I’m not watching much TV of late. Aside from the fact that it’s summer, with a lot of shows on hiatus or cancelled, it’s also a bit tricky when you’re usually getting ready to head off to work at 9:45 p.m. And truth be told, there’s not a lot of stuff on that I even like.
Still, I have managed to catch a few things…
( One new, one ressurected, two that never died, several dead and making me nostalgic, one finished and still beloved. )
Anyway, sleep time. A friend is coming down from Bellingham to wake me up much too early so we can go to the lake.
So, if you read my absurdly long review of Noir then you know that I think it's a fantastic series that you'll enjoy. If you didn't read it, please do! But if you're in a hurry, allow me to summarize: a main cast composed entirely of strong women, complex characters, smart and full of subtlety and subtext, brilliantly twisty plot, great action, great drama, visually impressive, great music, less cheesecake than the norm, I totally fell in love with it, you should watch it.
However, it's been pointed out to me that there's a real lack of decent torrents for downloading it. Not really surprising for a series from 2001. Of course, if you've got a Netflix account or your local video rental place has a good selection and you can rent the DVDs, that's certainly the best way to watch it. (If you lived in Seattle I would loan you my DVDs, like I've done for many of my real life friends I've gotten to watch and love this show.) But if it's not an option for you for one reason or another, and you want to download, then I might be able to help you out.
Even though I bought the DVDs (twice!) I still have my old downloaded copies of the episodes. And I finally remembered that I have a mediafire account, so I uploaded the whole series to it. (This took quite a bit of frustration to accomplish, but I'm stubborn.) They're eight-year-old video files, so the video quality could be sharper. And they have old fan-done subtitles, so the translation is sometimes a little awkward. But they're watchable... they're what I watched the first two times I saw the series, after all. (I wish I had the software and know-how to rip my DVDs and compress them down to a reasonable size, but barring that, this is the best copy I have.)
Now you have no reason not to watch. :-)
Click here
- Mood:
quixotic
It was back in 2001 or 2002, when it was still new, that I first saw Noir. A friend and I were trying to watch all the best series out there, and when we found this one we tore through episodes as fast as we could download them. Although I now realize that we didn't really grasp more than a small portion of what was going on beneath the surface, at the time we both felt that it was an excellent series. It's remained on my "A+" list ever since, one of a handful of series that I felt were truly fantastic, but for more than six years I never got around to watching it a second time.
In the summer of 2008, someone on my friends list was asking for recommendations of series to watch. Her criteria included things like "strong women," "intrigue," and "maybe some angst." I listed off a handful of personal favorites, including Noir, which I felt fit those descriptors like a glove. I realized then that it had been a long time since I'd seen Noir, and that my memory of it was getting a little vague. So, I got out the CD-ROMs I'd burned the downloaded episodes to back in '02 and spent my next two days off marathoning the series.
The show hit me with the force of a freight train. Emotionally I was drawn in to a degree I hadn't been before. Intellectually, the 26-year-old me noticed levels of meaning that the 19-year-old me had missed, subtleties and nuances, layers and depths. There was a whole lot more going on in this show than I'd thought. I went out and rented the DVDs and watched those, uncovering new meanings in the series with the help of the better translation. Then I rented them again to show to a friend, who agreed it was awesome. Finally, I realized that I was going to wind up wasting money that way and just went ahead and bought the series boxed set, the first time other than the Farscape Starburst Editions that I'd bought an entire series on DVD. I started to show the DVDs to friends, and to loan out the boxed set to them, all of whom agreed it was awesome. I started to cruise the internet for analysis of the series, background information on the production, and yes... even for fanfic.
In short, I turned into an utterly unabashed fanboy.
Now I want to convince you, my internet friends, to watch Noir. I do this because I think you will enjoy it, knowing the ways in which your tastes coincide with my own. I do this because I love to share the stories that I enjoy with the people that I like. I do this because I know many of you have recently lost (hopefully temporarily) a show that you love, and I think this will provide some of the things that you miss from it. And I do this because my real life friends, while generally intelligent people who loved Noir when they watched it, don't do the sort of in-depth analysis that you all do. They don't dig down into the layers of meaning like you all do. They don't read into subtext and nuance like you all do. And I really, really want someone I can talk about this series at length with, about more than just the surface stuff. About the things underneath. It's a selfish desire, I don't deny it. But I think it'll be to your benefit as well.
