World Apartment Horror (1991)

directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

Japan

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm a big fan of Satoshi Kon, but prior to this I was somehow not aware that he did anything outside of animated films. And now that I've seen it, forgive the hyperbole, but I have to ask how have more people not seen this? It's got popular names attached to its creation, but more than that, it's just an absolutely brilliant, fun, imaginative, and original film with genuinely important social commentary. Is its message so unpopular that it's led to it becoming obscure, or is its obscurity just down to low distribution worldwide (which is ironic) for some other reason? I would hope the latter is all it is.

The film opens with a long shot of the crowded streets of Tokyo with specific emphasis on people milling around who are not Japanese. Pay attention to this, because it's essentially the theme of the entire film. Our main character is a yakuza enforcer who's picked specifically to clear out a building that the shady "construction company" he works for wants to raze because he runs a prostitution service dealing with - again - non-Japanese women, and the last remaining residents of the building are all foreigners. The yakuza assume that these people are going to be so naïve that it'll be easy to sway them to leave their homes, or possibly that they're all there illegally, and just dangling that fact over their heads will be enough to get them to acquiesce. Basically, racist assumptions of inferiority all around.

The guy they send begins a campaign of annoyance, doing everything your least favorite apartment neighbors have done, but times ten and more actively malicious - playing loud music, doing karaoke in the halls, having loud nasty sex in plain view, you get the idea. But the whole point of this is that the people who live in the building and come from all over, most barely or not at all able to speak Japanese, are never the ones being made fun of or caricatured. It's the guy who walks in assuming he has birthright to any and all space he wants just because he believes he "belongs" there who is made to look stupid. This is something that's still relatively rare to see in Japanese media: not only the message that nationalism is bad, but a demonstration of how ridiculous Japanese people look when they act racist against people who are just going about their lives, daring to not be Japanese. This is something I don't really have any place to speak about, being a white American, but it's also something that I want to see more of as somebody who is also trying to be anti-racist.

Of course, racism and xenophobia is horror enough, but where the "horror" in the title comes in is the fact that the apartment building also happens to be haunted by a hateful spirit. Eventually the spirit possesses the yakuza guy and it's up to the rest of the inhabitants to deal with it and drive out the spirit. I can't help but feel like the possession was a direct metaphor for what being a racist can do to a person: That kind of obsessive, teeth-gnashing, childish "this is mine and only mine and all mine and everyone else go home!" attitude can do nothing but eventually take over your life, growing and growing in influence like an evil spirit until you're not a person anymore, just a vehicle for hatred. The possessee is saved and realizes how stupid he had been, but the ending of the film, while optimistic in some ways, is ultimately a fairly grim reminder that the shadow of the things we've done out of hatred will hang over us forever - unless we learn to recognize it, and to actively work on doing what we can to repair the consequences that our actions have had for other people. "No more Japan. World apartment."

All of this is delivered in a subtly stylish and at times very humorous - but never, ever mean-spirited towards the wrong people - film. The set design is something you might not immediately notice but it is extremely important in creating atmosphere; I loved the look of that cluttered, run-down building where everybody lives in slight fear mixed with reverence of some awful malevolent force behind the walls. If you watch a lot of Japanese horror from the 90s to early 2000s, this looks really familiar. The dingy paper screens, very little furniture, trash in the halls, stuff piled on the floors. You could walk in and go "yup, there's a ghost here." I don't really consume enough anime to be able to compare this to specific films, but there is definitely an artistry here that does feel a lot more like, well, art than visual media (not saying the latter is not art, but I'm talking about drawn artwork). Again, it's amazing to me that this doesn't have a high-quality official release and not a lot of people have seen it.

Terror Beneath the Sea (1966)

directed by Hajime Sato

Japan, USA

79 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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After hearing about Sonny Chiba's death from covid the other day, naturally I wanted to watch something he'd been in. I am not much for martial arts movies, but he's also been in a whole ton of cheesy old sci-fi/horror, which is of course my favorite thing. Terror Beneath the Sea (a Japanese/American co-production originally titled Kaitei Daisensô) is not a terribly good film, nor is it anything groundbreaking, but Sonny Chiba does make it better. Also worth mentioning is Hajime Sato's earlier Ogon Batto, which I watched, loved, but didn't review, and which features both Sonny Chiba and a superhero who is an ancient skeleton mummy.

