This DVD contains over four hours of pure autism, and is essential viewing for all Chris-chan fans (just so long as you’re not a JERK).
Although it was distributed in 2007 among a few select friends and family members, Chris intended this DVD to be mass-released at some point. He mentions in his Future Message that he thought the DVD would eventually be shown in schools. You see, Chris believed he is a special person, one worthy of great fame and recognition…and, as history has shown, he was absolutely correct.
The oldest piece of film is from 1994, when Chris was 12, and documents him winning some local sweepstakes thing. This video can be considered definitive proof that Chris is not a joke or a character. He talks to the camera like a shell-shocked PTSD victim, and the reporter mentions that he has high functioning autism.
The next video is from 1998, with Chris reading a poem in high school. “My peer relationship is low, and my loneliness is off the scale.” He soon wanders off topic, and starts talking about school life in general. The video ends with Chris raging and shrieking like demon-possessed Regan because he got bad marks in English.
Then we’ve got a pile of tedious videos of Chris playing videogames. There’s a news segment from 1999, when Pokemon was huge, that shows Chris playing the trading card game with kids half his age and generally taking it all rather seriously.
Then there’s Chris singing his cover of The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”, with lyrics about how he’s searching for a girlfriend.
And so on, and so forth…it’s endearing and rather moving to see Chris’s mind at work. I wonder what it must feel like to have such a world-view that 5 minute clips of you playing videogames seem like professional DVD-worthy content. Honestly, it would feel awesome.
This guy’s feedback mechanisms are broken in the best way possible. Everything he does is perfect. Every comic he draws is a masterpiece. Every game he beats gives him the rush normal people get from climbing Everest. Being Chris is like being a rat, pulling a lever, and having six pounds of Gorgonzola fall on your head.
The longest part of the video is a two hour slideshow of Chris’s art, comics, and photography. The soundtrack is provided by Chris’s “radio station” KCWC, which means I hope you like videogame OSTs and 90s pop songs. Apparently Chris has a master copy of this DVD that goes for six hours.
Chris is a legend in his own mind. And mine, too.
There’s a lot to like about Genocyber. It’s edgy, it’s violent, and it has a great atmosphere. But like so many OVAs, the weight is all in the packaging. Any dissection or analysis of this anime reveals there’s really not a lot at its center.
The plot looks deep and engaging at first, but almost immediately you realise it’s a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff. Blah blah siblings with a psychic link blah blah huge robot mechas blah blah shadowy government agents blah blah climactic transformation scene blah blah city blows up the end. The characters are mostly just stock, including the usual assortment of evil scientists and masked henchmen and a gang of street thugs lifted right out of Akira.
If you don’t care much about story, Genocyber works. It evokes a nasty and brutal atmosphere, and the thematic confusion could be interpreted as acute psychological depth. It worked for Neon Genesis Evangelion, after all. The animation is punchy and colourful, with a few CGI moments mixed in here and there. On the whole it’s hard not to be impressed by Genocyber‘s aesthetics and style, even if the content side of the anime comes up short. As with Ohata Koichi’s previous work MD Geist, the gore factor is comically high. One scene in the middle gets so outrageous and excessive that it borders on being comedic. The final battle ends with all of Hong Kong destroyed.
Things get hard to follow. Genocyber is confusing, bombastic, and over-the-top. In a way, it’s almost like its own characters, in that it’s cataclysmically fucked in the head and deserves to be in a room with padded walls. This is a definitive example of 90s anime, both the good and bad. The English dubbing sucks ass, by the way.
Ishiro Honda’s 1954 monster movie Godzilla isn’t scary now. Maybe it wasn’t scary then. It possesses a certain eerie power, though, because of what’s outside the frame: its context. You’re watching two of Japan’s deep cultural fears (the deep ocean, and nuclear weapons) collide on the screen, in the form of a huge mutated creature rising from the sea, destroying city.
Forty years later Roland Emmerich resurrected the franchise and shot it full of steroids.
The good part is that there’s no phoned in “humans are the REAL monsters!” subtext, a’la every other monster movie from the period.
The bad parts can be generally defined as “the rest of the film”. The CGI Godzilla is never even slightly believable. There’s never the sense that it’s a skyscraper-sized colossus that weighs a hundred thousand tons. It dives into the sea and makes a tiny splash. It sneaks around New York as inaudibly as Solid Snake.
The film’s best moments are the ones where the monster is outside the shot, or barely seen. This is an effective touch. It gives the impression that we’re looking at a beast of uncontainable size, a beast too big to film. But that’s also an indictment of how shitty Godzilla looks in this. His every appearance does to our faith in the film what the monster does to buildings.
The movie is badly cast and written. About half the cast is from the Simpsons, and there’s comedic moments (such as the Roger Ebert mayor) that ruin the tension and aren’t even theoretically funny. The characters are extremely stupid – deciding to lure the monster to one of the world’s most densely populated urban metropolises, where mass civilian casualties are almost guaranteed. It’s also one of those movies full of shots of marines firing magazine after magazine at a monster that we’ve long-since established isn’t hurt by gunfire.
I was into kaiju shit when this movie came out. Godzilla caused me to go out of it again.
