Category: Reviews

KLM in-flight entertainment and more

I took a couple of flights with KLM over the holidays. Being in the air is no excuse for keeping up with your language skills, so I took a look at what they have on offer. Their in-flight entertainment options are pitiful compared to Emirates, so I wouldn’t pick them for a long-haul flight, but the price was good and they actually traveled when a lot of airlines were cancelling flights, plus I felt very safe with them so I’m not complaining.

First they had this “Learn a language” program apparently given to them by Berlitz. It’s extremely basic though, just a few words like “Good morning” and “Help me”, nothing interesting for any serious language learner. The real problem with them for Cantonese was some random, crazy romanization system they pulled from goodness knows where. I really should have written down some examples because they were horrible. Think of something like “fay gai chong” for airport “fei gei cheung”, stuff that none of the common systems would ever write. And I hear Berlitz charge a lot of money for their programs. Is this the kind of useless lesson buyers typically get for their money? Sad.

The other thing I did was to see what kind of movies they were showing. I managed to find two in Cantonese, “Adventure of the King” about an Emperor who goes gallivanting around town and loses his memory, and “City Under Siege“, supposedly featuring a circus troop that has gone crazy and can only be stopped by the clown. Only in Hong Kong films, guys. My intention was to watch both of them, but after the first 20 minutes or so of “Adventure of the King”, I was so bored and sleepy I couldn’t keep going. They weren’t even trying hard to be funny, I guess they just assumed the setting would work for them or something. And it just dragged on and on with the silliness instead of moving the story forward. Maybe I’ve just outgrown mo lei tau? Dunno, I still like Stephen Chow though.

So essentially all four flights passed without me getting any serious learning done. At least I got home safely and my other studies are going well, right? That’s what really counts.

Cantonese movies!

I had two flights on Emirates Airlines over the weekend, so since I was trapped in that uncomfortable metal box for almost 15 hours total, I decided to spend it studying. So I chose to watch the Cantonese in-flight entertainment and listen to Cantopop on the music station. September is Jacky Cheung month! And there was Sam Hui and Anita Mui as well! They also have an awesome Japanese selection as well, 15 hours wasn’t enough to listen to most of it. The movies I watched were both pretty bad though.

The first one was “Future X-Cops” (未來警察 in Cantonese) starring Andy Lau. What a horrible film. The premise is like Terminator mixed with all the other Back-to-the-Future kind of films, except it’s all over the place and doesn’t even make much sense. Basically Andy’s wife gets killed in 2080 trying to foil an attempt on a Professor’s life. Afterwards he’s sent back in time to protect that Professor as a kid because the assassins have gone back to try and kill him. There are so many problems with the premise that I don’t even know where to start, but it’s all good because the story takes second place to the horrible, horrible effects, bad acting and lame attempts at comedy. I really like Andy Lau, but if he thinks this is a good movie he needs to retire, like, yesterday.

The second movie was called “Beauty on Duty.” Clever name for a rather dumb movie. It’s a Hong Kong remake of Sandra Bullock’s “Miss Congeniality”, not exactly the best movie in the world to begin with. The writers decided to give it a mo lei tau spin, so it’s a silly, hokey hodgepodge of misadventures: electronic crocodiles, ‘Genetic Self-Control Disposition’, running around with a dead body, etc. That sort of thing. Eventually the bad guys are foiled with no loss of life and everything ends happily ever after. I suppose.

There was a third movie running called “Hot Summer Days”, but after the fail that was the first two, I decided to stick to music and napping instead. After all, learning a language isn’t about forcing yourself to do things you normally wouldn’t. It’s about having fun. Right?

Akkake no Itoko – Hagio Moto manga review

Grhh…Banana Fish put me off manga for a while, in a way only truly annoying series can do. After a while I went through my collection of one-volume mangas for something new to try and settled on Akkake no Itoko by Hagio Moto. She’s pretty famous in Japan as one of the pioneers of thoughtful shoujo manga like AA’, but she’s not so well known in the west.

Unfortunately this collection of short stories is not one of her best. Maybe, just maybe, all this material was fresh when she published it back in 1970-whatever, but now they’re all silly, stale and shallow. The title one-shot is pretty good though, about a girl who moves to the countryside with her seemingly-Caucasian cousin Noelle (lots of Caucasian-types in this collection) and has to learn that there’s a lot behind her cousin’s happy-go-lucky facade.

