Ju-on: The Curse (2000)

directed by Takashi Shimizu

Japan

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

_____

As I mentioned last week, I've been reading David Kalat's J-Horror book, and his treatment of movies that I had seen before but was well overdue to give a second look to has been compelling me to go back and revisit some old favorites. In particular, I enjoy his enthusiasm for V-Cin, seeing it not as a wasteland full of trashy splatter flicks but a breeding ground for creative freedom that spawned some of the scariest and most original films in J-Horror.

Ju-on: The Curse is about the house. Shimizu himself has stated that if he had to posit a main character for this strange, free-floating, non-linear film, it would be the house wherein the horror unfolds. As Kalat says, this is a real house, not a constructed set, but the cinematography (Nobuhito Kitsugi) and the lighting (Hideo Oka) manage to transform a normal house into a Skinamarink-esque labyrinth of pain and misery. There's a shot early on in the film where one of the house's unwitting inhabitants starts hearing the tell-tale moans that signify her doom is close at hand, and when she runs out of the room she's in, the hallway outside is dark and she is framed in a classic Dutch angle - the house transformed, all of a sudden, the house itself conveying the ghosts to her, not content simply to let itself be haunted but insisting that it plays a hand in the horror continuously playing out within it. There's something oppressive about the interior of the house - we see characters throw open windows to daylight; look outside; enter and exit, but as long as they're physically inside the house, it could be as dark or as light as the house wants it to be.

It feels like there's too many stairs, too many angles. Not in an obtrusive way - just subtly. I kept catching scenes where the actors were framed inside doors or windows, boxed in by the house (perhaps, if I may be allowed to risk committing the sin of unforgivable pretentiousness, by the house). During that most famous scene at the end of the film I had a thought that somehow hadn't occurred to me before: "oh, wow, the house is giving birth to Kayako". Sliding down the stairs, wet and blood-matted, there's something disturbingly biological about the whole affair.

It kind of feels like one of those dreams where you're in a house that you used to live in, but something is not right about it.

The plot of Ju-on is deliberately told as a disjointed collection of scenes that aren't arranged in chronological order. When Kobayashi (the appropriately-named Yūrei Yanagi) discusses his missing student Toshio (Ryōta Kayama) with his pregnant wife Manami (Yue), the narrative flashes to a memory - whether it's of the past or of the future, we don't exactly know - that foretells the rest of the film. Kayako bows to him slowly, itself not an unusual action but disconcerting in the way it allows her long hair to fall in front of her face as she advances, out-of-focus, towards Kobayashi. It's not clear what the timeline is here: we see Toshio variously alive and dead at different points as the movie progresses. It's not that we never figure out what events set other events in motion - it's that everything seems to be happening at once.

Aside from how effective this movie is, what's also impressive is the influence it had. From the way Kalat describes it, the film garnered a reputation essentially through people spreading it around Ring cursed videotape style and telling all their friends "Have you seen this? It's the scariest thing I've ever watched". While it is not a perfect film and some aspects of it do still manage to feel superfluous despite its short running time, there's a core of pure, unrefined architectural horror goodness here that went on to have a ripple effect on horror as a whole down the line - much like the violent deaths of Kayako and Toshio Saeki would forever curse the space around where it happened, reaching out and touching any and all who come too close.

Long Dream (2000)

directed by Higuchinsky

Japan

58 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

I originally watched Long Dream a while ago but decided to give it another look since I'm in the middle of David Kalat's J-Horror book and it's making me nostalgic for movies I haven't seen in a decade. I have very fond memories of being in less-than-ideal situations during which I spent my free time reading volumes and volumes of Junji Ito - wasting an entire day reading Hellstar Remina in the spare room of my grandmother's apartment was a formative time for me. That being said, I don't remember Long Dream well enough to compare it to this film, so I'm going to leave that aside and focus on the movie alone.

Conceptually - and this is where it does owe a debt to the original Ito manga, of course - you can't really get more unsettling than this. The idea of people having "long dreams" where they live enormous chunks of time somewhere outside of physical reality while their bodies appear asleep to outside observers is downright horrifying. It starts with relatively small spans - a week, a month, a year - but then devolves into scenarios of unimaginable torture. Spending eight years of objective time searching for a bathroom. Experiencing every second of a dream in which you're a soldier hiding out in the jungle forced to auto-cannibalize to stay alive. And all the while gradually mutating into some other form of humanity the further into the future you go, becoming unrecognizable, a thing from another time, another place, alienated from everyone you may once have known.

While Long Dream does get the point of this scenario's implications across quite well, I think it fumbles a bit in trying to stretch out the manga to even the short length of the film. Dr. Kuroda's (weird-ass) personal life isn't a part of the original manga, although his questionable medical ethics were, and while it does provide more depth to the story and a slightly disquieting sense that the "long dreams" cannot be contained to one person, it's also just kinda your run-of-the-mill Dead Wife Backstory that I didn't feel particularly engaged with, capped off with an ending that in anything else would have been an unforgivable cliche but actually kind of works here.

But isn't it spooky? The little details are where the movie really gets you. If I may be allowed to get into the weeds a bit here, I think the reason why watching Mukouda slowly mutate as he experiences jaunts further and further into the future is the same reason why séances and Victorian spirit mediums were so effective (setting aside the overwhelming need people felt to contact their deceased loved ones). You, an outsider (Mukouda's medical team), are witnessing a medium (Mukouda) engage not bodily but mentally with another place or another plane of existence that is forbidden to you, and the only testament to what that place is like is the medium's reaction. Us normal people cannot go there, but we can watch someone else go there. But because Mukouda's mental state eventually begins to deteriorate, we don't really even get clear testimony of where he's going, and that makes it scarier. All we can tell is that it's someplace where humans have become very, very different from what they are now.

After this, I think Uzumaki is due for a rewatch and possibly a re-read as well, although based on other people's accounts, the anime adaptation was so profoundly disappointing that it will not be part of my Uzumaki experience going forward.

Crab Goalkeeper (2006)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

Happy Marine Day.

I made a mistake by going into this film thinking I knew what it would be like. I would have watched it sooner, but I had a preconceived notion of it according to Kawasaki's other "animal with job" movies and, while I do like those, some of them get a little tiresome when the jokes fail to land. But Crab Goalkeeper is so much more than an "animal with a job" movie. It's an often fairly brutal assessment of the value society places on ability to work as a measure of personal worth, but at the same time it's also a testament to the power of being genuinely kind in the face of a world that is too quick to leave people behind. I am dead serious when I say that you could apply Marxist praxis to this movie if you tried hard enough.

We begin the movie with a giant crab washing up on a beach, being kicked and hit with sticks by several boys. Our main(-ish) human character Shinichi rescues the crab, takes it back to his home, and teaches it to speak - in secret at first, but you can only hide a big, beautiful crab for so long. Shinichi's parents are constantly squabbling about the kinds of issues adults have: money, usually; it seems to be all they talk about, and it prevents them from seeing each other as real people. All they are is bodies who either can or can't, will or won't, make money. After Shinichi's parents discover the crab, their immediate thought is to sell it. His father even recounts a story of how his own father cooked and ate a pet chicken he had while describing how he fully intends to do the same thing to Shinichi's crab for money. The crab is never - can never - simply be a crab. Humans are only capable of viewing the crab as a commodity, not as a friend, not as a living, feeling being. In this way the crab is not only an example of the way capitalism makes us all cogs in the machine but perhaps, specifically, a spotlight on the unfair treatment of immigrants: if you wash up on our shore, you'd better make yourself useful.

One of the most interesting and unexpected things about this movie is its treatment of women. The crab, being automatically marginalized due to its appearance, ends up in contact with a lot of people who are equally marginalized in society - mostly sex workers. The film never, ever objectifies these women or presents them as anything other than people doing a job - a job that, because of their gender, leaves them specifically open to violence and exploitation. This the crab also experiences: it has the ability to generate foam when it's thirsty, so it's forced to work in a bubble bath brothel. All it wants to do is make enough money that it can go home and see its family, but it's forced to use its body to the point of exhaustion because its body - its ability to produce foam, its rich crab miso - is its only value.

I would be remiss not to mention that the crab itself has agency in all of this. The crab's personality is extremely childlike, and as has been demonstrated time and again, often the best way to point out the cruelty of the world in fiction is by making a character who is totally innocent be forced to navigate a harsh reality that has no intention of being kind to them. The crab, no matter what happens to it, is completely earnest in its zeal for life and its love of the people around it. The crab is totally accepting: it understands that Etsuko, the woman it befriends as she's about to kill herself after getting scammed out of all her money multiple times, is not stupid, just naive - something like itself. The crab demonstrates that it is worth giving people the grace we wish we'd be given ourselves. And it's not that the crab does all of this on purpose: it's born with this kindness by virtue of not having been corrupted by the caprices of human society. When Etsuko gets scammed again after the crab gives her several million yen that it made to repay her debts, it doesn't think twice about whether or not to help her. It doesn't judge. The crab is a better person than most people.

