Battlefield Baseball (2003)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

87 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

____

Last week I took a look at Deadball, so this week I'm writing about its predecessor, Battlefield Baseball. Because this film came first and seems to be a bit more popular than the later one, I assumed it would be superior in most respects, but I was surprised to find that - at least to me, personally - this was not the case.

Tak Sakaguchi again plays walking bad pun Jubeh Yakyu, but this is a very different Jubeh from the one we saw in Deadball. While his backstory is pretty much the same minus the younger brother (grew up loving baseball but too good at it for his own good, accidentally kills own father with pitch, becomes a wandering semi-delinquent), this Jubeh is a much gentler soul. When he transfers to a new school, there are rumors about him, but no indications that any of it is true; where the later Jubeh turned his guilt and shame over his father's death outward by committing such crimes as Dropping Televisions On People, this Jubeh carries the burden of his past far more stoically. Sakaguchi again seems like he's having a good time with this role, but this Jubeh doesn't have the same self-awareness as the other one. His only really great moments are the ones where he's doing obviously ridiculous stuff like punching a guy's entire skeleton out of his body.

The rest of the cast is similarly lackluster when compared to Deadball. I said in my previous review that Deadball kind of worked because everybody felt like they were bringing something to the table that was individually funny, but in Battlefield Baseball too many of the actors come off like they were given instructions to be as over-the-top as possible.

In fact, Battlefield Baseball's problem is that most of the time it is just not very funny. It feels like watching a bad comedian, except the entire cast is bad comedians. There were a lot of "ugh" moments, like when someone would break into song for no reason, when the kid they call Megane would get made fun of just for his inherent wimpiness, or when there would be a piss or fart joke that came from nowhere. But at the same time I have to admit that there were other moments in the film that absolutely did land and landed in a way that was actually better than Deadball.

The second half of Battlefield Baseball is where it feels like it finally hits its stride. The more far-out the humor is, the less hold the plot has on reality, the better. Death absolutely does not matter in this film. Quite literally the entire cast of characters dies at some point or another but it doesn't stick. I should mention that both of these movies are an adaptation of a manga; I've been leaving that out because I'm not familiar with it at all and so cannot judge the live-action films in comparison, but both of these definitely have that "this is a manga adaptation" vibe in how lax the rules are at all times. The final baseball game (which really is not baseball so much as all the players getting on the field and attempting to kill each other) is probably the best part of the film. The whole ensemble cast is together in one space and they play off of each other decently well instead of floundering about alone as they had previously done. The good guys assemble their team and it is a few high school students, two guys who died but got resurrected as mechas, a random cheerleader who up until then had basically not been in the movie at all, and someone's mom. Again, the times when this movie does manage to be funny outweigh even the best parts of Deadball - it just can't keep that pace up consistently. (But, to be fair, neither could Deadball.)

And there is nothing that will prepare you for the reveal at the end of who had been narrating the film the entire time.

Deadball (2011)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

99 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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Deadball offers us no explanation for the fact that our (anti)hero is possessed of preternatural baseball skills. It simply opens with the incident that decides his fate: him smoking Mickey Curtis in the nog with a baseball so hard he explodes. This happens when he is about 16, and next we see him he's a full-grown (well, sort of) juvenile delinquent - the worst in the country, wanted on "54 charges, including Dropping Televisions On People". He is finally arrested and brought to the harshest possible prison, where he's offered a deal: his freedom and the freedom of all the other inmates if they, banding together as a baseball team, can defeat the rival team from the all-girl Saint Black Dahlia high school. Of course, this was never a fair shake for the boys' side: the warden simply wants to get rid of them, and knows the opposing team will annihilate them.

The film's sense of humor is so offensive that it becomes almost banal. While I don't think Nazi imagery is something that should be trotted out simply for its aesthetic value, that is a relatively common practice in certain niches of Japanese cinema, and the pure aesthetic is so divorced from any actual ideological practices associated with it that it's hard to really feel anything after you've seen it a few times. Ditto everything else that happens here: so purely for shock value without any actual attempt at being mean about it that I almost don't care. Almost. The movie's weird homophobia is its only stance that feels like it has fangs, but again, when you know beforehand that the movie you're about to watch it as bizarre and offensive as Deadball, it's hard to feel surprised.

