The Triangle (2016)

directed by David Blair, Nathaniel Peterson, Adam Pitman, Andrew Rizzo & Adam Stilwell

USA

94 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I continue to disappear into the æther for long periods of time (I'm moving, it's going not very good), but I now return briefly to talk about one of my favorite movies in the world.

(You should listen to Polygondwanaland by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard a lot before watching this movie. It makes sense, just trust me.)

The Triangle is a faux-documentary that is both incredibly authentic and extremely subtle. It begins with a road trip montage, not too dissimilar from a thousand other road trip montages you've probably seen before, but in the context of this film - which took about three years to edit, supposedly, and was directed by five different people, all of whom also shared writing credits - you get the sense that this is actual, real footage of an actual, real road trip. The characters (if we can even call them that) are familiar with each other in the way real friends are, and the narrative renders it unnecessary for them to introduce themselves to us: we feel like we know them even from before the film begins; that's just the way things are set up.

Looking at reviews, I see that a lot of people regard the first two acts before the big finale as being kind of slow. I wouldn't disagree with this, but I also think that build-up is absolutely crucial. The way this movie evolves is unpredictable, low-key and, when it finally climaxes, somehow utterly terrifying. Without the sun-baked hippie nonsense of the first hour, none of that would hit nearly as hard.

Something of the overall theme of the movie (again, if there can be said to be a theme) is foreshadowed a bit in how insignificant the characters feel, and how de-centered their activities in the commune turn out to be when all is said and done. The characters are all just there, doing stuff, saying stuff, having opinions, the way real people do. The film seems to be pointing us in the direction of certain individuals. notably Rizzo, the leader of the cult-commune-thing, who comes off somewhat abrasive and we are primed to distrust him due to his status as pretty much a cult leader, but when shit hits the fan Rizzo actually turns out to be a good guy. The movie doesn't let the human characters get in the way of the overall story but at the same time it filters what is going on at the commune through human eyes, and the end result of this is a sense - which I am sure is exactly what the filmmakers were aiming for - that we're watching something happen that is unfathomably larger than a handful of individuals cooking lasagna in the desert and sleeping in yurts.

I love, and I have to emphasize LOVE, the way this movie culminates. I still have never seen anything like it. Nothing is ever, ever explained. We get hints of some kind of prophetic dream but not enough of it for us to be able to interpret it. That's the key here, I think: there's no way to interpret anything, it's all just happening. It can't be known. It just is.

There's not much else I can say about this without going into spoilers. This is really one of those movies that came out of nowhere, and despite not getting any fanfare now or close to its release, it still lives on in my heart next to Banshee Chapter as one of the most unique things I've ever seen. And, hey, technically counts as a KaiJune pick since it sort of has a monster in it. Maybe?

Harakiri (1962)

directed by Masaki Kobayashi

Japan

133 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is one of many movies that I've feared to approach for a while because I considered that I might not be smart enough to really get it. As it turns out, this is an excellent movie to watch not only for myself but also for others who might be putting off the "classics" for any number of reasons - despite its age and the accessibility barrier (for some) of subtitles, this is a movie that definitely still resonates and tells its story in a clear, masterful, and absolutely ruthless way.

And it really does feel like being told a story. The narrative here is laid out a bit unconventionally: we're presented with nothing at the start, nothing except for what we see on the screen: a ronin named Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) appears at the gates of the House of Ii, claiming that he wishes to commit seppuku in their courtyard, being in a state of financial and social ruin and having nothing else to do to restore his name but die honorably. He is invited in, but cautioned that this is not the first situation of the like that the House of Ii has seen. He's told about the ronin who preceded him, and the fate that befell that man; not truly intending to die, but hoping to be given some dispensation, the previous ronin was instead forced to make good on his claim and commit seppuku with a dull bamboo sword, without even the mercy of a second to relieve his suffering.

Slowly, the layers of the story begin to peel away. We find out that the preceding ronin was Tsugumo's son-in-law, who lived with him, and that his wife and their son were both sick and, lacking money for a doctor, he chose to beg for aid from the House of Ii - a true last resort from which there would be no coming back. His gambit failed, and Tsugumo pursues the same path, hoping to get answers if not justice. But there are still more layers than that, and this is where I'll stop going into detail because there are aspects of this movie that are really best experienced for yourself.

Saying what I'm about to say sounds crazy, and I know it sounds crazy, but I fully believe Tsugumo would kill a health insurance CEO in the street if this movie was set in the present day. That sentiment is what this movie is about, to me. It is a critique of justice without mercy, of any man who follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and of men who, gaining enough power to do so, define those laws themselves. Tsugumo repeatedly decries bushido as a façade. So too democracy. It's remarkable that a movie made in different circumstances in a different time can have such universal relevance.

Not to mention that it's a visually arresting movie, every shot hitting with what feels like palpable weight when accompanied by Toru Takemitsu's masterful score. Yoshio Miyajima, the cinematographer, also worked on Kwaidan, as did one of the two art directors, Shigemasa Toda.

A story depends a lot on the person telling it, and in this case the narrative is conveyed through the person of Tsugumo, as played by Tatsuya Nakadai in one of his most reserved but also one of his best performances. You wait the entire movie to see him really let loose, but he's as good before the payoff as after. The film builds steadily into an incredibly satisfying climactic swordfight with clearly impossible odds - the impossibility of victory less the point than the fight itself. As a noted swordfighting expert (this is sarcasm, I don't know what I'm talking about), to my discerning eye, the swordplay here looks deliberately showy: as with everything else in the film, its visual aspect does not feel like it's designed to be realistic; it's designed to have impact, to convey the story that it's telling in a fashion that is memorable and sometimes even darkly, brutally beautiful.

Sometimes renowned films are renowned for a reason, and this is an example of that. I will likely be revisiting this one from time to time now that I've accepted it into my life.

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

84 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I'm a few days late, but happy birthday to possibly my favorite Godzilla movie aside from the original. This is one of several Godzilla movies (including the original) that I don't rewatch that often because it puts me in a bad mood every time I do. Rewatching it last night, though, I didn't have time to be put in a bad mood, because I was too busy thinking "Ah, this is the best movie ever made".

(Please read this review which sums up the movie in one paragraph better than I could if I wrote an entire book.)

While I think it's a masterpiece, Terror of Mechagodzilla had the lowest box office attendance of the Showa-era films. I tend to wonder whether the dour tone of the film had something to do with that. The previous year's Godzilla film, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, was one of the most bombastic, colorful, high-energy entries in the franchise, so to follow it up with a deadly serious, character-driven story where the monsters don't have any big funny moments - directed by master of melancholy films Ishirō Honda, no less - is a bit of an abrupt change of pace.

The film carries over a lot of plot elements from the previous film, the most central of which is an in-progress invasion by the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens and their most formidable weapon, Mechagodzilla, which they develop by abducting/coercing humans into working for them. The timeline of vs. Mechagodzilla is much more brief, however, and more traditional to the way these films are usually laid out, with the bulk of the story occurring in a linear fashion, and events unfolding as we watch the characters experience them. One of the intriguing things about Terror of Mechagodzilla, by contrast, is that the invasion had been going on in the background for a very long time: at least 20 years, as implied by the flashback of Katsura Mafune's accidental death and immediate revival by the aliens.

