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Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Ways Not To Spend The Weekend, For Your Own Sanity
Reading five volumes of Angel Sanctuary in one sitting: I've described this series before as Garth Ennis and V.C. Andrews teaming up to re-write the Book of Revelations, and that's still fairly accurate. It's an unsettling mix of ultra-violence, incestuous love and shonen ai, and it makes for a heady brew. I'm not even going to attempt a recap of the plot up to this point, it's simply too much to try to explain to someone who isn't familiar with it.
Watch two seasons of League of Gentlemen...and the Christmas special. I've been a fan of the British show for quite some time, and I was always very frustrated by the fact that only the first season was ever released on a Region 1 DVD. Up until now, that is, when seasons two and three, as well as the Christmas special, were released all in one go. The second season strongly emphasizes the sit-horror feel of the show, as established in the first season. There's a strong mix of black-comedy, gross-out humor, surreal dread, and just plain uncomfortableness to this show that makes it hard to describe, and hard to sit through if you don't "get" the comedy. The Christmas special is amazing, mixing that BBC tradition of Christmas-time ghost stories with a tribute to the anthology horror films of 60s British cinema. However, the third season is the true stand-out. Each episode ends on a shared premise, a car-crash, and we see the same scene from six different angles, one for each episode of the season. The entire season is well-plotted, with random elements of one episode paying off in another, all building towards a cohesive whole and a surprisingly touching and redemptive conclusion to the series as a whole. (Doctor Who fans take note: Mark Gatiss, a League of Gentlemen member, has written several Doctor Who novels and audio-dramas, as well as an episode of the most recent series. Christopher Eccleston also has a cameo role in the final episode of the third series.)