#Anime on @Tubi: "Wicked City" - A Great Prototype for @StarWars Porn

 

*This blog post was started on October 22, 2021.

An exciting weekend has lead into a stressful work week.

Of course when the manager gets exposed to COVID 19, vaccinated or not, everything goes wrong. A fraudulent check ring has emerged. There is a new person to train. I actually had to figure out how to place holds on check without ever being trained how to. We are frankly all impressed that everything seems hunky dory.

It is fair to complain about the lack of expertise and managerial structure, but for us to come out on the other side in some degree of working order, the team is solid. We may lose the neighbor next to my station, but we know how I feel about them. There is optimism all around, especially when the comic con they went to was in Indianapolis and not Rosemont.

Optimism is a good thing coming off of a fun weekend. I remember placing the staff at OSF's Partial Hospitalization Psych ward on alert when I would return from an AAW weekend. Fun was had when I was in Berwyn. Upon returning to Morton, my mind was in the state that it shall not get better than that.

And, has it? Well, I can say things outside of Captain N cosplay have been better. Today's difficulty will be getting nourishment. There is no reason to complain because I have a podcast recording scheduled. With Fite TV allowing me to watch AEW Rampage anytime I would like, this should not be a problem. The trouble arises because I did not have to go into work today until noon.

Do you think I took an extra hour of preparation to have a meal before a shift without lunch? How much time will I have to eat before the recording when I need to make an alcohol run? On top of all this, I need to open the bank tomorrow. Will I survive the drive to Peoria for the Rivermen's opening weekend?

I guess there being so many questions leaves me with a bit of excitement? Life is not mundane for the moment, and perhaps that is what keeps me going. The moment I know things are going to get dull, I am fucked.

With that said, I am back at the retailer starting November 6.

Until that day, I have the upbeat attitude for a bunch of double features. The podcast I am recording this week with Kodiak Thompson will be about "Event Horizon". To get myself more material, the "Hellraiser" franchise seemed to run parallel to Paul W.S. Anderson's classic from 1997. Shudder allowed me to watch the first two for free.

October 26's episode of "NinetyForChill.com - The #Podcast" has the padding with those two features, but I was still in the mood for "the sights" Pinhead suggested showing me. Signing up for a free trial to AMC+ to see the other eight features in his franchise seemed like a hassle, so I turned to Tubi for Barker-like material. This lead me to revisiting "Wicked City", a feature I did not particularly care for back when I saw it on Starz a decade prior.

I guess giving this feature a second chance comes from my time buying anime on VHS. Renting was rarely an option, so if you dropped $25-30 on a tape, you got to justify the purchase. In other words, desensitizing one self allows for enjoyment of even the most blatant softcore porn that distracts from the narrative. With Yoshiaki Kawajiri film (TV movies in many cases), this is a common practice.

Wicked City (1987)

Taki Renzaburo is a member of the "Black Guard". He serves the interest of all humanity because there is a demon world that exists and needs to be monitored. For millennia there have been peace treaties between the world, but since demons have monstrous powers, a minority of them are not so keen on the idea of live and let live. The Black Guard keeps those radicals in check.

It is time to negotiate another treaty, so both sides are on edge to make sure no one sabotages the proceedings. The most important representative for humanity is the 200+ year old Giuseppe Myart, so the radicals will obviously target him with nearly all the assets at their disposal. With this increased pressure, Taki has been assigned a partner for this guard duty. She is Makie, a Black Guard who not only uses a modeling profession to cover for her real job, but to cover that she is from the Black World.

Myart is obsessed with pointing out Makie's beauty and sexuality to Taki. It may be a challenge for Taki to avoid getting his feeling and passion involved with this mission. Can he keep a clear head to secure the safety of the human race? When Myart is determined to run from his security detail to indulge in the seedier side of Tokyo, there maybe too many variable to succeed.

If your first exposure to a film of Yoshiaki Kawajiri is not an edited for basic cable version, it will be difficult to get past how sexually explicit his features can be. Thanks Syfy for making "Demon City Shinjuku" and "Vampire Hunter D" so accessible. I think they may have shown "Wicked City" a few times on the Saturday morning anime time slot, but I never caught it in that form. Which is probably a good thing because I would imagine the screen would be blurrier than a Barbara Walters's interview.

Needless to say, when I first saw this feature (and when I had rented "Ninja Scroll" from Morton's Movies America) the explicit nature was a turn off. If I wanted hentai, I know where to find that. This took me away from the narrative and just left me being judgmental about the excuses to warrant the director's decision. With this viewing, knowing what to expect allowed me to look past most of this and find an easily accessible narrative.

This feature comes across as knock off fan fiction. "Wicked City" is just pure pulp. Knowing this, Kawajiri plays it up very well. It has the feel of a manga and the action sequences thrive with a minimalist approach. Like Dario Argento's "Suspiria", the color choices make everything pop out at you. Regardless of how you feel about making every moment of this fairy tale revolve around sex, you cannot help but appreciate the art.

As for the dependence on objectifying our heroine, it is far too great. There are some clever scenes with other female beings where you can appreciate the implication of something nonsexual being totally sexual, but these antagonists are not spending 15 minutes being raped. This makes the feature come off as a grindhouse era revenge feature, but only a man can provide it to the victim. Perhaps, this is a cultural issue. I would need to look up the Japanese box office for 1978's "I Spit on Your Grave" to see if that is the case.

The only other way to interpret the story is to think of it as some pervert writing fan fiction where it is about the man showing his dominance while displaying the woman's frailty. You can easily see this as what the Proud Boys (and a lot of downstate men) would have wanted "Rise of Skywalker" to be. It is all about the misunderstood Kylo rescuing an abused Rey. If I was not looking for something with demons it it, I would not have had a reason to give this another chance.

