Geek of Oz

BEFORE YOU READ ANY FURTHER, PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING. I cannot stress enough that it's important, if possible, to see this movie with as little foreknowledge as you can. Don't Google a trailer. Don't look at a poster. Don't even scan your eyes over the press photos used in this review. If you can, just avoid anything to do with this film's marketing, and go see it unmolested. Words cannot describe how much I loved Your Name , but a lot of that love comes from knowing as scant as possible about it; its premise, its characters, its plot turns. Although most of the current media surrounding the film has been fairly good with keeping the major stuff hidden from view, there are some things you could still infer. Therefore, if there is any Faustian bargain you can strike to completely block out anything resembling anything to do with Your Name before you see it, go do that. For those who are after a hot take or a nice shiny review score before you determine if yo...

If nothing else, Resurrection F highlights just how goofy Dragonball Z truly is at its core. I mean, look at the basic premise: one of the most iconic DBZ villains gets resurrected by the magical dragon Shenron, tries to find and kill his worst enemies - who are busy training under the tutelage of a pair of gods on another planet - and ends up attaining a form that turns him into gold while he does battle with blue-haired antagonists. Like I said: goofy. Following on from Battle of Gods , the plot of Resurrection F kicks off with former galactic tyrant Lord Freeza getting brought back to life thanks to the unfortunately-named Lord Sorbet (because every major Freeza-related villain, like King Cold, Cooler and Lord Chilled, has to be named after something frosty - next thing you know, Goku will be fighting King Esky and his apprentice, Lord Gelato). Freeza quickly sets off for Earth to smack around Goku and his friends, whilst Goku and Vegeta are off learning to be Super Saiya...

SUCKER is based on the award-winning, smash hit stage show by Lawrence Leung. Leung co-wrote the feature film adaptation with director Ben Chessell. The comedic coming of age story stars YouTube sensation John Luc (who has more than 2.3 million YouTube subscribers globally), rising star Lily Sullivan (Camp, Mental) and Timothy Spall (Harry Potter, Mr Turner). Other cast members include Jacek Koman, Kat Stewart and Shaun Micallef. A fresh take on a classic con tale, SUCKER is the first Australian feature film to cast a YouTube star in a lead role, and is loosely based on Leung’s late teenage years. SUCKER  will be released in series with a series of Q&A events across the country from December 1st at select Hoyts cinemas. Both John Luc and Lawrence Leung will be touring. Tickets are on sale now. Hoyts locations include: Tuesday 1st December - Hoyts Eastland (VIC) Wednesday 2nd December - Hoyts Melbourne Central (VIC) Thursday 3rd December - Hoyts Broadway (NSW)...

Welcome to BINGE-READ MANGA! On the first Tuesday of every month, Geek of Oz reviews a manga with a back catalogue and tells you why it's worth binging, Netflix-style. ______________________________________________________________________________ Ever had a teacher you really disliked, and wanted to get rid of? These guys do. Quite a bit.   THE STORY AND CHARACTERS Assassination Classroom is crazy. Seriously crazy. But also heartwarming. It's weird that way. After blowing up part of the moon, a sentient octopus-monster (who is later named Koro-sensei) arrives on Earth and demands to teach a class at a high school, or else he'll destroy the world in a year. The students of Koro-sensei's Class 3-E, tempted by a hefty bounty from the government, set about spending every day trying to kill him. Given that he can move at Mach 20 and is impervious to most guns, poisons and explosives, trying is the operative word there. AC has a premise that is, as shown ab...

Welcome to BINGE-READ MANGA , a new monthly feature where I look at a manga series that's been running for a while and has a good back catalogue built up. Just as Netflix exists well for cramming seasons of TV into a sitting, so too do these manga exist for tearing through six or seven volumes back-to-back. To start us off, we're headed deep into the culinary craziness territory of Yuto Tsukada and Shun Saeki's Food Wars . . THE STORY AND CHARACTERS The way I've pitched this to the uninitiated is it's Harry Potter by way of Iron Chef - you know, that really awesome old Japanese cooking show where a flamboyant man who owns a Kitchen Stadium gets chefs from around the world to compete with his own masters of specialty cooking, which had a really, really goofy (and excellent) English dub? Yeah, that Iron Chef . That's the tone Food Wars sets right from the off. Culinary prodigy Soma Yukihira helps run a self-titled family restaurant with his father, J...

Suffice it to say there are MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST TWO FILMS, as well as MINOR SPOILERS FOR THIS ONE. I'd honestly recommend you watch both before you get stuck into my wordiness. Long-time readers of the site will know that I was, to put it very mildly, pleasantly surprised by the first two Madoka Magica films. As someone who hadn't seen the anime but had had it recommended and praised to high heaven, it was gratifying to see a story as lauded as this that actually lived up to a lot of the hype. It might not be Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop , but dammit it if isn't still one hell of a great film. That was a great enough experience for me on its own. But then I found out there was a sequel. That had been released earlier in Japan. And was coming out here. In English. In 2015. If there was a thermometer for measuring how excited a guy can get, it would've burst its mercury at this point. But that also left me skeptical. The original movie ended quite fir...

I can't remember the last time an anime made me cry the way The Tale of the Princess Kaguya  did. It might be unorthodox to lead with that off the bat, and while it's not strictly speaking a selling point that a movie is able to cause Kleenex share prices to skyrocket, it's nonetheless a quality with Princess Kaguya . You should know going in, especially since this is a creation from the mind of Isao Takahata - the award-winning scribe who began his career with the soul-crushing depression-fest Grave of the Fireflies  - that The Tale of the Princess Kaguya  will, unless your cardiac region has recently been removed, make you cry. But given that it's an overly-heartwarming, growth of the protagonist tale that follows the eponymous princess from her birth, what else could you expect? The movie opens with an elderly bamboo cutter discovering a tiny child, dressed like a princess, inside a strange-looking bamboo stalk. He takes the little girl home to his wife, whe...