The thought I kept having while watching this film was that, on a surface level, a lot of what happens can be blamed on Dr. Mafune for being too stubborn to let go of an old grudge after being slighted by the scientific community. But despite this, despite him being written as a bitter old man who turns traitor to humanity as a whole, I can't do anything but feel bad for him. Both he and his daughter are manipulated at every turn by the Black Hole Planet 3 Aliens. He and Katsura are both victims. Watching this movie again I was struck by how abrupt the scene where Katsura dies for the first time is: the aliens don't give Dr. Mafune any time whatsoever to process it or even to find out who they are or what they want, they just immediately ingratiate themselves to his entire life in such a way that he's dependent on them for the continued preservation of the only thing really keeping him going - his daughter. To me - and this is a point I've never seen brought up before, so I'm probably wrong - it feels like Katsura's death had to have been pre-planned. For the aliens to be able to know the exact time that she would be electrocuted and be able to enter the scene right away as soon as she had died, they would have to have been watching. Using Katsura to manipulate her father was the plan right from the start.

The dub will let you forget this, and becoming jaded to kaiju movies in general will let you forget this, but the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens are incredibly brutal. There's kind of a cult indoctrination thing going on here. They insert themselves into Dr. Mafune's life and give him everything that he ever wanted: his daughter's life, the opportunity to prove himself right to his detractors, and access to what he wanted to research all along (Titanosaurus). Meanwhile they see him as so disposable that one of them uses him as a human shield without a second thought. (I remain salty that the English dub cuts out the part where he gets shot.) We also see that they abduct other humans for slave labor and cut their vocal cords. These may be, in name, the same aliens as the previous film, but the air of sinister coolness that Kuronuma had is replaced here by pure evil.

I'm still going. This is my review, I can make it as long as I want.

I would be remiss not to talk about Tomoko Ai's performance as Katsura, because she really is what holds the movie together; she's the most sympathetic character and the one who we're rooting for the whole time. She was at this point a very young actress with not a lot of experience, she had been playing a semi-regular role on Ultraman Leo prior to this and as the story goes she ran over while still in her uniform from that show to try out for the part of Katsura. She's really good at conveying that Katsura still has human emotions despite being a cyborg, but that those emotions are deeply buried. I love one specific moment after Katsura is resurrected for the second time, where Ichinose is tied up in the control room and Katsura gets up to adjust something on a panel in front of him; when he begs her to see reason, she says "Be silent", but why did she get up in the first place? Did that one knob really need to be fiddled with in that exact spot that would put her right in front of him?

I also want to talk about Akihiko Hirata's performance in this because I think he knocks it out of the park. I continue to maintain that he wasn't given enough roles where he got to actually act. (You all should watch Saga of the Vagabonds or Farewell Rabaul or something.) He adopts a specific set of mannerisms for this role that make the fake glasses and mediocre old age makeup they put him in forgettable. It's hard not to compare Mafune to Dr. Serizawa, since they were both played by Hirata - bookending his appearances in the Godzilla series - and in a lot of ways I feel like the stuff Mafune gets up to is exactly the kind of thing Serizawa would have been afraid would happen to him: Mafune's weakness is exploited by an interloper who seeks to use research of his for destructive purposes. I can see a reading of Mafune as an older version of Serizawa whose staunch refusal to let his invention fall into the wrong hands wavered after life treated him poorly.

So, yeah, this is a contender for my second-favorite Godzilla movie. Above all, the way I feel about this movie is that it is just phenomenally well-made, easily on par with anything and everything that came after it. Tonally, it's more akin to one of the Heisei films, like vs. Biollante or vs. Destoroyah. Every inch of this movie looks incredibly good. That first shot of Titanosaurus from below, set against the backdrop of a bright and sunny sky, is an all-timer. There's something sad about the way the film ends on a shot of Godzilla wading off into the sea when you consider that this was really the end of "old Godzilla": the series would return from its hiatus, and is still going strong even now, but everything would be different. This movie just means so much as an achievement in the series' history that I cannot understand why anybody wouldn't consider it one of the best.

Eraserhead (1977)

directed by David Lynch

USA

88 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It's been probably over ten years since I last watched this and it has been one of those films that exists in my head as a concept more than as an actual memory of having seen it. And, like many if not all films that attain that category, even if I consider them to be personal favorites, I'm always surprised by how good they are once I finally do watch them again.

David Lynch's death is a hard one to deal with. Much has been said lately about his refusal to elaborate upon or explain themes in his films, choosing instead to leave it up to the viewer to interpret them. I think that this is an extremely admirable way of making art, and one that, if the artist is able to be personally content with putting their work out there in its finished form and letting it speak for itself, can be fulfilling for both the artist and the viewer. Art will always exist as much in the mind of the audience as it does in the mind of the artist. An artist might mean something specific by incorporating a specific thing in their work, but that thing will always ultimately be most meaningful to them; what resonates with a single viewer could be wholly different from what the artist intended when they created the work.

It's freeing, as a viewer, to be able to interpret a film without feeling like you're coming to the "wrong" conclusion about it. For that reason, I'm going to talk about what I think of Eraserhead on a personal level.

One of my biggest takeaways from the film is that there's something weirdly American about it. It feels heavily reminiscent of dour Soviet and Eastern European films like Stalker, The Ugly Swans, and 1980's Golem (among many others), but the characters, the way they conduct themselves, the music and the furnishings that they're surrounded with, all speak to a kind of uniquely desperate mid-20th-century American way of life. It's a little anachronistic; I wasn't alive in the late 1970s, but to my understanding people didn't really dress like the Lady in the Radiator or even like Henry's girlfriend Mary unless they were elderly. Henry himself goes around in a suit most of the time and proclaims that he works in a factory. It feels a little bit more like the times Lynch himself might have grown up in rather than the contemporary atmosphere.

A theme that seems to recur throughout the film is the horror of a hole. Things come out of, and happen inside, holes. Our introduction to the place where Henry lives is through an apocalyptic aerial zoom of a house with a large hole in its roof. A non sequitur involving the worm thing Henry finds in his mailbox ends in the worm itself growing a gaping maw that the camera falls into. Henry's brief affair with the woman next door culminates in the two of them sinking slowly into a hole that appears in the center of his bed. And at the very beginning, the film's horror of horrors, the baby itself, is birthed from Henry's open mouth. This is a deeply, deeply unsettling film, more frightening with what it shows you than with what it holds back, but there is still that sense that there are things in the shadows of it, at the bottom of holes, craters, canyons, mouths.

One tempting and even somewhat compelling read of the film is a literalist approach that says the world it depicts is some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where everything and everyone is strange because they're poisoned and mutated from radioactive fallout or some such. The film itself even gives us a small detail that could seem to point to this interpretation: the framed picture of a mushroom cloud next to Henry's bed. This could be a hint, or it could mean something else, or it could mean nothing at all. Personally, I think it kind of fits in with the American-ness of it all, the casual display of a symbol of incredible destructive power out of pride, maybe, or fascination; hung prominently the way one might mount a small crucifix.

And then there is the baby. I honestly forgot how horrible that thing is. It's one of the rare elements of the film that is acknowledged as being somehow wrong and bizarre within the film itself - "They're not even sure it is a baby" - and characters react to it in a way that seems reasonable given what it is, which can't be said for most other aspects of the film. On some level it does elicit a sympathetic reaction, since it is a helpless, sick creature too weak to do anything but cry and move its head a little, but it's also just so disturbing that it's impossible to really empathize with it. As for its significance to the narrative, to me it felt like after a while the baby was becoming an extension of Henry himself. They do become physically indistinguishable after a point, with Henry losing his own head and having it replaced with the baby's. Henry finally cutting the baby open and stabbing it could be read as a kind of suicide.

