Busy Weekend

[chomiji]

The sis-in-law (the one who's married to a minister) had a rotten week: her employer is transferring her, with almost no notice, to a different facility, and as she runs a senior center (basically, daycare for senior citizens), it means leaving behind not only staff, but also clients. So she decided at virtually the last minute to come down (with our nephew in tow) and see the Young Lady's play (our daughter is crewing her school's not-quite-spring musical, Beauty and the Beast) Friday night, because she thought it would cheer her up. This meant I had to clean up the guest room, which was wall-to-wall wrapping paper bits and rolls still, from the last installment of Xmas. But when I got home, there was an Amazon box waiting: I have Samurai Deeper Kyo 27, xxxHolic 11 [thanks, megan!!], and Takumi-Kun 2!

Saturday I was not feeling well - malaise about sums it up - and nothing much happened except meals out (lunch at Oriental East, which has great dim sum and forgettable service; dinner at Austin Grill, which is quite good for a chain) and the week's grocery shopping. The Young Lady was crewing again and had to eat leftovers for dinner. Oh well - it builds character!

Sis-in-law left early Sunday morning, and then sanada came to visit! We had brunch at Jackie's (retro American cuisine in a groovy-funky 1960s industrial setting) and talked manga nonstop. A good dose of fangirling makes one feel ever so much better. Then we went and saw the matinee of the play ourselves. Energy level good, one or two really good performances, scenery very uneven (the Beast's castle was very, very good, the village scenery was pretty lame), costumes pretty nice (althought the dinner plates were awful), and the special effects were much fun ... during the Beast's transformation at the end, petals fell from the catwalks onto our heads. They were meant to be rose petals, but all I could think of was (a) Sakura of Doom and (b) Nanao dumping baskets of petals over Shunsui. And the casting was the usual marvellous Blair High School racial mix: Oriental Belle, African American Gaston, Hispanic (I think) Beast, and so on. Dinner was what the Mr. calls "the meat place" - Brazilian BBQ.

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

And now the warrior women are pretty much all you can find. A lot of them also seem to be more talk than anything else, and there seems to be a deemphasis on smarts that don't involve fighting(one thing I did like about Xena was that Xena was smart and crafty all around, and Gabrielle was a extreme thinker who learned how to find.) One of the reasons I took to Sam Carter in Stargate so well is because, while she's just as good as the guys in a fight, the emphasis has always been on the fact that she's a genius and a fast and creative thinker, and while she's a tomboy, she's still very, very much a girl.

I took to Utena in the opening for the same reason(and I also took to Juri and Touga right away), but Anthy struck me not only as annoyingly doormattish, but also struck me as very manipulative from the start, and using Utena to her own ends, and as the series continued and Utena was more and more hung up on her, I started to get annoyed with her. The fact that the series just got harder and harder to follow after the first arc didn't help.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I've had RoS equally recced and warned against for me, but haven't seen it. Most of the recs seem based on my tastes, while all but one warning has been "ahistorical/not RoS/not Flynn=sucks"(but the one other is from someone I tend to trust, but we'll see...I'll watch it eventually.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this pretty much matches up with the positive recs that seemed to actually seriously consider what I might or might not like. Oddly, the one person who panned it approached it from the exact same-but opposite- direction, and I generally take her recs and warnings on the same level as you and Cho.

But no Ray Winstone...It is sad. Richard Armitage in black leather, it is good...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I despise 95% of actual love triangles, simply because they ARE just there for the angst most of the time, but really like them on the rare occasions that they're actually well done.