Although 1966 is, to me, a little bit later in the game than most movies capitalizing on the whole "what's up with this nuclear energy thing and how many weird ghouls can it create?" hype, and a lot of its other themes also seem more suited to the previous decade, Terror Beneath the Sea is every bit the 1960s science fiction poster child. It begins with the Navy unveiling their newest precision submarine technology, which eventually leads two photographers to an underwater investigation of a Mysterious Creature Sighting™, which eventually leads to them getting captured by a sinister mad scientist bent on creating a new race of mind-controlled super-soldiers under his command, who will conquer and repopulate the Earth. I'm a fan of the specific term - "Processed Man" - they use to describe these engineered post-humans. It just sounds like such a deeply mid-century sci-fi turn of phrase.

The way the movie goes about reeling out its plot is where I felt like this was a little different from others of its ilk that I've seen. Aside from the finale when all the good guys are trying to escape from the bad guys in their underwater lab that's under siege by Processed Men gone haywire, there's not a lot of terror to be felt in this. It just kind of... drifts, a lot of the time. It's like it starts off telling a story, but then it gets distracted whenever it comes time to show anything cool, and it focuses on that for a while instead. Like a special effects demo reel that's trying really hard to be a whole movie. During the transformation sequence that introduces the mad scientist's method of turning normal humans into his yucky bio-engineered fishmen, even though they kept cutting to the main characters' disgusted and horrified reactions, I didn't get the same vibe as I usually do when I watch a horror movie. It just felt like the movie was trying to show me how cool its practical effects were. Long, slow shots of the two leads scuba diving had the same effect, especially with that score that was more "funky space age cocktail party" and less "under threat from mutant gillmen". Those scuba scenes where absolutely nothing was actually happening gave the whole movie a different vibe.

This is also surprisingly progressive for its time in certain ways with regards to gender, but par for the course in other ways. Even though the woman photographer has to wear the sexy legless scuba suit while her boyfriend just wears a regular one, and even though she's the one who supplies most of the screams of horror, she's still treated like a co-lead instead of just somebody who's tagging along. I particularly liked the way Sonny Chiba's character defends her reputation to a couple of jerks trying to write her off as hysterical after the first Mysterious Creature Sighting™. Disbelieving her account of what she saw, the men turn instead to the man with her, asking if he saw it, and he gets angry with them and says "No, but she did". He backs her up 100% at every turn. I've seen this, I've experienced this, and as a man, that's what you do in that situation. When other guys start trying to get you to talk over or speak for the woman you're with, you stonewall them and redirect them right back to her.

(Then again, when the mad scientist captures the photographer and starts his process of gillman-ifying her, apropos of nothing he feels the need to mention that one of the effects of his process is "elimination of sexual distinction". Because the most terrifying scenario imaginable to a man is a woman losing her boobs.)

I guess ultimately the most disappointing thing about Terror Beneath the Sea is the lack of more monster stuff. There's a veritable army of those mutated guys running around and sometimes they have guns and try to kill people, but after the initial novelty of seeing their goofy-faced design wore off, I was left wishing there was more - maybe some neat miniature sets getting blown up (I've been watching nothing but Toho stuff lately so excuse me), or failed attempts at creating the mutants, or something else that would have opened up the opportunity to show off more than just monster suits. The meandering shots of monsters being made that I mentioned earlier are absolutely golden and I am as enthusiastic about them as the film itself seems to be, but I needed a little more of that for this to keep my attention.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

directed by Yoshimitsu Banno

Japan

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Since this year marks its 50th anniversary, I decided to finally revisit the first Godzilla movie I ever saw. It's a bit controversial due to being so out-of-place compared to the way the franchise had been going so far, and the director, Yoshimitsu Banno, was actually kept from ever making another Godzilla film again because Toho was so deeply, deeply upset about his decision to make Godzilla fly in this film (they would eventually begin plans to collaborate with him again, but unfortunately he passed away before this could come to fruition). In an undeniable boss move, Banno titled his autobiography Why I Made Godzilla Fly.  

