BECK live action movie!

 

One of my favourite mangas and animes ever was turned into a live action movie, starring some of my favourite actors! Needless to say I was ecstatic when I found out 1½ years ago. And ever since then, yes for one and a half years, I've been ecstatically waiting for the dvd-release.

And it's finally come!

And I've finally seen it! :D:D:D:D:D:D

And it was awesome!!!

And I love it!!

To most people this will not say much though so I will try to explain why. The first reason is simply because I love BECK. The story and the characters are undisputedly awesome and the live action does not let them down. All the actors have been chosen carefully and not only do they look like the manga characters, they act the same way, but somehow without making them manga in their manner and thereby making them seem more like manga characters than real people.

The crazy ones, like Chiba and Ryuusuke, are just as crazy, (and post-it man as Chiba is pure win) but in a manner more suited for live characters. Koyuki is as awkward as ever but not as exaggerated as it sometimes is in the manga. Saku and Tairas characters don't take a lot of room but they do an awesome support and live up to my image of them.

All the other supportive characters like Maho and Saitou (the actor here really looks like the manga character, too bad his story is cut out) are really good as well. I give them a special bonus for having foreigners playing all the parts of foreigners, and the man playing Sykes is awesome!! O__O Just his appearance is reason enough to love him. :D

How can you not love this!

A lot of money has gone into the production of this film, and you can tell. It's really well-made and keeps up a high quality throughout. Just the fact that all of the people that are supposed to speak English actually do and speak it perfectly adds a lot to the value, at least for a foreign fan like me. :)

 Also the props. Lucille (the guitar) is made to look exactly like in the manga.

 

There is a lot of English in the movie, and it's good enough for me to wonder if they dubbed the Japanese actors. XDD Which is a good thing. And Ryuusuke and Maho actually speak English with each other and not the fake kind they use in Nodame which is "we're really speaking another language but we thought you'd be sick of not understanding so we make it Japanese, you can just pretend it's some other language"

The music! I've always loved the BECK music and the movie is no exception, I want the soundtrack! The songs are awesome BUT (and this is a big but and the only downside to the movie in my opinion) you never get to hear Koyuki sing... To keep up the illusion of his awesome voice they've muted all his singing and just play the background music and show peoples reactions... I know that this is the best way of keeping the illusion of a perfect voice real, cause no matter which voice they'd used it would never live up the the expectations but I'd be willing to give up the illusion to get the vocals of the songs... At one point you get the lyrics in English on the screen, the background music and Koyuki lip-syncing the words. It's kind of frustrating, I want to hear the song! But this was the only part of the movie I didn't like.

It is well-made, the English is good, the story isn't rushed (it's 2½ hours long so it shouldn't be) and I enjoyed every moment of watching it. I admit I'm totally biased, considering I loved it before I saw it but it didn't let me down even though I had high expectations which speaks in it's favour. I really recommend watching it and even though there are no subtitles yet anyone of medium Japanese skills will be able to follow without any problems. I'm not that good and I never feel lost and, as I've said, there is quite a lot of English which helps.

All in all; I will love this movie forever! :D (and I don't care if anyone disagrees!)

Review of Max Misty Green lenses in green eyes

A few weeks ago me and my friends ordered coloured lenses from pinkyparadise.com and we got them just in time to use for KodachiKun (which is a small convention that Mangakai Lund arranges once a year). When I was browsing aroung trying to choose which lenses to buy I searched for reviews of them and there are a lot of them but I can hardly find any that features people with naturally blue, green or grey eyes. So let's fix that! :D

 First of all, ordering from pinkyparadise works well, the order arrived in Sweden within two weeks (using the cheaper form of transport) and we got one free super cute lens-case for every pair of ordered lenses. :3

Free stuff always makes me happy.

I normally wear glasses so I ordered the lenses with strength and after some searching around for how to convert the perscription for my glasses I settled for this:

Right: -3.50 ---> -3.00

Left -3.75 ---> 3.25

I heard that lowering by half would be good and since I didn't want them too strong I went for that. The strength is not perfect, it's a bit weak but at least I see well enough to get around. I wouldn't have them for every-day use but for once in a while it works fine though I think I'll increase it by 0.25 for the next pair I buy.

These are my very first pair of lenses ever and it was both harder and easier to use them than I thought. I have quite dry eyes so I was a bit worried and after wearing them for several hours my eyes did become dry but that might just be a case of getting used to it. But it was really nice walking around without glasses, I haven't done that since fourth grade. :)

Anyway, on to the pictures (which is probably the most interesting part for potential buyers of these lenses).

 

This is what my eyes look like without lenses...

