Not-Lovecraft, random anime & the insanity of fandom yet again

[narcasse]

John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness is shite in a box if you’re looking for a nice, serious Lovecraft inspired film. On the other hand if you’re looking to spend an evening with the lads throwing popcorn at the screen and doing Haedraline impressions then it’s fabulous. If you’ve seen the special effects in one John Carpenter film, you’ve seen them all. All his monsters look the same regardless of whether or not they’re eldritch horrors or vampires or just about anything else.
Depending on your mood it might be fun to be able to yell ‘Innsmouth’, ‘Dunwich’ or ‘Wilbur Whateley’s brother’ at the screen but aside from that there’s not much else of value to it: even Charlton Heston’s appearance in the film wasn’t all that entertaining. I also suspect that I’m highly resentful of a film with such a similar title to In the Mountains of Madness that didn’t feature anything even vaguely reminiscent of a shoggoth. Tuesday was rather disappointed too and he’s terribly philosophical about this sort of thing for the most part.

The thing is, my biggest complaint has to be the fact that the entire focus of the film was inexpertly elucidated only after an hour and twenty minutes and even then it wasn’t terribly astounding. It’s that old ‘what if we were in fact fiction written by someone else’ idea and to be honest, it’s not exactly a new idea at all. It could have been handled well but it just wasn’t. It’s an interesting idea until you start thinking in terms of viability and the fact that even if you were a character in a work of fiction it wouldn’t matter to you any more than anything else because your life is filtered entirely through the lens of your own perception.
If I was a character in a set of internationally best selling novels about my life, it wouldn’t matter unless I could climb out of the novels and interact beyond them. You could get to the twentieth novel in the series about that charming, handsome, somewhat arrogant PolSci with stunning hair and it still wouldn’t matter to said PolSci if his world comprised entirely of the text in the books.

In the semi-darkness he casually plucked the wine glass from the desk and in a rather theatrically overdone motion swallowed the remainder of it’s contents down, savouring the faint acidity against his lips before turning his attention back to the light of the screen and musing on his typing. Not that the content bothered him all that much anyway. Figment of the imagination or otherwise you still had to pay your train fare or so he was fond of saying.



The first episode of Witchblade on the other hand was rather… jiggly and featured what looked suspiciously like a remade where they’d left off the human bits by mistake. The claws sported by the actual witchblade wielder though were the perfect reason to keep watching. There’s nothing like steel claws to cheer you up after some bad not-Lovecraft really.

Also Ayatsuri Sakon subs seem to have picked up again quite delightfully enough and XXXholic is still utterly charming at least.


And lastly to round off, the Phantom of the Opera fandom which seems to have suffered quite severely with the onset of the most recent film gets its batshit on once again.
Why are all these teens wanting to marry their favourite homicidal characters and live in Stepford-esque domestic bliss anyway? Though maybe that’s the key actually, the whole mechanical wives aspect of it; they look like improved versions of the original where ‘improved’ means having been changed to the author’s specifications and they do exactly as you say. I suppose I can understand the appeal of it but shouldn’t they just acquire minions for that? They’d involve far less effort to maintain certainly.



Also, I want this and I will call him ‘Peaches’.