With a movie like this, a lot depends on the actors' individual skills. It won't work if every single person acts like they're in the world's most bugnuts film. There should, ideally, be a few people who take themselves just seriously enough that it highlights how outlandish everything else is. Tak Sakaguchi pulls off the Yakyu role really well, playing it not quite fully straight but with all the stoicism and bravado that a delinquent hero protagonist should have. (He also played a Xillien in Godzilla Final Wars.) Other people who felt like they brought exactly as much sauce to their roles as was necessary were Miho Ninagawa as the warden and Mari Hoshino as Shinosuke, Yakyu's 16-year-old cellmate and the only truly sympathetic character in the film.

There is also, I suppose, technically, in some way, a plot. It doesn't really develop until the second half to final quarter of the film, but we occasionally get nuggets of information that hint at the storied past of Yakyu and his brother Musashi (yeah, those are their names). After the accidental death of their father, Yakyu becomes a delinquent while Musashi is forced to turn to much more unpleasant means of making profit until he finally snaps and commits murder, and after that is never seen again, the mystery of his unknown fate being a thorn in the side of our hero. (He shows back up at the end in a truly spectacular way which I will not mention in detail due to it being a spoiler.) Like I said, Sakaguchi carries this off with enough seriousness that you can get invested in it - all insanity all the time would have made this thing unwatchable.

Did I like this? I don't know. It happened, that's all I can say about it. I really liked the running gag where Yakyu could reach out of frame and grab a lit cigarette to smoke for dramatic effect at any given time. Other characters react to this, which makes it even funnier. If you like splatterpunk films, there's some pretty good gore in this, and there's a scene where a character gets punched through a telephone, so if that kind of thing sounds like something you'd be willing to sit through a lot of visually offensive jokes about basically everybody and everything for, go for it.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

directed by Robert Gordon

USA

79 minutes

3 stars out of 5

___

So we round out this year's KaiJune with yet another non-Japanese monster movie. I'm including this one because it is irrevocably tied to kaiju film history, being a product of the same zeitgeist as Godzilla - or I guess I should call it Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, since that's what American audiences would have seen.

I ended up liking a lot of things about this movie but also absolutely hating a lot of other things. The opening of the film is incredibly strong: the interior of an atomic submarine, the camaraderie of its crew, and the sudden, inexplicable things that begin to happen when, unbeknownst to the men inside, the giant Mindanao octopus grips the sub fast in its tentacles. No windows means that while we, the viewer, with the benefit of 70 years of pop culture to inform us of what's going on, are in on the unfolding events, all the crew have to go by is murky sonar images and the uncanny sensation of being very, very tiny in the grasp of something very, very large.

But as soon as they introduce the woman scientist, things get... 1950s. I am limited in how much I want to complain about this movie's misogyny because I know there's no real point in expecting an old movie to have modern attitudes, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Prof. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) is arguably the film's best character (although the film isn't stellar at all in terms of the human plot) but she spends the whole movie having to fight tooth and nail to justify her existence as both a scientist and a woman. She's constantly being belittled by the men around her, particularly one of the ones she's having some kind of romantic liaisons with. It's only when a man sticks up for her that her worth as a professional and her individuality are recognized, and even then, it has to be couched in a statement about the "new breed of woman" who is every bit as smart and capable as any given man. In some sense it does feel radical to have a man step aside and make room for women as intellectual equals, but I'm not comfortable with how that statement dismisses the often grueling, thankless, unacknowledged work of women prior to WWII and women becoming more visible in the workforce.

And it's even more of a shame because I really like Domergue's performance here. There's something about her body language and expressions that makes Prof. Joyce feel constantly absorbed in whatever she's doing. Domergue gets into the role in a very believable way. In an era where actors could be fairly stiff or over-polished, Joyce feels like a real human.

