Dragonmeet 2014

Yes, it's December, which must mean that it's Dragonmeet again. It's been moved to a new venue from Kensington Town Hall to the Ibis Hotel in Earls Court ("more room" according to one of the volunteers).

To me it seemed smaller, or more compact. There weren't many vendors there, but perhaps more producers, including a new card game called Stak Bots:

I bought an RPG that I've had my eye on for a while, which seems to be a bit different from the usual character based games:

Unfortunately, I didn't get a game so, on my way back, I stopped off at Covent Garden to do a little more shopping and saw the lights:

Turning Japanese - 47 Ronin and Kick-Ass 2

Two films from my Amazon subscription. The first is the sequel to the popular Kiss-Ass. Bored with premature "retirement", David Lizewski a.k.a. Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Mindy Macready a.k.a. Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) join with other super-heroes while struggling with growing up and leading a normal life.

I must admit that I haven't read much of Mark Millar's work, in particular the Kick-Ass books, so I can't compare them to the original. The one book I have read, Wanted, was awful, and the film much better. The original Kick-Ass had a kind of naive violence, like Tom and Jerry, and the corresponding charm. This has the difficulty that the novelty has worn off, and the violence seems a little more serious and intense, as does the whole film. Jim Carrey (Colonel Stars and Stripes) plays the father figure that Nicolas Cage (Big Daddy) played in the first film, and the supporting cast is good enough, but it is an inferior sequel to a mediocre film.

The second film is 47 Ronin, based on a classic Japanese story. Kai (Keanu Reeves), a mixed-race woodsman in feudal Japan, is treated with suspicion and ill-disguised contempt by his master Lord Asano's (Tadanobu Asano) samurai retainers.

A visually stunning film, and worth watching for that alone, the cast, aside from Reeves (who isn't that bad, really), is excellent, headed by Hiroyuki Sanada as the lead samurai and the beautiful Ko Shibasaki as Kai's true love. Tadanobu Asano and Rinko Kikuchi are also suitably evil as Asano's nemesis and his sorceress.

It's problem, however, is that it adheres too closely to the original story for the Western audience (and is too conservative a film for the modern Japanese audience: Battle Royale is more typical) and yet is too Western for the Japanese audience, so it's no surprise (but a bit unfair) that it's the second most unsuccessful movie of all time, losing $20 million at the box office. You can imagine the effect on us if Hollywood decided to make a film about The Battle of Britain with Harrison Ford as Hugh Dowding, or The Dambusters with Nick Cage as Guy Gibson. Nah.. they wouldn't... would they?