Reviewer's Note: It has come to my attention that some (or many) copies of both the Ultimate Edition and Standard edition of this movie have a bad video defect. In Chapter 12, at about the 52 minute and 57 second mark there is bad pixellation and audio cut-outs through at least chapter 14. I have even heard that from this spot on, the movie is horrendous on the video side.

Bandai has released an announcement of how to replace your disc if you have this problem. The information can be found in the DVDTalk forum here.

I received an early copy of the Ultimate Edition and did not experience these problems. I stand by the review I have given. I also feel bad that many people may not see this movie for the beauty it is because of this problem at this time.


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Love Hina - Secret Lives is the 3rd release of this series comprising of episodes 9-12. I talked a little about the history of Love Hina in my review of the 1st release, so I will not go into that very much here. I will start off by saying that this is the weakest of the releases so far and makes me start to question exactly what this series is trying to do.

Episode 9 starts out with the disappearance of the rental money envelope in Keitaro's room. Kitsune dresses up as Sherlock Holmes and decides to get to the bottom of it. She asks all the girls and Keitaro what they were doing when the envelope disappeared. It seems everyone has an alibi except for the turtle Tama. Tama has something on its belly and Naru sees it. It is evidently what Naru was frantically looking for earlier ...Read the entire review

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Love Hina - Go West is the 2nd release of this series comprising of episodes 5-8. I talked a little about the history of Love Hina in my review of the 1st release, so I will not go into that very much here. Instead I will go straight into the episodes.

Episode 5 starts off with Keitaro and Naru ready to go for their Tokyo University entrance exams. This will be Keitaro's third attempt and Naru's first. At this point Keitaro still believes Naru is the girl he made the promise to 15 years ago to meet up with at Tokyo University. After the test they go to the house and Keitaro believes he aced the test while it is obvious from her expressions that Naru does not feel she did well. The next day they find out that neither of them passed the exam. Keitaro brings the promise up again, b...Read the entire review

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I start off my review with a little honesty. I have never seen Armitage – Poly Matrix and pretty much went into Armitage – Dual Matrix cold turkey so to speak. The 14-page insert did help me catch up a bit on what happened in the prequel, so I was kind of confident going into this movie. Overall this is a pretty good movie, but nothing spectacular. The presentation is top-notch though and this movie had a relative fast track to the US from Japan.

Armitage – Dual Matrix is the continuing adventures of Naomi Armitage. She is a Third, a brand of robots that act human. In fact she is the last of the Thirds or so the story goes. In this movie Mars is colonized by Earth and a definite separation of the two worlds has been created. With a critically low birthrate happening on Mars, the government decided to create the Thirds to he...Read the entire review

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Pilot Candidate – The Test is the final volume in the anime series. I have no idea if the manga version of this is still going, but it would certainly explain a lot with how we are left so high and dry at the end of this disc with supposedly nothing coming in the future.

That is right...this show has no true ending, much like another Bandai show The Big O which is fortunately being rectified with a second season coming. The problem with this release is that towards the end it is promising so much, but with it being the end we see no true payoff. Episode 9 (the series starts at Episode 0) starts with Zero dreaming that he is in a world that everyone from the Pilot group is in, including the instructor and the repairers. Through his dream he decides that he needs to be a pilot and he will put all of his energy toward reaching that goal. He...Read the entire review

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Pilot Candidate – Working Together is the 3rd volume of this 4 volume series. Let me point out at first that I have not seen the previous 2 volumes, but I can safely say I believe I know what is going on…and none of it is really good.

Titled Candidate for Goddess in Japan, I have no clue why Bandai thought it necessary to change the given name of the show. The only reason I can think of after seeing the end of this series is that the original name would truly not fit. Pilot Candidate is based around a pilot named Zero and his ship repairer Kizna (incorrectly named, the phonetic name is Kizuna). Zero dreams of becoming a pilot and eventually becoming a Goddess pilot. The Goddesses are the top tier of the pilots and they battle against an enemy called Virus that threatens to attack Zion, the planet that everyone seems to be protec...Read the entire review

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Lilo & Stitch is a great movie that will most likely go overlooked. This being Disney animation's third modern attempt at an original story (Lion King and Dinosaurs being the others), I was going into this movie with high hopes and it really delivered.