There's a scene in the movie Jigoku that I kept thinking about during this. The guilt-ridden protagonist of that film descends through Buddhist hell until he meets his dead girlfriend, who tells him that she's had a baby down there, but she put it on a big leaf and sent it floating away down the river, and he has to rescue it right now, hurry up, he has no choice, he has to save his baby, right now, go! Overwhelmingly, watching that scene, as with watching Eraserhead, I got the feeling that I was watching a nightmare on screen, because nightmares are the only place where I personally have experienced such a sense of deep urgency and obligation coupled with a situation that is so outwardly bizarre and impossible. It feels like a classic nightmare situation to be tasked with doing something that is of life-and-death importance but is also nearly impossible and makes very little sense in the first place, like raising a disgusting cow fetus-baby when no one has ever told you where it actually came from, just that you are somehow the father.

I guess I have to stop this somewhere. This is one of my favorite movies. It's an easy five stars. I could watch this ten more times and come away from it with ten new interpretations, each entirely different from the last. It's a film that really feels perfectly realized, and I think that may owe a lot to Lynch's ability to put art out there without explaining it. I love that a film can just be weird and nightmarish without having to justify itself.

The Thing (1982)

directed by John Carpenter

USA

109 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Note: This is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. I am extremely busy this month, and did not have time to write anything new. My apologies.

Not even considering its massive cultural impact, The Thing is one of my favorite movies. I think it's also objectively one of the best horror movies ever made, with one of the most interesting and well-executed concepts for a monster. Even though that concept is not original, having been adapted from another film that was itself adapted from a book, it's done so uniquely in this iteration that it stands out from its predecessors.

The first time I watched this was when I was only just getting into movies, and I wasn't "good at" watching them. Stuff just didn't occur to me; I would miss huge parts of the plot because I wasn't paying attention to anything. I don't know if it's because of that or just because it's been a while since I saw it, but so much in The Thing jumped out at me that didn't the first time. The film's opening scene follows a dog across the frozen white Antarctic landscape as a helicopter tries desperately to track and shoot it, for reasons as yet unknown to us viewers. The Norwegians' desperate attempts to kill the dog and warn the U.S. base - attempts that fail, but may have been in vain anyway - are the frontispiece to what will become a building of dread that never stops throughout the whole movie. 

It really struck me upon this rewatch that this movie is just that: dreadful. It has an ominousness to it that maybe can only be understood when you've seen it and you know what's coming, which might seem counterintuitive given the anticipatory nature of dread, but watching capable people encounter an entity that they don't (and can't) understand gives off such a strong feeling of wrongness that it fills the whole atmosphere with foreboding.

I also did not know how to appreciate practical effects the first time I saw this. I didn't recognize that besides the very obvious fact that the effects in this are some of the best ever put to film, they're also used to perfection, at the perfect times; enough is shown that we feel like the alien - or, technically, the organisms the alien possesses and attempts to imitate - is flesh, a real creature. I can't really say that it doesn't tip over the line into being excessive, because the whole thing is an excess of blood and guts; entrails whipping around to find purchase; dragging itself along by its organs; body parts sprouting new, horrible limbs never glimpsed by any Earthly creature. But it's one of the only times where such a liberal application of grossery is needed, where it's used as real, genuine horror instead of a cheap attempt to shock.

I want to talk about the alien. I could talk about it all day and all night if I was given the chance. Because like I said, this is one of the most enduringly frightening concepts in horror that I've ever had the pleasure of giving space in my brain to. It is something that has no physical body itself or has a physical body that can be discarded at will, something that exists as a possessing spirit. It is an organism that is only concerned with survival, and it has the ability to alter its body plan in the blink of an eye to do whatever it can do evade injury and continue its goal of infecting as many life forms as possible. There is something so uncanny about the concept of a being that can just sprout new appendages if needed; it doesn't have to conform to evolution's idea of an ideal body plan honed over millions of years because it can reach out a coil of intestine as a grasping limb or grow a new mouth full of teeth on whatever spot its body needs one. And all of this is depicted with what I'm calling accuracy - it may be a misnomer considering that such a creature (thankfully) does not exist and so there isn't a way to depict it "accurately", but the practical effects team created what felt like a true-to-life depiction of the concept.

That scene where one of the infected men tries to run from the others but is found half-mutated, his hands horrifically misshapen and a blank alien look in his eyes. The noise he makes. That's fodder for a thousand nightmares. I can see how that single scene echoes in my favorite horror film of all time, Banshee Chapter.

I could go on even longer about this movie - how Jed the dog is one of the best canine actors of all time, managing to convey not the obvious immediate threat that an angry dog would, but cunning. Malice. Granted, a lot of that is more a credit to good editing than the dog himself, but I want to point out another specific scene, and then I'll close this review: Towards the beginning, when Nauls is told to turn down his Stevie Wonder, refuses, and then the camera explores empty corridors with the sounds of "Superstition" playing muffled in the background, we see the husky silently slip his nose in the door. He silently pads down the hallway until he finds a room with a human, and enters, as the human's shadow on the wall turns toward him, and then the scene cuts. I felt like I was watching a predator. Not just a dog, but something else. I think maybe it's the segue from light humor to a vision of dread that does it. That you can still hear humanity in the background while you watch the beginning of its downfall on four legs. That scene and every other in this film is why it's one of my favorite horror movies.

Event Horizon (1997)

directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

UK, USA
95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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September is well underway, and as we all know, September is just a long pregame for Halloween. So I wanted to revisit one of my favorite horror movies, which I somehow haven't seen in eight years. Not only does it hold up as well as it did the last time I watched it (with the exception of the CGI, which continues to age like milk), I might have actually liked it better.

This is such a heavily visual film. So much of the information it wants to give the viewer is conveyed not through scenes where the human characters strive to figure out what's wrong with their surroundings but through those surroundings themselves. While we're onboard the rescue ship Lewis & Clark, we have an inkling of the sense of foreboding that surrounds the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of the Event Horizon, but it isn't until the crew actually boards the Event Horizon that we feel the full weight of its menace. Even before it went to Hell, the Event Horizon must have been an intensely discomfiting place for its crew to inhabit. One wonders if it always looked like that or if being in Hell changed its architecture on a fundamental level. It looks like a huge Gothic cathedral floating through space; remarkably cruciform, apparently captained by a man fluent in Latin.

The design of the ship's core cannot be anything other than an intentional nod to the idea of a "biblically accurate angel". It is three concentric wheels orbiting each other around a central mass, covered all over with spikes and orbs of light. There's a scene fairly early on where one of the rescue crew ends up in the chamber alone while they're all still surveying the ship, and all three rings of the core turn directly to him and lock into place - it's like it's looking right at him.

I actually feel like the area where this movie fails is with the dialogue. It doesn't feel like the language used can match up with the visual and psychological impact of the rest of the film. Lines like the ones from the aforementioned crew member who, after being corrupted by looking directly into wherever the ship's black hole drive sent it, would talk about the "dark inside of [him]", just feel trite in comparison with what the movie is trying to tell you in a big-picture sense. Even Weir's monologuing frequently falls short of describing everything that is implied by the film's concept.

