Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

I realized there was another list of GWG movies (in a paper book on HK cinema, rather than a website), and I found a few that I hadn't seen yet. Only the first of these is really any good.

Princess Madam (1989). ( Read more... )

Mission of Justice (1992) ( Read more... )

A serious shock! Yes Madam! (1993). ( Read more... )

The Avenging Quartet (1993) ( Read more... )

Madam City Hunter (1993). ( Read more... )

Lacking any better sorting method, I stuck all the "Girls With Guns" movies with "Angel" in the title (of which there were quite a few) into their own folder, and have now watched them all.

Things learned from this experience:
1. Cops have revolvers, criminals have uzis and AK-47s. Somehow it never occurs to the cops to break out heavier weaponry when they are shooting at the bad guys' HQ.
2. Every single time a criminal deal goes down, whether for the purchase of drugs, jewellery, counterfeit currency or guns, one or both sides will inevitably try to kill the other side so they can keep both money and valuables. This is usually done by having confederates jump out of hiding and mow down the other side with sub-machine guns. Sometimes instead someone just produces a machine gun out of hiding and mows down the other side. Yet somehow, despite every single purchase/sale of illegal goods inevitably leaving a room full of dead bodies, there seems to be no shortage of gang members willing to participate in such transactions.
3. If there is the slightest possibility of melodrama, then you can count on it being in there, dialled up to 11.
4. Gun jammed? Out of ammo? Then the obvious answer is to switch to kung fu. Gun knocked out of your hand? Don't bother trying to pick it up again, just switch to kung fu.
5. Early boss fights are only allowed to happen at construction sites, abandoned quarries, or derelict factories. Final boss fights either happen at one of those places, or they sometimes instead happen at a palatial mansion where the big boss lives.
6. *Everything* opaque is completely bulletproof - not just car doors, but also things like couches, the sliding panel doors in Japanese restaurants, and stacks of cardboard boxes all provide 100% safe cover for cops or bad guys to hide behind while the other side pumps a hail of bullets into the object in question.
7. Hong Kong cinema police tactics are even stupider than Hollywood police tactics, and involve a ton of anonymous officers stepping out into the line of fire and getting shot to death.

Angel Enforcers (1989) ( Read more... )

Midnight Angel (1990) ( Read more... )

Angel's Mission (Xian fa zhi ren) (1990) ( Read more... )

Angel Force (Tian shi te jing) 1991 ( Read more... )

Angel Terminators (made 1990, released 1992) ( Read more... )

Angel Terminators 2 (1993)

In Hong Kong cinema, numbered sequels don't necessarily have anything whatsoever to do with the original beyond being vaguely similar in genre and theme and released by the same company. Case in point, this film is utterly different from the previous year's Angel Terminators. With all the drama of the first installment but none of the brutal mysogyny and with a more upbeat ending, this is one I may be keeping in my library. ( Read more... )

The original series of pulp novels is called "miniskirt space pirates," and the anime was released in English as "Bodacious Space Pirates", so you'd think this was a crappy sexist production full of fan service aimed at appealing to arrested adolescent males. It's absolutely not, which is why I'm using the Japanese title up there in the subject.

This is a fun, lighthearted space opera series focusing on girl power, girls working together to overcome adversity, and girls achieving their dreams (which have nothing whatsoever to do with boys or boyfriends). And it is completely devoid of the T&A fanservice bits that marred "Read or Die." The endemic sexism of the Japanese anime industry had to express itself somehow, though, so this lovely feminist series has a title that is almost guaranteed to drive away some of the people who would most appreciate it.

Backstory: In the distant future, humans have colonized the galaxy. A planet orbiting Tau Ceti called Sea of the Morningstar gets tired of being a colony subject to the homeworld, and they launch a war of independence. Lacking a space fleet, they take a page from the 17th century and issue letters of marque to pirates willing to harass the homeworld's fleet. The war is a success, but some bureaucrat made a minor mistake: the letters of marque have no expiration date. Issued to the captains of the pirate ships, they are passed down from parent to child, and you have pirate dynasties, operating with legal sanction.

