Cowabunga Corner

One of my main goals these last two year was to read all of the Harry Potter books prior to seeing the beginning of the end for the movies. Sadly, I did not accomplish that goal. I only made it to the fourth book before my life became its normal chaos. I had a basic idea of what was going to happen in The Half Blood Prince, as my husband listened to the audio book at his computer without headphones. With The Deathly Hallows audio book, he used headphones. So, going into this first part of the movie, I was completely clueless as I have been with all of the previous movies aside from The Half Blood Prince.

This week I got the chance to go see “127 Hours,” a movie based on a real life story about a man, who has been climbing all of his life, went out on a day hike. He fell and became trapped after a boulder crushes his arm. His story was well known as he had to cut his own hand off just to escape. I remember hearing about this story back when it happened, so it was interesting to see a movie about it.

My first question when going into this movie was, how are they going to make a movie out of someone trapped alone for 127 hours without putting the crowd to sleep. True, the challenge of getting away is something of interest. Though, how much could they really put on camera that could hold enough attention for a theatrical movie?

Recently I was introduced to an anime named “Soul Eater”, about children that are being trained by Death to be warriors. From the beginning it is clear that this world isn’t Earth. It’s a fun world of magic and warriors.

One of the things that pulled me into this series was their way of handling this darker side of life, giving it the light twist of insanity. You could see this from the beginning of the series with the faces upon the Sun and the Moon. I’ve always enjoyed that bit of twist to the darkness. Much like Halloween Town in “Nightmare Before Christmas”, this town had that feeling that these dangerous things were only out there to live and do their job, while having fun.

RSD - Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome

I’m writing this story to help get awareness out there for something that I have lived with for six years now. RSD, also known as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome, is very painful and debilitating disorder. Someone just touching a person who has RSD can cause pain to that person with the slightest touch to the area where the RSD is affecting the person. For me, it’s my right arm. Here is my story, one I’ve told thousands of times in the last six years.

Fresh on DVD is the third part of Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story movies.  Toy Story started back in 1995, and became an instant hit.  A fun original movie about toys, facing the dangers that enter their life and getting use to a new toy in the group.  An adventure that anyone could enjoy. Though when Toy Story 2 rolled around, fans were wary of the idea of a sequel to the CGI movie that they all enjoyed.  To our surprise Toy Story 2 was just as good as the first, facing another issue that toys have to deal with, being “in or out of package”.  Well written, the characters stayed true to the first movie.  The movie crew some how pulled it off.   Though could they do it again with a third movie?  Early this year Toy Story 3 came to theaters, and just this last week it was released on DVD.

Here is a Teaser for the Youmacon 2010 Video report which is coming soon! We got a lot of video footage at Youmacon which I can not wait to share with everyone. As one of the new features of the Cowabunga Corner channel we will be doing event reviews in written and/or video format.

This review covers two conventions, because this year these two conventions decided to take place on the same weekend.  While it was an interesting idea, it had a lot of down falls for a fan who goes to both events.  Namely, they were forcing the fans to make a choice between the two conventions, which took some of the fun out of going to these events.  This, however, did not make for a bad weekend just more stress than what was needed.

Youmacon is an anime convention held in the Detroit Metro area yearly for six years now.  I’ve been lucky enough to make all six of these years, watching as we went from the small Hilton Hotel in Troy Michigan to what is the tallest building in Detroit, the Renaissance Center.

This year at Youmacon, they had a great guest list ranging from voice over actors to musical guests.  There were panels, contests, dealers, and free give-aways.  Youmacon went above and beyond to go out of the way for the attendees to have a good time.  I was able to get a look at the different areas of the convention through the weekend and found people enjoying themsevles.

More and more lately we are seeing a lot of CGI movies coming to theater. It feels as if a lot of them are just thrown together to make money and nothing else.  We get slammed with bad animation with poorly written plots, but voiced by A-List actors.  Though 2010 has been finding itself some real worthwhile CGI movies like “Toy Story 3″, “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Despicable Me”.  These type of movies make me decide to go back to the theater to give each of these CGI films a chance, knowing every now and than you’ll find the diamond in the rough.

AMC’s The Walking Dead – Episode 1

What can I say about it?

My expectations were high for this new television series. I never like getting my expectations up too high, just because I’ve been so disappointed in the past. But, I knew the comic it is based off of is good, I knew the director is pretty darn amazing, and what I have seen of the makeup for the zombies was impressive. It was difficult not to have high expectations.

Thankfully, my expectations have been met and pretty much exceeded.