"Wicked City" has moments of looking beautiful, but the immediate need for the story to make that beauty its bitch makes it too insulting to recommend. I will say the other Kawajiri works I have seen get away from being insulting, but the sexualization of elements is something that still gets in the way of appreciating his art. There is a way to tell its story without being so sexualized, and you watch this wishing for that feature.

This time around, "Wicked City's" narrative got old fast. Even if you love the character design and direction, his repetitive nature of wanting to let us know it is hot results in near immediate burn out. A feature should not leave the male audience wondering if they need Blue Chew to get into it.

The Behemoth Post Evangelion 3.0 Pixiv Prime: CrunchyRoll

SiN: An #Anime to Promote an American Video Game

*This blog post was started on October 7, 2021.

I have yet to line up a guest for my podcast "NinetyForChill.com - The #Podcast" this week, but the past few days have felt pretty productive.

A blog each day, sleep has been caught up on, I finally requested that the "libertarian" who works in the next to me stop watching those hate videos.

"I will turn the volume down."

"Thank you."

The request was made after they were chuckling a long with a talking head who was calling all those who have been vaccinated dumb. That is an implication that you think half of your coworkers are dumb. Why do you want to insult us. Once I knew they were a right-wing nut, I had stayed away from political conversation to avoid confrontation.

"It just is not the place for politics."

"I get it, but I am not watching anything harmful."

Is that an attempt to call me a snowflake? I did not respond because the only appropriate one is, "What about all the guilty pleas for January 6th? They claimed videos as their instructions."

We will see how long there is peace. They were working a half day, so they did not get that behind my back time to bitch to our coworkers. Of course, the catty one did announce before she started watching her murder porn, "I will try to keep the volume down" and "That's why I have captions on." It is cool to know that I am not the only one who uses subtitles all the time.

If only HBO Max would keep that consistent. With "Robot Chicken" on my Apple TV, I end up having to put the captions on for each episode. Weed is my path to relaxation when I put Stoop!d Monkey's show on. What do you expect a stoner to be capable of?

With my nightly routine exposed, I may as well transition to last night's DVD.com (Netflix mailer) feature. The awkward meshing of CG and anime to serve as a sequel to a forgotten first-person shooter for Windows 95 could have served as an amusing display for someone who had just partaken in self medication.

This feature must have been a big get for ADV Films in 1999 since "SiN: The Movie" had its trailer attached to all of their VHS releases. They probably did more to promote the franchise that Ritual/Activision did for the game. If only they were quick enough to release it before I lost track of the anime industry, I might have been impressed.

SiN: The Movie (2000)

John Blade is a cybernetic colonel in the HARDCorps, an elite force that primarily works in vice, but after a string of serial kidnapping and murders of young girls, the drug busts are not impressing the media. When the team gets a break in this case, their body count begins to rise. It turns out that the killer is/was a nearly indestructible mutant that can absorb other organic matter. Blade's best friend JC ends up being assimilated as they try to capture the monster, resulting in Blade killing his compatriot in an act of mercy.

The latest kidnapping victim is rescued, but JC's sister, Jennifer C, wants to take control of the case with her military authority. She also wants to bring down Blade for not only his recent failures, but his possible ties to the mob. With the physician over seeing the victim Elise's treatment does not feel she can be moved from the hospital, so nothing can be done investigation wise to find the answers.

This dead end seems to be the ideal time for Elexis Sinclair to act. Using mutants of her creation, she commences an operation to capture the girl. Her target seems to hold the key to unlocking her father's work, creating unstoppable humanoids that would embarrass god's image. SinTek has the politicians in their pockets, so despite the casualties, the HARDCorps hands are tied.

It is up to Blade, his mob ties, and Jennifer to bring down Sinclair. If you are a betting person, I would put your money on the colonel. Sinclair is the reason for Blade being as much machine as human. Her goals also resulted in the death of Blade's father. Did she need to give him any more motivation?

"SiN: The Movie" is a brief piece of action (1 hour) that provides an intriguing enough story that does not bog itself down in exposition like many video game adaptations tend to do. When you have seen the likes of "Battle Arena Toshinden" and "Tekken", you will appreciate the decisions made in terms of storytelling. It is the computer generated dependency that will bug you.

At the turn of the century, anime must have thought that it had become stale because many title try, mostly unsuccessfully to incorporate it into the programs. The problem is, this technology was not experimental at the time, so it should not feel out of place at all. This feature ends up with scenes that present a CG monster, but when the monster attacks, traditional animation is used. If you cannot integrate the new effects seamlessly in, you have the feel of a made for Syfy movie.

What really makes this embarrassing is that anime has been trying to use computer effects since the early '80s. "Golgo 13: The Professional" had computer generated effects in 1983. The reason they work is because it is essentially an aside to the rest of the content. They were not meant to interact directly with the traditional animation. Just because your tech is superior, does not mean you know how to approach it. This ends up muddling a good narrative by distracting us from what the film does right.

What it does right is just abandoning character building. It is kind of like they knew video games were not at the point of two-hour cut scene tutorials. This movie knew it had to end quickly, so it makes our characters deal with the horrors they face. The audience knows it is crazy, and we just become impressed at how well they are dealing with the trauma.

"SiN: The Movie" feels like a fun, over-the-top, horror take on cyberpunk anime. Too bad half of that fun is ridiculing the poor CG effects, but an hour of a "get to the chopper" attitude is amusing enough on its own. If only this could have been dedicated to a console game, because I am not getting a PC to play this.

Wikipedia