Fade to Lack

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.

Monday, October 24, 2022

Japanimation Station #10 – Fullmetal Alchemist Movie Round-up! The Sacred Star of Milos & Live-Action Trilogy

Welcome to Japanimation Station, an anime podcast brought to you by the folks at The Weekly Stuff Podcast. We are here to dive into the wide and wacky world of anime, and you can subscribe on all platforms at JapanimationStation.Com.

In our 1^st-season finale, we conclude our series of Fullmetal Alchemist reviews by rounding up the remaining theatrical feature films. First, there’s 2011’s The Sacred Star of Milos, an animated spin-off of Brotherhood made by the same crew, but with entirely different creative leadership, leading to a radically different aesthetic and the best animation Fullmetal Alchemist has ever seen. It’s a bit narratively messy in integrating Hiromu Arakawa’s characters into an otherwise original and unrelated story, but it’s also an entertaining and memorably weird experience that’s an essential watch. The live-action Fullmetal Alchemist trilogy is entertaining in its own way, but far less essential. With three films – 2017’s Fullmetal Alchemist and this year’s The Revenge of Scar and The Final Alchemy, all streaming worldwide on Netflix – this series, directed by Fumihiko Sori and starring Ryosuke Yamada as Ed, is a surprisingly faithful recreation of the manga (maybe too much so at times). Bouncing between hilarious B-movie oddity, boring recitation of the original story, and a few genuinely affecting performances and scenes, these movies are uneven but extremely interesting, and more than worth taking the time to discuss here.

Enjoy, and come back next year for Season 2 of Japanimation Station, where we will be reviewing Ufotable’s Type-Moon adaptations, including their Garden of Sinners and Fate/stay Night series!

Subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts!

Follow Japanimation Station on Twitter!

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #449 – Fullmetal Alchemist Movie Round-up! Plus Modern Warfare II Campaign & Doctor Who Reaction

After giving initial impressions of the campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – Here We Go Again! and Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, we give a live reaction to the latest regeneration on Doctor Who and discuss the series’ exciting future now that Chris Chibnall has returned to the chasm from whence he came. Then it’s time to finish our series of Fullmetal Alchemist reviews by rounding up the remaining theatrical feature films. First, there’s 2011’s The Sacred Star of Milos, an animated spin-off of Brotherhood made by the same crew, but with entirely different creative leadership, leading to a radically different aesthetic and the best animation Fullmetal Alchemist has ever seen. The live-action Fullmetal Alchemist trilogy consists of three films – 2017’s Fullmetal Alchemist and this year’s The Revenge of Scar and The Final Alchemy, all streaming worldwide on Netflix – that are a surprisingly faithful recreation of the manga (maybe too much so at times). Bouncing between hilarious B-movie oddity, boring recitation of the original story, and a few genuinely affecting performances and scenes, these movies are uneven but extremely interesting, and more than worth taking the time to discuss here.

Enjoy!

Time Chart:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:01:32

Modern Warfare II & Other Games: 0:01:32 – 0:24:18

Doctor Who: 0:24:18 – 0:34:46

Fullmetal Alchemist: 0:34:46 – 3:04:04

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

Monday, October 17, 2022

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #448 – The Teaching Episode

It’s a Very Special Episode this week as Sean & Jonathan answer a series of questions all about our day job: Teaching! Sean is a high-school English teacher and Jonathan teaches at the college level as PhD student, and while we’ve touched upon all this before, we haven’t yet done a deep dive on the profession, our thoughts – positive and negative – about it, how our two teaching roles differ, and so on. It’s a fun, informative discussion fueled by some great listener questions, and while we’ve never done an episode like this before, we hope it will be useful for those interested!

Enjoy!

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

Saturday, October 15, 2022

The Real Michael Myers was the Friends We Made Along the Way: An Analysis of the New Halloween Trilogy

I used to write movie reviews a lot.

Like, a lot a lot. It was kind of my thing. I don’t do it anymore, and I haven’t for a while, and while there are a lot of reasons for that – including it just not being a viable career path anyone, no matter their talent, can actually pursue today – the main one is that I just stopped enjoying the exercise. The older I get, the less ‘good/bad’ as a metric matters to me, and the less I enjoy explaining why something falls into one of those broad categories. What I care about more than anything in a piece of media is if it’s interesting – if it’s going for something, if it has something to say, if it tries something I’ve never seen before. I want something worth chewing on. There’s an argument to be made, for instance, that Marvel’s overall output has had a notable qualitative drop since Avengers: Endgame in 2019 – but when I look at how many of their recent films and shows I genuinely like and would call ‘good,’ I don’t know if that’s really true. What is true is that they’re safe, they’re simple, and they don’t really have anything to say. Certainly nothing new. We’ve seen everything in that bag of tricks. There’s nothing left of substance to chew on. And as a result I’ve felt increasingly alienated from anything they’re putting out.

David Gordon Green’s new Halloween trilogy is really, really interesting to me.

These three films – 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and this weekend’s new Halloween Ends – would all, in different ways, be impossible for me to review. Are they good? In some ways, yeah. Are they bad? In many ways, yes. Do they give you something to chew on? For me, at least, the answer is a resounding and overwhelming yes, and it’s a ‘yes’ that outweighs anything I could say about their relative ‘quality.’ These are fascinating movies to me. They are weirdly shaped, they play with a bunch of themes that don’t quite connect, they mostly fail as ‘horror’ movies, and they run back and forth from polar opposite ends of the tonal map – but I also think they’re chock full of interesting ideas and moments and emotions, that they break open and play with a well-worn genre in challenging and provocative ways, and go places (especially in this latest entry) that I never expected to see but am surprised at how engaged I was when we got there.

These are interesting movies. I’m not going to review them – I don’t do that anymore – but I do want to talk about them for a little bit.

Spoilers for all three new Halloween movies coming up after the jump…

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #447 – The FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST Episode(s) Part 4 – Brotherhood Part 2 (Episodes 33-64)

Our journey through Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood comes to an end with the second half of the second anime, now in fully uncharted territory as it adapts the final stretch of Hiromu Arakawa’s original manga. Diving deep into the Briggs and Promised Day story arcs that conclude the series, we discuss all the many ups and occasional downs of this last run. The manga is probably at its most uneven during this portion, but Brotherhood fully comes into its own as an anime, its pacing finally relaxed enough to fully tell the story, its ludicrously stacked voice cast fully in place, and its animation and aesthetics frequently on point as it approaches the end. As we go through the good, the bad, and everything in between, we find no shortage of topics worth discussing, and Brotherhood proves extremely rewarding to talk about all the way up to its all-time great ending.

Enjoy!

TIME CHART:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:03:42

Fullmetal Alchemist: 0:03:42 – 3:38:27

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

Japanimation Station #09 – Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood – Part 2 (Episodes 33-64) Review & Discussion

Enjoy, and come back next time for our first season finale, as we wrap up all things Fullmetal Alchemist with reviews of the 2011 animated movie The Sacred Star of Milos and the live-action film trilogy currently streaming on Netflix!

Subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts!

Follow Japanimation Station on Twitter!