to be The Annihilator, a superhero created by Stan Lee and Dan Gilroy, and the focus of a multimedia campaign including a film and comic books. The Annihilator will be shot in English (but they’ll probably be some Chinese in the film) and is budgeted at over $100 million.
Stan Lee talks up the story as another superhero story, except the hero just happens to be Chinese. The film will be made with an eye towards worldwide box office (and the casting of a star popular in China and about a Chinese hero is a sure fire way to get access to the lucrative Chinese box office!)
“The Annihilator” will tell the story of a young Chinese man forced to leave his hometown in mainland China amid dramatic circumstances. After time in the United States, he returns home in the guise of the Annihilator, who uses his extraordinary powers to save the world and also explore his roots. One official description added that the character would be “a young Chinese man given a second chance as an international superhero, who returns home to mete out justice.”
This is an interesting play, because there isn’t an established hero to base the film on, yet the budget is very large. Still, the Chinese aspect should fuel enough money to turn a tidy profit, and if the film is good, probably much more than that. With the small amount of films with an Asian male lead, The Annihilator is also a welcome piece of good news. Here is hoping this hero is not a zero.
Even his album’s title knows he’s a hero!
Artemis Fowl is the next "Next Harry Potter" book to film series you haven't read yet
I’m Harry Potter with goggles and fashion sense, suckers!
Though from the look of these books, I could read them all in a week. But I’m too busy playing a game. Of thrones. At the moment to read them, but I’ll have plenty of time before the first entry hits theaters. At this moment, all we know about Artemis Fowl the film is that it’s happening.
Plenty of YA books have come and gone from the theaters without making even the slightest of ripples. No star and no director means I can’t call it the new failure, but at the rate studios have been churning out YA fiction books into film to try to find the next Harry Potter (and the next Twilight), eventually something will end up making bank. Sure, Percy Jackson inched by to somehow score a sequel, but Eragon, The Golden Compass, and Alex Rider are among the dead.
Artemis Fowl is an antihero who does both bad and good things, this status can serve to give the series a different flavor from some of the other fantasy fair. Or they’ll just screw it up. Have any of you read the series? If so, do you think Hollywood can turn it into a good film, or will they be using Artemis Fowl as a tax writeoff?
Also because I’m a jerk, I hope that “foul language” is one of the MPAA warnings about Artemis Fowl.
K-Fried-C: Killer Joe’s Reflection of Human Interaction in the Age of Social Media
K-Fried-C: Killer Joe’s Reflection of Human Interaction in the Age of Social Media
2011
Written by Tracy Letts
Directed by William Friedkin
Social media has literally changed the entire world. From creating uncountable communities great and small, to expanding our reach and allowing connections the world over, to creating billions of collars of customer data, social media is an ever-evolving juggernaut that reworks the fabric of society in a heartbeat.
As social media changes how we interact with each other online, the effects spread to our offline interactions. Character dynamics in stories reflect society, and as culture curves towards more online activity and more online influence, it is reflected in print and film. The expansion and fragmentation of social media is reflected in the Smith family in Killer Joe, as the genie is unleashed and cannot be contained, forever changing their lives in unexpected and tragic ways.
The Smith family relationships are already fractured as the film begins. Ansel is on his second wife, Sharla, and their favorite hobby is being disgusted at each other. Chris begins the film being thrown out of his mother’s place, having committed violence against his mother after she stole his drugs, causing him to owe far too much money to a local gangster. And Dottie is always in her own little world, rapidly switching from childlike innocence to implausible omnipresent knowledge at the drop of a hat.
Instead of “likes” and “retweets”, the Smith family deals in “anger” and “screaming” They are the living embodiment of getting into a political argument on Facebook, where suddenly your relatives that you’ve loved forever start spouting abhorrent viewpoints that make you question their humanity. The Smiths scream and some openly hate each other. Chris and Sharla do nothing but scream insults at one another, barely containing their contempt to just throttle the other. As internet discourse takes over, the veil that polite society limits such squabbles to sniping and occasional remarks is long abandoned. In order to get any point across, the easiest way is to yell and scream the loudest. As the family’s arguments increase in volume, the screaming gets louder and more violent. Like online, no one filters what they think, everyone just ramps things up.
Dreams for Sale
Dreams for Sale
aka 夢売るふたり aka Yume Uru Futari
2012
Written and directed by Miwa Nishikawa
In the blink of an eye, flames reduce a couple’s restaurant to ash, and with it their future. Struggling with depression, dejection and suffering at lower jobs at subpar restaurants, a drunken affair sparks a scheme that sees them become grifters to earn the money needed to buy a nice restaurant. Nothing is that simple, and their fall from grace exposes their dark sides. Dreams for Sale is a tale of struggling to survive and doing bad while excusing it as a greater good.
Director and writer Miwa Nishikawa doesn’t just tell a normal con artist tale, the story of Kanya and Satoko Ichizawa (Sadao Abe and Takako Matsu) is only one side of the coin. The focus in Dreams for Sale is not only on the couple, but on the female victims as well. The movie is their tales just as much as the two leads.
Nishikawa wanted to write a film that dealt with issues of women, their life choices and their feelings of anxiety over whether they made the right decisions with their lives. With the various women who are targets, Nishikawa explores the social consequences of their lives, from discarded mistresses to empty beds to vengeful exes to single mothers struggling to hold things together to driven athletes on the cusp of giving up. This focus is defined in the opening and closing montages that are tiny scenes into the lives of women (some random, some central to the storyline).