The rest of the collection is lame. IIRC there’s this one called “Marmalade-chan” about a girl who looks like a boy, who gets involved with a fashion school and turns out to have been “pretty all along.” The next one is called “Mia” and it’s about a girl with a boy’s name who is put in a boy’s dormitory by accident and has to keep up the facade. It was so stupid I couldn’t read it but hey, maybe she was the first do to that hidden-girl-among-boys shtick, who knows. …And I stopped reading after that, even though the fourth story showed comedic promise I just couldn’t take the simplistic storylines and pat resolutions any more.

Aspiring mangakas might find the last story about mangaka struggling to come up with drafts interesting, but it seemed a little too longwinded to me so I just browsed through it. Still, I haven’t given up on Hagio Moto yet, someday I’ll find out just what it is that makes her special. It’s not Akakke no Itoko, for sure.

Banana Fish vol. 1-3 manga review

You ever had a manga you knew was good…but the main character was such a <bleep> that you couldn’t enjoy it? I like a good conspiracy theory/ragtag gang-on-the-run manga as much as anyone else, but when the protagonist is about as sympathetic as Jack the Ripper, it just ruins everything.

So this <rather unpleasant guy> named Ash had an older brother who took some bad drugs in ‘Nam and ended up shooting his whole unit. Older bro ends up as a vegetable who can only say “Banana Fish” and Ash winds up as a minor gang boss in New York. Eventually he finds a clue to the whole Banana Fish deal, but there are plenty of people – namely mafia boss Papa Dino, who will do anything to keep him from finding the truth. Etc, etc.

Banana Fish has got angst and violence – physical and sexual (how many times must Ash be raped before the mangaka is satisfied), it’s got action, mystery, suspense, tragedy and more. And everything moves along at a good pace, not too fast, not too slow. By the end of volume 3 Ash has already lost his best friend, his brother, his gang, he’s been to jail and back, he’s got a new Japanese best friend (I love how Japanese always self-insert no matter how improbable the location) and he’s gone home to trace his brother’s past.

…And that’s how far I think I’m ever going to get because I can’t STAND Ash. He’s the most incredibly stuck-up prat, ever! He’s supposed to be so smart, but most of the trouble he gets into is because he just won’t listen when people tell him not to do something. “No, Ash! It’s a trap!” means “It’s a trap!” you numbskull, don’t go dashing out there all half-cocked and act surprised when you get arrested and sent to jail. And then yeah, he shows flashes of brilliance in jail, but he wouldn’t even have BEEN in jail if he wasn’t such a nitwit in the first place. What a moron! “Oh, but he was raped as a kid, you’re supposed to feel sorry for him!” Yeah…NO. In fact the mangaka, Akimi Yoshida, clearly realizes that Ash’s level of —holery exceeds the pity point, so she keeps revising the age of his first rape earlier and earlier, wait he was 10, no wait he was 7, no wait… Give it a rest lady, your main character is a twit.

Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia where I can read up on everything that happened without raising my blood pressure. Adios, Banana Fish!

Tsukuyomi ~Moon Phase~ vol. 1 manga review

Another stupid manga, I won’t waste too much time writing about this one. Kouhei is a photographer of spiritual phenomena. He runs into this loli named Hazuki in Germany and she tries to make him her slave by biting him. After some hijinks involving a cursed castle, Kouhei and Hazuki end up back in Japan together. She turns out to be a vampire, and Kouhei promises to help her find her mother, partly because he has unresolved mommy issues of his own.

If Tsukuyomi ~Moon Phase~ doesn’t sound too exciting from my description, that’s because it’s not. Hazuki’s too stupid to be a manipulative loli, too young to be a convincing tsundere and too bad-tempered to be a sympathetic character. As for Kouhei, the only thing he’s got going for him is that he’s invulnerable to hypnosis and stuff, but that’s because he’s DENSE, nothing else. So you’ve got a series that revolves around a relationship between two unlikeable characters…is anyone but me seeing the problem here or do you need a few more hints?

After licensing so many bad titles like this, no wonder Tokyopop is in trouble. Moving on…