Yup, it’s that time of year once again, when I decamp to Scotland for another round of anime movie screenings. It’s Glasgow this weekend, which promises a mixture of things you’ve probably seen, things you probably should have seen, and things you almost certainly haven’t.

Likely highlights of the weekend are Patema Inverted although I’ve still not got around to watching Time of Eve and the mysterious Mystery Film, which I’m trying not to get my hopes up for too much. I mean, most of the hints suggest it might be this (in an still-incomplete edit), but that’d probably be too neat, and last time I went to one of these mystery screenings, I was right about what it was supposed to be, but the materials didn’t arrive from Japan in time… so, yeah, I’m trying not to get too enthusiastic in the off-chance it’s something really weird that I’ve never so much as heard of.

(-edit- Actually, the mystery screen is possibly even more likely this thing, which would also be interesting)

Which would certainly be interesting in it’s own right, I guess.

Completely independently to the SLA festival, I ended up going to see the live-action Rurouni Kenshin movie last night. I missed the chance to see it at Otakon, and whilst it’s been on limited release here in the UK this last week, the release is limited enough that it wasn’t actually playing anywhere near to where I actually live.

It was pretty OK. I mean, it’s been a pretty long time since I’ve seen any Kenshin (I don’t think I’ve watched the earlier episodes, which this movie is based in, since the original Media Blasters DVD release), but it seems faithful in as much as at least everything I was seeing had at least some basis in the original work. This isn’t to say that they didn’t remix a bunch of early manga content into a somewhat different story, but it was tonally consistent with the original.

The main problem with the movie, though, is, like way too many action movies these days, all the fights are shot way too close up, in a misguided attempt to give them some impact that it actually just ends up removing. I’m not even sure it’s in an attempt to disguise poor choreography, or an inability to actually fight, like it so often is in these movies – there’s brief flashes in pretty much every fight scene that last just long enough to give the impression that, even if they don’t really know what they’re doing, they can at least fake it well enough.

But *shrug* – it’s not the worst manga-to-movie adaptation I’ve ever seen.

(PS – Kill la Kill was rad. Galilei Donna was pretty good, though I wonder if they can keep up the production values, or keep Umetsu’s somewhat… tendencies under control. Samurai Flamenco was OK. Valvrave is Valvrave. Infinite Stratos is still ass. Either behind or have no particularly strong feelings on everything else).