Lilo & Stitch are about two characters, one a young Hawaiian girl and the other a dangerous and powerful alien. Funny thing is they both are more trouble to their handlers, but the girl is mostly innocent while the alien is treated as physically dangerous. At the foundation they are the same character but are from, literally, different worlds. Stitch (or 626 as the aliens call him) was created by a mad scientist and is considered a very dangerous and smart construct. Virtually invincible, Stitch's only weakness seems to be water. Stitch escapes his imprisonment and fli...Read the entire review

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I will again admit I am not a huge follower of Sailor Moon. I know many people who are religious followers of this series and I think even they would agree with me that Sailor Moon Vol. 4: The Secret of the Sailor Scouts is more continued crap from the disc I previously reviewed. There will be some repeats from my Vol. 3 review coming up.

What is presented on this disc are episodes 19-24 of the Sailor Moon TV series. DIC productions have owned what I believe to be the first couple to few seasons of the SM franchise, Pioneer Entertainment owns the rest of the series. ADV bought the rights from DIC for these and we are presented here with basically what has been shown on our television stations, including Cartoon Network before the Pioneer-owned episodes, when we were younger. And what is presented here is crap. The video looks like ...Read the entire review

The Movie

I will admit I am not a huge follower of Sailor Moon. I know many people who are religious followers of this series and I think even they would agree with me that Sailor Moon Vol. 3: The Man in the Tuxedo Mask is utter crap. This is not all the fault of ADV though, they are obviously in this to make money or at least I hope that is the reason.

What is presented on this disc are episodes 13-18 of the Sailor Moon TV series. DIC productions have owned what I believe to be the first couple to few seasons of the SM franchise, Pioneer Entertainment owns the rest of the series. ADV bought the rights from DIC for these and we are presented here with basically what has been shown on our television stations, including Cartoon Network before the Pioneer-owned episodes, when we were younger. And what is presented here is crap. The video looks ...Read the entire review

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Steel Angel Kurumi was a surprisingly good entry into a series that I was not at all interested in at first. This series consists of 15 minute episodes, with this disc containing the first 6 episodes in the series. This is one of those animes that are based around maids or maid-like characters. Such series as Hand Maid May and Amazing Nurse Nanako are examples, both good and bad, of the sea of maid anime series that are coming out. I figured Kurumi would be one of those bad series, but boy was I wrong.

Glancing at the series, it seems to adhere to the "fanservice" area of anime. This area of anime usually has panty shots (in the second episode), the lead male accidentally doing something confused as flirtatious (happens a lot in these episodes) to a female and the female characters being in outwardly sexual costumes and having outwa...Read the entire review

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Traffic: Criterion has been a long time in coming. I did not pick up the first version of Traffic that came out because there were already rumblings of this release coming in the future. I unfortunately cannot compare the two releases as I do not have the other one, but what is presented here is certainly great.

Traffic, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is a movie about 3 different situations revolving around American drug trafficking. One story is about the new American Drug Czar, Robert Wakefield (played by Michael Douglas), and his beginnings as the new Drug Czar of America. Not only does he have a problem on the international front with the drug traffic, but he also has a problem on the home front. His daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen), has fallen into drugs with some friends at school. Throughout the movie she gets deeper a...Read the entire review

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I have been waiting a while for Love Hina to come out on DVD. This series has a bit of a history to it. Wildly popular in Japan, the American fansubs were one of the first digitally downloaded fansubs in existence. Most of the people I know in the anime community downloaded the whole series and the legality of such a thing sits on a fence. On one hand the show was not announced as licensed by Bandai yet. On the other hand they were downloading a series that was obviously destined for an American DVD release. So now this series is upon us and from the first volume it looks to be somewhat interesting, but also seems, at first, very flighty in execution.

