I wuz sick...

So, over the weekend I didn't go out, I just stayed home and felt sorry for myself and...

read The Complete Bone

That's a complete graphic novel series in one volume at about 1800 pages long. Forget doorstop, it's practically a door, and it was incredible. I heartily recommend it to anyone, especially kids, but anyone. It's like a kids cartoon, Marx Brothers, Lord of The Rings without all the boring bits. But BETTER.

and read Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff

Which I actually found a little lightweight even for a deliberately grotesque look at an attempt to break the world record for porn gang-bangs. For Palahniuk fans it's worth it, it cuts down on some of his narrative quirks (though many are still present in full force) and his prose style is impossibly good. Seriously, there's a lot of gross porn stuff, but the really disgusting stuff is mostly just about people eating candy and crisps, because it's so well written. But even though Palahniuk wins on a number of levels (it's about the characters not the porn industry, there are several twists but none of them carry the value of the book) it's still one of my least favourite of his books.

and watched Crows: Zero

The sequel to this Japanese high school yankee movie just came out and I had the original on my hard drive forever so I watched it. It was pretty fun for a movie where cute boys beat the shit out of each other and contemplate becoming men, but not all that great. I really liked Yamada Takayuki as the school's reigning champ, he played it a little too sensitive (read: kinda gay) which made his character a lot more interesting than everyone else. There was an interesting message which went something like: "Being a yakuza is not something to aspire to. Being the top dog at a school with no rules and no actual teaching staff is definitely something to aspire to, and such yankees (thugs) that attempt this are way freakin' cool. In fact schools like that where every day is like gang warfare is cool too. And if they eventually do become top dog they'll learn that being a Yakuza is lame. Somehow. Possibly by osmosis."

and watched 20th Century Boys Part 1

It's a big hit Japanese sci-fi conspiracy thriller which has been released on DVD in the west apparently (which means I can download it with subtitles at last!) that I've wanted to watch for a while. The concept's a killer, a group of elementary school friends make up a story about the end of the world and twenty years or so later someone uses it as a template for taking over the world, drawing them into a great conspiracy. It was good, but not great sadly. The story's probably a bit compressed from the Manga so it fell squashed and stretched a bit, and there are a few too many unexplored or unanswered questions for it to be completely satisfying, but it was very well directed. There are some really nice tricks the director uses to great effect especially during some of the action moments. There's a slo-mo stabbing that puts Zak Snyder to shame. Still I'm in for the other two parts (part 2 just left cinemas, part 3 later this year).