Really Late Monthly Links Round Up

It doesn’t mat­ter that we’re halfway through June already — there’s still time to gather up all the stuff we’ve been look­ing at at SPK and throw together a post of to let the inter­net know about it. So to make up for our extreme late­ness, we will be doing two edi­tions, one from each of us.

For the most part the reason that this post is late has a lot to do with com­ics. Spe­cific­ally Seinen Manga which I can’t seem to get enough of right now. Since there are so many of the things out there it’s proven dif­fi­cult to stop

Luck­ily (or unluck­ily) for me, as I am not Japan­ese and some­times find it hard to tell which title will be what I’m look­ing for, recom­mend­a­tion sites like Anime Planet exist and their easy to use data­base sys­tem, though small right now, makes it very easy to pick out some­thing new.

Just to get you star­ted here are a few of the things it’s poin­ted me towards this month:

Dragon Head is post-apocalyptic, dark and creepy but oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult to cater­gor­ise but def­in­itely worth a look.

Ber­serk requires a word of warn­ing: there are just over 20 years of it to read so it could take a while to trawl through it. It’s also a fairly bru­tal read focus­ing as it does on evis­cer­a­tion and sexual viol­ence towards almost everything so if these things are not to your taste it may be best avoided. How­ever it is a bril­liantly drawn, engross­ing and stun­ning in it’s scale and ima­gin­a­tion. There are also a lot of draw­ings of horses.

Hotel is a short but beau­ti­ful one-shot comic. If it doesn’t make you cry a little you are prob­ably not human.

If you’re inter­ested in any of these titles, or any manga at all and you’re look­ing for a place to try them out for your­self then you can head over to Manga­Fox which is eas­ily the best site of it’s kind I have found so far.

Movie wise The Good, The Bad and The Weird is released on DVD this month. If you like ana­chron­isms, trick rid­ing, and West­erns set in 1940s Man­churia you will prob­ably like this movie which stars Kunh-ho Song star of The Host, and Park Chan Wook’s Thirst (which recently premiered at Cannes). It may not always make a lot of sense but it is visu­ally stun­ning, enter­tain­ing and oddly hilarious.

Another movie of interest is Moon which is on lim­ited release in the USA right now and which will even­tu­ally arrive in the UK on the 17th of July. Star­ring Kevin Spacey as GERTY, a whim­sic­ally creepy HAL-esque com­puter this could be like a watch­able ver­sion of epic but frus­trat­ing 2001.

Lastly a new series of the long run­ning Red vs Blue starts tonight at 9pm CST (that’s 3am for all you UK people). I can’t say a lot of about a machin­ima series put together with Halo 3 because I neither own an XBox 360 or enjoy any­thing to do with Microsoft, but I can endorse Red Vs Blue as the only good thing to do with both of those things. The pre­vi­ous five sea­sons and their com­pan­ion mini series have been con­sist­ently hil­ari­ous and are even enjoyed by my mother which should go to prove that a prior know­ledge of the Mas­ter Chief is not required to enjoy them.