I was expecting some kind of humor out of this, but honestly, aside from the situational comedy of watching a giant crab who can only walk sideways get itself into trouble, there's very little about this that I would call funny. Okay, one thing was funny: the way they didn't edit out the rubbery, squeaky noises the crab suit made every time it moved. Other than that, I really just loved this for what it says about the inherent worth of a being outside of their ability to participate in capitalism and for how pure and good the crab was. Hiroshi Fujioka is also there, I guess.

Cinema.

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.

Cellphone Investigator 7 (2008)

directed by Takashi Miike, Takeshi Watanabe, Hiroyuki Tsuji, Manabu Asō, Kazuya Konaka et al

Japan

4.5 stars out of 5

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As a tokusatsu fan, I should probably know better than to judge by appearances at this point, but I have to be honest: I did not expect the television show about a walking, talking cell phone who solves cyber crimes with a 16-year-old boy as its partner to be one of the best things I've watched in recent memory.

The show basically gives you everything you need to know about it within its opening credits. Keita, a high school student, suddenly finds the whole course of his life changed when he witnesses a man killed by a rogue construction crane in front of him, and discovers that the man was secretly an agent for Under Anchor, an organization developing special AI-powered cell phones to combat cyber crimes. Keita is reluctant at the beginning of the show but becomes a full-fledged Anchor agent soon enough, and by the end, god damn, that high schooler is the best agent they ever had. (Okay, maybe not the best, but probably the most emotionally invested.)

This show has pacing issues. I will say that up front because I think that what constitutes "issues" for any other show is instead, for CPI7, something it wears with pride. One of the things this show does that I really admire, and that I wish more series would do, is bring in different directors and let them keep their directorial style. Every so often there will be an episode that's so wildly different that you think "wow, who did that one?" and you look it up and surprise! It's Mamoru Oshii (for example), and you can tell it's Mamoru Oshii, because instead of keeping to a baseline throughout the entire series, some episodes are allowed to just be these wonderful little one-off capsules of weird that don't develop the plot but feel instead like a movie starring the characters of the show you've been watching.

For a show ostensibly about cyber crimes, there's really not a lot of cyber crime-solving going on. Most of what happens is very self-contained and usually the stakes aren't that high: Keita and some random guy almost get killed by gun smugglers, a little girl finds Seven (the phone) and he helps her get over feeling alienated by her parents' impending divorce, a really bad comedian makes it his mission in life to court Touko, and, like, literally just The Ring, to name a few. Like I said, the double episode that Oshii directed is one of the most astonishing things I've seen in the context of a television series, and it has absolutely nothing to do with solving crime. It just lets us meditate with the characters for a while in a world that is wholly a fantasy and is more real for it.

"Life is just saying goodbye."

"Then what is the spring that always returns?"

I think by far the crowning achievement of CPI7 is how much it got me to care about the phones. When we begin the series' storyline, Anchor had been developing cell phones called Phone Bravers with the ability to walk and talk and learn from their partners, seven of which were created but only three remain functional (we learn about the others as the show progresses). The phones are partnered with human agents who are referred to as their "Buddy", and develop a bond with them where each influences the other, as the phones provide tactical and logistical support that a human couldn't, and the human provides, for lack of a better term, life skills for the Phone Bravers. And let me tell you, they are doing some kind of magic with how well the Bravers are integrated into the cast. By the end of the show I was 1000% invested in the phones and 1000% forgetting they were little CGI phones and not actual human cast members. It's just absolutely perfect at making you care about the Bravers and feel for them as they respond to - and develop - emotions in their own flawed, weird, nonlinear, very human way.

To discuss the story in-universe a little bit: the bond between the Bravers and their buddies is integral to the overarching plot of the show. The ultimate villain is a rogue AI named Gene created by Ultraman Agul a shady tech CEO that evolves to come to the conclusion that humans are making the world a worse place and should be eliminated. Gene becomes a villain precisely because it's let loose without the ability to learn from an individual human the way the Phone Bravers are. Gene's creator failed to provide the kind of care, attention, and empathy that the Under Anchor agents did for their phones, and instead he just mass-produced them as quickly as possible with a childlike brain intended for rapid growth and self-sufficiency rather than emotional reasoning and understanding. The Phone Braver program works because the phones are treated like people, because they functionally are. The relationship between the Bravers and their buddies is a friendship between equals. Gene is a feral child left to fend for itself, with nobody else to learn from but other feral children.

I want to nominate Masataka Kubota, who plays Keita, for every award retroactively. The way he handles the massive tonal shifts from episode to episode is admirable. He does at times feel authentically like a 16-year-old boy, but he doesn't play Keita like a parody of himself. And he always sells his interactions with Seven and the other Bravers. The whole cast does, but Keita has more direct interaction with the phones than anyone else. I was so fully invested in the final episode due to how Kubota was nailing it and how the writing team was managing to make these phones feel like real living characters that it was honestly a little overwhelming.

So, yeah. I watched the cell phone detective show and it got me really emotional. I wish there were more shows like this, but this one is a special, rare thing, and maybe that's how it should be.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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As its full title ("The G Extermination Strategy") suggests, this is one of those Godzilla films in which the goal is simple eradication - not finding a way to live with Godzilla through psychic mediation, not putting him somewhere where he can never be a problem again, just killing him dead, no nuance. This straightforward approach reflects Godzilla's role in the film as well. However, even though he is a cut-and-dry villain here, this is one of the more comedic Godzilla iterations. I was actually surprised by how comedic he is on my most recent rewatch; some of the fight scenes are Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster-level goofy.

Some of these movies give Godzilla a real "jealous boyfriend" attitude: on the one hand, when humanity does anything he doesn't like - such as developing nuclear weapons - he comes to put us in our place. But on the other hand, if any other kaiju emerge to threaten humanity, he'll also come and dispatch them. Not to protect us, but because Godzilla can only ever be the sole arbiter of humanity's fate, and no potential usurpers will be tolerated. This film in particular takes place in a neatly explained timeline in which the original Godzilla was the beginning of a series of attacks, where any time a milestone of scientific development was reached, Godzilla would appear and destroy it. There is a human villain at the end who is unscrupulous enough to risk getting Japan stomped in favor of financial gain, but humans on the whole are not the bad guys per se. Still, the human characters are too thinly developed to really root for: the protagonist is given the most predictable of backstories (her mentor was killed by falling debris during a Godzilla attack in front of her, now she swears vengeance), and Godzilla is just doing what he usually does in knocking humanity down a peg when they get too high and mighty.

I really don't like bug kaiju. Not because I'm afraid of bugs but because I think "thing, but huge" is a really silly and uninteresting format for a monster (this is also why I dislike King Kong). Megaguirus is no exception. I appreciate the level of detail put into her (her?) design, and the puppetry was so good I kept forgetting it was puppetry, but as a character she doesn't compel me nearly as much as other Godzilla antagonists, especially considering this movie was sandwiched between Godzilla 2000 and GMK, which - and you can dislike 2000 as much as you like, but Orga was a cool idea - both have great kaiju casts.

This kind of feels like a Godzilla movie for people who don't particularly want to watch a Godzilla movie. It is good, and I enjoy it whenever I watch it, but it's a movie I watch and then don't think about very much, whereas every other Godzilla movie occupies a permanent spot in my brain. The black hole gun is an interesting idea but it becomes almost laughable when Godzilla repeatedly shrugs it off almost every time they fire it at him. Killing Godzilla for real at the end of the film was basically not ever going to happen, so even the big moment where they seemingly blast Godzilla into the crust of the Earth has its impact dulled by the final scene implying the Dimension Tide didn't work so well after all.

This is not my favorite Godzilla movie, but I rewatched it on New Year's Eve, and - without timing it at all - it hit midnight almost exactly as they fired the Dimension Tide for the last time, and let me tell you, it got me hype as hell.

Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Present (2005)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

47 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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It's been a few years since I've seen this, and considering that the season has rolled around once again and I'm running out of Christmas horror movies (I have been running out of Christmas horror movies for several years now), and the fact that Kazuo Umezu recently passed away, I thought it was time for a rewatch. This might lead to me rewatching the other Horror Theater films, actually - they're all really solid.

