Two movies and one book down! Next up will be The Quiet American.
Fruitvale Station was enjoyable, but ultimately disposable. I hadn't heard of the incident it was based around, so at least I know its details. As a recreation of the events leading up to the shooting off Oscar Grant, everything was well acted, but the material simply did not lend itself to being a feature length film. The movie meanders a lot and is far too on the nose with its foreshadowing and the message it wants to convey for the death to have any impact when it happens. In that sense, it's actually a disservice to the man. It's a thoroughly average film saved by the few believable and touching moments between father and daughter.
Voice-Over Voice Actor is, as the title suggests, a primer on voice acting by two veterans in the field (and no strangers to PersonaGAF) Yuri Lowenthal and Tara Platt. As a primer, the book is geared towards anyone with a vested or passing interest in voice acting who might not otherwise know where to begin learning about it. The book is well-organized and does a great job of addressing the various factors involved in the business, but does so in the most shallow way possible. Part of this stems from the very nature of this line of work, particularly in how personal everything can be and how little of it (save for the technical) can be generalized. Still, for something so individualized, the book suffers from a bad sense of detachment, relying on a poor sense of faux-quirkiness to build any sense of rapport between author and reader, disturbing the otherwise wonderful organization. The book tries to charm you with cheap, templated clip art comics, when it is fact the small blurbs by other professionals peppered in between the sections that have the most personality and warmth. Still, it acts as a nice first step for any aspiring voice actors.
A Band Called Death
Punk has always had a nebulous history, no doubt in part to its very definition. Though both the music and its subsequent movement have had their origins pinpointed to the late '70s, the genre simply suffers from a lack of good documentation that will likely plague fans with the need to debate who the true pioneers were for many more years to come. One such band that miraculously managed to avoid these pitfalls is also one of the greatest outliers - the punkest of punk: Death.
As an all-black punk group who got their shaky start before The Ramones were even The Ramones, Death was a band that should have never existed, given the myriad influences trying to tear it apart. As a rock band springing up within one of the many black communities of Detroit, all three of the members were vilified by that very community for playing "white people music" - something distinctively foreign in neighborhoods and towns characterized by Motown. For those few willing to listen to them, and the fewer offering a record deal, the question was always "Why not change the name?" A world of money and fame awaited in exchange for but the smallest compromise, and yet, its visionary, David Hackney simply would not relent, no matter how small the change.
What would become a band spearheaded by pure stubbornness and a very specific, if poorly-communicated, notion of what the band would be should have been fated to eternal obscurity. But it wasn't. Over thirty years since the band's inception, nine years after the master mind's death, his creation had found a new audience. Always a spiritual one, David told that this would happen to his brothers (and fellow band mates) shortly before he left this earth, and now, those words sound outright prophetic. Despite all the odds stacked against it, all common sense condemning it to never being heard again, Death lives.
Likely due in no small part to David's obsessive mind, Death is incredibly well-documented, with various photos, movies and recordings still preserved for all the world to see. This gave the editors the ability to make a highly idealized work, with various photographs spliced together to create scenes that reinvigorate the past, lending it a necessary liveliness as the still-living members recount how the improbable happened. Unlike Fruitvale Station, A Band Called Death does do justice to its subject matter, letting material stifled for thirty years finally come out.
I liked the way they formatted this one and I was happy that it took place as a side story overall. Table City was a really interesting setting as well, and how they brought in Creta, Amestris, and the valley dwellers into a confrontational mix. There was so much going on during the train sequence and it was so tense. All it really made me do is think of all the good times had watching Brotherhood!
