It’s 3 p.m.! Let The A.V. Club briefly make use of the waning hours of your productivity with some pop culture ephemera pulled from the depths of YouTube.
Sure, carrying on the legacy of the Rocky franchise and playing the charismatic villain in one of the most buzzed-about superhero movies in ages has probably been fun (and also extremely lucrative). But Naruto superfan Michael B. Jordan’s career didn’t truly take off until yesterday, when The Hollywood Reporter broke the news
In a recent interview with Japan Times (via /Film), Netflix’s director of anime Taito Okiura teased that 30 of the 700 original movies and TV shows that the streaming service will launch this year are going to be anime-related. That’s the latest move in Netflix’s attempts to seriously ramp up its anime library, which…
Right now, Michael B. Jordan has the potential to be the coolest dude on the planet. He’s being critically lauded for playing one of the most interesting Marvel villains to date in the number one movie at the box office. He’s undeniably handsome and has his tight-fitting-sweater game on lock. Also, he was once on The…
A single match of Dragon Ball FighterZ lasts for just a few minutes, but it packs an entire Dragon Ball Z story arc’s worth of over-the-top action into that time. Brutal combos take unlucky combatants zig-zagging across the screen and careening into the dirt. Fireballs and lasers fly like mad, exploding as they…
Anime can be about anything—from the magical-girl fantasies and giant-robot space epics we typically associate with the term, to richly drawn historical dramas and muted character studies. This is one of the grand contentions among fans of the medium, which can also vary wildly visually from work to work. And yet…
How much of the stuff that you don’t like have you actually given a fair shake? I’m posing this question to you, the reader, as cover for the shame of my own answer. There are things—things with widespread, dedicated followers who can’t imagine not having them in their lives, who even pity those who have never…
If you watched Game Of Thrones and spent time on the internet this summer, you might have seen a few tweets directed at Bran Stark, whose personal reinventions as the Three-Eyed Raven came off to some like a Westerosi Jaden Smith. What that generally means is vague, incoherent, freshman Philosophy 101-speak that can…
For many Westerners, the films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli are the entry point for Japanese animation. With their meticulously detailed worlds and breathtaking, hand-drawn style, they’re the type of movies that transcend their genre and cause people to say things like, “I don’t like anime, but I like Miyazaki.”…
It looks like Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig is up to something weird, and that’s kind of saying something considering that he seems to be good friends with Weird Twitter legend Seinfeld2000. His latest weird project doesn’t have anything to do with imagining what Seinfeld would be like if it were back on TV, but it…
Wendy’s social team has had a big 2017, finding its off-handed dismissal of a troll suddenly picked up on as a feel-good reverse David and Goliath narrative, in which a corporate behemoth steps on a tiny troll and everyone cheers because fuck trolls. Since then, the Wendy’s team has gone full-on shit-poster, eagerly…
Already the fourth-highest-grossing film ever in its home country of Japan (trailing Spirited Away, Titanic, and Frozen), the anime romance Your Name boasts a fate-driven appeal that’ll be quite familiar to Americans who love Nicholas Sparks novels and their onscreen adaptations. Initially, the story appears to be a…
Shin Godzilla—or Godzilla: Resurgence in most of the world—recently stomped its way through Japanese theaters, reigniting people’s love for the big monster faster than a blast of his atomic breath. Now, the Godzilla custodians at Toho have come up with a new way to capitalize on that film’s success, and it’s an idea…
An alien rockstar/cop helps a young boy discover his destiny, while that same boy struggles to define himself in a world seemingly gone mad. That’s probably the easiest way to describe FLCL (also known as “Fooly Cooly” or “Furi Curi”), the cult anime show from Gainax and writer Yōji Enokido and director Kazuya…
There was a time, in the primitive era before Netflix and streaming video, when Blockbuster Video provided its customers with a portal to a whole world of amusement and entertainment, with shelf after shelf of music and games just begging to be rented. The local Blockbuster wasn’t just a place to get movies, though.…
I have to admit, until tonight, I was unaware of the phenomenon that is Tweek x Craig yaoi. For my fellow uneducated South Park fans (if any of you are actually uneducated on the matter), the slash art depicted as overtaking the elementary school this week is very real, with countless romantic/sexual images of the two…
It rained in Austin yesterday afternoon, a rare enough occurrence, according to my Uber driver, to completely mess up the already-terrible Austin traffic. (Everywhere you go, everyone says that their beer is the best, and their traffic the worst.) I said that I must have brought it with me from Chicago, and the driver…
Ghost In The Shell, Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 cyperpunk masterpiece, is high on the list of anime that even people who don’t watch anime have seen, and with good reason. It’s a beautiful, challenging film, impeccably drawn and directed, light on dialogue but big on big ideas. In his latest video, The Nerdwriter Evan Puschak…
It’s interesting to note how much of a show’s charm is evoked not just by its script and characterizations, but also by the look and feel of its aesthetic. Adventure Time has played around with its appearance before, most notably in season five’s “A Glitch Is A Glitch” which used computer graphics to render the…
The question, “what would Star Wars look like in the style of ’80s anime like Macross” has finally been answered. For fans of both–as well as the TIE Fighter and X-Wing game series and cool-looking shit in general–one-man animation team Paul “OtaKing” Johnson drops a real treat in the form of this “Star Wars: TIE…