Some of you have no experience with this medium. Perhaps this would be a good time to give it a try. Others of you have only seen examples of it you didn't like. I urge you not to judge an entire medium based on those poor examples, any more than you would judge all of film by the works of Pauly Shore or all of television by the reality shows on FOX. I guarantee that this series is not like those you've seen before, because it's not like anything I've ever seen before, and I've seen a lot. This would not be a bad gateway series for the medium, despite its complexity. There will not be a lot of confusion over divergent cultural concepts (most of the series takes place in France) and it abstains from many of the more odd or obnoxious tropes of the medium. One could easily have made this series live-action, if one had a hundred million dollar budget for practical effects and location shoots.
If you're reading this, then I know we like some of the same things. I think you'll like this, too. If I'm wrong... well, video rentals are cheap and downloads are free. It's only 26 half-hour episodes, the exactly length it was always intended to be, so it's not a huge cost in time, either. What do you really have to lose?
And now, on to the review....
Overview
( Noir... )Plot
( It is the name of an ancient fate. )
Characters
( Two maidens who govern death. )
Qualities and Flaws
( The peace of the newly born their black hands protect. )
- Mood:
excited
The Narrator’s-Living-Room Inn was doing a brisk business this weekend. First some old friends let me know at the last minute that they’d be visiting Seattle and crashed on my floor from Friday night through Monday morning. Then my friend who comes down from Bellingham for the weekly gaming decided to crash on my couch rather than try to go back on Monday night.
The old friends slept at night while I was working, went out and did the tourist thing in the mornings when I was sleeping, and then we hung out in the evenings. On Sunday, with my work week done, I decided to only catch a half-night's sleep to spend more of the day with them. As always when they come up, we had a few tasty beers at the Elysian Brewery. They insisted on going to the top of the Space Needle, though, and dragging me along Let me tell you a little something about Seattlites: we don’t go up the Space Needle. There’s a reason for that. It’s just not that interesting. You can look out over the whole city, yeah, but we already know what the city looks like. They were inexplicably fascinated by it, however, and stayed until it closed. It was after dark, and Seattle Center and Downtown are not great neighborhoods... I found myself longing for my body armor.
Monday night my friend from Bellingham and I stayed up until dawn (which is turning in early for a night-shift type like me) first watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya for about nine episodes and then stopping and working on game-related stuff for a while, because there’s only so much Haruhi one can stand in a single sitting. Not the show, which is funny and smart, but Haruhi herself. She’s such a horrible fricking person! Like, a borderline-sociopathic sexual predator. It’s not as funny as the writers seem to think it is. They really need to tone it down. (They need to tone down the fan service, too, but I know that’s a vain hope.) Even with a little rum (previously established to help with the viewing of the first few episodes), we hit the limit of our tolerances after a while. One of the reasons the first episode of the second season that aired last week was so good was that there was so little Haruhi in it.
Got up early (for me) and then he and I went out into the U-District for a bit. It was fun. We checked out the comic and gaming store to see if they had some RPG stuff he was looking for. They didn't, but on the shelf I spotted Farscape comics! New Farscape comics! Why didn't anybody tell me they were doing more? I grabbed the two issues there and told the guy who runs the place to put the rest on my subscription list. I'm always interested in more Farscape.
Even better, my replacement Noir boxed set arrived. Discs themselves are exactly the same as the previous set, so I have all the extras, and I like the box art even more than the other one. Black suits this series, for obvious reasons, and the whole thing is more badass.
Anyway, the net result is that I didn’t really get a proper night’s day’s sleep all weekend. Decided to sleep late today yesterday rather than get up early enough to get my comics before the store closed. Will have to get them tomorrow today.
Also, it seems Television Without Pity has finally decided to close the TSCC forums. They shall be missed. Goodbye, Meet Market thread! You were the source of much fun and wasted free time over the last two years! (Did we ever decide on a fallback point, or are we just going to do our nerding on LJ full-time now?)
- Mood:
tired - Music:I can hear construction outside....
So, when I went back for some more sleep after my very long day Friday-through-Saturday, I only wound up getting a couple more hours before waking up unexpectedly. I think it might have been because of hunger. It's early Sunday morning, and I have a few things I wanted to do before my friends show up for gaming anyway, like my laundry, so I decide to roll with it. I'm way short on sleep, but I'm not really feeling it.
So, after a shower, a breakfast burrito from Memo's and a lot of time-wasting on TV Tropes (damn that wiki and its addictiveness!) and absolutely no washing of laundry, my friends start to arrive for gaming. One of them is supposed to be bringing back the Noir DVDs I loaned him quite a while ago, which is nice because I have a hankering to watch them. And when he arrives he returns to me four of the discs I'd loaned him... out of seven. The other three? Apparently his soon-to-be-evicted deadbeat housemate decided to deliver one last "fuck you" to the house by stealing them and (most likely) pawning them for cigarettes.