Present opens with its main character, Yuko, in a flashback to her childhood, awake in bed after a strange dream. It's almost Christmas, and Yuko's parents remind her that Santa is always watching, and that he brings presents to good children, but if you're bad, he'll "come get you". This flashback sequence ends with Yuko looking out her window with a big grin, and it's implied that she sees something, but what happens next - if anything - is kept ambiguous for the whole film.

Next we see Yuko, she's an adult with a rowdy bunch of friends. It's Christmas again and everybody goes to stay at a hotel to have some fun. Yuko's the quiet one of the bunch, but she's making moves on the guy she likes, except... all this Christmas stuff seems to leave her really uneasy. We as viewers can tell she's got some heavy unaddressed trauma surrounding whatever happened to her that one night as a kid. Actually, this entire thing feels like it's about unaddressed Christmas-related trauma. Every cheery holiday thing Yuko sees seems to set her on edge, and it only gets worse when she sees the clerk at the hotel is a guy dressed like Santa.

This might turn out to be a longer review than warrants a 47-minute movie because I honestly think this thing is so interesting. There aren't many Japanese Christmas horror films, but those that exist put such a refreshing spin on the genre that I wish there were more. Santa in Present feels like an ancient god, capricious and vengeful, omniscient, ever-changing. The extent of Yuko's friends' involvement in the story is basically to be slasher fodder, but the film establishes that they all see Santa differently according to whatever their childhood idea of him was: one of them sees him as a woman, since her feminist mother told her Santa was a woman, and the other sees him as his father, presumably because he caught on early that Santa was actually his parents. Yuko sees what she was told Santa was: a big white guy with blue eyes. And remember the "come and get you" part? That's kind of the key here.

This movie packs so much gore into such a small space that it almost ruins the pacing sometimes. Although the elements like Santa being some kind of wrathful shapeshifting god are what make Present stand out from the slagpile of Christmas horror, it does at times feel like a long slasher movie chase sequence with a little tiny plot attached. There's a lesson here about being good and responsible - I've read a few other Umezu manga where the message is basically "bad girls get punished" - but for the most part we're watching it for the creative kills. (The film was certainly directed by the right man for the job: Yudai Yamaguchi is responsible for such films as Meatball Machine and Battlefield Baseball.) The overall atmosphere is unsettling and the lack of dialogue makes everything dreamlike - the characters have to be responsible for acting out the story rather than giving it to us via exposition dump, so a lot of the backstory only exists in what can be put together by the viewer through vague context clues.

I would love to someday see this in better quality than 240p on YouTube with the opening theme music muted to avoid a copyright strike. I just love the idea of Santa delivering gory retribution for "denigrating Christmas".

Guyver: The Bioboosted Armor (2005)

directed by Katsuhito Akiyama

Japan

780 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Another review for a TV series today. I held off watching this for a long time because all I ever heard about it was that it was less gory than and generally inferior to the '89 series - which I hold dear in my heart - but after finally watching it, I have no idea what everybody was talking about. This show rules.

I think you should listen to the absolute ripper of an op while reading this for maximum effect.

It would be an understatement to say that a lot of anime and manga focus on high school students stumbling into a dangerous or bizarre situation and ending up gaining (or finding out that they've always had) special powers. It's probably impossible to reckon the number of series that use that trope. But Bioboosted Armor feels like it does it differently. The story begins with a high school boy, Sho, and his friend Tetsuro coming across a Control Medal (the device that allows a wearer to bond with and activate a Guyver suit) in the woods. Sho touches it and it immediately and forcibly equips him with the Guyver suit, leading him on accident down a path that will entangle his life with the destiny of the entire planet. Pure chance - not fate, not destiny; unless you want to headcanon it that way.

Sho himself doesn't get a lot of characterization, he's just sort of A Guy, but the people around him are presented in really interesting, faceted ways that I want to explore before getting further into the review. One of the standout characters to me is Mizuki, Sho's classmate and maybe-girlfriend, who is dragged into the chaos by virtue of being Tetsuro's sister. I will never forget a YouTube comment I read when I was watching the '89 series that said something like "I feel so bad for Mizuki, she's just a little girl and her entire life got turned upside-down". Mizuki is in a lot of ways the exact opposite of the traditional anime schoolgirl: she's clearly immature, not equipped to handle everything that's being thrown at her, constantly depressed and anxious, etc - basically, she's the only person in the show who acts realistically given the situation. I love how when everyone around her talks about fighting and dying and giving one's life to protect the greater good, Mizuki is there essentially saying "What THE HELL are you people talking about, you guys are my FRIENDS and you're GOING TO DIE. That is NOT NORMAL and why are you acting like it is."

Tetsuro is also cool because they never shoehorn him into either being the funny fat guy comic relief or the funny smart guy comic relief. He is clearly very smart but he has his own issues and deals with the ongoing trauma of the series in his own way.

The thing about watching this after having already seen the original series was that I knew I was eventually going to get to the part where Sho's dad (Fumio) dies. I swear, man, I've seen NGE, and Sho's dad dying bothers me almost as much as anything that goes on in that show. Fumio is one of the most normal anime dads I've ever seen: he loves his son very, very much; when we get to read his diary, he talks about how he's concerned for Sho (who has acquired the Guyver suit, but keeps it secret), but he trusts that he'll open up to him sooner or later. The set-up of Fumio as a caring, kind father who believes in his son makes it incredibly painful when - and this is a big SPOILER, but I want to elaborate the whole scenario for emphasis - it seems like both of them finally escape from Cronos, but Fumio has secretly been processed into a Zoanoid, and because Sho refuses to fight him after both of them transform, Fumio as Zoanoid crushes Sho's skull and activates the Guyver suit's incredibly aggressive autopilot mode, rendering Sho into a passenger within his body as he literally vaporizes his own father.

I knew it was coming and it still hit hard.

The concept of the series is premium juicy sci-fi, although the pacing suffers at points due to repeated exposition dumps that bring the show to a halt for several episodes in a row. I love stories where humans are left to infer information about an alien species through their technology because the aliens themselves are absent. We know the Creators' basic goal - engineering humans as perfect living weapons - but we don't know why, or how they operated on Earth. The Guyver suits were never meant for human use, and seeing Sho and the others wear them and eventually even pilot an abandoned Creator ship feels like this almost Rendezvous with Rama scenario where something beyond our imagination is left to us with no explanation.

Unfortunately, most Guyver series seem to have "non-ending" syndrome. After building up a ton of momentum Bioboosted Armor fizzles out into a final three episodes that halfheartedly introduce a future where Cronos rules the world and Zoanoids are integrated into human society. This could have been interesting if it was given the proper time to be fleshed out, but as it is, it feels like an afterthought. The fight between final-form Guyot and Makishima while Sho is desperately trying to pilot the Creator ship out of a volcano and get everyone to safety is more riveting than anything the final few episodes contained, and that's a shame. For a series that had been so epic before, we should have gotten an ending that felt more cathartic than this.

I'm going to stop here, because I've gone on way too long, but I want to go to bat for this series that seems to be dismissed in favor of the earlier one. I do think that I like the '89 series better, but it was so hamstrung by budget constraints and other production issues that it never felt like it achieved its full potential. This series gets closer - but again, the rushed ending does it a disservice.

Kibakichi (2004)

directed by Tomoo Haraguchi

Japan

95 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Werewolf samurai? Werewolf samurai.

The title character of Kibakichi is a member of a decimated clan of werewolves who wanders the backroads of Japan circa the early 1700s, always on the outskirts of humanity, but never quite accepted by the yokai, either. When he gets press-ganged into a dice game, he ends up staying in a town in which all he intended to do was get a drink far longer than anticipated, and eventually realizes that the whole town is full of yokai who have disguised themselves as humans and are under threat from a bunch of mercenaries dressed like Final Wars Xilliens. Up-front warning: this film contains less werewolfery than you may desire.

I think I understand why there aren't a ton more movies like this out there (hard to get right, goofy if done wrong) but the idea of a ronin who is separated from the rest of the populace not only by class barriers but by virtue of his actually being some kind of a supernatural creature is just fantastic. That angst Kibakichi experiences about not being monstrous enough to be a "monster" but being too close to a monster to be comfortable around humans feels like it fits perfectly with the lone-wolf outsider theme that a lot of jidaigeki with wandering ronin/gambler main characters have. The film itself totally plays up those genre conventions to its advantage, and it's really fun: all the tension and the questions of identity that frequently figure into good jidaigeki are here.

