Streaming Reviews

My first encounter with Kraven the Hunter was in an episode of Spiderman And His Amazing Friends which I had on an old video tape from my great grandfather, along side many other old cartoons. In that episode he was a boisterous boastful bruiser of a man wearing a lion vest who commanded dinosaurs and wanted Firestar to help hatch his dinosaur eggs (it makes sense in context trust me). Kraven The Hunter in this movie is quite unlike that.  Aaron Taylor Johnson plays Kraven as a hunter of bad people. He is a vigilante/assassin taking out the most powerful crime bosses around the world with enhanced strength and reflexes that were somehow granted to him through a magic potion and lion’s blood when he was fatally wounded during a hunting accident when he was young. Why does he do this? It is never clear. He says he does because the people he hunts “bring bad things into the world”   As stories go, this one is really shallow which is a pity because it feels like it has a lo...

At first glance, Mobile Suit Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance seems dressed to impress. A gundam co-production done outside of Japan, and meant to appeal first and foremost to the international audience. Its trailer boasts lots of mecha combat action, its synopsis promises a familiar tale the likes of band of Brothers or saving Private Ryan, just set in the Gundam franchise’s universal century timeline. It’s character designs replaces the typical anime aesthetic with a more realistic, looking one. In some measure it delivers, and in others, I feel it falls short.  The animation on the giant war machines are very well done, conveying that sense of mass and inertia befitting their size. Little details like dents, pockmarks, right down to visible rivets all lend a very gritty feel to the show. On the flip side, the character animation suffers.  Characters lack the visual polish of CGI animation contemporaries like Sola Digital Arts (Appleseed Alpha, Starship Troopers Traitor of Mar...