Hipster Antagonism Day

Every couple of years a terrible doom descends upon the offices of the tastemakers at Pitchfork Media, and to a lesser extent those of their second rate counterparts at the Onion AV Club. For every now and again, when the conditions are just right, a new Radiohead album is released. (For the purposes of this discussion, we're going to treat Thom Yorke's solo record as if it were a Radiohead album.)

You see, when such an album is released the hippest of the hip find themselves in a seemingly inescapable quandary. On one hand Radiohead are one of those most repugnant and vile beasts - a popular band, but on the other hand they achieved this popularity while deliberately moving to a less commercial sound. And it must also be considered that they have a more or less unassailable status down on the 'hipster street'. Caught between these opposing forces, the beleaguered music writers must figure out how to write a review (and write a review they must, for they have a reputation to maintain and ignoring such an important release would not go uncommented) without being seen to either non-ironically enjoy popular music or to appear as if they 'don't get' an unconventional band. So what can they do? The answer is obvious once it is presented: write a few snide paragraphs mocking both the Radiohead faithful who would spend good money to hear Thom Yorke read the phone book and mainstream audiences who can't handle the quirky direction Radiohead has gone in over the last few years, while conveniently forgetting to offer an opinion of their own on whether it's any good or not.

And lest I be found guilty of what I'm condemning: Yes, Thom Yorke's album is great. It somehow manages to take moody glitchy electronica accompanied by his trademark wailing and turn it into agreeable listening.

The hipster elite save their real venom for other bands, in particular Muse. For a long time I couldn't figure out where all the Muse Hate was coming from, after all, I consider them the closest thing to indie amongst my music collection. However after listening to their new album Black Holes and Revelations it finally clicked: Muse are the new Pink Floyd, and as such they shall forever be the Moby Dick to hipsterisms Captain Ahab.

In order to understand the reasons behind this we need to go on a little historical digression. Many years ago Sid Vicious famously called Pink Floyd a bunch of dinosaurs and used them as an example of the kind of music that punk came about in order to destroy (members of the Sex Pistols later admitted that they were actually OK with Pink Floyd, but they were a convenient target with which to refer to 70s stadium rock as a whole). Too effete to like real punk music, hipsters nevertheless revere it as the forerunner to their beloved 80s new wave, and every throw away statement by a real punk is therefore a holy statute to be followed without question. Since the real Pink Floyd are sadly retired, the hatred is transferred to Muse.

*** Wildebeest Asylum Handy Hint ***

If you're planning on going to a party or a bar where you may encounter hipsters, bring along a copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall in order to protect yourself from unwanted attention by these scourges of the music scene. If one approaches you, simply brandish the album with all the strength of your spiritual convictions, and this unparalleled icon of classic rock indulgence (Led Zeppelin may work in a pinch too) will cause the hipster to retreat into its cardigan, leaving you to either make your escape or to beat it to death with a blunt object, as you see fit.

*****

It is therefore with great sadness that I must concede a lone victory to Pitchfork Media and the hipster community as a whole. You are correct. The new Muse album sucks arse. It is an overwrought parody of the greatness of Origin of Symmetry, Hullabaloo and Absolution, all of which by the way, you are still completely wrong about.

Yes It's Actually Called The Chumby

It's some kind of ipod-esque gizmo for super geeks.

The Bonehunters

by Steven Erikson

Erikson has thus far managed to overcome the problems that most epic fantasy writers suffer from and keep his series of six hundred page door stop novels from getting bogged down in detail or overwhelmed by the huge number of subplots and secondary characters. Unfortunately in The Bonehunters (the sixth in what will eventually be a ten book series) signs start to appear of such a deterioration.

To be fair he hasn't become Robert Jordan just yet, a lot happens in this book but while the earlier entries worked as standalone novels as well as part of the series, The Bonehunters consists of individual scenes and setpieces unrelated to one another that feel just like events and plot points that Erikson has to check off before we can get to the good stuff at the end of the story. And in true epic fantasy style the characters take their damn time moving from plot point to plot point, I was sick and tired of 'trekking through the desert' scenes by the end. At least when the characters arrive where they're going the action scenes still contain everything that fans of the series love, which is to say lots of shit getting fucked up by absurdly bad assed heroes and villains.