Ryūji Harada plays Kibakichi decently - but not fantastically - well. Kibakichi is interesting because he's one of those characters who works better as a silhouette than in closeups: our first image of him, in the classic round hat and tatty cloak, is essentially how his character is defined (except for the final scenes, which I'll get to in a minute). Any time we see him up close, something just feels kind of off. He seems like he's meant to be perceived conceptually rather than personally. Because of this, there could have been a lot of added weight to the handful of scenes where we can see Kibakichi's face clearly - a feeling of encountering him on a personal level rather than as an archetype - but something prevents him from being relatable in such a way.

There's way more tokusatsu to this than I expected. The film is chock full of Toho kaiju roars to a point where it's almost distracting. I was watching a werewolf vs. yokai fight but my brain was telling me it was hearing Gaira and Titanosaurus go to town on each other. This, as well as the excellent creature suits and concepts, is no coincidence; Tomoo Haraguchi has a great deal of toku credits under his belt (however you may feel about Death Kappa aside), including work on the Ultra series starting with 80. The final battle at the end of the film is pure tokusatsu fight scene, with a frankly ridiculous amount of explosions and a fully wolfed-out Kibakichi becoming nearly indestructible in the face of bullets and hand grenades.

As I've said when I've talked about other films with yokai in them, although this wasn't meant to be a Halloween movie, it fits the vibe in a way that feels entirely natural. Kibakichi is shrouded in atmosphere: the fog of a dark, fantastical past; a fog in which various creatures cavort and hide themselves - the most terrifying of which, to use a bit of a cliche, turn out to be humans. The film is a visual treat and super fun with its spooky atmosphere, and has an excellent opener and an excellent finale, but the middle faffs around a little, although not so much as to be boring.

The Calamari Wrestler (2004)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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At this point I've watched quite a few of Kawasaki's films, and while not all of them hit as hard as his best ones, like Executive Koala, I do still think they're all interesting. What distinguishes these movies is Kawasaki's unwavering commitment to the bit, which extends across the board to everybody else involved, too: no matter how goofy the premise is, all of this is always played completely straight.

The Calamari Wrestler is about a man who becomes a squid. As the title implies, the film is set within the world of pro wrestling, and the squid in question is the reincarnated form of famous wrestler Kanichi Iwata, who was forced to retire at the height of his popularity by a terminal illness and returned as a squid. We meet him when he ambushes another wrestler, Koji Taguchi, poised to himself become the top wrestler in Japan, and absolutely smites him. Though it isn't an official match, Taguchi obsesses over this loss and demands to face up against Iwata fair and square.

Outside of the obvious weirdness of having the antagonist of the film be a squid (with the protagonist eventually becoming an octopus - more on that in a minute), this is basically a normal movie. Even boring. The way it manages to subvert your expectations at every turn is what makes it. If you took all the seafood out, this would be an average love story set against a pro wrestling backdrop and I would probably not care for it in the slightest. But through the addition of a wild card element - the squid - Kawasaki produces something that makes us pay attention not just to the squid itself but to the larger narrative. It makes us think more about how other stories that follow the same beats but lack squid function.

What I thought was unusual about all of this is that there's a fluidity between squid and human that essentially implies that being a squid might be better than being a human, at least if you want to be a wrestler. Iwata was only able to reincarnate as a squid under the strict supervision of an elder monk and his team of younger monks, and he can maintain squid form so long as he resists his earthly desires. He's fully able to turn back to a human - but it's an accidental thing, and framed as a mistake; when he meets his girlfriend and they get down and dirty, he returns to being a human. Suppressing desire and connection to the material realm is what grants him squidhood. The same thing eventually happens to his opponent, Taguchi: through training and self-denial, he is able to become an octopus and fight Iwata on even ground.

Topping all of this off is some seriously awesome creature design and suit acting. I was wowed by the squid suit: it's simple, just a big squid with legs and wrestling boots, but the way its face is articulated gives it a surprising level of expressiveness. Instead of having a mouth that moves when he talks, the squid has articulated eyelids, which on paper sounds weird, but when you watch it in action, it just works really well. The top of the suit also has some mobility around the brow area, so the squid can actually change his facial expressions and convey emotion. Neither of the other suits have this level of articulation.

I'm kind of conflicted about what rating to give this, because on the one hand as a love story and a story about pro wrestling - something I could not care less about, personally - this is a little boring. The only thing it's got going for it is giant seafood, but boy, what a thing that is. This kind of movie will probably only appeal to a narrow subset of the populace, and even then, I don't see it being anybody's favorite thing ever in the world. But it is pretty good.

I don't know where else to put this, but in researching this movie on Japanese Wikipedia, I found out that production was supervised by none other than Akio Jissōji. Yes, that Akio Jissōji. This Transient Life Akio Jissōji. Overseeing a movie about a wrestling squid.

The Great Yokai War (2005)

directed by Takashi Miike

Japan

124 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched all of the original Yokai Monsters films throughout October 2022 and loved pretty much all of them to some degree, but never ended up reviewing any for some reason or another, so I wanted to give it a go for this one.

The inimitable Takashi Miike's celebration of the Yokai Monsters series and the film studio that produced it doesn't have much to do with the older movies directly, which is fine, because none of them have anything to do with each other either. This film is set up as kind of a coming-of-age story, taking place during the hazy, liminal time of summer vacation, when the boundary between reality and fantasy feels flimsy. Our main character, Tadashi, is bitten by a kirin during a festival and therefore chosen to be the "Kirin Rider", whose responsibilities, according to local legend, involve various feats of strength and triumphs against other local folkloric creatures. But it turns out he also has to do a whole lot more than that. If you know anything about Miike, you probably know him for his tendency towards extreme gore and absurd situations - really, as a director he's so unique that summing him up that way doesn't even scratch the surface - but this is a bit more subdued for him, though with a lot of the tricks he usually employs still recognizable. 

What this feels like is a love letter to growing up in Japan as a horror fan, and I'm talking pre-Ringu and Ju-on days, before that was all that Japanese horror was associated with. I'm very hesitant to call this kind of film and indeed Yokai Monsters as a whole "horror" at all, because even though they depict things that are eerie and weird, they don't have any association with horror in terms of the Western conception of it as a cohesive genre. Yōkai themselves are so isolated as a concept that I don't really feel comfortable lumping them in with general monsters and creepy-crawlies like your Draculas and your werewolves and whatnot. If you're not familiar with these creatures, nothing will be explained to you in The Great Yokai War - this is a movie that assumes prior understanding. Due to the protagonist being a young child, some context is given to him along the way, but as a viewer you just have to roll with it. And it also name-drops other things that a young person who was really into the macabre and strange would be familiar with, like GeGeGe no Kitarō, for example, and the fact that the main villain is none other than Yasunori Kato (you know, that guy).

I absolutely love the way the whole tone of the film changes when Tadashi starts making his way up the mountain and encounters all of the yōkai. There is no firm delineation between the realistic, mundane life he's familiar with and the world of myth, but you can tell that somewhere along the way a boundary is crossed. In the city, where everyone is moving on with their lives and no longer paying attention to legends, the kirin has to be puppeted by two people, a depiction of itself. Up the mountain, the kirin just is. In the city the man wears a mask, up the mountain the man is what he really is.

Besides having to save his wandering grandpa, Tadashi also ends up (along with an immense number of yōkai who, aside from the main crew, seem to mostly just be there for the party) having to maybe-not-technically "save" the whole of Tokyo from Kato's weaponized rage and bitterness. In an enormous complex of factory stacks and industrial buildings situated on the back of a flying, salamander-like creature, itself the size of a city, Kato is harnessing the negative energy from all the things the people of Tokyo throw away without a second thought. This is why the city is not wholly "saved" at the end: it goes through a reckoning, is mostly destroyed, but the message is that maybe it needed to be knocked down a couple of pegs, that people had to be reminded to care a little bit more... but not the way Kato wanted.

There's something I also really love about the way Kato is ultimately undone by a single bean coming into contact with his big evil cauldron in which he made his big evil scrap metal creatures. For all of his power and planning, for everything he constructed and put into motion, one tiny element of the traditional, of the remembered, of the story that is continuing on, was enough to destroy him. Just one bean representing everything he wanted to hurry up and forget ruined all of his evil schemes.

This is altogether pretty light on story, it's mostly something you watch if you're an effects nerd like me, but it's still got an important message about care and responsibility. The ending is surprisingly dour, but I liked this because it serves as a final reminder to us, the viewers, of what can happen if we don't have respect for the world around us. I'm looking forward to the more recent sequel and hope it only expands on what this film began.

