The Booty

I'll put all of the Hong Kong movies in my cumulative list, but I just wanted to share my acquisitions with all (two) of you:

• The Brave Archer 1-3. There are supposed to be four volumes to this series, but this box set seemed pretty nice, so I went for it anyway.


• Come Drink With Me. This is a movie by King Hu, who also created A Touch of Zen, which I've raved over before. This is considered his other masterpiece.


• Eight Diagram Pole Fighter. A classic Shaw Brothers martial arts film.


• Infernal Affairs. A cop drama, supposedly one of the best in years.


• New Police Story. Revisits Jackie Chan's classic police character, though relying on a younger cast to carry the story.


• One Night in Mongkok. An award winner this year.


• Throw Down. Another award winner. Funny story: I had this and another movie in my hands, and was trying to decide which to get (both! nope, stick to the budget). I asked the grey-bearded gent who runs Drunken Master, the store I always buy from at Expo, what he thought. He said, "well, I did the commentary track on the English track of the DVD of Throw Down, so I gotta go with that."


• The Twins Effect II. I was trying to buy Twins Effect, but in the hustle and bustle of the convention Dealer's Room, I was handed the 'sequel', instead. I'm gonna borrow the original from Alan, and let him borrow this one...


• A World Without Thieves. One more award winner...

For myself, I also got a Gankutsou T-shirt and mug. For Kelly, aside from all the Dealer's Room freebies, I got her the T-shirt, a baby-doll T with a cute picture, and a manga, called The Wallflower (which I guess I already mentioned).

The Parks

Did the parks. It's pretty much as you'd expect. Only new thing for me was the Indiana Jones ride, but that was not so special. More fun was the fact that Space Mountain was open! It was in stealth mode, in that the Disney website listed it as closed for renovation, and they were not advertising it in the park. You just had to show up at the ride, and they let you line up. We only got to ride once, since when we came back during the evening, it was closed 'due to technical difficulties'. So we were on their shakedown cruise! Talking to the ride operators, we were told that the official date is supposed to be the 15th.

Dinner was at Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen, and that was excellent. My meal, from the menu:

Paneed Chicken and Crawfish Cream

"Thinly pounded chicken breast dusted in breadcrumbs, herbs and parmesan cheese, paneed and served with mashed potatoes, seasonal vegetables and a Lousiana crawfish cream sauce"

Con End

A very light day. We wandered about a bit, I bought still more Hong Kong movies, then we ran and caught Gun Sword. It was a raw Japanese screening, the first episode of a show which has not even aired in Japan yet. That sort of event is getting increasingly rare at Expo, so this was a treat.

We attended the charity auction, where James won two bidding wars, spending way too much money on a couple of Gundam character sketches. The record bid of the auction was for a sketch from Howl's Moving Castle, for $13,000!

We spent the evening at California Adventure and Disneyland. We all went and ate at Ariel's Grotto, but Ariel wasn't there! In fact, she no longer works there! Excuse me? Ariel's Grotto??!!?? In any case, I still took some character photos.

Afterwards, Dan wanted to try to experience a bunch of rides, and hijacked me as his 'guide'. We did the Maliboomer and California Screamin', and were fortunate to get four rides in a row on The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. We then crossed over to Disneyland. We rode the Matterhorn, the Teacup, Pirates of the Carribean and the Haunted Mansion. Finally we'd had enough and headed back to the room.

Sunday Highlights

We ate breakfast at Coco's (second time) and then Dan and I went to the Del Rey Manga panel. The guy running the panel was their editor for the manga line, and he is a true believer. He ran through a number of their titles, talking each one up as he presented it. I ended up buying volume one of Wallflower for Kelly. Next we headed off to see Ultraman The Next live action movie. I grew up in Washington, D.C., and we had UHF channels that showed all sorts of crap, including Ultraman, direct from Japan. So it holds a special place in my heart, and I had lots of fun.

