'Death Note : The Last Name' English Subtitled HK DVD Released March 13th 2007.

The second of the two recent Japanese Blockbusters gets its English Subtitled HK DVD in a week or so, fairly hot on the heels of the first.

Now, I have watched that film, and it was fairly passable. Yes, I will be watching the second, partly out of grim fascination and partly out of true interest. For those interested, I put some thoughts about the first film in the forum a short while back, and to reiterate what I said there I will mention that this film has a fairly light story which is probably more about bringing to life aspects of the story from the manga and anime incarnations... if you liked last years 'Nana' live-action adaptation, and you're familiar with how it went about things, you'll have more of a sense of how this one works.

There's the usual irrational fear of imperfect hair which gives away its intentions to appeal to as big an audience as possible, without offended their most delicate of sensibilities - unless it's necessary to do so in an ironic fashion, to drive the story along or to provide contrast, shocks and so on. So there's a fairly anodyne presentation of a film that's essentially discussing concepts of justice (or lack of it) by showing an upcoming super-human law student (known as 'Light') battling instinctive crime-solving genius 'L' in order to exploit and predict the possible outcome of using the ubiquitous 'Death Note' notebook to identify and control the specifics of any given individuals fate by jotting down details within the bounds of the book's rules.

The films ending though, and not wanting to really give much away if you're intending to watch both without being too interested in manga or anime as mediums, leads interestingly into how the relationship between 'Light' and 'L' might grow to work. Enough fascination in there to get me interested in the fairly minimal cost of seeing it, but still generally not that much of interest to me beyond that. Still, wonder how this compares to some of the less-obviously manga-to-film adaptations of the past in how it compromises the in-print stories to something for at least a potentially large audience; 'Lady Snowblood' for example.

Pre-Order 'Death Note : The Last Name' on English Subtitled HK DVD for release March 13th at YesAsia.