Jun Fukuda is usually the Godzilla director whose movies have the most garish, hyper-modern pop feel to them, and even his non-Godzilla work often uses outlandish outfits and loud, youthful nightlife as a motif. But this movie tops even him when it comes to psychedelic imagery. The backdrop this film is set against is one where young people of the country realize the problem, but don't quite seem to have any concrete plans regarding what to do about it other than to get together in bodypaint and sing and dance a bunch. But even though Godzilla vs. Hedorah dispenses with any of the serious atmosphere of previous entries in the franchise in favor of gettin' down, Hedorah as a concept is actually very much in keeping with the message of Godzilla. Both creatures arise from a manmade crisis, though Hedorah serves as more of a metaphor since it's depicted as an alien: Godzilla from the use of nuclear weaponry, Hedorah from continually dumping waste in the sea and polluting the atmosphere. Each one is a manifestation of a particular threat to humanity that comes from within ourselves. But while Godzilla is recurring, never subsiding, always there so long as disarmament remains an optimistic dream, Hedorah feels more ephemeral. Having Godzilla, an avatar of destruction if there ever was one, fight against a symbol of such a massive problem as climate catastrophe and win really just reinforces Godzilla's own strength rather than Hedorah's.

This movie is just structured really weird and it's very obvious that it was made by a newcomer and first-timer to the series, although for what it's worth, Yoshimitsu Banno is not at all a bad director, having worked with Akira Kurosawa in the past. The human characters are generally either unimportant or slightly annoying in these films, but in this case they basically don't matter at all. There's barely a main cast. One of them gets slimed and spends the entire movie being transported from place to place while lying down with bandages over half his face. Nothing the humans do seems to have any effect on the outcome, which is also in keeping with the series - you never really know whether whatever anti-Godzilla scheme we think up is going to actually do anything - but even so, the defense forces are featured even less than they usually are and are shown as more incompetent than anything when they can't get their supposed superweapon to work in time. The kaiju just kind of bumble into the battlefield, taking out power lines and only sort of noticing the things the military set up to attempt to defeat them, and ultimately duke it out with each other while the humans watch, powerless as their efforts fail like they never had any chance in the first place.

There's so much silence and so many scenes where either kaiju and kaiju just stare at each other, or humans and kaiju just stare at each other, or nobody in particular is staring at anybody and nothing is really happening. There's a lot of standing around going on in this film. Almost as much as there is dancing and grooving. However there's also a surprising amount of onscreen death. Godzilla never really kills anybody personally, aside from a couple of times; logically we know when he stomps through cities that there's an absolutely massive body count stacking up with every footfall, but we don't see anything in the way of dead bodies. Yoshimitsu Banno says hell to that and we get to see piles and piles of victims of Hedorah's smog crop-dusting and toxic sludge attacks. People fall to the ground in crowds, choking on foul air. They get buried in acid slime until just their limbs stick out, unmoving. Like I said, this is a funky, psychedelic, wild & crazy film that's very incongruous with the slightly darker tone of its predecessors, but somehow it's also the most explicitly full of death of any of them thus far.

It's not a great movie but I love it and I have no real excuses. The message of needing to drastically curb pollution is always a good thing to see, even if in this case nobody really does anything about it other than, like I said, dance and sing. That's not to say the message is ineffective, because it is - repeated shots of disgusting, sewer-like ocean water and floating trash do turn your stomach enough to hopefully make you think about your impact on the world. But it's also victim to the shortfalls of the hippie generation that basically took aesthetics and pure contrarianism to be more important than action. Honestly though, who cares? Godzilla flies and Hedorah is a weird sludge monster from outer space who can turn into a UFO.

All Light, Everywhere (2021)

directed by Theo Anthony

USA

109 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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"From what history does the future dream?" is the refrain used a few times throughout the course of this documentary, and it is the concept that, I would argue, drives the entire thing. When the film uses that phrase, it's asking us to question what past has created the concepts that we now define as "futuristic": Where did the imaginary of things like surveillance drones, facial recognition software, and police body cameras come from? Where did we get the framework on which this vision of the future that involves photography being deployed as a method of state surveillance is built? This is not strictly a historical documentary - neither is it not one, it is many things - but it does reveal that there is, and always has been, a direct connection between technologies of image-capturing and the use of surveillance by the state to monitor, capture, prevent, and, most of all, invent criminals.