As a whole the book was still fun to read, but didn't meet the standards set by the series so far. However most long fantasy series' suffer from 'middle book syndrome' and I remain hopeful that later episodes will continue to satisfy as the overall story arc begins to descend towards what should be a fucking intense climax.

Erikson keeps the real world subtext coming again in this book. The last book, Midnight Tides, made its primary villain an aggressively capitalist, expansionist empire that had more than a few similarities with the USA. This book reveals more about the plans of the series' ultimate villain, the Crippled God, whose promises of redemption after death in exchange for suffering on Earth are clearly meant to be uncharitable interpretations of Christian beliefs (or those of Abrahamic religions in general). This commentary is supported by more than a few soliloquies by primary characters regarding the ultimately harmful nature of any brand of religion. Even in a world where gods are provably and unavoidably real, promising devotion to an all powerful being who sits by and lets mortals suffer in this fallen existence is not only irrational but morally suspect. Jesus and Mohammad may not literally stalk the desert themselves deliberately spreading war and disease as the gods in this book do, but the analogy is pretty much spot on.

For the Role Players

700 things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG (via Lore Sjöberg)

"388. Pursue means chase after, not just make called shots to the knees.
389. My samurai is not required to commit seppuku if he fails to hit the monster.
390. My character's background must be more indepth than a montage of Queen lyrics.
391. A starting paladin has no conceivable use for industrial lubricant."

Catch Up

Okay look lively you lot. We've gotten way behind and there's a whole lot to catch up on. Here's a quick summary of everything I've read, seen and listened to in the last few months.

Howls Moving Castle

Generally very well done (and as with all Miyazaki films the animation is spectacular) but the story was kind of dull.

Layer Cake

Pretty fucking good. Not as funny as Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but a cool, entertaining movie nonetheless.

Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)

I know this won the Booker Award for 'Best Book of the 20^th Century' but I found it quite boring, although I did appreciate some of the clever things he did with how the story was framed.

Everything and More (David Foster Wallace)

A non-fiction popular maths book by the guy who wrote the behemoth novel Infinite Jest. Fascinating stuff, if you like maths. Some day I'll have to write a post about just how much maths freaks me out...

Spawn (Todd McFarlane)

The first trade collection. Cool concept but a cheesy execution. The animated TV series was far better.

Napoleon Dynamite

I left off seeing this one for a while because movies with a cult geek following like this one often don't live up to their reputations. This one's an exception though. Absolutely hilarious, and with a moral that I found quite touching: It doesn't matter how much of a loser you are, find something you love and do it well.

Dark Horse

A really random Dutch film. Suffers a little from pretentious European Art Cinema syndrome, but is generally entertaining for most of it's length.

The Brown Bunny

What a pile of shit. Yes the twist ending was clever in how it put the rest of the film into focus, but the rest of the film is a total bore-fest, and the climactic blowjob scene makes a joke out of the whole thing.

Palindrome

Not a chore to watch but it doesn't have much to recommend it beyond the clever gimmick of having the lead character played by completely different actresses throughout the film.

Nothing

From the writers of Cube (one of my favourite sci-fi movies) comes a stupid comedy with a similar plot hook. Unfortunately these guys are far better at making up interesting concepts than at writing comedy. It had it's moments but was pretty lame a lot of the time.

The Proposition

An Australian movie written by Nick Cave. It's a great, moody outback western for the first three quarters of its running time, but the ending completely lacks any emotional punch.

Jazz

A kind of counterpart to the Blues book I read earlier this year. This one is not as snarky, and the writers are (as you might expect) far more reverent to the material (with typical Jazz fiend snobbery), but it makes up for that with an abundance of photos and quotes and interviews from those who lived through the Jazz era. (The Blues book lacked these things, as bluesmen tended to die young or just wander off and disappear.)

Dante's Equation (Jane Jenson)

A trashy sci-fi novel from the writer of the brilliant Gabriel Knight series of adventure games. It's generally a pretty fun read, but I could have been spared some serious forehead slapping if they had had it proof read by a scientifically inclined editor. Just a paraphrased example:

“Oh my God! This is like no sine wave I've ever seen before!” says the brilliant scientist. They both looked at the screen. This is what they saw:

[picture of a square wave].

Sun Ra: Space is the Place

A fun B-movie, if you're not too bothered by the (heavy) reverse racism. Plot summary: Sun-Ra returns to Earth in order to take all the black people to up to his paradise planet where they can live unmolested by whitey. The devil tries to stop him.

