The Pnictogen Wing

My friend passed it onto me since she knows I’m nuts for this series. I’m told it didn’t even have a price sticker on it and wasn’t in the store’s system, but the store clerk let my friend have it for something like $10. Would love to know how it ended up there. Did someone else misplace it? Well, who knows, but it lives with me now. I’m still losing my mind about it haha, what an incredible find.

From what i can tell this thing was printed in 1986, and contains an assortment of stuff: stills and concept art from the TV-broadcast run of episodes and the opening and ending sequences (with each episode getting its own double-page spread of stills), several pages full of stills and concept art and other stuff related to the Affair of Nolandia special, what seem to my Japanese-illiterate eyes to be staff profiles and interviews, some gag manga strips i can't read but look very cute, a number of full-page illustrations including a couple of large fold-out ones, and on the dust jacket, some paper dolls of Kei and Yuri.

I can’t seem to find scans of this online anywhere, so i might try to remedy that if i can figure out a good way to scan this without having to damage it (if anyone with more experience with this sort of thing has any tips, I’m all ears). I want to at least get the illustrations and manga strips posted online, even if I have to resort to just photographing them.

(okay I know that here it's a portmanteau of book and magazine, but I had to throw in the obligatory Mean Streets reference ~Chara)

I came up with a doozy. holy heck can I actually write this?

get this. an argument that Michael Mann's Heat is an illustration of entropy. Entropy catches up with Neil McCauley at last, literally. "heat" gets him

his whole life is dictated by pure calculated risk—it's actually impressive to see how well it's enacted. de Niro never misses a note, so far as I can tell, he always does seem totally rational, making risky but reasoned decisions, and...well his luck runs out. his last impulse turns out to be a BAD one and down he goes

~Chara

It's taken me a long time but I've finally gotten used to the idea that sometimes you just can't watch a movie any longer.

I've had the worst misplaced feelings of guilt about not finishing books but it's even worse with movies. Books you can just...put down. But a movie is often something with an audience. No matter how quietly you try to slip out you're probably bothering someone. You'd think that we'd realize with home video we don't need to be so cautious and completionist but old habits die hard.

Last night I bounced off Paul Schrader's Auto-Focus not because it was bad but because it was too good. Schrader is one fucked-up guy and he makes movies about people who are at least as screwed up inside as he is. He's really good at it, but watching the resulting movies is like trying to swallow a whole bottle of quinine in a single gulp. "Caustic" is the word for movies like Auto-Focus and this one's like a stick of potassium hydroxide.

Elon Musk is all too much like Bob Crane in Auto-Focus. Think about that for a bit.

~Chara of Pnictogen

if there's any one movie that would rip our psyches wide open today and shake things up, what would it be ~Chara