That being said, high-concept science fiction movies like this oftentimes let character development fall by the wayside, but thankfully this one doesn't. The cast plays off each other perfectly, and they assemble to create a ship's crew that feels like an authentic crew, like seasoned sailors who know what they're doing and are not as enamored with the idea of the film's futuristic science as modern viewers, to whom it is fiction, would be. And - most importantly - they seem to care about each other as human beings. I appreciated Captain Miller about ten times more on this rewatch: he's extremely competent, always in control, but not unfeeling; surprisingly for such a stoic, no-nonsense spaceship captain, he's also one of the most vocal proponents of something being direly wrong with the Event Horizon. He takes what his crew experiences at face value even when they themselves don't, because he respects them. And for some reason I noticed this time that he was married. He wears a wedding ring. Only a few of the rescue ship crew are afforded backstories, but I found myself thinking about the idea that Miller had family back home, and never spoke of them.

I think this movie is extremely good at operating on multiple levels of horror. There is the basic concept of a ship that goes to hell and comes back demonically possessed, which is shown to us in every inch of film, basically, but then there's the real blood and guts of it - and that is restricted to only a few key moments. I always like to include the link to this Imgur gallery that shows frames from the film you wouldn't be able to catch without pausing it repeatedly (although if you are at all averse to graphic imagery, including imagery of a sexual nature, please don't view it). Had we been seeing things like that constantly, the film would be nowhere as scary as it is. As Weir says, hell is just a word. But while he follows that up by saying that reality is far worse, I would argue that - as a film viewer - what we can cook up in our imaginations is even worse than that. That's why I like that the movie respects its viewers enough to let us think about the implications it presents to us without having to be shown them at every corner.

I just really love this one. It's one of those movies that, to me, doesn't feel like anything else, and nothing else feels like it. It has its cheesy moments here and there (any time it attempts humor is just... really, really bad) but it's such a vibe. I wish it was three hours long.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Final Chapter (2015)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

89 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Hi, hello, this is the best movie I've ever seen in my life.

I want to apologize if I've ever sounded dismissive when I was talking about Koji Shiraishi's preoccupation with his weird worm dimension thing. That was never my intent - I was never making fun of it, I never thought it was just some wacky idea, I always took it seriously; I guess I just thought it was a little funny how insistent he is about it. But now I see. This is what it was all leading to. This masterpiece of a film.

Here, the format of the previous entries in the Senritsu Kaiki File series is dispensed with entirely, as we pick up immediately after The Most Terrifying Movie in History. Ichikawa and Kudo are lost in worm hell, so Tashiro has been left behind to finish the movie (and he apparently makes a pretty good profit off of it, too). But things have been changing ever since the crew uncovered the demon soldier project. The world that Tashiro lives in now feels intensely unsafe. We see him talking to his livestream viewers in his apartment at night, alone, and even then, we can feel this sense of unease. Then Tashiro hears a knock on his window - his second-floor balcony window - and both he and the viewers are abruptly catapulted into complete and utter chaos.

Entering the picture very suddenly is a man named Eno whose origins are never explained (although the translator makes sure to note that he has a really strong Osaka accent). Eno seems to know everything about what the world is becoming - or maybe not everything about it, but he knows how to stop what's happening. (By "what's happening" I mean the growing crisis situation that followed the appearance of a massive hovering silhouette in the sky over Shinjuku - this will all be explained reasonably well if you've yet to catch up with the previous films.) Unfortunately for Tashiro, he is the only one who can execute this plan that will not only bring Ichikawa and Kudo back but also (ostensibly) correct the path towards annihilation that the world is headed down. Eno gives him four tasks that he says will result in his teammates coming back from the other dimension, and I won't get into what these are since every one of them is hideously disgusting, but through his steadfast adherence to Eno's plan, Tashiro confirms what we could all already tell - that only one thing matters to him:

Filming. He has to film everything. When Eno threatens to shoot him for not moving fast enough, he's afraid, of course, as anyone would be. But it doesn't compel him to act. What compels him is when Eno points the gun at the camera. That - and only that - is unacceptable.

Shiraishi is doing something really incredible here. This is the end game of the entire series. I was right about how it wasn't so much a bunch of disparate cases of paranormal phenomenon - maybe that all existed, but in the background the whole time, an apocalypse had been slowly forming. Shiraishi continues to use the found-footage tools he's demonstrated such proficiency with, but now instead of low-stakes (yet terrifying) movies about kappa and haunted toilets, he's showing us the fabric of reality folding and unfolding, truth and fiction blurring, timelines disintegrating. It feels real. Shiraishi convinces us that it is real, because he begins to involve himself - his real self. When Eno called Shiraishi by his real name it shook me to my core. The incredibly delicate and at times transparent third wall this movie sets up is a thing of beauty.

I have to talk about the climax. It's impossible to explain this without going through a play-by-play of the film as a whole, so I won't try. When Kudo was poised to end the entire world and therefore bring about a better one with his Cronenberg-ass arm gun supported by Ichikawa as Tashiro filmed it all, I realized that this moment was an encapsulation of the series as a whole. Kudo is raw, unhinged chaos energy, and Ichikawa is there to aim him at what needs to be done, to try to exert at least some small measure of control over his utterly batshit persona so that the team can run itself as something vaguely resembling a business. And Tashiro's role is to film it. Shiraishi's role is to film it. To make meaning out of what the team sees.

Can the three of them save the world this way? No. But they can destroy it and start again, and keep making movies in whatever new world they find themselves in.

Good Morning (1959)

directed by Yasujirō Ozu

Japan

95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It's been a really long time since I've watched an Ozu film. I put this on spur of the moment within an hour of waking up because I found out that Yoshiko Kuga died. (Tonight I'm probably watching Zero Focus or something.) I have osmosed some information about Ozu and his works just from being heavily interested in Showa-era Japanese cinema in general, and I have to say that every time I watch something of his I wonder why I ever watch anything else. The cinematography in his films is unparalleled: the blocking is phenomenal; characters seem nested within boxes of their own making, little comfortable microcosms of modern living that they are continuing to perpetuate through their own actions. Conflict between generations is a huge theme running throughout Ozu's oeuvre, and while Good Morning is on the surface a lighthearted film, there is still that streak of anxiety in it.

Synopses will tell you that Good Morning is about Isamu and Minoru, two boys who enact a strike in response to their parents' refusal to buy them a television. This is true, but it's also true that there is so much else going on in this film. The fascinating thing about it, and what gives it such a unique feel, is that every issue is treated with exactly the same emotional weight. Each character has something going on, and sometimes it's just random background life problems: did my neighbor forget to pay the dues for our women's group? How do I get this salesman to leave me alone? My mother is annoying. My kids are being a pain. But at other times - in fact, not even "at other times", these deeper issues are always encapsulated within the "surface-level" ones - it gets more devastating.

To the adults of the film, Isamu and Minoru are simply being brats because they don't understand the real world and how it works. The boys complain that adults just say the same things all the time: "good morning", "good afternoon", "how are you", and so on. Empty platitudes. The adults counter that, well, that's just the way it is. They don't even realize that there could be any other way to be. By telling these children, who are questioning the social order of things, to accept that things are the way they are because they just are, to be obedient, quiet, and participate in the same meaningless small talk as the adults around them, they are unwittingly trapping them in a cycle and taking away the tools of subversion and dissent that might aid them in escaping it.

