Eastern delights

One of the good things about DVDs is that I can watch films at home without needing a TV. And not only films. I indulged myself a little at the weekend - going up to London and visiting the Virgin Consumatorium in Oxford Street I picked up the collected boxed set of The Water Margin first season, a bit of nostalgic TV history for me - and, I suppose, many of my generation as teens in the '70s. Watching the first two episodes showed that yes, they are as much fun as I remembered. And this looks not to be the butchered-for-rerun version that removed the slight amounts of gore. [But then I didn't find Kill Bill to be terribly gory, either.]

I also tried another oft recommended martial arts movie (Zu : Warriors of the magic mountain) and decided that even the good ones are rubbish. This makes it 3 strikes and out for this genre as far as I'm concerned, as I do tend to prefer to have some level of narrative flow connecting the scenes (even as perfunctory as Hollywood is at the same, it manages better than this).

And as a sheer bit of silliness, the first two Dirty Pair - Flash disks, which were entirely fun, if not at all serious (the second being an excuse to send the team through a whole set of stock 1990s-setting anime clichés). Having first met the Lovely Angels in the pages of Adam Warren's comics from Dark Horse, I'd always been more of a Yuri fan (even though his new fat-lips version is not the same as the one I lighted on originally); but in DP-Flash, I found I had switched sides. And, I must say, I prefer this of the visualisations I've seen of the pair - the original Warren costumes had at least a pretense of function, and so are still the best of the original concept visualisations, but his recent ones are just superhero spray-ons more extreme than even Emma Frost's outfit. The stills I've seen of the Original videos series show the girls with hairstyles looking more like a Lifeguard's bearskin, which is just plain ugly.