From what history does the future dream? A history where the early use of photography is intimately and inextricably tied to eugenics and colonialism. A history where one of the first applications of the preternatural ability to slow down time, to see frames that our eyes were not, on their own, previously capable of seeing, is to study how people with racialized characteristics are somehow "inferior" to the white, able-bodied, wealthy men creating the photographs. Is it possible to build a future in which photographic technology is divorced from its origins? Can we turn the eye back on the seer? This topic is brought up in a meeting between the (white) operator of a 24/7 aerial surveillance drone, who's looking to sell the people of Baltimore on his creation, and the community, who instantly recognize that they are the targets of his plan, even if he doesn't make this clear and possibly doesn't even want to see it himself. When technologies of recording, of seeing, are deployed, what's necessary, and what often is not done or even considered at all, is for scrutiny to be turned on who is operating the camera. This is another topic the film drills into us: There is no camera without an operator. There is no eye without a body. Even when the eye is an artificial construct manufactured by its millions in a lab, there is no use of a camera without the power of human intent behind it. The isolated footage of a group of Senegalese children walking past the lens of a camera cannot be a recording of the life of those particular children. There is always the question of why these subjects are focused on and why they are in the environment they're in. If we refuse to ask these questions, we may simply see children, without recognizing that the man behind the camera was actively attempting to construct a future in which the children belonged to an easily categorizable, and therefore easily exploited, class of people.

How much of an abomination is the state, that we are actively summoning it into being like some alchemical daemon of old? Every time there is new technology, the apparatus of the state reaches out from the ether to begin inhabiting it. Capitalism continues to give the state more eyes, a new one turning on and looking out at the world every time a brand-new body camera is removed from the packaging and activated and placed on an officer's chest. And now, the state is skyborne, floating above us, capturing images of us as small as pixels on the ground even while we aren't aware. The further technology progresses, the more the state becomes an unthinkable, aiming-to-be-unrecognizable beast. Wresting power back from it involves foiling its attempts to be unrecognizable.

This documentary is not arguing that police body cameras are useless and that state crimes committed in the dark with no witnesses but the murderer and the unable-to-speak victim would be preferable. It is, instead, showing that body cameras are being deployed with the wrong intent. The intent is not to provide an objective record so that the officers involved in violent incidents are punished accordingly and the rate of police-involved deaths goes down. We have to remember that the camera is not an objective viewer. The camera is manufactured, trained, and deployed like an officer of the law itself. Its goal is to show a series of events that accords with what the officer claims about their own conduct, to back up an officer when he says he was in the right. The camera will always be this, because it is in the hands of the state. When bystanders film an assault, when the footage is leaked onto the internet, this is why courts and the state fight tooth and bloody nail to throw it out, to prove that their footage is superior to the cell phone footage that might show the horrible reality of what happened. No eye can be allowed at the scene of the supposed crime that does not belong to the state.

During the total solar eclipse of 2017, which is featured in this film, I was not directly in the path of totality, but I was able to see all the light around me dimmed in a way that was unlike anything I had yet seen. In the lead-up to this event, glasses that would enable safe, direct viewing of the sun were being sold at astronomical prices, and in most places were simply not available to purchase because of the massive demand. This should be familiar after the events of the first quarter of 2020. I went to a location where I would have an unobstructed view of the sun, bringing with me a pinhole camera I'd built out of two sheets of thick paper and some tin foil (it worked, mostly). I planned to use this as my sole way to see the sun during the eclipse, but when I got to where the rest of the crowd was, a man gave me his sunglasses. He said he was leaving and wasn't going to use them anymore, so he gave me something that cost a lot of money to buy at the time, if you could even find it. And so I was able to see the sun. From what history does the future dream? Why are we able to see what we're seeing? Do we see it as a shared expression, like the way sharing a pair of sunglasses might enable two people to view the sun from their own, separate, subjective perspectives? Or do we see it because a single entity is showing us that this is the only possible perspective, that only the image manufactured and captured by them is the correct way to see?

The Green Knight (2021)

directed by David Lowery

Canada, Ireland, UK, USA

130 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I wasn't sure if I was going to review this because there's already so much that's been said about it and I doubt I have anything intelligent to contribute, but after putting it at the top of my "best of the year" list, I wanted to at least get some thoughts down about it. So consider this less of a critical review and more of me talking about how I personally responded to the film.

