I'm In Love With Illusions

Aria volume 5 is finally going to be released in November. Yay! Well, not such a happy yay. Having recently looked at/held a few of Tokyopop's new releases, I have major issues with the cheap, see-though paper that they're using. The books felt flimsy and you could nearly roll one up as tight as you can a magazine. You can see an example here. I really love Aria but I don't see being able to read two front/back pages at once to be a printing virtue. And if they release the final volume of Furuba with this paper...ouch! It's going to get ugly.

Flicker Alley will release the John Gilbert double feature (Bardley's the Magnificant and Monte Cristo) on July 7. It's great to see Gilbert getting some DVD love outside of his films with Garbo (even if Gilbert+Garbo=absolute on-screen magic). Flicker Alley's page.

Tomoko Ninomiya is launching a mini-series based on Nodame Cantabile supporting characters. I am unable to say no to more Nodame. This should be very interesting.

New Futurama for 2010. One one hand, I'm super excited because I really love Futurama. On the other hand, the movies ranged from being merely good to lackluster. Much of the problem there seemed to revolve around making the movies reduce down to four episodes. Such an arrangement didn't make for coherent, seamless storytelling. Hopefully moving back into the season/episode format will realign storytelling to something like it was in the past.

Aria 4 is mine at last! All it took was a 30 minute trip to a B&N in another part of the metro complex. And we were both pretty amazed at how much better their manga selection was. It wasn't necessarily bigger but it had a better array of titles and volumes. And the staff didn't treat you like you were a slow witted idiot for still reading comic books (you're losing a valuable customer over this B&N that pops up on the way home from work - and the fact that you don't stock any part of the store very well doesn't help). So, we ended up spending way more money than had been originally intended. Issues? Aria 3 (along with 7 other various volumes) is still in transit and won't be here for the next couple of days.

Brooksie Talks!. Perhaps, all right - certainly, not as dynamic as Garbo Talks(!) but it's a nice peek at a speaking Louise Brooks that isn't the Windy Riley movie, the Richard Leacock interviews (which you can watch on the Pandora's Box supplemental disk in the form of the documentary Lulu in Berlin), or the Kevin Brownlow (I think?) interviews for the Hollywood documentary. But the clip doesn't alleviate any notions that the film is pap. Cat fight over an ugly man - that hasn't been played to death over the generations at all.

Further Brooksie related talk - and truly a weird note on what has and hasn't survived the silent era. Brooks' second role on film (and her first one for which she received listing in the credits) was The American Venus, a comedy about beauty pageants set in Atlantic City. It is presumed to be lost - but it's trailer is totally available. Actually, I believe that another trailer for this film was on youtube for awhile - it was either tinted or two-strip color.

Silent prospects for March? Totally dismal. It's one of the few times I can look at the schedule and roundly say that I've seen most of it. But Don Juan comes on toward the end of the month and I am slightly excited to see it. April, though, looks great.