 (this picture was taken at the end of the day so my make-up is falling 

and I look really tired, please ignore these facts)

 

...and this is with the lenses.

Looks: 5/5

It's a big difference from my normal colour and since these lenses become a little yellow towards the middle they blend well with my eyes. On this close-up they're more noticeable but from a distance and when the light is not so bright you don't see it as much. 

With these lenses it's apparent that they're not real, they don't look natural but they give a great effect and really enlarges and defines your eyes. This would be the only minus about the looks, since they're so unnatural I won't wear them just anywhere but instead wait for a time when unnatural-looking eyes is OK.

Comfort: 4/5

They're OK to wear, they became uncomfortable when my eyes dries up but that might just be me so don't make or break your decision on that. :) Before that it was all good, I felt  them but didn't feel any discomfort.

Overall: 5/5

I really am very pleased with them and can't wait for the next time to wear them!

 Photos from a distance, thank you Kajsa for taking lovely pictures as always!

Sunao ni Narenakute

This is a Japanese dorama about a group of people who meet over twitter and their relations to each other. This kind of theme is quite common in Japanese doramas; a group of people who didn’t know each other before become friends and these new relations change their life. But they always make me wonder; didn’t these people have friends before this?

These people don’t know each other when they first meet, yet they depend on each other from the start, when a major crisis happens they call the person they have only known for a week… New friends is always nice but if something happened to me I wouldn’t call a new acquaintance; for more than one reason. Apart from me being uncomfortable with a person I hardly know, consider the other person, a new friend you’ve only met once calls you and wants you to (as in this dorama) accompany her to the maternity clinic and pretend to be the father of her child. I would be extremely suspicious and feel the stalker warning light coming on. But maybe that’s just me…

Ignoring this part of the dorama, (maybe Japanese people don't have friends and bond very quickly with strangers?) it has a nice feel to it. The characters are well developed and feel real. They also have a nice chemistry between them, especially Eita and Ueno Juri, but they’ve co-acted in several doramas already so they’re probably comfortable with each other. I also want to give a special mention to Mr. Park (I don't know his real name) who did a great acting job and made me find him adorable even though I don't like him as a person.

This doramas strength doesn’t lie in the plot, which is quite a mediocre plot about love and relationships, but in its characters and their chemistry. It reminds me of Love Shuffle and Last Friends in it’s atmosphere, though Love Shuffle had even greater chemistry between the characters and Last Friends had a stronger story.

All in all I enjoyed it and would recommend it to people who enjoy human doramas.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This book was recommended to me by a few friends who said it is awesome so I borrowed it and read it. The basic story is that Armageddon is upon us and the Antichrist is brought to earth to eventually destroy it while heaven and hell fight each other. The problem is that an angel and a demon who have lived on earth since it's creation about 6000 years ago are quite fond of it and would like to keep it around. They both try to influence the Antichrist during his upbringing but when he turns eleven they notice that the boy they thought was the Antichrist is in fact just a normal human. So where is the Antichrist and can they stop him from destroying the world?

Apart from this there are quite a few sub-plots, we get to follow the four horsemen on their journey towards the centre of destruction, there is a witch whose ancestor predicted the end of the world and a witch-hunter that are also involved, and many more but I liked the parts that involved Crowley and Aziraphale the best. Their relation to each other is interesting. They are angel and demon which makes them enemies but, as Crowley puts it, “an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.” They are the only ones on earth that don’t die and so they hang around each other, besides they are very similar and when Crowley does something like changing paint-ball guns into real guns so that people really begin killing each other Aziraphale’s reprimand is more like a habitual one than one with real conviction behind it. In the same way Crowley tolerates when Aziraphale does good. They are like an old couple who put up with each others bad habits for the sake of the general peace of the relationship. These two characters made the book for me, I love them. The rest of the book with all its sub-plots and, truthfully speaking, quite boring characters were mostly long-wound and made me loose the urge to keep reading.

The book in general is quite slow-paced and with quite detailed descriptions of all the characters doings, especially the few hours before the supposed end of the world. Some of these parts seem to be included for the sole sake of wittiness, which is confirmed in the interview with the authors in the end where they say the goal of what they wrote was to make each other laugh. The book is admittedly witty and smart in an amusing way but wittiness for its own sake can push it over the line and make it tedious.

The concept is smart and clever and the way the Christian theory of evolution is used is spot on. It is a well-written book and I like the wittiness, even if it goes overboard at times. Good Omens is a well-loved book around the world which it could not have become without being as well-written as it is, but its strength lies more in the technical skills of the writers than the content of the story. On a whole I liked the book, if not all parts of it, but to me it will not become the tattered worn copy that has been read and re-read dozens of times.