The film is set in a complicated arrangement of houses that are in very close proximity to each other. All of the neighbors have their own private thing going on, but the physical closeness of them means one person's business becomes everyone else's. Kuga plays one of these neighbors, a young woman named Setsuko with an admirer who she seems oblivious of. I think the last thing I saw her in was Thus Another Day and her role here could not be more different. She exudes warmth and cheerfulness (and my god, those heels she wears) and, although her character is ultimately another adult who doesn't concern herself overmuch with the two rebellious boys, she does treat them as people.

I think the boy playing Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu, who was fairly prolific as a child actor but did not seem to have any roles past the early 1960s) is the star of the show here. Isamu is basically a little adult - and, for the reasons I've been talking about, he is in many ways more mature and understanding than the real adults. He takes himself, his brother, and their struggle wholly seriously, but also engages in childish behavior; although, again, everything he does, whether meant to be funny or not, is given equal weight. Shimazu's performance is incredibly endearing but also remarkably level-headed for a child that small.

As much as there's a well of intergenerational conflict and anxiety about modernization at the heart of this film, it's also so genuinely sweet and lovely that it almost made me tear up. This is possibly the only movie I've ever seen to have this many fart jokes yet never once feel awkward to watch. And Ozu seems to understand children on a deep level, but he also understands why the things they do make older people nervous.

I am a little bit stuck in a rut of knowing what I like to watch and pursuing only that instead of exploring other genres and styles. This isn't the kind of thing I watch very often these days but it's an incredibly beautiful film and has definitely made me want to get further into Ozu.

Technically has a tokusatsu connection as somebody mentions Gekkō Kamen at one point.

The H-Man (1958)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

87 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is a favorite of mine to watch while I'm on... herbal supplements, but I decided to watch it sober and finally give it a proper review. I'm never sure how much plot to talk about when I write these reviews, because I review movies with an audience in mind who has either seen them or has easy access to Google to look up what the hell I'm talking about, but to summarize this incredibly briefly: The H-Man is about humans who have become contaminated with nuclear radiation and transformed into sentient slime that has the ability to melt and consume other humans. The idea that the post-transformation "H-Men" (this is one of the only times where I think the English rebranding of a Toho movie is more succinct; in the original film they're simply referred to as "ekitai ningen", liquid humans) could retain their mental capacity is something I'll explore later on in this review. 

Honda directed so many movies in which the supernatural element is introduced by way of gangsters running afoul of it that I have to wonder if the noir-ish detective story framework was something imposed by the studio, hoping to capitalize on trends of the time, or if it was something that personally resonated with Honda and the screenwriters (Takeshi Kimura, in the case of the Transforming Human trilogy). This particular film isn't shy at all about where its inspiration lies: the film opens with newspaper headlines about a missing fishing boat feared contaminated by nuclear testing, a blatant reference to the real-life Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident that informed much of Honda's filmmaking.

This film came out the same year as The Blob, and it's impossible not to draw comparisons between the two in terms of how the practical effects for the creature/s in question were achieved. (The Blob is actually the latter of the two films, having been released in September while The H-Man was released in June, but it's still worth thinking about.) But a more interesting comparison, I believe, is the ways in which Japanese contemporary film was lifting tropes from American sci-fi and horror movies and utilizing them to tell stories with different meaning than their Western counterparts. American science fiction of the 1950s-60s was frequently obsessed with the concept of an other, of some invading force - sometimes thinly-veiled communists, sometimes just anybody who isn't a WASP-y American - whereas Japanese sci-fi films of this era seem to be more concerned with the idea of becoming the other. The terror at the heart of The H-Man lies in the possibility that one's body could be so transformed, through the echoing aftereffects of nuclear testing, that one would no longer be recognizable to one's fellow humans and - worse - would have no choice but to act in a way that is actively hostile to non-mutated humanity. Japanese science fiction often feels like it understands the outsider in a much more nuanced way than American films that were being released at the same time.

This is where the idea of sentient slime people comes in. It's not given a lot of focus in the film itself, but there is speculation that humans who have mutated into H-Men still have the mental capacity that they did before their transformation. It's even brought up that they might be purposefully returning to Tokyo out of some kind of instinctual, remembered pull. Despite this, the film ends with all of the known H-Men having been eliminated quite brutally, through the ignition of huge gas fires to drive them out of the sewers and the use of guns (yes, shooting the slime with a gun works; I love the 1950s). Like a lot of Honda's films, the ending is unfulfilling for those expecting a neat, tidy, day-is-saved wrap-up: there's no such thing as hope or optimism, just the stark acknowledgement that the world has changed irrevocably and things such as what we just witnessed will continue happening.

Interestingly, the element of the H-Men retaining their human memories was cut completely from the American version of the film.

It's also just a really good and fun movie. The colors are absolutely gorgeous (that's Toho Scope, baby!) and the music and fashion makes it a perfect little slice of 1950s cinema that exists out of time when viewed through a contemporary lens. These genre hybrids that Toho put out are so fascinating because they allow for heavier topics to be explored using visual language normally reserved for non-genre cinema. 

I've kind of intentionally been talking more about the implications of the concept of this film than the practical effects, because a lot has already been said about that side of it, but I have to acknowledge how extremely good the effects are anyway. It's one of those movies where you would think watching it in the best possible quality would make the effects less convincing since you'd be able to see all the rough edges, but it actually makes it better the more clearly you can see it. I am, tentatively, attempting to start up a tokusatsu film club in real life, and movies like this are the kind of thing I want to show to people.

Seven Samurai (1954)

directed by Akira Kurosawa

Japan

207 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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For a long time I was carrying around a dirty little secret, and that secret was that despite being a huge fan of Showa-era Japanese film, I had not seen Seven Samurai. I wasn't unfamiliar with Kurosawa, and I wanted to watch this, but you gotta carve out time for a 207-minute-long movie, even when you know doing so will be a rewarding experience. (This is not, as of this time, the longest movie I've ever seen; it is tied with Inagaki's 1963 Chushingura, which is also exactly 207 minutes.) Many people have written a library's worth of words about this movie far more intelligently than I ever could, but not saying at least something about it feels wrong.

It's kind of amazing that almost four hours of film can come out of a remarkably simple premise. The plot of the film is that a village of poor farmers, pushed to near-starvation by continued bandit raids on their rice crops, hires a group of samurai to fight back against the bandits and protect them. The film is split down the middle by an intermission, and while I'm not sure if it was intentional to divide it into two distinct halves, there is a definite change in tone, from a focus on planning in the first half to a focus on doing in the second. And the beauty of it is that the planning stages are almost as interesting, if not more so, than the action.

Now, this was my first watch, and I haven't even read any of those far more intelligent things people have said about this movie yet. But I think I'm onto it. I think I might have it figured out. I think the idea here is that Seven Samurai is not about the samurai.

Kurosawa does this thing that I've noticed in almost all of his films where he has a way of making characters - even ones who should be the "protagonists", ones who we spend the most time with and should be getting to know the best - decentralized. Instead of populating his movies with heroes, he populates them with people, making it so the characters who are in the spotlight feel like they're functionally no deeper than the villagers in the background. We never get much backstory on the seven, and if you're not familiar with the movie, like I wasn't, you might be expecting that. I think the movie plays with that expectation intentionally: it's only the leader of the seven, Shimada (played by Takashi Shimura in one of his best performances), who realizes that the victory belongs to the peasants, not his group. Neither are the antagonists ever expanded upon: the difference between villain and victim here is somewhat ill-defined, and the film presents a cycle of violence that should make the viewer slightly uneasy about assigning glory to any side.