Cloverfield (2008)

directed by Matt Reeves

USA

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It's been a long time since I've revisited Cloverfield. Being as cemented in pop culture as it is now (which isn't very, but it does have something approaching cult status), it's hard to imagine watching it with no knowledge of what was going to happen. I was growing up when this came out and I remember people acting almost personally offended by the shakycam filming style - somewhat understandable, since this was, as far as I can remember, the first really mainstream found-footage movie, at least since The Blair Witch Project. The sequels have gone in... weird directions, but at the time it was released, Cloverfield was a kind of excellent little slice of sci-fi/horror presented in a relatively new format.

As far as I'm concerned, Cloverfield joins the ranks of classic kaiju films not because it has a giant monster in it but because it has a human story that feels forced and boring. The film begins innocuously and obnoxiously as we're taken along for the ride while an increasingly drunk and annoying cameraman films "testimonials" at his friend's going-away party. We (and everybody else at the party) find out about his friend's affair, things become awkward, and the cameraman will not stop bugging this random girl (Lizzy Caplan) who doesn't even really want to be there. I sound like I'm ragging on it, but I don't mind the party segment of this film - it feels real enough to occupy the viewer's time while they wait for the action to kick in, and the music and the clothing styles can give you some "fun" whiplash if you, like me, can't comprehend something from 2008 looking so dated. Personally, I don't need a human story in a giant-monster movie; it can be interesting if it's done well, but I don't feel like I need somebody to relate to in every single movie I watch. I also dislike Clover's parasites for this same reason: They feel like they're only there so the human characters have something more in their own scale to interact with. But the going-away party only lasts for so long before it's interrupted.

At first everybody thinks it's a terrorist attack, of course, because the only thing anyone can see or hear from their place in the city is loud noises and lots of smoke. Even when the party spills out into the streets, there's so much confusion that nobody can tell what's going on. Fairly early, there's a somewhat iconic shot that I've always had a love-hate (okay, it's mostly hate-hate) relationship with: That scene where the Statue of Liberty's head comes flying out of the sky and lands in front of the main characters. Firstly, I would think a projectile of that mass launched at that speed from that height would make something of a giant crater rather than just kind of gently coming to rest in the street. Secondly, it's too convenient - the very first thing Clover smashes is America's most iconic monument? One could possibly argue that Clover thought it was another giant lifeform, and therefore a challenge, but Clover would really have no reason to recognize the Statue of Liberty as a lifeform any more than it would recognize an apartment building as a lifeform. What it feels like is a money shot; the creative team knowing they have the thing that's going to go on posters, blog articles, DVD covers, etc. And it encapsulates the tone of the film as a whole: A very, very well-done imitation of roughness, of spontaneity, of amateur filmmaking, but one that cost $25,000,000 to make.

There haven't been a lot of "on the ground" perspectives in a giant monster movie, which is why Cloverfield feels so fresh within the genre. The reactions of the main characters and the people around them make this movie hit home. But it's not consistent - the less said about T.J. Miller, the better, and Odette Annable as Beth is not the best actress I've ever seen - but sometimes it's really striking. Lizzy Caplan's character Marlena in utter shock as the only person in the main party who actually got a good look at Clover while everybody else was still confused and unaware is maybe one of my favorite parts of the first half of the film. Her delivery when she says "It was eating people", so blank and matter-of-fact, is way more effective than hysteria. It's also unusually tragic when Rob gets a call from his mother during a lull in the action and has to tell her his brother died. I think this movie does have a good handle on emotion, but only part of the time.

But let's talk about Clover. Oh ho ho ho. "Clover" is a nickname for the giant creature who really has a problem with Manhattan. Its official designation is "Large-Scale Aggressor", but you must stop me if you see me starting to go off about that, because I could talk for several more paragraphs about how referring to a lost, scared baby as an "Aggressor" cheeses me off. Clover is destructive not out of aggression, but due to being dropped in the middle of arguably the most bewildering civilized area in the country. Imagine you get lost in the middle of a maze, and you've never seen a maze before in your life, and you're also a baby. You are going to run into some walls. Unfortunately in Clover's case those walls are buildings with people in them. That Clover apparently eats humans (but finds T.J. Miller as unappetizing as the rest of his species does) isn't as big of a deal as I think this movie wants it to be, because again, this is a baby, and we all know how hard it is to keep babies from putting random things lying around on the ground into their mouth.

This movie feels like a video game. The way it progresses is like going through a series of challenges, some of which you fail: Try to keep all of your party alive while juking and dodging your way through a devastated city, with CGI rubble here and there and a creature or two on the loose. The film certainly has a video-game-like idea of what kind of damage a person can take - my "favorite" is Beth being apparently impaled through the shoulder and staked to her apartment floor, but then being able to run around as soon as she's freed and, inexplicably, move that arm, as if the piece of shrapnel just happened to conveniently bypass the muscles and bones in its way.

I guess I am being a little harsh on something that I rated four stars, but none of the things I've been pointing out actually bring me out of the movie. It wouldn't be as much of a thrill ride if there were more deaths or debilitating injuries to break up the flow of the story. This is a good movie; it got famous because it's really fun to watch and it's done in a (for the time) unusual style. The CGI still holds up for the most part, and although Clover never gets as much of the spotlight as I wish it would, this is still a very interesting version of the humans-vs-giant-monster story.

Summer of Ubume (2005)

directed by Akio Jissōji

Japan

123 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I read Summer of the Ubume a few months ago and it's never really left my mind since then, but somehow I failed to notice that there was a film adaptation of it. And, what's more, it was directed by one of my favorite directors, Akio Jissōji. I had no foreknowledge of this movie's existence, so I wasn't giving the question any thought, but if you had asked me who I would want to direct an adaptation of Summer of the Ubume, I would probably have named Jissōji before anybody else.

I'm not going to attempt to go through every plot point of the book, because if nothing else, Summer of the Ubume is a tremendously complicated story. There are about a hundred different threads that mostly all end up connecting at some point or another, as well as what feels like a hundred different characters, major and minor, who are involved in the central mystery. That "central mystery", if I may do it a great injustice by summing it up in just a few words, is this: A daughter from a reclusive, ostracized family who have run a medical practice for several hundred years appears to have been pregnant for 20 months, ever since the unexplained disappearance of her husband under mysterious circumstances. There is no "main character" so to speak - possibly in the book, but not really in the film - but the two central players are Sekiguchi, who feels more like a non-person in this than ever, and Kyogoku, Sekiguchi's enigmatic occultist bookseller friend, who also moonlights as a Shinto priest and an exorcist. I would argue that Kyogoku is the most important character of the whole thing, but again, it's difficult to explain exactly why without writing an essay on this story.

If that name sounds familiar, it should. Summer of the Ubume was written by Natsuhiko Kyogoku. (Also worth noting is the film's original title, which is translated literally into its English one: Ubume no Natsu). The author and the character don't just share a surname but part of their given name as well; book-Kyogoku's name is Akihiko, although this is never mentioned in the film. And "Kyogoku" isn't even his real surname, it's a nickname based off the bookstore that he runs, but again, not mentioned in the film. It's very difficult not to wonder if the author wrote this character as something of a stand-in for himself, and honestly, if so, I don't have a problem with that at all. Movie- and book-Kyogoku feel exactly like how it would be if an author were to somehow gain the ability to transport themself into their own story: He's preternaturally savvy about everything that's going on, and although he interacts with other characters, he seems like he's never in doubt of how the story is going to end. Most of his actions throughout the film and the book are done to manipulate other characters into seeing his point of view, which is the truth, or as close to it as you can get. I found this all fascinating, not pretentious, although I recognize how it could easily come off that way. Having a very thinly-veiled stand-in for the author transforms Summer of the Ubume from a mere work of fiction into something that stretches the boundaries of the term "fiction" itself. With no background, this doesn't come across as well in the film; Kyogoku instead just seems like a guy who has all the answers for no reason, but he still works as a character.

While this whole movie works on its own, I think there's a lot about it that underscores the difficulty in adapting a book. This movie is two hours; the book took me several days to read and required participation on my part in the form of generating a mental picture of what was going on and keeping track of the plot and characters. I wouldn't say that this movie has any flaws, but you lose a lot of what made the book so unique: Namely, the literal pages upon pages of Kyogoku philosophizing on the nature of reality and the limits of human perception, which forms the core of the story, but there's also a little more background on Sekiguchi's time in the military, and a fairly large subplot about the depth of his involvement with the impossibly pregnant woman (I didn't mind this being glossed over, however, because it was gross). This kind of feels like a movie you have to study for, but then the book itself also feels like you have to study for it.

