Just the Ticket

I know it's been hard to capture the spirit of the holiday season this year, what with all of the restrictions to product availability, travel, methods of shopping, social gatherings, and the like. But hopefully everyone still had the best Christmas they possibly could. Sometimes, you just have to heat some frozen leftovers, ship yourselves some gourmet candy, bake an easy dessert you found on YouTube, and find a movie for you and immediately yours to pass the time with. For me, it was Chinese food, Swiss Colony, homemade cheesecake, and--appropriately enough-- Peppermint . In the last issue of Anime Spotlight , I mentioned the Jodie Foster vigilante film, The Brave One . And to make a long review short, if you've seen movies like  The Brave One , Death Sentence  with Kevin Bacon, the original Death Wish  films, The Punisher  with Thomas Jane (who has terrible luck with his fictional families , BTW...), Denzel Washington in The Equalizer  series, the John W...

Step into the Anime Spotlight , Weebotaks, for the last anime-related post of the year! Sometimes Magical , sometimes Scientific , it's always Certain to be the Seinfeld  of action anime franchises. Now that you've returned from your trip down the Google rabbit hole to "the show about nothing," strap in for the sprawling universe of Academy City, starting with: A Certain Magical Index --Somewhere in Academy City (a city-sized school in Japan that's basically a social experiment with psychic powers, underground criminal organizations, a student military, and Unit 731 -questionable scientific endeavors going on beneath the surface), we meet a "Level Zero Esper” named Touma Kamijou (who is extremely stubborn, secretly overpowered, has dark, spiky hair, and wears a giant, invisible sign that says “Kick Me, I’m an anime trope!”). One day, a young nun named Index falls out of the sky and lands on him because the downside of his overpowered ability (he can shatter ...

Merry Christmas to all, Ticketholders! While working on my upcoming  Anime Spotlight , I happened upon an interview with George Clooney where he was talking about his experience on the set of today's selection, The Midnight Sky . According to Clooney (who also directed the film), the scenes of his character in a blizzard were filmed in Iceland, in actual weather conditions. Snow in any volume is a good place to start for a Christmas review, and authentic filming conditions are a good selling point for someone who doesn't want to watch the same movie for twenty-four hours straight. Unfortunately for roughly half of those who sought out  The Midnight Sky   this holiday weekend (as I did), it ended up being as big of a waste of time as the alternative, but without the benefit of nostalgia, comedy, or (most importantly) things happening or being explained. Clooney plays a dying scientist of some broad definition who discovered a habitable moon-planet near Jupiter, and is liv...

Welcome, Weebotaks, to the Anime Spotlight : a new series where I take a look at a selected franchise, production studio, or completed anime that has particularly grabbed my attention. Today's selection, as indicated by the title, is Puella Magi Madoka Magica ; a mouthful of a title for a franchise that (aside from its print sources, of course) is comprised of an anime series, three feature-length movies, a mobile game, and a promotional gaiden  ("another" or "side" story) anime for said game, and several non-animated media, like stage plays. But since this is Anime Spotlight , I'm only going to be talking about things that are anime, so media like the game, manga, and stage plays will not be addressed here. Before we step into the Anime Spotlight , be sure to drop a like, comment, and tell your friends that the blog is back! Puella Magi Madoka Magica  doesn't look like everyone's cup of tea at first glance, what with the simple, egg-headed, lanky, c...

A very happy #AniMonday to you all! I am back on track to finish my Accounting degree by 2022 after taking several hard hits to soul over the past year, including COVID-19, self-imposed crippling debt, repeated academic failure, and a self-imposed, "complicated" (to put it in vague, euphemistic terms) personal life, all of which I am trying to simultaneously ignore and repair in the only, moderately ineffective way I know: by constantly telling jokes, making obscure cultural references that no one remembers or cares about, burying myself in work, obsession, and academia, and trying my hardest to not screw everything up while the world around me fixes itself. And if anything screams obsession and escapism, it's twenty-six-ish letters worth of Anime-BAWklog . so let's dive back in, shall we? Lord Of Vermillion: The Crimson King —Title included, this series has obvious Stephen King influences. I mean, it’s basically Cell : The Shonen Remix with recycled elements from De...

Another #AniMonday is upon us, and your favorite Ticketmaster (with movie theaters closed for the foreseeable future, anyway) has just overcome another educational hurdle! Intermediate Accounting I at WGU is harder than Ben Grimm's adamantium jockstrap, I didn't pay enough attention to the material the first time through, and I failed like a YouTuber planking on Jello. But now I've put that class behind me with flying colors, with my sights set on the three remaining, super-easy, super-boring installments of my fifth term of virtual college. First, though, a little breather to get through more of the Anime-BAWklog , starting with something a bit controversial in the anime fandom: Fairy Gone —anime fans don't like this series. It has ugly CGI, derivative plot mechanics, and stereotypical characters. But I liked it anyway. In a steampunk world, opening in the wake of a terrible war,  Fairy Gone  focuses on "Fairy Soldiers," human soldiers who have been implanted...