The best example of this kind of surprising de-valorization of characters who would in any other movie have been framed as heroes comes in Kikuchiyo's death. Most if not all of the samurai do have at least some kind of personality, but Kikuchiyo is the most outsized by far - of course he is, it's Toshiro Mifune in the role - and he dies in the mud without final words, like a peasant. Which he was - he's one of the only characters to have backstory, and we learn that he was born a poor farmer just like the villagers he's reluctantly protecting. That totally unexpected coda to an incredibly colorful, loud, energetic character is the perfect example of how this movie shifts the focus off of who we would expect to be focused on, and onto the people in the background.

Seven Samurai is one of those movies where time has done it a bit of a disservice - it's not that it doesn't warrant the reputation it has as one of the best movies ever made, but its constant popularity throughout the past 70 years has done a lot to obscure our context of the film. Because movies like this can be made with relative ease today through the use of CGI and other "cheats", one can sometimes forget that all of this was real, physical stuff; real sets, real mud, real (extremely terrified) horses. The history of Japanese cinema began decades earlier, but I would argue that with such landmark films as Seven Samurai, Godzilla, and Twenty-Four Eyes, 1954 was a huge step for the country's film industry.

I won't brook a single argument about whether or not this deserved to be three hours and forty minutes long. It deserves to be longer, if it wants to be. There's nothing in here that feels unnecessary to the larger picture. Visually, narratively, and in its dialogue, this is a really monumental film. But it's also that way because of what isn't in it. It's brilliant because it leaves these holes through which you can get a better feel for the real core of it. The end doesn't feel triumphant - the peasants certainly seem to have triumphed, but there's not a sense of satisfying victory. But the end isn't the point. To risk deploying a cliche, this is a movie that is totally about the journey rather than the destination.

Twenty-Four Eyes (1954)

directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

Japan

156 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

Even before meeting her, Miss Ôishi's class have already given her a nickname ("Miss Koishi", or "little pebble", a play on her surname, which means "large stone"). The children love her just because she's there; a kind, friendly face; the only person who's willing to let them be children for a while in the middle of the harsh island life that requires them to grow up much too fast. This is shown by Miss Ôishi's reaction to a prank that trips her in the sand and causes her to tear her Achilles' tendon, taking her out of her job for several months: kids will be kids. She'd be within her rights to be frustrated with her class, but they had no way of knowing what would be the result of their innocent joke, and if she were to punish them simply for being children, the innocence they had such a tenuous hold on would be further damaged.

For the first part of this film, the focus is mainly on the children, and they're portrayed as a group. It's not that they don't have their individual lives, but they're united for a brief time by the experience of being children and facing the hardships that all young children face. The theme of unity is something that comes up very often in this film: not unity in a political or ideological sense, but in a sense of just being a human, being alive in a difficult world. When the children sing their school songs, which they remember throughout their lives, and which are a thread that continues to connect them well after leaving school, they're together not in motivation or outlook but as a family of individual souls connected by a shared humanity. One could watch the more lighthearted first act of this film forever, because the performances Kinoshita elicits from the children are so wonderfully authentic that it feels like watching real children go about their lives. One of the most endearing parts is when they learn where Miss Ôishi is staying while recuperating from her injury, and somehow, as a group, manage to catch a bus to her hospital, but they don't plan it very well, so by the time they arrive, they're just a band of miserable, dusty, crying, hungry children. The unwavering loyalty the kids show to their teacher remains constant throughout the timeline of the film, no matter the strife that they all endure.

This is a beautifully shot film, incredibly expansive in its scale but at the same time enclosed. It doesn't restrict itself to the school or the homes of the children, but instead involves what truly feels like the entire island. And that's because it literally is: the film was shot on Shôdoshima, the island that it depicts. I don't think any studio sets were used here, so the scenery is utterly breathtaking. It may have been deliberate that as the world of the children gets smaller and is defined more by societal pressures, there are less sweeping nature shots, and characters are more commonly shown in towns and houses. But for a little while, Twenty-Four Eyes reminds us like very few things do of what it's like to be a child in a vast and new world.

Eventually the war comes even to a small secluded island. Despite being beautiful, tender, and softspoken, this has to be one of the most brutally effective anti-war films I've ever seen. Even before the events that would lead to Japan's official entrance of the war, it rapidly becomes dangerous for Miss Ôishi to go on teaching the same way she had been before. One of the school's other teachers is arrested on suspicion of being a communist simply because another teacher he was friends with was reading a book rumored to have communistic or at least anti-war messages to his students. Miss Ôishi pipes up: she's taught the same book to her kids, and has it in her classroom at that moment. (The principal burns it upon this revelation.) Suddenly, practically overnight, Miss Ôishi can no longer teach her students material just because it's well-written and sounds good and talks about the value of life. Now, her job is as an extension of the Empire, to teach her students to become nothing more than soldiers whose only value lies in their ability to die for their country.

This is when the film takes its inevitable turn towards being completely devastating. Miss Ôishi is driven right out of her job by her newfound restriction from teaching her students anything that might lead them to appreciate being alive. With a new and growing family, her time is now taken up with caring for her own children, and the love of teaching is beaten out of her - but not her love of her students. Her class is decimated by the war. Her male students are drafted and only two of them come back, one permanently injured. Her husband dies in the war as well. Even before the war, life takes its toll on her children almost from the minute they can walk: several of her girls are required to stay at home and care for younger siblings, or to earn money doing jobs for their family. Again, Miss Ôishi's role as the one refuge for these children where they can learn about a world bigger than their island and experience wonder and care is crucial to their lives and hers. Despite narrowly escaping censure or worse for "communist sympathies" (the appreciation and protection of human life), Miss Ôishi remains staunchly anti-war. When it ends, she doesn't care that Japan lost, she's just happy it's over.

I believe that this film is something that needs to be paid attention to now because of the change in curriculum that comes when the government begins to intervene in Miss Ôishi's school. When the children were young and war wasn't on the horizon, being taught how to live in the world, how to appreciate just being alive in nature with your friends, seemed as or more important as being taught actual book knowledge. But that doesn't make for a good soldier. Indoctrination with a message espoused by the government or a miscellaneous ruling party, for ends that ultimately serve the larger structure at the cost of the lives of individuals, is occurring now, in the US, in what is occasionally referred to as "peacetime". Teachers aren't - and haven't been - free to teach children how to live. They can only teach them how to be citizens.

Despite the overwhelming amount of suffering the children and Miss Ôishi undergo, the end of the film remains - although bittersweet and emotionally raw - still lit up with hope. After 18 years, the children still haven't forgotten their teacher, although their number has been greatly reduced - by war, disease, circumstance, and the simple process of growing up. I think the end message of this movie is that the only real way to live a life is to be there for other people who are also trying to live their lives, no matter how much it might hurt when things separate you. Watching this just cements my feelings about cinema even further, that movies like this have to be seen and remembered, because even though it is fiction, it's still crucial to the human experience to tell stories that are a lot like real life, but a little more beautiful. Also, I knew I recognized Hideko Takamine from somewhere, and I realized that I first saw her in Naruse's A Wanderer's Notebook, in which she played a character who underwent changes in response to her circumstances over some span of time in a similar way to Miss Ôishi. Her performance as the lead (if one wants to define "the lead" as her, not the children) in this movie makes it what it is.

- "Are you against soldiers, Miss Ôishi?"

- "No, but I prefer fishermen and rice merchants."

- "So you're a coward?"

- "Yes, I'm a coward."