So let's move on to more of what the story is about. Towards the beginning of the film, Kyogoku talks about what will become the backbone of the film: That human perception cannot show us the "truth" of reality, and there's nothing that is truly, objectively "strange" in the world, because seemingly supernatural events, and the perception of them as such, are inextricably tied to the brain's limitations in experiencing reality. Essentially, because we experience reality through the filter of our own interpretation of it, we can never know what the "truth" is, if there even is such a thing. This is not just a simple story involving a family curse and an old legend, it's something that questions the very nature of such things. It's the philosopher's ghost story: A premise that acknowledges the supernatural as really existing in the minds of those who experience it, but then shows how fallible those minds are. Kyogoku's end-game when he reveals that the location of the husband's body was known all along is an exposure of the human brain's flawed ability to perceive the world.

Jissōji's unmistakable style is perfect for portraying all of this in a visual medium. Admittedly this is the first of his later movies that I've seen (aside from the episodes of various Ultra series he directed); his earlier films like Poem and Mandara left an indelible mark on my very soul and will never be topped by anything else he made. But this is good, this is really good. Decentralizing Sekiguchi in the film changes the story from having an unreliable narrator to the story itself being unreliable; now, instead of figuring out the cracks in how Sekiguchi is remembering and perceiving events, we have to figure out what we, the viewers, are unable to see. There's always a feeling that there is a larger truth in the film that we are not quite ever able to reach - flashes of a disturbing bird-winged woman hint at this. Another framing device I really enjoyed was the occasional interlude of a storyteller presenting an illustrated version of the events of the film to a group of children - bonus points if you spotted that the storyteller is played by tokusatsu veteran Noboru Mitani, probably best known from Ultraman Taro and Space Sheriff Gavan. (Kyogoku the author also appears in a vanishingly small cameo role.)

All in all I guess the only real complaint I have about this aside from the inherent changes made when a book is adapted for film is that it could have been a little spookier. The exorcism scene in the book was a terrifying whirlwind; I could not put it down. It is a central moment in the film as well, but it's (necessarily) protracted. If anybody's seen The Wailing, I imagined something more like the absolute powerhouse of an exorcism scene from that film. Kyogoku is not exorcising any literal spirits, just dispelling the misperceptions of human witnesses, but although nothing haunts Summer of the Ubume aside from our own grudges and flaws, the eeriness of it comes from realizing the limits of our perception. However, despite Jissōji's immense skill in creating an atmosphere that is deeply unnerving for no apparent reason (the whole of It Was A Faint Dream feels like a panic attack), unless this movie was about eight hours long, it couldn't capture one hundred percent the immersiveness of the book. This is not a mark against the film itself, because I think this movie is excellent, it's just different from the book.

Gamera the Brave (2006)

directed by Ryuta Tasaki

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This movie retcons the Heisei Gamera trilogy as well as pretty much everything else since vs. Gyaos and places us in a version of 2006 where Japan has not seen a kaiju event since Gamera sacrificed itself to defeat Gyaos 30 years prior. The main character is the young son of someone who was himself a boy when that happened, and it's clear that Gamera and stories of Gamera are something that is deeply woven into the pair's lives. Going back to how things were pre-Heisei, children are once again central to this film. This is a coming-of-age story, but to me, it feels like there's a lot here that was intended for the parents watching over their kids' shoulders as much as for the kids themselves.

That being said, though, this also feels more explicitly "for kids" than earlier Gamera films. I think the reason for that is because everything is cute. This movie, being less than 20 years old at time of writing, is more in line with modern tastes and sensibilities than the films that first introduced us to Gamera. I have no problem with cute, and I was in love with the teeny-tiny baby Gamera who we spend most of the movie with, but I think that the insistence that everything made for children has to be in some way cute or stylized is a thing that has come about since Gamera made its debut. In the Showa films, there was not necessarily a lot of cuteness, but what there was was things that were complex and interesting and colorful and made you (if you were a child) want to be in that world and explore it. There's not a lot that's different from our world in the Brave, other than the kaiju. I can't speak for every child, but when I was young, I didn't only want to see things that were adorable, I wanted to see things that made me think in ways I'd never thought before; puzzles and scenarios that felt fresh and new. Something like the kids exploring the Virasian spaceship in vs. Viras and encountering the Virasians themselves, who have glowing eyes and can combine into one giant form, would have felt fresh and memorable to me as a kid. Little bitty hovering Gamera baby, while it is incredibly important and adorable and I loved it, would have felt to kid me like anything else from any other property aimed at kids.

Treatise on adorableness over, with apologies. So one of the things I really liked about this movie is that despite definitely being aimed at a young audience, there's still layers to it. The child protagonist finds a Gamera egg that hatches in his hands, and he takes home and begins to raise the infant Gamera that comes out of it. He gives it the nickname that his mother, now deceased, gave him - Toto, short for Toru. So he identifies himself with this poky creature that is small, doesn't have parents (well, Toru has a good father, but he's quite busy), and needs help getting around. This is something I haven't specifically seen that often: A child personally identifying with Gamera. He gives it the parenting that he wishes he could have had from his mother. The baby of course grows rapidly to abnormal size for a turtle, and it becomes apparent that this is not just a regular turtle, this is a Gamera. Using a kaiju in this instance as a role model is really interesting and works really well: That this creature who's so small can grow into something that can protect and defend other people and the planet is an uplifting message for any insecure young child.

This is where the coming-of-age aspect comes into the film. At some hard-to-define point, external events force the turtle to cease being a small, innocent, helpless creature and propel it into becoming Gamera. To me this felt like a really strong parallel to the moment - often impossible to perceive until afterwards - that a child becomes an adult. This also was one of the things where it felt like the heaviness of it was reserved for the adults watching. To a child, it would still be tragic to see your beloved pet having to go off and do something else without you, but to an adult who has watched or is anticipating watching that moment come for their own children, it carries more weight.

And I think the biggest place where that dual message for both parents and children comes in is at the very core of the film. Toru obviously cares deeply for his Gamera. He doesn't want to let it go, because he knows what his father told him happened 30 years ago, that Gamera died in sacrifice to save humans. As Gamera grows, Toru struggles with the fact that someday it is going to leave him and he's not going to be able to protect it anymore. He loves Gamera and he knows the world needs Gamera, but selfishly, understandably, he doesn't want it to die. You want to let the thing you love grow and see it live a full life, but that comes with the qualification that it will be in danger most if not all of the time.

But this is also an extremely chill film. There's a real summer-y, casual vibe to it. I got the feeling of being a kid on summer break and not really having anything more pressing to do than run around with a bug net. Time feels stretchy and weird and you live in a place that's safe enough (or as a kid, you don't see any danger) for you to just play in the sun all day. The film is so light and airy that I almost didn't like it at first after watching the darker and more urgent Heisei trilogy, but there is so much heart to this that I eventually saw how it is as good as those films, it's just different. As for the suits, which I always talk about, I liked them but wasn't wowed by them. There's something interesting about how visible the humans inside the suit are here compared to the way they were almost entirely hidden in the Heisei films, and how it means that the actor has to put in more work towards actually performing instead of just animating the suit, but despite that I wasn't enamored with the design of either Zedus (a very forgettable semi-aquatic dinosauroid with no backstory) or the refurbed Gamera and its cowlike eyes. 

I think this is the most complaints I've had about a movie I would still say I loved. It's hard not to be won over when something feels as authentic as the sequence in the end where a relay race of children hands off the object Gamera needs to get its second wind back in its fight against Zedus. I should have watched this at a different time, like possibly some time after the potency of the Heisei trilogy had left my system, and with different expectations.

Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)

directed by Shusuke Kaneko

Japan

105 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I rewatched this recently and as is often the case I don't know why I didn't just rate it five stars the first time I saw it. This is basically a perfect movie. I don't agree with everything I wrote in my initial review anymore, so I guess I have to update it to be a more current reflection of my feelings about this, one of the best and arguably an outlier of the Godzilla series.

As often happens, this is a "no Godzilla since 1954" scenario. There has been peace for a long time, but unlike other examples from the franchise that take place in this situation, people don't seem quite as flippant. Maybe it's only the central characters who are alert, intelligent people instead of the inept bureaucrats we often see, but it seems like the awareness of the possibility of a second Godzilla (or the first, returned) is not lost on most people. This is the tone that the film sets from the beginning: A feeling that something has been building for fifty years, that although no giant monsters have menaced the world since that time (unless Gorgo is canon in this timeline, you never know), the fact that one has, ever, removes the ability for most of Japan's citizenry to sleep easily. This movie draws very clear parallels between the existence of Godzilla and the use of nuclear weapons in war. It is not shy about it whatsoever and this is just one of many things that make me appreciate it so much.

