Daredevil Season 1

The Daredevil TV series is not the type of show you would want to watch with children. Netflix had the freedom to go darker. It is a show for the kids who grew up with the comics, who are now grown up. Expectations were high. Reviews by geeks on the Internet were favorable.

Charlie Cox (whose only movie I've seen was Stardust) is Matt Merdock, a blind attorney who lost his eyesight as a kid. His story is typical of comic books. I still loved it. Daredevil is one of my favorites as a kid. The Ben Affleck movie was panned years ago, but I kinda liked it too.

This Daredevil adaptation from Netflix is better. There was more time to explore and develop the characters. Foggy, Merdock's friend, keeps it balanced by giving us some good dose of comic relief. And Vincent D'Onofrio -- boy, he's good as Wilson Fisk (a.k.a. The Kingpin).

At first sight, we thought D'Onofrio was not fat enough. That's what I remembered. But from the head up, he was the Kingpin. There is a good deal of depth with his portrayal. I was expecting a more archetypal caricature of a villain.  Lately, there aren't any of them. But this version of Kingpin is miles better than the movie. It makes an amazing origin story. The socially awkward but brilliant criminal mind's meteoric rise and fall in this first season makes a compelling story. You may side with Wilson a little here.

Issues:

• Costume - I hated the final costume. I guess the evolution of the costumes from the start is interesting, but I liked Ben Affleck's costume more. Adaptations of comic books lack color. And the horns look a bit too ergonomic, not much like horns. I understand what they wanted, but I want devil horns! Dammit.
• Violence - There is plenty. There was a scene, where the typically calm Wilson Fisk loses it, then violently kills a Russian, by slamming a car door on him. It was gratuitous.

Despite my issues that will not be anything to most fans, the story was tight, the characters were interesting, and the fight scenes were pretty decent. I mean, compared to how fight scenes are choreographed these days, the dark theme was well-utilized to cut corners without being obvious.

A New Start

In the end of 2014, I left a high-paying job and found myself in a rut. I halfheartedly took a job that paid decently eight months later. The people were amazing; but being from where I was before and where I was then only made me feel dissatisfied.

I left the job that may have been a mistake, but I felt it was time to take a big risk. At age thirty-three, any later would be a bigger risk than it is now. So I threw all precaution to the wind, which is very uncharacteristic of me, and took the plunge -- knowing full well how it may jeopardize my way of living.

For two weeks since I resigned, I've been reevaluating my life. It only got me angry.

I became a stranger to my own self. I lost my identity.

I've been channeling all the anger on other stuff. I was able to make it to Level 13 on a mobile game because of that anger. I feel sorry for the people around me.

I decided to revisit American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I loved that book ten years ago. Reading it now, as an adult, although still fun and refreshing, is different than when I read it when I was younger. I'm happy to read a book and not be conscious of the things that bothered me before. I was an editor, and happily, I no longer so conscious about punctuation. Maybe that's one reason I stopped reading.

Tomorrow, I start work for a start-up company that pays. Hopefully, this is a good decision.

Awful Ending of Golden Time

Golden Time is this anime I casually saw on Animax. In the few instances I saw it, the story got more interesting. Skipping episodes did not work for me, so I watched all 24 episodes.

Golden Time is a story of Banri Tada, a college freshman, who enters a university with everything put behind him — because he has amnesia. There, he created a new life, while struggling to keep in terms with his past. It's a story about identity, peppered with a good amount of comedy and drama.

What I liked about the Golden Time is the developing characters. Kuoko ( the female love interest), for example, wasn't very likable in the beginning (she's a bit of a psychopath), but she evolved into an adult, episode after episode after episode. It's not only her, but almost everybody in the anime grew, except Banri.

A core part of the story is Banri's relationship with another female character, Linda, his high school sweetheart to whom he shared secrets and a deep understanding. She was easily likable, which in terms of how stories go makes an exciting love triangle.

I enjoyed every episode until episode 23. I hated the finale. Despite some foreshadowing, I was not prepared of the supernatural. I thought the other version of Banri who knew his past, who spoke to the viewers, was his repressed subconscious. Not a ghost of his former self, rather a part of his psyche. Maybe I wanted it to go my way.

It appeared that when Banri got into an accident, his former self departed his body as a spirit, and the one after the accident was a new soul.

I should have known better. Right in the middle, ghost Banri had powers that poltergeists would be envious of. His power bordered on cosmic abilities: weather control, probability manipulation and jinx enhancement.

You must understand, ghost Banri has god-like abilities, such as creating bad weather, putting people to sleep, and give you bad fortune.