Atragon (1963)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

Alright. I'm finally reviewing Atragon. I've seen this movie more times by far than anything else (except for maybe Banshee Chapter and the original Jurassic Park) but I've never managed to review it because every time I watch it I seem to get a bit distracted.

Upon my latest rewatch, I've come to realize this is my favorite movie of all time. I've always been the kind of person who doesn't have a single favorite movie because there's so many, how can you ask me to pick just one? But I'm pretty confident now that it's this one. And not only that, this is also the movie I would pick if somebody asked me to explain why I love tokusatsu. It's a perfect example of the use of incredibly detailed miniatures and practical effects to execute a story that is also extremely well-written and resonant, a balance that not every tokusatsu film achieves. I think this movie is basically flawless in every way. It's something that feels like it accomplished 100% of what it set out to do.

I also want to quickly say that one of the only times I've ever gotten really mad at another film reviewer was when I saw this film referred to as "jingoistic". I just don't know how far in the sand your head must be to watch this entire thing and not get a strong anti-war message from it. I'm not sure if maybe the English dub casts it in a different light; the extent of my experience with the dub is accidentally renting it on DVD, going "aw man, this is a dub" and returning it. But the film itself is possibly Honda's most explicit anti-war statement aside from Farewell Rabaul (and Godzilla, of course).

The initial setup of the film is almost reminiscent of Toho's hardboiled crime flicks of the late 1950s until it begins taking a different tack with the slow reveal of multiple factions within society working in opposition to a peacetime Japan. The central conflict of the film is between the undersea empire of Mu, sunk 12,000 years ago and now returning to reclaim their "colonies" - the rest of the Earth - and humanity, but this also contains a conflict between a group of former military personnel holed up on an island after the Pacific War, refusing to accept the new constitution and disarmament of Japan. The leader of this group, Admiral Jinguji, has been secretly building a massive multi-terrain warship (the Gōtengō, or "Roaring Heaven") unlike anything any country has ever seen, and wants to keep it solely for Japan - Imperial Japan - when it becomes militarily active again. As the threat from Mu becomes greater, Jinguji's old commanding officer as well as his daughter attempt to convince him to let the Gōtengō be used for the good of the whole world.

Jinguji embodies Honda's critique of nationalism, and the role is possibly Jun Tazaki's best. In retreating to his island, Jinguji separated himself from his daughter Makoto, a toddler at the time, and when the two finally reunite, Makoto is horrified to find her father so dedicated to his ideology that he refuses to accept reality and shuns the rest of the world. One of the others who come to the island refers to Jinguji as a "ghost wearing rusty armor called patriotism". The specific word used here that gets translated as "ghost" is "bōrei", and I want to take a minute to talk about that because there are a lot of different concepts within Japanese culture that are translated en masse as "ghost". "Bōrei" is a term that is synonymous with other, more common ghost words, but is a little more antiquated and Gothic, and refers to a departed or ruined spirit that has left their physical form. It has literary overtones as well. Referring to Jinguji as a ghost is itself a very evocative turn of phrase, but I wanted to mention the term originally used because in its original language there would have to have been thought behind what kind of spirit, specifically, to reference. Jinguji does eventually come around, and personally, I love how little focus is given to this moment: the entirety of Jinguji's change of mind takes place in one sentence: "I think I'd been wearing rusty armor. I took it off, and I feel fine." It's not emphasized that this is a radical shift in ideology; Jinguji is the same person, but he's been confronted with the error of his ways in a manner that finally got through to him. That the film itself doesn't dwell on this allows me to imagine Jinguji's inner conflict more acutely than if he'd been given a protracted redemption arc.

(I do kind of feel like the subs on the 2006 Media Blasters release leave something to be desired, and I was wondering at some points if they were using dubtitles. I generally try to stay away from complaining about subtitles unless they're egregiously bad, because I'm not fluent in Japanese, but... did I catch them translating "mokusatsu suru" as "ignore"? Were there not some significant real-world repercussions to doing that exact same thing at one point in history?)

Let's move on to the practical effects, which are stunning and I love them. You really can't get any better than the enormous Gōtengō prop. It was a functional drill, and if I remember correctly, was at least partially built by a hardware company. There is something so magnificent about the Gōtengō that never gets old no matter what film it reappears in or how many times I watch this one: that first scene of it rising out of the water, accompanied by Ifukube's massive, swelling orchestral score, is impressive every time. The ship is the centerpiece of the film (literally - the original Japanese title is "Kaitei Gunkan", or "Undersea Warship"), but Atragon also contains enough beautiful matte paintings and miniatures to ensure that the undersea Mu empire feels like a real, fleshed-out location. I've always been captivated by the interior view of Mu's engine room, those massive, spinning rotors that completely dwarf any human being give off such a sense of scale that it's difficult for me to remember they're just miniatures in real life.

And there's Manda. I never really thought the inclusion of Manda was as jarring as it seems to be for some people, but maybe that's because I love this movie so much that I don't think about it enough. There's such a focus on military grandstanding and who has the best submarines that I guess if you look at it one way it could be a little silly to see Mu suddenly pull out their giant underwater dragon that they feed people to. But I love Manda and I hate when they freeze it after it attacks the Gōtengō. Manda did nothing wrong.

I'm going to try to end this review here because I could talk at length about this movie for much longer than I already have. It's just one of those things that's perfect from start to finish and never gets old. It is dated but its message isn't. I'll say one last thing before I wrap this up: every time I watch this I notice something new about it, and this time what struck me was how much the supporting cast gives to it. Yū Fujiki being a ham and Kenji Sahara wearing the most obvious disguise ever (perhaps rehearsing for his future stint wearing the most obvious disguise ever in Space Amoeba) add a little humor to a very serious and heavy film. The Empress of Mu, played by Tetsuko Kobayashi (who apparently also did her own makeup for the film), has few spoken lines but a screen presence that supercedes her. Every part of this movie is so good. I can't believe people think it's boring. I want to get everybody to watch this with me.

Hausu (1977)

directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Japan

88 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Hausu is one of those rare movies made by a director who I would consider almost "arthouse" (at least in his earlier work) that has broken into, if not exactly the mainstream, then a wider circle of cult following than usual. You do not in any way have to be a fan of Japanese avant-garde cinema of the mid-20th century to know about this film, and in fact most people who have seen it probably aren't. From personal experience, I've asked people who are huge fans of this movie if they've seen any other Ôbayashi movies and the answer is usually "no". I'm not saying this to be condescending at all - cinema is an odyssey and one of the best things in life is the fact that we all of us have a bunch of great movies we haven't seen yet waiting for us - I'm just demonstrating how wide the audience that this movie has reached is.

What's also remarkable is that it is a rare instance of a time when the most famous work of an otherwise relatively obscure director retains a lot of that director's signature trademarks. Hausu is far and away the most bizarre of Ôbayashi's feature-length films (setting aside earlier short works like Emotion, Confession, and An Eater, the last of which has a lot of blueprints for what would later make it into Hausu) but a lot of his standout themes are still there. One thing that has been present in almost every film of his I've watched has been a background score that never stops for nearly all the film's running time. There are some bangers on the soundtrack, but there's also quieter, more ambient music that is almost literally in every scene, in places where there absolutely doesn't have to be music happening, and the result is a feverish, sensationally overwhelming atmosphere that is very unique to this specific director. Apparently, when the amateur actresses had trouble with direction, Ôbayashi would play music on the set to help them get into it, so the soundtrack was there in reality as well as the finished film.

