Is it about body-snatching movies? Alien invasions? Robots gone mad? You never quite know what they're riffing on, so you're never quite sure where you stand.īut that ambiguity gives the movie a little breathing room. The World's End doesn't really have that clear referent. The tropes make for solid films, and playing off of the tropes makes for humor everyone can relate to.
Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz have much stronger genre underpinnings - it's not just "zombie movies", it's "George Romero slow-zombie movies" it's not just "cop movies", it's "Michael Bay over-the-top cop movies". The first two were Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.Īnd The World's End, I think, is always going to be the sort of scruffy underdog of the three. It's also the last film of Edgar Wright's so-called "Cornetto trilogy", three cock-eyed genre riffs he made with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. This is the 2013 Edgar Wright film about a group of erstwhile childhood friends who meet back in their hometown for a pub crawl. So: maybe not the *only* Japanese grammar you should have onhand, but it's a good read and a good reference. Generally, it's a great book for topics in Japanese that you already know, when you want to learn about them in more depth or see a different perspective on them. These all sort of went in one ear and out the other, but it'll be good material to have around once I finally get around to properly learning those topics. It becomes more of a standard reference book towards the end, covering much shorter, more obscure, more advanced, and more specific topics in quick succession. A lot of these descriptions were pretty eye-opening for me - cases where I'd heard the ideas explained three or four times before, but *this* was the explanation that suddenly made sense to me. Lammers covers these foundation ideas in detail, and with a strong bent towards the nuances actual spoken usage. The book's at its best in the early chapters, covering basic grammar ideas like the topic particle or "explanatory の". The book itself is pretty straightforward - general grammar topics for each chapter, and subheadings with more specific topics in each chapter. The way you speak the language is heavily context-dependent: are you a woman? a man? are you speaking to your boss? a family member? a stranger? is this a formal business meeting? a bar? a temple? Comics give you language surrounded by all this context - which, as another side benefit, makes it easier for a newbie reader to puzzle out what's going on. Plus, the format gives you the context of what's going on - and that's really important for Japanese.
It's a novel approach that works surprisingly well - as the author explains in the introduction, comics often provide straightforward language, presented in the way that it's actually spoken. This is a Japanese grammar reference that uses untranslated manga for all of its usage examples. wherein Peter posts a Weekly Media Update.