But the peace is not to last. We're told that Godzilla sightings are starting up again after the accidental (?) sinking of a nuclear-equipped ship. At first Godzilla is reported as having attacked America, and this starts up a sense that it's now only a matter of time before he finds his way to Japan again. At the same time, other strange events linked to other monsters are happening with increasing frequency across the country. Like I said, the tone for this entire film up until it reaches peak action is a sense of building, of things in progress, of a cyclical, unstoppable process that can only end once the forces of destruction, in this case embodied by Godzilla, have been put to rest... but it will always start up again, eventually. As a sidenote, I love Hideyo Amamoto as the only character who knows what's going on, but no one believes him. He's one of my favorite actors who pops up from time to time in pretty much any tokusatsu series you can think of and his role in this is a great one. I love the mystery around his character, how his appearance is left as kind of an unsolvable mystery, something a little bit more explicitly supernatural than the franchise typically gets. And it had to be Amamoto in this role, it couldn't have been anybody else; it had to be somebody who you would see and immediately think of all the other times you'd seen him in tokusatsu going back 40 years.

(There are also a lot of easter eggs in this movie that call back not only to the Godzilla series' history but to other Toho/Tsuburaya productions. The main character being a reporter named Yuri, like Yuri Edogawa from Ultra Q, and working at a newspaper called "Digital Q" is the biggest one. But my absolute favorite is that during the recreated flashback to the first Godzilla's attack in 1954, for a split second you can see a poster on a wall for Farewell Rabaul, another Ishirō Honda film that came out the same year. I highly recommend it, by the way.)

This is really different from any other Godzilla movie I can think of. I'm positive that this is down to it being in the hands of Shusuke Kaneko, who lends an extremely distinctive, refreshing, and original spin to a series which has re-invented itself countless times already. For some reason this was his only Godzilla film, though he has of course made the best Gamera films of all time (you can fight me on this) and also written and directed for the Ultra series. This idea of kaiju that we, the audience, already know about getting re-invented as "guardian monsters" is such a new concept that for the 20-plus years since this film first came out everybody has been wishing for a sequel that revisits it. Many fans know that, behind the scenes, Varan was originally slated to be one of the guardian monsters, and some maquettes were made that show his updated design would have been absolutely beautiful, but he got the boot in favor of more recognizable kaiju.

I said in my first review that this was "almost heinously early-2000s in aesthetic", but I take that back because upon second viewing I believe this is honestly one of the least dated Godzilla films. The internet definitely still feels new and the idea of digital reporting and livestreaming is treated as an unusual novelty, but overall, when I think of this in comparison to movies that were coming out even just five years previously, the difference is really stark. Despite the swift transition into a digital age, there remain warning signs from the past in this film, and I think it's interesting that the core concept of Godzilla as a representation of nuclear power can go from being espoused as a known truth by everyone involved (the way it is in the original film) to a fading memory that survivors are trying and failing to pass on to their children. The idea of what Godzilla is is still here, but it's nested within what seems to be a differing worldview, because so many of the main characters are young people who grew up well after Godzilla had "died".

And Godzilla himself takes on a bit of a different role than usual here, which is incredibly compelling. I've kind of specifically chosen the most terrifying screencap of him I could get for the header photo just to show how really unique he looks here. Again, this is pretty much the only time I've seen him depicted from this specific angle, and it's just begging for a sequel or some other expansion. Godzilla is MEAN in this one, and it's for good reason. In this film he represents a literal amalgamation of all the souls of all the people who, regardless of nationality, were killed as a result of WWII. He is a walking embodiment of hatred and vengeance, motivated largely by a desire to burn humanity down, but moreover to not let us forget - which, in this film, people are starting to do. Even his body language is markedly different here. Mizuho Yoshida is in the suit this time, and you will not recognize that name as one of the "big three" Godzilla suit actors, but if I told you he's the guy who plays Zeiram in Zeiram, if you know what I'm talking about, you'd be like "oh yeah, that's why Godzilla is like that". Even though he's never returned to this specific role, he brings something to Godzilla that I am really just in awe of because of its subtlety; an expression of calculated rage that we usually never see. Godzilla is noticeably faster when he really gets mad than we ever see him, and there's a specific moment that is so small but so fascinating to me that I need to mention it. When Baragon, the first of the guardian monsters, goes up against Godzilla and gets absolutely creamed, right when Godzilla delivers the coup de grâce, he doesn't just blast Baragon point-blank with atomic breath; there's this thing he does where he starts blasting a little bit in front of Baragon and then moves upward towards him, so this is not a quick finish, this is drawn-out, done with relish. His stance afterwards is not one of a monster but a very human look of having just done something strenuous. There is just so much rage in him and you can absolutely feel that. Right down to him clenching his fists. The fact that Yoshida as a suit actor has mostly played humanoid characters might have a lot to do with Godzilla's very different portrayal here.

Even though Godzilla is the antagonist in this film, he is not "the bad guy", and this fact alone is why I love this movie so much. It has the brains and nuance to show us that even though this is not a Godzilla you can root for, it is still one you sympathize with. You understand that his motivation is incomprehensible pain and agony, a pain and agony that is endless and recurring. This isn't a good vs. evil story. Even the guardian monsters aren't fighting explicitly for humanity, they're fighting on the side of the land that they inhabit, and whether or not humanity has built our skyscrapers and warehouses and factories on that land is irrelevant. This is a story of forces much, much, much bigger than us, but that we have nevertheless had a hand in creating. Again, Kaneko's direction and writing brings a depth to this film that I really don't see from Godzilla that often. The destruction in this one is also a lot more personal, we see multiple individual people getting killed, not just wide shots of cities burning where we have to assume people are dying but cannot see them. This choice to bring the violence down to a personal level was deliberate, and I understand why it isn't done more often, but it's so good when it's used sparingly.

I'm sorry to be so hyped about it but this is, I'll say it again, basically a perfect film to me. I've gotten used to a rhythm when I watch Godzilla movies: Usually something big will happen at the beginning, then things will go quiet and we'll get stuck with a human story for the majority of the film until a big battle at the climax. This is completely different in tone from that. It only builds and builds, never stopping for a second and - crucially, and unusually - never having the human side of things feel like it drags, or is imbalanced against the monster stuff. I just love this one, everything about it.

Salyut-7 (2017)

directed by Klim Shipenko

Russia

106 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I watched this for Yuri's Night/Cosmonautics Day. Usually my picks for the occasion tend to lean more towards the imaginative, science-fiction side of things, but I think this was a good choice since it's basically nothing if not a spotlight on cosmonaut heroics, and there are portraits of Yuri Gagarin in the background here and there, as any good Russian space film that knows its history will have. This is definitely one of those movies that feels like it's a very conscious of being A Movie™, a feeling which is difficult for me to describe but entails a sense - more intrusive than usual - that everything you're seeing is embellished to perfection and choreographed for maximum entertainment value. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because we all like to be entertained, and Salyut-7 absolutely achieves that factor, but it loses a little relatability in the process.

This is a movie that's based on real events, but is highly fictionalized outside of the basic fact that a rescue mission to the drifting, uncontrolled Salyut-7 craft really did occur. You can of course find all of this on Wikipedia, but in short, the Salyut-7 space station experienced a malfunction in an electrical sensor that determined when batteries needed charging, leading to it losing power, going wildly off-course, and becoming uncontrollable from the ground. There were no people in the station at the time, but the way things were going, it would eventually crash somewhere on Earth, and without power no one had any control over where that would be. Two pilots, Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh, were sent up on a ridiculously difficult mission to dock with Salyut-7 and bring it back under control. Wikipedia's article is fairly terse on this subject, but they did, amazingly, manage to dock with an out-of-control, freely rotating object, apparently using handheld laser rangefinders, get inside, and conduct the repairs needed to bring the station out of its frozen state and back to something a little more manageable. Ironically, the station did eventually end up undergoing an uncontrolled reentry in 1991, and crashed somewhere in Argentina.

Dzhanibekov and Savinykh are our two protagonists, with Dzhanibekov arguably being the main focus. At the beginning of the film, he's banned from further missions after an incident during a different emergency in space where he sees something inexplicable, claiming that "angels" visited him during a spacewalk. This is really fascinating because it bookends the film. Both him and Savinykh experience the same phenomenon during their isolation together while repairing the Salyut-7. Such a small thing actually ended up being possibly my favorite detail of this film, because I love the way the film just allows this event to let lie, doesn't explain it, just gives room to this impossible, supernatural event as a way of letting a sense of the miraculous remain in a story set against the rational, reactionary backdrop of the Cold War. The bureaucrats try to manage Dzhanibekov's experience, try to suggest factors that contributed to his seeing something that wasn't there, but the beauty and mystery of space refuses to be explained away.