I think one of the problems with this movie is that it doesn't really feel like it gets excited about anything. It's not fair to compare it to Godzilla - it's not fair to compare anything to Godzilla - but I couldn't help doing it. The issue that almost ruined the film to me was that the initial octopus scene comes out of absolutely nowhere: when I think about how that Odo Island reveal with Godzilla's ugly head cresting over the hill felt like something that had never, ever been done before, and how it was done with much more rudimentary puppetry than this, I feel like this movie has no real excuse for just throwing in our first full look at the monster octopus at random with no build-up or fanfare. All the action scenes in this thing feel unearned, and while the effects are undeniably impressive, there could have been a much better sense of segue between the monster and everything else that was going on around it. Not to mention that the film is entirely lacking any sense of pathos or poignancy; the Mindanao octopus is just a giant animal to be destroyed by man's might.

All that being said, though, I still did like this more than I thought I would. Its flat, dry tone honestly kind of works sometimes - like in the opening submarine scene, where panic and terror would have felt cheap. I liked the procedural, scientific aspect. I actually also liked how the octopus was just a big creature with no particular intelligence (inaccurate, given what we know about octopuses now) that was too large and destructive to be allowed near human civilization. The film doesn't manage to express the sense of monster as paradigm shift that Godzilla does, but as long as you're not expecting a game-changer, this is a pretty solid atomic sci-fi flick.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

directed by Yoshimitsu Banno

Japan

85 minutes

4 out of 5 stars

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Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a tonal nightmare. Environmental horror presented through a lens of dancing hippies, random Mt. Fuji jam sessions, giant flying sludge piles, and a cuddly, heroic Godzilla. While focusing on the things that make vs. Hedorah such a distinct entry within the series is useful for talking about it as an individual film, I think emphasizing those traits can have a tendency to make it seem like this film does not fit with the overall tone of the Godzilla series. Especially on my most recent rewatch, it's very obvious to me that Banno and everyone involved with the film was - while creating something a lot more bombastic and trippy than the series had yet seen - keeping very closely to the message of the original 1954 Godzilla in their own weird way.

One of the first things we see in the film is a kid playing with some Godzilla toys. We're at full commercialization at this point (not that we haven't always been - there was a lot more marketing done around the time of G '54 than a lot of people may think) and Godzilla is explicitly a hero, suitable for the fantasies of children. But rather than see this as a horrific aberration, as the character being mishandled and fundamentally altered from what it was originally intended to have been, I feel like there's also a way to see some bitterness and irony in this. The simplest way to put it is that in the face of a threat like Hedorah, Godzilla really doesn't look that bad. When one of the characters remarks on the awful state of the planet, how polluted and dirty it is, and says that "if Godzilla saw this, I bet he'd be mad" - I honestly thought "yeah, I bet he would". I think if Godzilla saw that humanity had continued to ruin the planet, not with nuclear power this time but with chemical smog, poisoned earth, and uninhabitable oceans, he probably would be pretty mad. 

I think this movie totally knows what it's doing. On the outside it looks like a stark departure from the roots of the Godzilla series, but I really think it's not. There's an obvious callback to the original movie in the fact that one of the main human characters (insofar as any of the human characters are "main", humans are remarkably useless here, even for this series) is a scientist who ends up spending much of the movie with bandages over his right eye. Even more to the point is that he keeps fish in his lab, like Dr. Serizawa also did. The movie really wants to show us that fish tank, and I have to admit that I can't figure out why the fish were made to feel so important - maybe there was an implication that even these perfect creatures, kept isolated from the toxic slime that was choking their non-captive-bred counterparts in the open ocean, would eventually fall victim to sludge like all the rest of the planet, given enough time. Nothing is safe.

This movie is scary. It deals with scary things. It may not seem like it, because it's so colorful and wild that you almost get distracted from the imagery of people dismembered and buried under stifling piles of sludge. But there is a solid philosophy here, under the fish masks and the dancing girls in bodysuits. The younger characters take the view that the good green Earth their parents grew up with is gone, so the only thing to do is sing and dance: the planet is dying, we are all dying, what else can we do? It's the same core concept of revulsion at what humanity is capable of that fueled a lot of the original Godzilla, but instead of getting all mopey, Banno decides to have his characters party about it.