The translation I read of the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight poem was not fantastic - an extremely stodgy rendition that felt like it had been given a bag with a very limited number of words in it to choose from, and specific instructions never to become overly emotional or upsetting - but it highlighted something that, I think, made me approach this film in a different way. Prehistoric Britain is a personal fascination of mine and something that I'm so much of a stickler for in media that it ruins my enjoyment of anything set in the era, and I was almost edging on getting my enjoyment ruined several times during The Green Knight because of all of its anachronisms, but then I thought about that garbage translation I read and I realized that the Sir Gawain poem itself was not being faithful to the truth of ancient Britain, but creating a motif that would have been recognizable to the people of its day. The Green Knight does not attempt to re-create a specific time and place so much as it uses those themes as a palette with which to create something recognizably "old", but in the process it creates something out-of-time. It's not important that we believe 100% what we're seeing is pinned to a specific era. The feeling just has to be there enough for us to respond to it.

There is a scene that I particularly liked in which Sir Gawain essentially has his photograph taken by the lady of the castle he comes across in the wood. This is a great example of trading perfect historical accuracy for tone, and I felt that using anachronistic technology also said something about the mystery and inaccessibility of the past. To imagine that the technology to take a photograph might have existed in the time of Arthurian legend risks bringing us into bunko Ancient Aliens territory, but as long as it remains just an idea and we recognize that we have no actual evidence to prove that it could have happened, it's such an interesting concept that I'm kind of still struck by it. There's something about the thought of people in such a far-flung time having the ability to permanently capture images without the use of painting, and how that would have impacted the entire world, that resonated with me.

In its context, the photograph plays an important role to the story as well. Gawain is captured in it not yet having reached the end of his journey. The first time we see it, he's a troubled man reckoning with his place in the world around him having been shifted and smudged to incomprehensibility. The second and last time we see the portrait, it's hanging behind him while he is on the throne during the vision where he sees himself becoming king. While he's been thrust into a role of power and fulfilled an expectation that others had of him and that he, possibly, had for himself at the start of his journey, the difference between the morally conflicted man on the throne and the confused, searching knight in the photograph is only the addition of a crown.

One of the most interesting things that was present in the film and not in the poem is that there seemed to be this confederacy of women throughout the entire thing, who were driving the entire thing, and that was never explained or even really shown in full but only hinted at. Gawain's mother is rumored to be a witch and is shown performing some kind of ritualistic magic multiple times, magic that parallels and perhaps even invites the Green Knight's challenge to Arthur's court. The magic she performs also mirrors King Arthur's own demise, possibly as part of a plan to get her son on the throne. Even in the far reaches of his journey, when Gawain comes across the castle, there's an old woman present who is blindfolded in the same manner as his mother during her rituals, suggesting that his mother's method of divination or spell-casting is not specific to her and her peers but scattered, known by many women across the land. The little girl in the post-credits scene who finds Gawain's crown also hints at an inheritance of power by girls and women. The lady of the castle, the one who takes the photograph, is learned and certainly seems to have some knowledge that neither Gawain (nor her fairly inconsequential husband) are privy to. And despite Guinevere's otherwise small role, when the Green Knight enters the king's court, it is her who delivers his message, not the Knight himself, which seemed to me to further prove that there was some connection between the Green Knight and Gawain's mother's circle of women. I would argue that girls and women are at the heart of this whole movie, influencing everything that happens, though it may not be apparent at first glance.

The central message of the story has also been changed to reflect more of the storytelling norms of our modern era as opposed to the structure of the original poem. At the time, the tale would have been told to audiences not as a story about a single man but as more of a moral fable intended to teach them something about how to be. These kinds of tales with morals still exist today, of course, and are now often blended with stories about an individual person's journey, but The Green Knight as a film is far more focused on Gawain as a single, specific man than stories of its time typically were. I am going to link to a Reddit comment that explains very eloquently how Gawain goes through five separate encounters that force him to face the five values of chivalry, because this person's analysis of the film in contrast to the original poem is very good and opened my eyes to a couple of things I had missed out on. As chivalry is really not something people follow to the letter anymore, at least not in the sense that it was followed during the Gawain poet's time, these five trials are used as moral building-blocks for Gawain as an individual instead of a lesson to to the audience about how to act. To transpose something originally written with a completely different aim into a format that modern audiences are familiar with and still not lose any of the feeling and symbolism shows that David Lowery has significant talent.