100 years after the conclusion of the revolution, dozens of the pirate ships chartered during the revolution are still in business. In addition to taking on odd jobs too irregular or too risky for the taste of regular space merchants, the pirate ships get hired by the insurance companies that underwrite interstellar cruise liners. The pirate crews dress up in traditional pirate costumes, raid space liners with guns and swords drawn, and steal valuables from the high class passengers. This is deemed part of the entertainment provided during the voyage, and the cost of hiring the pirates and replacing the stolen valuables is factored into the first class ticket price.

Just prior to the first episode of the series, the pirate captain of the Bentenmaru, one of the first pirate ships commissioned by Sea of the Morningstar, dies. His partner Ririka seems to have decided that a pirate ship was no place to raise a child, so it comes as quite a surprise to 16 year old Marika Kato to learn that she can, if she wants, become the new captain of an honest to gosh pirate ship.

Marika thought she understood her life: she waitressed at an ice cream parlour, attended a fancy girl's high school, and belonged to the space yacht club at the school. Now she has to deal with a pirate crew that isn't quite sure if she has what it takes to command them, and various government agencies and rival pirate ships that are extremely interested in whether or not she plans to assume the mantle of her father (if she doesn't take over the letter of marque, the Bentenmaru's commission will expire and there will be one less pirate ship in the galaxy). Not to mention keeping up with her schoolwork and getting enough sleep.

Fortunately Marika's mom is awesome, her yacht club is full of resourceful girls who have her back, and the Bentenmaru's crew wants her to succeed because they want to keep their pirating gig.

While Read or Die had a few short story arcs to establish characters and then launched into a high drama, high stakes story that took over a dozen episodes to tell, Mouretsu Space Pirates sticks to shorter 2-4 episode stories throughout. The tone is light, the drama and the stakes are real but less nerve-wrackingly intense. Stories alternate between adventures with the yacht club and adventures with the Bentenmaru's crew (which appears to be half female).

Every so often I see people complaining about how North American SF has become too grimdark, too obsessed with dystopias. Japan is one of the places to go for optimistic SF, and this is one example. There doesn't seem to be any poverty in Marika's universe, and crime seems to have been made so rare that people pay to experience the thrill of being robbed. When it is revealed that the president of the yacht club is a lesbian and one of the Bentenmaru's jobs is to aid her lover, this is accepted by everyone without question (although there's quite a bit of blushing and looking away when the reunited lovers embrace).

I strongly recommend this series (26 episodes, plus a movie that feels like another standalone story from the series with a bigger animation budget) to anyone looking for girl-heavy SF that breaks away from the grimdark tone of so much Anglophone SF these days.

After watching the first couple episodes of the new Cosmos, I decided to check out the original and compare them. ( Sagan's Cosmos )

The new Cosmos, in contrast, is a lot more polished and slick... and a lot more cringe-inducing. ( Tyson vs Sagan )

Being a review of William Patterson's "Robert A. Heinlein In dialogue with his century: Vol 1, Learning curve."

I didn't have high expectations for this book -- after reading Jo Walton's critique of its poor fact-checking (and saw the author arguing with the reviewer in the comments of that post, which did not leave me a good impression of him), I knew it wasn't going to be great. Sadly, it failed to even be good. ( TL:DR version: incredibly poor scholarship is incredibly poor )

These failings aren't academic esoterica, but very basic issues of scholarship that anyone trying to write a serious biography really needs to have mastered. And they wouldn't stand out so much if the biography was an interesting and insightful account of Heinlein's life... but it isn't. ( TL:DR version: it's somehow simultaneously boringly overlong and breezily superficial )

Right from the first page of the introduction, we learn that this book is going to be hagiographical to a fault, when Patterson, with a straight face, claims that the day Heinlein died was comparable to such events as the Challenger disaster, the Kennedy assassination, or September 11, 2001.

As best I can tell, the only reason it was not rejected by the publisher is that Heinlein has a massive following of rabid fans who do see him as a saint, if not a god, and that it is an "authorized" biography that benefited from extensive interviews with Mrs Heinlein before her death.

As a massive compilation of notes and source materials for a biography, this book is great. As a biography, it's piss poor. If you are a Heinlein fan and want to know the story of his life, do your wallet a favour and check it out from the library -- and then be prepared to do a lot of skimming.