I also think Hedorah rules. Kenpachiro Satsuma knocks it out of the park with this performance (and so does Nakajima in the Godzilla suit, as always). There's something that really clicked with me about Hedorah's overall vibe this time; I just love its silhouette, how lumpy and blobby it is, how its body plan is so totally opposite from Godzilla. It drives home the point that Hedorah is not a creature born from Earth, even though it may be breeding here. Hedorah looks and acts like an alien. I love its static facial expression in contrast to Godzilla, who had been becoming more and more human-like in his expressions since the 1960s.

Yeah, man, the movie's good. This had been one of my least-frequently-rewatched Godzilla movies because it does feel like such an outlier on the surface. But watching it last night made me realize how good it is and how well it fits with the rest of the series. Banno is often maligned for the choices he made in this film, but imagine a continuity where outside directors were invited into the Godzilla series more often. We could have had a few more super artsy, daring films like this at a time when the series was mostly sticking to an increasingly child-oriented vibe.

Indie Kaiju Roundup, part III

Yatsuashi [2021]

Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

12 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This very short short comes to us from director Hiroto Yokokawa, who has made more well-known feature-length kaiju films such as Great Buddha Arrival, Nezura 1964, and recently Hoshi 35. As with much of his work it features Kazuma Yoneyama in a central role, although not the lead role; there's an Iron King thing going on here where the guy who actually transforms is not technically the main character. 

Yatsuashi was evidently based off of a scrapped Daiei film called Great Demon Beast Dagora, which I can find virtually no information about (most of the Google results for that title lead back to Yatsuashi itself). Based on a Japanese blog post and a tweet from the creative team behind Yatsuashi, I gather that Dagora was an attempt in the same vein as the disastrous Nezura to use a live animal or animals rampaging in a miniature set to portray a giant monster, only instead of rats, Dagora would have used an octopus. Taking an unmade project and spinning the idea into a brand-new film is always a really interesting experiment, especially when it turns into something like Yatsuashi that is probably nowhere near what the original filmmakers intended to create. Like I said when I reviewed Great Buddha Arrival, that's how lost and unmade films can continue to survive: by influencing a new generation of filmmakers.

As for the plot, Yatsuashi is essentially about a guy who is so frustrated by his job that he turns into a giant octopus. That is pretty much it. Bin Furuya appears on a news broadcast at one point. There's not much else I can say about a 12-minute film. I really enjoyed this short's sense of creativity and how much it felt like everybody involved was passionate about what they were making, and even though the octopus scenes were minimal, the way it's photographed feels very deliberate, like the creative team really wanted to convey how strange and alien an octopus looks, not just slap one in front of the camera and leave the viewer to decide how to feel about it.

Godaizer [2010]

Directed by Hillary Yeo

19 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

This one hails from Singapore, which is always cool. It's on YouTube under the title "Giant Robot vs. Monster Animated Short" and that is certainly what it is. With no dialogue, the short uses environmental storytelling and lingering shots of news clippings to introduce us to a world where a small family had, at some point in the past, been making and piloting giant robots to defeat a sudden kaiju invasion, until eventually the cost of deploying the robots became too much of a strain on resources... or so they say.

The animation style here is interesting. I did not know how old this was and took it for a more recent production, assuming the patchy, almost brushstroke-like style was a deliberate choice, but now that I know it's 15 years old, I think some of that feel may have simply been due to technical limitations of the time. Still, though, I really did like the way this looked - it's the kind of thing where you can tell the storyboards for it were probably really beautiful.

The story being told here is also interesting: the past is only hinted at, but there's clearly a deep sadness to the characters and their backstory that is fully expressed despite the lack of dialogue. Facial expressions exchanged between the father and son convey everything we need to know.