In the end, instead of Banri remembering his past in addition to his present memory, he forgets his post-accident experiences. I thought they would merge together as one personality, then decide who he loves more, Linda or Kuoko. Either way would have been fine. I liked them both. 

It's a cop-out ending for Golden Time where Banri forgot his pre-accident self to be with Kuoko, and Linda says goodbye to Version-1 Banri as a ghost before going into oblivion. 

I read somewhere that the story is ongoing, Maybe the book is better, but I wouldn't bother knowing. An emotional investment and time put to waste.

* * *

When I was in college, back in 2002,  I had a classmate who asked a question about amnesia. She asked about a man found in the beach by a woman who had amnesia. They fell in love. The memories of the man returned and forgot all about the woman, until everything came back again like Banri did. It was a story she read on a cheap Tagalog pocketbook.

I told her it doesn't happen in real life, fairly annoyed by such silly plot.

Hopefully, she will never hear of Golden Time. I have not spoken to this classmate since graduation. But if she's seen Golden Time, hopefully, she does not remember me as the idiot.

No, I still stand by what I said. 

Email Salutations

I received an important email and replied to it. What I forgot was a salutation. You know, "Dear Mr. Doodledoo, " Forgetting that salutations are good manners, I messed up. It's a good thing they contacted me again.

Then I started thinking. How do we make a salutation in the digital age? In school (back when we still used pen and paper), we wrote:

 Dear Mr Doodledoo, 

This salutation has been kind of the standard. This is written neatly above the message body with an empty line before the message body. These days, it feels kinda weird. You don't say dear to just about anybody, and it comes across as too formal.

The True Cost: A Fashion Documentary

Coming from a third-world country, watching the documentary The True Cost is enlightening and traumatic. Imagine that. We all must have noticed that probably most of our clothes or much of what we use — everything — are imported from China or other developing country. We just don't pay attention to it.

The documentary The True Cost, directed by Andrew Morgan and co-produced by Livia Firth, is a look at the outcomes of fast fashion, the trend these days set by giant clothing companies. It is a documentary that is shocking at so many levels.


It tackles the effects of trends to the workers from poor countries, consumer mentality and the environment; and all of them aren't pretty. Like most documentaries where big issues are compacted for viewing purposes, The True Cost is still another simplified presentation of a big issue. The economics involved are complex and cannot be covered by even a two-hour video.

Ethical issues covered included harsh labor conditions, consumer behavior, farmer suicides and environmental hazards. It does not put the blame on a single entity or industry, but looked at the whole system, as it should be.

This made me feel guilty. It made me sad and angry. Toward the end, the video montage of American shoppers and video bloggers talking about their shopping haul, juxtaposed to victims of chromium poisoning in India, violent riots in Cambodia and suffering laborers in Bangladesh, makes an ending for this harrowing film climactic. It makes you feel bad for buying clothes.

*****

Now looking for sustainable clothes will be tough. Like the zippers, buttons and even the very thread used for most clothes comes from developing countries. Even if we try looking for good sources. It is difficult. I guess the only thing we can do is just wear clothes we like, and not treat them as disposables.

American Gods on TV

There has been talks on the Internet for quite some time, years, of an American Gods TV series based on the book of popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman.

It's an amazing book I read seven years ago or so. I am a fan of Gaiman's writing, especially those  written before the year 2000. American Gods was the most recent story from him that I just loved. Now that it is to be made for television, it's scary that other people's interpretation of the book could wipe out the images created by your mind.

It will be co-produced by Gaiman himself, or so we are told, and produced by American network Starz (Spartacus), so we could expect some adult material, which we're not complaining about. Showrunners and writers would be Bryan Fuller (Heroes, Pushing Daisies) and Michael Green (Gotham).

There are a lot of stories in the book that I hope would be maintained and explored. The difficulty would be finding the right actors to play the part. We are talking about gods here, and screen presence is imperative. There's a lot of gods in here.

The main character, Shadow, is a hard find. Some fans suggested Jason Mamoa or Kit Harrington on comments and forums. Then the character of Shadow's wife Laura is a tough find. [SPOILER ALERT] I envisioned a charismatic actress who can pull off being a walking corpse.

So, I am torn. Am I excited or not?  Anxious, more like it. I just loved American Gods. But I would still watch out for the series. Hopefully, they don't stray too much from the source material. It's a good book about gods from all over the world stuck in the United States, written by a British writer.

One Month After

It has been quite some time since I made my last post, the last of which was about bitterness. Bitterness. I think I am in the process of healing now, and there is definitely progress.

From Pixabay