Stardust (Neil Gaiman)

An actual, no irony allowed fairy tale, sticking to all the conventions of the genre but still making a damn fine novel. More than makes up for the disappointing Anansi Boys.

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

Now this book just made me angry. It starts out with incredible mood, full of post-modern malaise and seems poised to delve into the conflict between art and money, and how discerning what is genuine is being made harder by the trends in today's advertising, but in the end it just goes nowhere. Fuck you William Gibson! Now I'm going to forever wonder just what would have happened in the book you started writing.

Peeping Tom

On his newest album Mike Patton goes in an upbeat, hip hop direction. It's good and I'd recommend it, but it's far from his best work. The single 'Mojo' is easily the best track on the disc.

Dear Wendy

Seriously, what the fuck? I have no idea how to describe this movie, in fact, I have no idea if I even liked it or not...

Faster Pussy Cat, Kill Kill!

This legendary B-movie certainly fulfilled its title's promise of PG13 T&A, but while it may have been provocative when it was released, by my standards it was not terribly interesting.

Valley of the Dolls

Another, not quite so legendary B-movie (it will always be overshadowed by it's sequel). Worth watching for some great 70s cheese and some entertainingly hysterical overacting, but only if you have nothing better to do. It's quite lengthy and the plot is very dull.

Ichi the Killer

A moderately disturbing anime. Again pretty tame by my standards, but I'm told that the live action movie it was based on was better.

Damnation

An acoustic album by Swedish death metal band Opeth. A few songs are absolutely brilliant, most of the rest are quite good but others fall a bit flat. It's an admirable change of pace for them but they should probably keep concentrating on rocking out.

--

That'll do for now. There's a bunch more stuff I want to write about, but they're all things that demand more than a paragraph each.

Is This Thing On?

The editorial staff of the Wildebeest Asylum are proud to officially announce the new look, massively overhauled, Windows Vista(TM) ready Wildebeest Asylum 2.0. From our brand new offices in central Sydney our dedicated team of writers are spending every available minute drinking rum, hanging out in divey metal bars and chasing Aussie pussy in order to bring you the unique brand of state-of-the-art, next generation content that our fans have come to love so dearly!

Sign up to our members only area and for just $40 a month you get access to exclusive content including:

• A limited edition Wildebeest Asylum rainbow enema.

• Special behind the scenes footage of the writer's creative process: See Jon play air guitar while listening to Opeth! See Jon masturbating to old episodes of Buffy!

• The right to obey, and the right to kill.

...all of which is my way of saying that I now have a computer and internet access again, and actual honest to god content will resume shortly.

The AOL Search Data

See here if you don't know what I'm on about.

The things you see when using the random user search are at first frightening, then amusing and finally depressing when you see how bad the average internet user's spelling is (not to mention their lack of understanding of the difference between the search bar and the address bar).

Johari

Since all the cool kids are doing it, I made a Johari page too.

An Oldie But A Goodie

An amusing article about Anime in Japan. The bit about tentacle porn is very good.

A Sydney Moment

#1 in what will (hopefully) be a continuing series:

Dirty dancing with a hot girl to Coal Chambers' "Big Truck".

Hot Girl: I hope you won't be turned off if I start singing along in the death metal voice.
Jon (aloud): Oh no I don't mind.
Jon (silently to himself): Allll-riiiight

"Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of of the wind, or of the wave , or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."

--Baudelaire

Mogwai Live

Mogwai Fear Satan:


Tracy:

Yes, We Are A Long Way From Home:



It was good.

Best Web Page Ever

NSFW

Please Stand By...

There will be a temporary outage while The Wildebeest Asylum relocates to new offices in Sydney. Normal service will resume shortly, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience.

While we are looking forward to expanding our business overseas, the editorial staff of The Wildebeest Asylum would like to emphasise that the move will not diminish our commitment to 'Kiwi' values*, nor does it reflect a lack of interest in the 'Kiwi' market. It's just because of the Damn Socialists not giving us any tax cuts!

* Including but not limited to: a friendly and easygoing nature, a quarter acre block for every family, an excessive drinking habit and an antiquated and emotionally stunted ideal of masculinity.

Pirates of the Caribbean

Yeah I must be getting bored. I know it's a kids movie but I'd heard enough good things about it to give it a chance. Naturally as a Disney movie it's incredibly stupid. Every character is a tired cliché, and you can expect a whole lot of treacly true love bullshit (especially at the end). But hey, even Disney can't fuck up a movie about zombie pirates, and there's plenty of decent, not quite gory enough action.