That time period between when the mecha program apparently ended and when the events of the film take place is what I kept thinking about after I watched this - the father-son team clearly have a lot of robots fully built, serviced, and ready to go, considering that they deploy on fairly short notice as soon as the monster escapes containment, so you have to imagine a decade or more of these folks just... watching their robots rust, knowing they could be used for good, but probably getting told over and over "no, we don't have the budget for that". Again, this is something that isn't stated, but the feeling of being forced to let your passion stagnate because you're not being given the resources you need is incredibly frustrating in a very real-world sense.

Magara: The Final Showdown [2015]

Directed by Jun Awazu

5 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

At just five minutes, this is probably the shortest short I've reviewed. Like the earlier Negadon, this is entirely CG-animated, but unlike Negadon, I think this one lacks some of the expressiveness that the human characters in the earlier film had. Granted, this one has a total of two human characters: the mech pilot and a little boy on the street having his absolute mind blown by the kaiju showdown he's witnessing.

There's not much to talk about here, but the kaiju design is gorgeous - sort of a standard dragonish thing, but something about the head design and the shape of the mouth was really beautiful to me. I would love to see what the 3D model for it looked like. And then we have the mecha, which is clearly based off of Dogoo ceramics and is actually pretty bad at its job. The best thing about this short is that it's an example of a scenario I don't see in tokusatsu often enough: "What if we deployed the mecha and it just made everything worse?"

Howl from Beyond the Fog (2019)

directed by Daisuke Sato

Japan

35 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Another slightly unconventional pick for our second week of KaiJune, but one that, again, most definitely does have a giant monster in it.

Howl from Beyond the Fog bowled me over for about the first ten minutes. The film begins with a young man returning to his childhood home after the death of his twin brother (this is thematically significant but never addressed). There he meets a blind girl - who everyone thought was supposed to be dead - living in seclusion inside his house, and she introduces him to the god inhabiting the lake in the middle of their village, a creature that just wants to live and breathe along with everything else in the world.

I screened Great Buddha Arrival to a small audience this past month, and afterward, my friend and I were talking about the sense of never being able to go home again, of having memories of some specific place or thing that you can never, ever replicate, because even if you try, whatever you're nostalgic for is never going to be the same as the first time you experienced it. To me, that was the overwhelming feeling of the first ten minutes of this short: coming back home to find that everything is the same but also different - it's your home, the place you grew up, but there are aspects of it that you never recognized, here represented as the tremendous, unmovable force of nature that is the creature, but also the undercurrent of hatred in the village that the protagonist may have been too young to notice the first time around.

This is a stop-motion film where all of the characters are portrayed using puppets. Their static faces did not bother me at all, because I wasn't looking to the individual characters for information, I was listening to what was being told through their actions and the imagery onscreen. The creature (canonically named Nebula, which I think is quite beautiful, although it's never named in the film) was designed by legendary creature designer and modeler Keizō Murase. Most relevant to our discussion of this film is the fact that Murase also designed Varan, a creature who was also depicted as being a god to the people who lived nearby. Varan feels very influential on Nebula, and in a way, the story of Howl from Beyond the Fog is a bit like what an alternate-universe version of the movie Varan might look like. Varan is one of my favorite kaiju because of its unconventional origins, and I've always wanted a story where we get to see the creature in its context as a god.

I also want to mention that the film has this way of making Nebula's roar almost diegetic that I thought was really amazing. There's a soundtrack that starts up almost every time Nebula is onscreen, and when the creature roars, it fits in with the music so well that it feels like it's part of it. I don't know, that just gave me chills whenever it happened. Some of the music in this is actually rather unfitting, but the part of the soundtrack that blends Nebula's roar into itself is gorgeous.

I don't think this movie is all that it could have been, but it's pretty close. Going into this with expectations is not the best way to encounter it. Try to just live in it for a little while, get past the lack of human actors and revel in the craft of making this film.

Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi] with English Subtitles

It took longer than I wanted it to, but I finally finished the subtitling project I've been working on: two episodes of Comedy Trio subtitled in English for the first time. This series has been on my radar because it's the most well-known work of Yoshiko Otowa: singer, actress, and younger sister of Akihiko Hirata.

Read more about Comedy Trio here and see the post about my subtitles - which includes the archive.org link to the episodes as well as my TL notes - here.