By that time it was time to go stand in line, forever, for the Maaya Sakamoto concert. It was a slow, mellow concert, and I bought a CD of Maaya's songs, again for Kelly. Then we ate at the Hilton restaurant, and now we're just sitting in the room. Alan is going totally nutso with faux accents, doing his best to annoy me, and not yet succeeding. We are waiting for the masquerade to finish so that we can go out and photograph the cosplayers, so until then we're gonna watch a Hong Kong movie on Jeremy's laptop computer.

Oh, and the last two nights we ate at the Naples restaurant in Downtown Disney, and at Tiffy's next to Coco's. Just for the record...

Highlights

Time seems to fly even when I don't think I have a lot of activities lined up at this convention. Friday I sat in the Ugetsu Hakua panel. He is the creator of Bakuretsu Tenshi and was reasonably entertaining. I then attended Kazue Yamamoto's panel. She is an illustrator and the president of her own company. I went to her panel without knowing a thing about her, solely on her personality at opening ceremonies. She claims to be shy, but loves to talk. Someone would ask her a question, and she'd talk for five minutes before letting the translator actually translate. She's pretty cool. She is a heavy-set middle-aged woman, and looks like she'd be at home running a home-style restaurant. But very personable.

Alan and I did a tour of the con looking for good costumes to take pictures of. Alan has been doing that at several conventions over the years, and he is very blase about it. I just followed him and 'parasitically' snapped photos. I'm going to go out today and try to take some photos on my own. I havve trouble asking folk to pose. I guess I like candid photography because I don't have to talk to anyone.

One series of photos I took Friday may not look impressive, but they're pretty cool to me. I was in the dealer's room, where all the anime companies hawk their wares. I was quite impressed by the size of the place. It just gets larger every time I go. So I noticed that AD Vision had a skybox at their booth location, and asked one of the AD Vision folk "what would it take for me to get up there and take some pictures?" The guy told me they were having a meeting up there, but if I came back in ten minutes, he'd walk me up himself. So I did a round of the floor, and when I came back, he escorted me up. The resulting photos are on my Flickr page, but the banner photo is one of the better crowd shots.

Today the gang took a lazier approach to getting started. We lounged around in the room in the morning, then wandered over to catch the Geneon panel. This is a company that is making deals for some of the more popular anime, so we went to catch the clips. After that, I went to see the live action movie version of Tetsujin 28. This is the origin of one of my childhood cartoons, known in America as Gigantor. I even wore my Gigantor T-shirt.

After that, I walked upstairs to the KOTOKO concert. She's an idol singer being promoted by Geneon. It's been years since I've been to any sort of concert, so I thought it would be fun. She opened with some techno-beat J-pop, moved on to basic J-pop, and transitioned into a ballad. Around this time, the whole front section started waving light wands and glow sticks overhead. It appeared as if they'd all brought them, or been given them before the concert. Not to be outdone, other sections began to wave their cellphones and PDAs around with the backlights on. I looked around, and this was happening all over the room! I don't know if this is common practice now, but it was new to me.

I'm back in the room now, writing things up for a break. Next it's off to try to snag a photo or two. Bye!

Opening Ceremony

The guests were introduced one by one. First the American voice actors, who do the dubs of American licensed anime. After Crispin Freeman was introduced, Colleen Clinkenbeard was introduced. She was clearly pleased by the volume of the applause and gave a little twirl. Then came Greg Ayres, an anime fan who has become a voice actor. He showed up with purple hair, and when he was introduced, he decided to be giggly and bubbly too, and did a twirl that topped Colleen's. From that point on, each guest did a twirl, with one exception, and the guest after him did a multi-twirl to make up for it. I was clapping and cheering whenever they did it. Spontaneous emergence of silliness really brightens my mood.

Concert 'Tickets'

More Expo planning goodness. I wanted to go to the Maaya Sakamoto concert, which will be held on Sunday afternoon. My ticket, it turns out, is a wrist band which was attached this morning! Any attempt to tamper with this wrist band will result in refusal to enter the concert. Any attempt? Like, oh, taking a shower? What dunderheads. They want to prevent ticket scalping, but they just don't think through the consequences.

I'll let you know if this stupid wristband survives two evenings in bed and two showers before the concert.