Basically the movie is all about Johnny Depp, who hams it entertainingly up as a crazy pirate captain, who makes a very cool, charming anti-hero. Even though the film is fluff I couldn't help but feel that there was a better movie hidden somewhere inside. The villains, a crew of pirate zombies, have some cool lines about suffering from their curse, never able to enjoy the fruits of the treasure that incurred the curse by stealing. A real movie could have extended this into some sort of metaphor. A real movie could have also played up Johnny Depp as 'the worst pirate in the world'. As it is it has trouble deciding whether he's a brilliant pirate who's secretly a sham, or if he's a brilliant pirate who outwardly appears to be incompetent. Either option could have been cool, had the writers picked one and stuck with it.

Oh my god! I’m the pushy queen of Slut Town!

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season 7 Part 1

As I've said before I loved Buffy right up until the end of the sixth season, even though conventional wisdom holds that it started to suck from season five onwards. However even I am forced to admit that season seven, to put it delicately, sucks balls in comparison to the rest of the show. It certainly started out with a lot of promise, as some interesting plot hooks were introduced at the end of the last year. On one hand we have Willow, who as you probably recall went batshit crazy in the climax to the previous season and started killing people. There could have been a lot of dramatic potential in watching her come to terms with her actions and learn to keep her power under control, right? Spike has also just been granted a soul, completing his years long journey from villain to hero. Unfortunately it seems to have driven him mad, leading to a very cool scene at the end of the second episode in a church, when Spike collapses Christ-like onto a crucifix. (Rather painful for a vampire.) Finding out what happened to him, at the same time as he learns to deal with his rediscovered humanity, should be pretty compelling, right?

If the writers had just carried on from there they could have produced something really good, but knowing that it was the last season they preferred to hedge their bets. Firstly they introduced the biggest, nastiest, most overdone baddie they could think of: the First Evil, ultimate source of all pain and suffering. Secondly they tried to recreate the thing that made the first few seasons of the show so popular, the high school setting (slash painfully obvious metaphor). Unfortunately these calculated moves failed to pay off and in fact did more harm than good.

The First Evil is not an interesting character. Up until this season the show always did an excellent job of creating memorable, entertaining villains who were also genuinely well thought out characters with real motivations and personality. The First Evil is just a plain old clichéd cackling villain. Possibly the reason it never exhibits it's own identity is because it always manifests as another character. They could have gone in some interesting directions with this, as at times it seems to take on the personality of whoever it's appearing as, but I suspect that this is just bad acting.

The high school is reintroduced by having it rebuilt (after being blown up at the end of season three) and Buffy employed as a guidance councillor. Why they thought this would work is beyond me, as the central characters are all four years older. Just as in real life you can't go back to high school again, trying to wedge these characters back to where they came from is an exercise in stupidity.

A few of the standalone episodes are quite good. In 'Him' the female characters are enraptured by a love spell cast on the football jacket of a high school jock. This episode is arguably the best they do at a decent high school analogy in this season, and this is probably because it's played completely for laughs (the Charlie's Angels scene and Buffy trying to take out the principle with a bazooka are some of the most memorable things about the season). 'Selfless' is even funnier, showing flashbacks to Anya's transformation into a demon in first millennium Europe, complete with hysterical subtitles: “Her hips are wide and unattractive, like those of a baltic woman. Your hips are slender and arousing, like those of a baltic woman from a more arid region.”, “The troll is doing an Olaf impersonation, hit him with fruits and various meats!”

'Conversations With Dead People' is kind of stupid in a few ways (especially Buffy's long, pointless conversation with a vampire psychologist), but Dawn's plot thread, in which she is visited by her mother's tormented shade (who may or may not be the First Evil in disguise) contains some of the entire series only successful attempts at horror. It only took him seven years but Joss finally figured out that genuine horror isn't bought about by a scary monster hiding in a dark alley (unless you're a five years old), but by the subtle undermining of the familiar and comfortable by the disturbing and evil, in this case the threatening and sinister manifestation of a departed family member.

