I'm pretty shocked, really. This past Saturday evening, and well into the wee hours of Sunday, Cartoon Network showed all night long. Naruto, Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist, Moribito. Too bad I've seen all those shows in their entirety. Instead, after my office Christmas party I got drunk and started watching the latest episodes of Bakemonogatari, Sora no Otoshimono, Kampfer, and Liar Game season 2. I highly recommend Bakemonogatari, while I warn you that watching Sora no Otoshimono around non-anime fans will cause you a headache of questions of  "why did he transform to 2 feet tall, his eyes go squiggly, a ghost comes out of his mouth. the tear drop" - just save yourself the time and watch it ONLY with anime fans. Kampfer, meh, it's disposable fun. Liar Game? Watch now!!!

And without further commentary, click on "Read More" for the full listings of anime on tv this week. Cheers!

I still promise to spruce up the review for Avatar, while over the weekend saw much news in the anime community. Zenigata, from the Lupin III series, apparrently must die . The second annual YouTube Video Awards Japan has several different videos that are pretty kick ass. Evangelion 2.0 will have additional scenes cut back into the movie for DVD release. I still maintain that everybody should hold out buying Evangelion 1.0 until the Blu-Ray 1.01 version that will likely be announced soon. See everything after the jump and now, your moment of zen:

So there you go. Check out the weekend's recap and stay tuned for further developments! Click on "Read More" for the full synopsis.

This movie was made for geeks, by geeks and will, in the short or long term, be appreciated in the same vein as Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Princess Bride, Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Dark Knight, Watchmen and all geek movies. I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'll probably be ridiculed, yet I will give this one sentence of what I think about of this movie:

This is without a doubt in my mind, after easily watching well over a two thousand movies from all around the world in many genres and time periods by some of the greatest filmmakers of all time and that means Igmar Bergman, Orson Welles, David Fincher and Akira Kurosawa, yet no movie have I ever seen that matches the sheer beauty, quality and epic unfurl of a tale told in such a majestic scale to a point where I conclude to myself that:

this is without a doubt, the greatest movie ever made,

period.

The entire movie is built from the bottom up. From the flora and fauna, a tribal people integrated with nature around, indigenous creatures with foreshadowing, standard weaponry that doesn't veer very different from today's modern varieties of murdering a largely unarmed and unaggressive minority civilization, an entire spiritual religion encompassing entire planet in a hive mind cocoon in diverse independent minds but in tune enough to defend itself from a grander enemy, a contemporary retrospective glance of century old history (essentially the Bush doctrine of preemptory war for a finite resource of high demand), and well... this is an anime, but not. 

This movie also has prototype Gundams. SRSLY! 

The furry community will find much masturbatory material herein. There's even a furry intimate scene that will undoubtedly find itself in slash fiction. God damn these otaku hentai stereotypes. Cat people. Saw it the day after Caturday. Freak.

Elements from Aliens, including the impending doom John Williams musical score, and the badass helicarrier Hispanic girl, the team ready to go on suicide missions and an entire reverse of the paradigm of Aliens, his entire epistemology of that universe is represented here. The Aliens are the good guys and the Americans... er, ummm... Earth, yeah, Earth people are the bad guys. Earth sucks because we want what is almost unobtainable, which, cheesily enough is a 20,000,000 per kilo metallic ore called unobtanium. If there is any crack in the system is that you sorta know that the heroes of the story will ultimately stand victorious.

This isn't the "best story" movie ever made, by far, we've seen the story a hundred times over. To get this right out of the way and for basic formula of movies and this is a rinse, recycle, repeat story line: we have the hero who takes a stance that distances himself from the reality he is subjected to and becomes absorbed by the mystique and discovery of the unknown, which obviously encompasses a love interest where in many a trope repeat figures love, misunderstanding and rejection, followed by trial and success and redemption where the hero gets the girl. Best part of Cameron's movies is that "damsel in distress" doesn’t exist. Often, in a Cameron movie, as we all know, the woman is the larger opponent and defender heroine to sub-alpha males like Kyle Reese to Sarah Connor in Terminator.

To show what movies top my list, you can check my Facebook profile (which I desperately need to update) for Rob Worst (yes, that is my last name) to know that Braveheart, Fight Club, Ran, Shawshank Redemption, Citizen Kane, Seventh Seal and a lot of IMDB'S top 250 (Avatar comes in at #25 THAT FAST!) all time best- on top of it all, I will guardedly say that this is the greatest movie I have ever seen. See it in 3D if you can and if you have an IMAX showing around you, this movie deserves the quality. $13 movie ticket, $12 downtown Ft. Lauderdale parking: totally worth.

I can't remember if I covered this or not but since I saw this clip on CNN last night, it's just too hard to pass up. If you want to watch the CNN clip, click here. Nene Anegasaki, from the Japanese dating-sim Love Plus, was presumably forced into marriage with a 27 year old otaku, while another lunatic also married sim character Mio Akiyama back on November 22nd at 12:00 pm, live on the internets. We know about herbivore men in Japan but being passive in the quest for women, these guys have just lost their shit.

Seriously... they completely and utterly lost their shit and because of the absurdity of their nature to marry an etherial life form, yet gays still aren't allowed over here for some reason, because of this, I now know who my second wife will be!!! I'll probably have to fly to Japan to do it but I demand to be married to my cat neko. I love her. She's only 4 but with all the lolicon over there and the weird marriages, marrying a feline shouldn't be a sweat. Besides, tomorrow is Caturday y'all. Represent! Now I'm off to the IMAZ to go watch the cat people in Avatar. Review coming soon.

It's been a busy time for anime fans this week. It's too damn bad that I've been so busy lately but I promise that when I can finally move closer to work (insteada' a 30 mile drive back and forth) then you'll see a lot more full frontal over here. ;P By the way, IT'S FRIDAY YA BASTIDS!!!

This week saw news that the next Studio Ghibli film will be based off of the Mary Norton novel called The Borrowers. The movie will presumably be using the 1955 The Borrowers Afield, the first of 5 in the series of Borrower children's novels. Astroboy's Imagi Studio will lay off 100 out of 400 workers. This is terrible news but considering Imagi had the precognition to not save the original film prints containing the Japanese dub, making it so that now anybody in Japan who wants to watch Astroboy will have to watch it with the English dub with Japanese subtitles, well let's just say that this isn't terribly surprising. We'll be getting another Bleach and Naruto Shippuden movie by next year, both the 4th installmentin their respective series and hey, we might actually see Ichigo turn total hollow! Maybe. The trailer to the epic 2 1/2+ movie Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya went live. And soooomuch more.

Click on "Read More" for a list of ANN news from the past few days. I'll be trying to stay on top of this by doing a link dump for ANN at least every couple of days now. Enjoy! And Japan is warning you that if you drink, don't go out in public... it'll just make it that much  worse.

We always love it when websites take so much careful time in prepping all the new shows coming to Japan this month and next . Usually about 30-40 new shows emerge from Japan every season and it would be impossible to watch faithfully every episode of everything. So we get a preview of things to come. This comes from T.H.A.T. Anime. Click on the picture below to check everything out

If you want to be superlazy about it, here are the shows they go over: Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 3: Owari Naki Unmei | Chu-Bra!! | Sora no Woto | Seikon no Qwaser | Ladies vs. Butlers | Omamori Himari | Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu | Dance in the Vampire Bund | Durarara!! | Hidamari Sketch×☆☆☆ (Hoshimittsu) | Ookamikakushi | Nodame Cantabile Finale | Katanagatari | Hanamaru Kindergarten