This looks, on the surface, very much like one of those movies of a kind that you've certainly seen before where the achievements of one or two people are valorized above a greater whole. Most of the time I have no stomach for this viewpoint, because it ignores the fact that singular heroes almost always have a pool of other people surrounding them during their time of heroic deeds. But this time I feel like the portrayal was mostly fair. The team back on Earth, calculating exactly what it'll take to dock with the rogue station, guiding the cosmonauts, and contributing math and ideas to the effort, is incredibly important here. At the end of the day, it's true that there were only two people in that ship, that they had support and training from back home, but there were two sets of hands alone that accomplished the actual mechanics of docking with the station. But it's also true that they couldn't have done any of it without mission control. Both cosmonauts are still alive, with obscene amounts of medals and awards and both with planets named after them. Dzhanibekov went on to go into politics, photography, and, uh, attempting to circumnavigate the globe by balloon, apparently, and is now only 80 - I know, "only" 80, but when you watch movies like this for some reason you always imagine the people in them to either be dead or like a hundred years old.

Most of Salyut-7's appeal is visual. All of the CGI used to accomplish what would be a pretty dead movie without it is more than up to snuff. If nothing else about it grabs you, the sheer power of the EVA scenes will grab you. I don't think there's anybody out there who has seen a movie involving a spacewalk scene and not gotten sweaty palms - it's that feeling of being totally unmoored, attached only by the thinnest of tethers to a huge object that is itself floating through space controlled partly by you and partly by what people thousands of miles away are telling you to do. It's horrifying, and when the cosmonauts are cast against the looming Earth or the rising sun, it's also horrifyingly beautiful. You can't have a good space movie without that sense of terror and beauty, and Salyut-7 is up to the task, cinematography-wise. There's one scene that's going to stick with me, of the fire in the ship that leaves Savinykh injured: Dzhanibekov watching from outside, helpless, as his friend is trapped in what rapidly becomes a corked bottle full of fire. This is one out of many fictionalized aspects of the film; there was no such fire onboard the ship, and a lot of what happens to make the repair and return of the cosmonauts seem nearly impossible was just invented wholecloth. But man, watching it makes you feel. All in all I don't have much of a problem with the invented details because you can look all this up and find out easily what really happened - I see this movie as kind of a metaphor for heroics more than a record of real things, a way of saying how difficult the repair mission was and telling its story in a more sensational way.

So this is a fun movie that you probably shouldn't watch if you'd rather watch a space documentary because it doesn't have all its facts straight (on purpose). It's a movie - it makes stuff up so that you'll have a good time watching it. My favorite part of the film is when the two main characters are discussing why it is that cosmonauts, despite being such manly men, always seem to have daughters, and they both conclude that it's because girls are cool.

Orphan (2009)

directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

123 minutes

Canada, France, Germany, USA

3 stars out of 5

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This movie came out right around the time I started to be allowed to see movies other than Disney or Pixar stuff as a kid, and so I was peripherally aware of it as something that was also playing in many theaters that my family went to. It was one of those movies that seemed to be known mostly for its twist, and not necessarily in a good way; the reception was a mixture of making jokes about it and... well, making other jokes about it. Nobody really seemed to be taking it seriously and I had no idea up until recently whether or not it was actually a good movie. The sequel that came out not too long ago had me intrigued, so I decided to finally watch the first one and find out what its deal was.

Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard play a married couple whose lives hit a stumbling block after the stillbirth of their third child and the wife, Kate, going through recovery from alcoholism. An accident is also implied to have happened in the past involving their younger child that is blamed on Kate's alcohol abuse, but this is not really relevant to the plot at large. We see the two of them go through the process of trying to adopt a child until eventually they find Esther, a girl (supposedly) from a Russian orphanage whose parents died in a house fire, and are immediately smitten - she seems perfect; this reserved, quiet little girl who likes to paint and wear old-fashioned, pretty dresses. We the viewers, of course, know what's going on, and even if we somehow have managed to avoid being spoiled and don't know exactly what's going on, the tagline "There's something wrong with Esther" gives us a big hint that all is not as it seems.

Watching this with knowledge of the twist allowed me, for a minute, to elide over the fact that the whole backbone of this movie is kind of based in ableism. I won't go on about it too long, but when you watch this knowing that there is actually something wrong with Esther beyond the generic disturbed-child horror tropes, you're a little blind to the fact that in many ways this is a movie where our fear of the kid in question relies on behaviors that autistic kids tend to exhibit (dressing oddly, having unusual speech patterns, behaving differently from other children their age, not fitting in at school, etc). A lot of us are thankfully not phobic or bigoted enough to see it, but when, say, a horror movie contains a character who has autistic-coded behavior, but is made out to be a murderer or otherwise a criminal for reasons separate from their apparent autism, the end message is not "they wrote this person to be so obviously evil for other reasons that their evilness has nothing to do with their autism". The end message is that non-autistic people are afraid that autistic people secretly ARE that devious and dangerous. There's a subset of people who are frightened that kids who act differently like Esther will also end up being like Esther in the way that they abuse and harm other people.

I dismount my soapbox. The first thing I noticed about this movie is that it's ugly in that way that horror was throughout the first decade of the 2000s; that Saw-Hostel-Midnight Meat Train-House of Wax style where nobody wears any colored clothing at all and everything seems to be coated in ash and dirty snow. It's very industrial, stripped-down; there seems to be a rejection of the idea of cinematography in favor of presenting an atmosphere that communicates through blunt force that life is harsh. This aesthetic is not as severe as it is in other movies I can think of, and it's not distracting, but it's just kind of something where I thought "oh look, it's that mid-to-late-2000s drabness" and moved on.

Without a doubt the thing that makes this a watchable movie at all is Isabelle Fuhrman's performance as Esther. When you're a kid, you always feel older and more mature than you really are, and then when you do get older, you realize you had no idea what it was actually like to be an adult. Children on film, when they're in roles that require them, for whatever reason, to act more maturely than kids their age usually do, end up like the peripheral child characters in Orphan: annoying, not even through any fault of their own but because mean, vindictive lines such as those given to Esther's bullying classmate sound contrived and cringe-worthy when written by an adult to be spoken through the mouth of a child. It's too easy to become aware of the artifice when we're watching movies with children acting out scenarios written by adults trying to imitate what children are actually like. Absolutely none of that applies to Esther. At no moment whatsoever does she feel like a little girl, even - and especially - when she's pretending to be one. Furhman was 10 at the time, and everything about her line delivery and body language just says "tiny adult", not "child pretending to be an adult". It's really, really impressive for a child to be able to deliver a performance that breaks through that feeling of separation between adults and children and have adult viewers (or at least this adult viewer) feeling like they're looking at somebody their own age, even when they're not. Isabelle Fuhrman rules and it's so awesome that they got her back for the sequel. I don't think anybody else could have handled "child pretending to be an adult pretending to be a child" as well as she does here.

I should mention that Vera Farmiga also does a great job in her role and further saves this film by not matching her husband in typical horror movie parent obliviousness. Her character seems to have a depth and interiority that Sarsgaard's character does not. It's interesting to me that we never see her stillbirth presented in a realistic manner but instead our only view of it is as a horrific, trauma-warped memory that opens the film and is never shown again. Having that be our only window into what happened to her centers the film around her point of view rather than looking at her entirely as an outsider.

The pacing is fairly decent - I don't believe movies need a "reason" for their length, but I admit that the fact that this movie is over two hours long had me wondering about it a bit. I generally trust Jaume Collet-Serra as a director and aside from the color palette (which was really just how a ton of media looked at the time) I think this is a perfectly competent film. Despite everything going for it, though, this feels like a three-star movie at best. It's mid. It's maybe the most mid a movie has ever been. And it's so weird for a horror movie - in my brain I don't even necessarily categorize it as one, but I don't categorize it as not one either. It's just kind of, there's horror, and then there's Orphan. The scenario is horrific, yes, and the film uses horror tropes, but it mostly does its own thing in its own inscrutable, grungey, late-2000s way. It kind of falls apart if you start thinking about it even a little bit in that way that tabloid headlines do; it's meant to be entertaining and make you go "wouldn't it be horrible if..." but not explore that concept too deeply.