Aside from those three instances (and the first two episodes of the season) the show mostly just slowly drags it's way through the main plot, introducing new characters who add little (those Slayers in waiting are really annoying) and throwing in dramatic revelations that fall flat. The Watcher's Council gets blown up. Who cares? We haven't seen them for three years. Buffy has to fight a super powerful vampire from the dawn of time. Well that would have been cool if it didn't take three episodes for her to kill it. What is this, Dragonball Z?

Anyway, in conclusion I shall present the Buffy The Vampire Slayer Relative Hotness Table (all scores are out of 10):

Buffy: Season 1: 8, Season 7: 5

I have been accused of finding Sarah Michelle Gellar more attractive at the beginning of the show because then she was playing a sixteen year old schoolgirl, but I insist that that is not the case! It's because she has become another victim of the Hollywood 'starve yourself into a skeleton and tan your skin leathery' school of beauty treatment.

Willow: Season 1: 10, Season 7: 10

Nerd with a touch of goth. According to Joss the network execs tried to convince him to replace her character with a blonde cheerleader.

Anya: Season 3: 9, Season 7: 2

I'm not sure what happened to her, but the most probable baseless accusation involves drugs.

Faith: Season 3: 9, Season 7: 9

I think being evil automatically provides bonus points.

Cordelia: Season 1: 10, Angel Season 4: 4

Mostly just because of that haircut, and possibly the transition of her character from brainless but entertaining bitch to bland and boring love interest.

Xander: Season 1: 4, Season 7: 10

Man did that guy get macked fast.

Dawn: Season 5: 2, Season 7: 7

The only female character to get a higher score at the end of the show than when she was first introduced. This has nothing to do with her being the youngest. Next up on 'The Real Reason TV Shows Get Cancelled': The Golden Girls...

See also:

Buffy Season 5 Part 1
Buffy Season 5 Part 2
Buffy Season 6 Part 1
Buffy Season 6 Part 2

The Brain Eaters' Greatest Hits Part 1

Well seeing as I have all this time on my hands, I figure it's probably a good time to commit to paper (electrons?) a series of posts that I've had in mind for a while. This one is only two parts, so unlike the last time I did this it shouldn't take me a year and a half to finish.

I shall begin by introducing the titular Brain Eater. Millennia ago this ancient beast, a refugee from a far away interstellar war, crash landed on Earth. Weak and injured by its fall, it has been unable to return to his home galaxy and until this day has remained trapped on our planet. It has gone largely undetected in that time, as the brain eater is an energy being and does not have a corporeal form. However it has been moving among us, seeking the thing that it needs to restore it's strength enough to flee our lonely backwater of a solar system: human brains.

As an energy being the Brain Eater does not physically consume it's victim's brains, instead it merely drains them of all creativity and artistic talent. For this reason it seeks out the most talented artists in the world and feeds on their energy, leaving only shattered remnants of their former selves.

I shall illustrate with a few examples. If one were a fan of the band Metallica, one might say, “Boy, the Brain Eater sure made a messy meal of those guys after the black album!” However, it would be incorrect to say “Man, look at what the Brain Eater did to Gwen Stefani/Green Day!”, as to do so would be to imply that Green Day or Gwen Stefani at one stage had some degree of talent to speak of.

In this series I shall be looking at some of the most spectacular recorded instances of the brain eater ruining a formerly brilliant artistic career.

8. Korn

Korn were never a brilliant band, but they did at one time have a certain raw passion that allowed them to put out a few compelling albums with quality ranging from decent to pretty good. However their recent output has had such a dramatic drop in quality that it is only reasonable to conclude that the Brain Eater, desperate for sustenance after being subjected to three years of indie rock, concluded that Korn (having been around for over ten years now) must have at least something worth devouring in their heads. Lets hope that such a paltry meal is not enough to keep it alive long enough to find another victim.

7. Robert Jordan

The Wheel of Time series started out with a hell of a lot of promise. Jordan had a good writing style, an original plot and setting, and a clever knack for handling prophecies and internal references to both events in the book and in the real world, creating a large and detailed world that captured the imagination of many a reader. Sadly he drew the series out too long, and by the halfway point the Brain Eater had already done its messy work, leaving only the sad spectacle of five whole fucking seven hundred page books in which absolutely nothing happens. Curiously enough, he started receiving mainstream attention right about the time of the Brain Eater attack.

