Roger Ebert is my favorite film critic. He approaches each movie with the intent of finding things to like about it, whereas a lot of critics give the impression that they'd rather be at the dentist.

Ebert is a friend of animation and has given glowing reviews to Japanese animation in the past, but he did not find much to enjoy in the way of anime in 2009 and listed only Studio Ghibli's Ponyo on his list of 2009's best. While not specifically calling anime out by name, he says:

Now too many stories end in brain-numbing battles, often starring heroes the age of the younger audience members. Here is no food for growth and for the imagination, just brainless kinetic behavior.

I've only seen one of the movies on the list, and it's a must-see: Coraline was probably my favorite movie of 2009 in any genre or medium.

Definitely some interesting-looking animated movies there that I'd never even heard of from places like Israel and India. I also agree with his broad definition of "animation;" he considers movies like Avatar and A Christmas Carol to be animated movies, and who can say he's wrong when the majority of those movies are computer-generated?

Ebert's blog is good reading in general; there are some inspirational posts about his battle with cancer. He can no longer eat or talk, but still enjoys life.

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The final episode is out! The climax of the series -- and by "climax" I mean "literal sexual orgasm" -- is now ready to be consumed by your greedy eyeballs like a fat man slurping down a bowl of ice cream after wandering through the Sahara Desert for a couple of days. This sprawling epic is finally at an end.

Cast member Gavin (a.k.a. "Battlestar Galactica") is standing here next to me as I post this and he has offered to personally sleep with the first three hundred people to watch the video below or through this link over at The Escapist. "No fat chicks," he cautions. "Just kidding, I love 'em! I don't care if the first three hundred are all fat chicks."

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This isn't geek-related news but today, Mozilla Firefox is five years old.

What's truly remarkable about Firefox is that it's improved your web experience even if you're not one of the 24% of web users using it. Before Firefox started gaining market share, Microsoft had disbanded the Internet Explorer team and had no further updates to Internet Explorer 6 planned. It was largely the release of Firefox and looming competition on the browser front that spurred Microsoft to release IE7 and IE8 which, while still lagging Firefox and Chrome in areas, were vast improvements over the abysmal IE6.

Thank you, Mozilla, for making the web a better place! You've made so much possible.

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Congratulations to the Yankees and all of the Yankees fans on OtakuBooty for a dominant season and a World Series victory.

The Phillies, 2009 champions of the actual real baseball league where there is strategy and you can't have a crippled guy who can't field hit for your pitcher five times a game, salute your championship of the thing that is almost exactly like baseball.

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If you like films like Machine Girl or Tokyo Gore Police then Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is for you. A bit more humor in this one and some of the most racist scenes I think that's been put to film in the past 30 years. Best seen with a group of people.

View the trailer

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Surely, you've all played Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, right? Perhaps you've even cosplayed it?



I had no idea how real the game was. Bonus activity: Listen to the background music and play "name that anime/RPG." The music at 5:09 is driving me nuts. What's that from? Actually, I think it's a Yoko Kanno track, now that I think about it.

Thanks to nope for sharing this video.

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Classy team. Congratulations to the Dodgers and their fans on a great season. If things went the other way, I would have been proud for you guys to represent the National League in the World Series.

Signed,
A Guy Born In Beautiful Norristown, Pennsylvania, Birthplace Of Tommy Lasorda

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As a follow-up to our earlier story about that cosplayin', nudie-slasher-pic-acting representative, please note that former Japanese Prime Minister Junichirō Koizumi will soon be making his voice acting debut as the voice of Ultraman King in the upcoming Daikaijū Battle: Ultra Ginga Densetsu The Movie.

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"Wow," I thought this morning, as I nursed a small hangover. "We've been so busy working on new site features that we haven't posted a news story in a while."

And then we see this.

Japan's Diet is quite similar to our Congress; its directly-elected representatives pass laws and and are also responsible for formally selecting the Prime Minister.  One newly-elected Diet representative, Ms. Mieko Tanaka, has quite the interesting past.

Turns out that she used to cosplay and interview sex workers, and appeared naked in a movie called Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf that we know nothing about other than the fact that we feel perfectly safe assuming it's completely awesome based on the title alone. You can buy the movie on Amazon, if you're really curious about what naked Diet Representative titties look like when they're being groped by some sort of demon. A basically-mostly-worksafe version of a scene from the movie can be viewed here.

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