Damn it!
My friend insists on paying for a whole replacement boxed set, which is perhaps overkill, and even shoves $60 into my hands on the spot, much to my surprise. (I ordered the new set Monday night, so it should arrive shortly. Went with the older black boxed set instead of the newer white one this time. It just looks cooler. And more fitting: the name of the show is the French word for the color black for a reason.)
What really sucks? He hadn't had a chance to watch the last disc before it was stolen. So he's stuck in the middle of a huge, tense plot arc with no resolution. And I can't talk with him about how awesome the ending is yet. And I really want to talk about how awesome it is. It is very awesome.
Then we gamed. That part of the day was good. We played Shadowrun, which is always fun. One guy couldn't make it, so we had to run his character for him. Unfortunately, he was playing the "face" for the team- the one who does all the talking- so we had to spend quite a bit of time putting words in his mouth. One of the other characters pulled off a particularly neat trick: shooting the gun out of somebody's hand. (Absurd in real life, of course, but only a -4 penalty in the game.) I decided to have my character try it as well, but the dice weren't with me. After two complete misses, my character gave up, took the time to load a rubber bullet and just shot him in the chest instead. :-P
Then it was off to work, which I don't normally have to do on Sunday nights, but I'd swapped shifts so I could go to the union meeting on Saturday. It was really warm in the tower because of all the sun that day, the heat-distibuting shirts I wear under my body armor were all in the wash, and I was soaked in sweat the whole time. Then, in the last hour, everything went crazy. The engineer apparently forgot that a test of the fire alarms had been scheduled, so he hadn't told anyone it was happening and wasn't there to help. I had to run all over dealing with that in addition to handling everything else people needed from me because I was the only one there.
I go home and go to sleep. At this point I've been awake almost 30 hours, and I wasn't well-rested to begin with. Less than eight hours later, I get woken up by a text message from a friend over something really trivial, but I decide to roll with it because I didn't want to sleep too late. I get up and go to check what's happening on the internet.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been cancelled.
GODDAMMIT!
Yeah, it was hardly a surprise. But it's still a shame. It was an intelligent and enjoyable show. I met a decent percentage of the people on my LJ Friends List on the TWOP forums for that show. It shall be missed.
Well, maybe there will be some new, equally cool scifi show in the lead-in spot for Dollhouse next season.... What's that? Sitcoms? Damn.
....and my laundry still isn't washed.
- Mood: tired
So, I've been neglecting this thing for more than half a year now. Sorry to just up and almost entirely drop off the internet like that. (Again.) Had a lot of stuff going on and kept getting busy and distracted and stressed and wound up putting off dealing with this for a lot longer than I'd realized. It's been sort of a strange time for me: working a lot of overtime, getting stuck with a new schedule where I work swing and graveyard shifts, sleep deprivation from working split shifts, watching Noir again for the first time in six years and getting totally hooked on it, watching Noir again with better subtitles, making my friend watch Noir, buying Noir on DVD, working the double shift from hell during a snowstorm, getting a transfer to just graveyard shifts so I have consistency but live a nocturnal life, having my friend crash on my couch for three months until he could find his own place, working the holidays, more overtime, going on only four hour's sleep every Sunday so I can game with my friends before work, watching a whole ton of movies and anime with my friend who was crashing on my couch, forcing more of my friends to watch my Noir DVDs (yeah, I'm a little obsessed), a bunch more stuff going wrong at work, and still more sleep deprivation. (Gah... not much sleep the last few
Fun times. (Well, the anime and gaming was fun, at least.)
Anyway, I'm going to try and pay more attention to this thing from now on, because I hate ducking out on friends and people I enjoy having discussions with like that. I've been meaning for months now to write down some thoughts on some stuff I've watched or rewatched lately (including Noir, no surprise there).
Managed to finish a short writing project that I'm thinking I might toss up here once its been through some editing (which it's almost certainly going to need, since I wrote it entirely in the slow times during graveyard shifts).
Not much to say on the world of comics, except that it seems that every single book from DC I read has either been cancelled or stopped interesting me to the point that I dropped it, so I guess I'm done with that company after six years of putting up with near-constant irritation with their bad storytelling and misogyny for the sake of their tiny handful of good writers and characters. I've been ignoring all their big crossover events, so I've no idea what nonsense they're up to right now anyway. But on the upside, ignoring the Big Two gave me time to finally read Usagi Yojimbo all the way through, and it's frickin' fantastic.
I doubt I have anything to say on the terrible casting for the Avatar movie that has not already been said.
Anyway, I've been out of the loop for a while... what'd I miss?
- Mood:
exhausted - Music:it's quiet.... too quiet
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