This anime was created by Production I.G., one of the premier Japanese animation studios. They have done work on such things as Jin-Roh and the upcoming FLCL along with many others. ...Read the entire review

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Directed by first-time director Hirotsugu Kawasaki and supervised byKatsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Spriggan shares quite a bit with Otomo's masterpiece, but leans more toward action than plot. Based on the popular Japanese comic Striker by Chu Takasige and Ryoji Minagawa, this license had quite the bidding war for it. Eventually Kawasaki and Otomo won out and you can see some of the parallels between Akira and this movie, especially in one key character. In order to enjoy this movie you really need to leave your brain behind and treat it as a non-plot filled action film.

At the very beginning we see some archaeologists in Turkey. One of them falls down a deep cavern and falls upon Noah's Ark directly from the Bible. The Ark awakens and lets out some sort of sonic boom that goes so far as to destroy an orbiting satellite in space. We then...Read the entire review

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As I walked out of this movie, a question popped into my head: "Were everyone's expectations for this movie so low because of The Phantom Menace that everyone blindly called this a great movie?" Something tells me the answer to that question is yes. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (AotC) is a good movie, but not nearly as good as it could have been. As I was watching the movie I began to wonder if Lucas was knowingly trying to create AotC in such a way that it would rival Empire Strikes Back in its magnitude and scope. In some ways this movie excels Empire and all the other Star Wars movies, but in other ways it falls far below all of them.

This movie is set 10 years after The Phantom Menace. Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) is now a senator after her term as Queen was completed. She is a major ...Read the entire review

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Conceived by Yadate Hajime and Mobile Suit Gundam creator Tomino Yoshiyuki, as well as animated by Sunrise (Cowboy Bebop, Visions of Escaflowne, etc.), Brain Powered is a very confusing series during the 9 episodes in this DVD release. Tomino once said that Brain Powered (BP) would outdo Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE), but I think he was a bit too hasty in his statement. BP might be better than NGE if it could get over its biggest problem: the total confusion of the viewer. Granted, NGE was not the most logical series, but at least it made some semblance of sense. This series jumps around too much and never really explains very much in these first 9 episodes.

There are a couple pluses in this series though. The animation is good in a Gundam sort of way. I can easily see features in Isami Yuu, the main mal...Read the entire review

The Movie

The Batman/Superman Movie encompasses Superman's animated series episodes 39-41. This arc is commonly known as The World's Finest (which I shall call this from now on) and I was surprised they did not call it that for this release. This arc was originally put on television unlike many of the direct-to-video releases the Batman series enjoyed over the years. This release brings the two biggest heroes, Batman and Superman, and the two biggest villains, Joker and Lex Luthor, together into one arc.

The movie starts off with Joker stealing a green dragon in Gotham. Batman picks up a piece of the dragon and determines it is kryptonite. It seems Joker has grown tired of always being thwarted by Batman, so he decides to go to some new digs in Metropolis. First order of business is to talk to Luthor. Harley Quinn takes out Luthor's usual driver a...Read the entire review

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Batman: The Animated Series – The Legend Begins is the first in what I hope is the continuing release of DVDs based on Batman: The Animated Series. I consider this show to be the best non-prime time American produced, but mostly Japanese animated, animation series of modern times. In fact, Batman: TAS started during a low time in Saturday morning cartoons' history. Batman: TAS brought a darker and more adult-like mood to Saturday morning cartoons. The success of Batman: TAS brought about a few spin-offs by some or all of the same creative team: Superman, Batman Beyond and Justice League. It is important to note that the sales of this specific title will dictate whether any more Batman: TAS DVDs coming out and if they will come out in a different format like a box or not.

The 5 episodes presented here are actually not in sho...Read the entire review

Reviewer's Note: I've decided to split this review into 2 sections. The first section will be a spoiler-free section for those not so familiar with the history of the comic book or have not seen the movie yet. The second section will go more into what they got right and wrong with this movie from a comic and Spider-Man fan angle. This will be a spoiler-full section and you may want to read it after the movie if at all. For those comic book people that have already seen the movie and want my views, this is for you as well. Both sections will have a Final Thought on them just for people picking and choosing between the two reviews. So for those that don't want spoilers or are interested in the movie, just read the top part of the review. For those that want to delve more into it or want to know my views, check out the second part.


The Movie (Spoiler-Free)
<...Read the entire review