6. System of a Down

Their self titled debut album is a genuine classic, managing to be hard metal and have a quirky artistry at the same time. Their follow-ups, Toxicity and Steal this Album, sacrificed a bit of that for the sake of commercial appeal but were still very good. Then came Mezmerize and Hypnotize; in a few short years absolutely everything which made these guys stand out had been stripped away, leaving just another boring nu-metal band. Curse you Brain Eater!

5. The Writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Like most people the Brain Eater didn't click on to Buffy for a few years, on account of the terrible movie it was based on. Fortunately for us we got four brilliant seasons before it did, at which point it began to nibble gently here and there. I suspect that the Brain Eater looks at situations like this as a kind of 'watering hole', where as long as it doesn't feed too greedily the show stays on the air with new writers coming on every year and providing it with a potentially permanent food source. It wasn't until the final, seventh season when the collective genius became just too tempting and the Brain Eater finally lost all self restraint, gleefully gorging itself on the minds of the writers in a grisly orgy of gluttony. (Fortunately Joss Whedon hid under a desk and was spared.) The seventh season was completed, but with half its plot threads unresolved and a completely nonsensical emotional arc. Afterwards the Brain Eater sat weeping, knowing that it had become an addict but unable to ask for help, having driven all its friends and family away by being emotionally unavailable. Don't be like the Brain Eater. If you or someone you know has an unquenchable desire for human brains, act now. Call Quitline to receive information about brain addiction and to learn how you (or your 'friend', you're not fooling anyone man) can get power back over your own life with the help of friends, whanau and a healthy government subsidy.

Funny Webcomic

Man do I know this feeling.

In Which I Learn That Some People Have Even More Time On Their Hands Than Me

Dominos in Oblivion

Final Fantasy: Advent Children

Short Version: The (barely comprehensible) story sucks. The voice acting is terrible. It retroactively wrecks the end of Final Fantasy VII. But hey, it's still worth watching.

Final Fantasy VII is one of the most popular computer games of all time, and even though it's a Japanese RPG (a genre legendary for it's confounding plot lines) it actually had a pretty decent story, if you paid enough attention to decipher it. In particular the ending was appealingly ambiguous (for the record, my interpretation was that the planet (with it's self-defence mechanism 'Holy' activated) purged itself of the thing that caused it all the problems in the first place, i.e. the human race). However a lot of people can't handle ambiguity and legions of fanboys were positively salivating at the chance of some sort of explanatory sequel.

So Square-Enix have followed up their last box-office flop The Spirits Within with this movie, which continues the story of Final Fantasy VII. It turns out I was wrong about the ending of the game, as the human race is alive and well. Mostly well anyway, a virus called the Geostigma is afflicting children all over the world, and a bunch of guys with long white hair are riding around on motorbikes fucking shit up. But never mind the plot, like ninety percent of Japanese imports it's nearly incomprehensible to our feeble, unenlightened western minds. The emotional arc is trite and stupid too; it can be summed up as 'Cloud has to learn to stop running away'. (Hey, didn't he learn that lesson in the game?)

While The Spirits Within was released in theatres worldwide and was designed with an international audience in mind, Advent Children is basically by the Japanese for the Japanese, with an international DVD release almost an afterthought. The difference is obvious just from the look of the character models, those in The Spirits Within have a deliberately raceless character to their faces, while those in Advent Children are definitely Japanese.

So why is it worth watching then? Firstly the animation is great, the backgrounds still look pretty fake, but some of the detail on the characters is amazing, especially the hair. Secondly the music is excellent, it includes orchestral and hard rock arrangements of the midi music from the game which was brilliant even in that format, but benefits greatly from a real performance. (There's a very funny moment when Tifa finishes beating the crap out of some guy and his cellphone starts ringing. His ringtone is the classic Final Fantasy 'battle over' bugle call.) Lastly the fight scenes are immensely entertaining, cheesy as fuck but definitely cool. The movie only really succeeds because it's ninety percent fight scenes. In fact the whole last half hour is simply nonstop action, and it's a jolly good time.

The movie is really just an excuse to see these well loved characters, locations and musical themes back in action again. By the end there's no avoiding that the plot is there simply to provide a pretext to resurrect Sephiroth for an over the top rematch with Cloud, enhanced by the latest advances in computer animation. There are heaps of references to the game thrown in for the enjoyment of fans (mostly special moves from the game performed during the fight scenes) and if you're a fan of the game and accept the movie as just a big blatant piece of fan service and don't take it at all seriously, it's a lot of fun.