So what is this thing about? It does have a plot, although the psychedelic visuals tend to overshadow it. After her father introduces her to his new wife, Gorgeous, missing her real mother, takes a trip to the countryside to visit her aunt's rambling old house where she's lived alone for some time. Along with Gorgeous go several of her school friends: Mac, Fantasy, Prof, Kung Fu, Sweet, and Melody. Very quickly and with almost no segue from "something strange might be going on in this house" to "something strange IS going on in this house", terrible and bizarre things start happening to the girls. There's no time for exploring, no time for the audience to warm up to the transition between what had just moments before been a summery, fun movie with a bunch of teen girls taking a trip together and what turns out to be a horror story involving a house eating people. The fantastic is not separated from the mundane in Hausu because there is no mundane. Everything is constantly happening at all times. Even the parts of the film that are "normal" are so hyperstylized and obviously artificial (in a good way, more on that later) that at no point does any of this feel like real life - and it shouldn't.

A bit of context that I personally feel helps put the plot of this movie into perspective is the cat. This movie famously has the biggest, fluffiest, cutest cat you've ever seen, and it is somehow connected to the house and the aunt and the series of strange happenings the group of girls find themselves stumbling into. When the characters talk about the cat being a "witch cat", the word they're using is "bakeneko", which as a term can refer to an entire subgenre of Japanese horror - a genre which Ôbayashi would later play with in Legend of the Beautiful Cat/Reibyo Densetsu, a film which is tied with this one for my favorite of his. The gist of most bakeneko films (but not all) is that a beloved cat witnesses something horrible happening to its owner, sometimes resulting in their death, and absorbs a kind of grudge or becomes a receptacle for its owner's spirit, which later takes revenge on the people who wronged them. Hausu doesn't follow this format exactly - it doesn't follow any format exactly, and that's why we love it - but the aunt's backstory, of having lost her fiance in the war, becoming bitter and alone in her old house, and slowly starting to kind of meld with both the house and the cat until the three of them form a persona that consumes young, unmarried girls, definitely makes it feel like this movie shares some DNA with bakeneko films.

I'm a big, big fan of house-as-character movies. Like I said, the aunt, the cat, and the house form a triad whose identities as separate beings occasionally blur into one. The legend is that the aunt eats unmarried girls but really it's the aunt as the house doing the eating. (Eating is a big theme running throughout the film.) And, really, what exactly happens to the girls the house devours is not always that clear. Some of them don't even seem to be having such a bad time with it. Mac's disembodied head comes up out of the well frisky and grinning. Melody is horrified at first to realize she's being eaten by a piano, but eventually giggles about it, and her dismembered body parts look pretty happy. Gorgeous doesn't even really "die" but instead becomes a new avatar for the house after the aunt's body is killed. But there is a real, serious terror underlying the events of Hausu, and not even just the house stuff but the thing as a whole, situated in real time and space - on the Criterion DVD, Ôbayashi talks a lot about the bomb and how it influences this movie, which I highly recommend looking into or reading about because I cannot fully get into it with the space I have here.

Ôbayashi plays a lot with nostalgia across his entire filmography, which is where that sense of artifice that I mentioned before comes in. I feel like he understands the notion that what exists in your memory is always going to be different, and more beautiful, from what really is. The sunset that you saw may have been objectively beautiful, but going out with a camera and capturing a picture of it is not going to capture the feeling that that sunset gave you when you saw it in that one specific moment of your life. So instead of using composite photography, a painted backdrop, more vivid and lush than life could ever be, conveys the feeling of the sunset that you saw, rather than the sunset that was. That's just one example, but the whole of Hausu is set up like a memory, like a dream, and I don't think any other filmmaker manages to capture that feeling so well.

I will try to wrap up this review, if I must. This is a movie that I could talk about for days but ultimately it's the kind of thing where if you see it and you really get it, you know it, there's no words that describe it. Except for maybe comparisons to Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's other films, there's nothing you can really refer back to when talking about Hausu because it is so much a thing by itself. There are some factoids about its production that can aid in partially explaining Why It's Like That, but not entirely. That the plot of the film was influenced by Ôbayashi's young daughter explains a lot. That it was shot with no storyboard also explains some. One thing I thought was particularly interesting is that Wikipedia claims it was filmed on one of Toho's largest sets - and this is Toho, like, Godzilla Toho. They do large sets. It doesn't necessarily come across when you're watching the film, but the house really is unimaginably huge, a weird labyrinth full of unpredictable things popping out and countless ways to be consumed and haunted. This was supposed to be a movie like Jaws. Instead, it ended up being a movie that experiments with what it even means to watch a movie, what it means to be a movie, what movies mean to us, and I'm so glad it exists the way it is.

Nope (2022)

directed by Jordan Peele

USA/Japan/Canada

130 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It took me a long time to get around to watching this - its theatrical run was while covid was even more of a significant risk than it is now - and I had to contend with rampant spoilers in the meantime. I spent a lot of time scrolling really fast past gifsets. I thought I had seen some things about it that constituted major spoilers, but as it turned out I had done something that I don't know if everybody else does or just me: I'd seen very tiny details from a film and constructed a whole story around them in my head almost unconsciously, leading me to believe I knew the plot, when in reality the actual film was totally different. This is one of those movies where reading about it pales in comparison to seeing it, so I'm going to discuss spoilers freely and recommend that you skip all this and just watch the thing. I also must say: I used to live around this part of California and it kind of is just like that. I would not at all be surprised if there were aliens living out there.

We kind of "cold open" into Daniel Kaluuya's character, OJ, witnessing his father's death in front of him in circumstances that are almost impossible to explain. A nickel, apparently shot at high velocity, embeds itself in his brain, killing him. We also see a house key embedded in the side of one of his horses, the implication being that some extremely high-speed hail of small objects fell over the ranch the night OJ's father died. This is a bizarre occurrence and a perfect way to start off the film, because it doesn't actually reveal anything about the plot or the creature that will come into play later, but still primes us for something utterly strange and new.

I think Kaluuya does an incredible job playing his character for the simple fact that there's a palpable sense of him being a different person before his father's death and after it. And when I say "before", I mean in the literal two or three lines of dialogue he has at the beginning of the film. It's nothing short of impressive how he manages to convey such a change in personality that even though I only saw his "before" self for a very scant amount of time, I was still conscious throughout the rest of the film that the version of him I was watching seemed different. His performance is subtly physical and he conveys the sense of somebody who is uncomfortable in the public eye, somebody more suited to his horse ranch, to the solitude of being with his own family, with his horses. Keke Palmer as his sister, Emerald, is almost the exact opposite, but her performance is just as good, she's so cool and easygoing that it feels like there's no wall between the viewer and Emerald as a person.

This is a movie about cycles of consumption. It's about seeing and being seen. Nothing embodies this better than Steven Yeun's character, Jupiter. A former child actor, he sets up an apparently successful Old West-style theme park experience in the California desert with his wife and children. But in the past, in his role on a fictional late-'90s sitcom called "Gordy's Home", he was witness to an incredibly disturbing trauma that should sound at least somewhat familiar because it is taken from a real-life event that I think probably lives rent-free in the brain of everyone who's read about it. Gordy was a chimpanzee, and as Jupiter tells it, one day one of the chimp actors portraying him "reached his limit". Jupiter does not go into the gore in his own recollections, but we see in flashbacks - and we know from real life - that this was nothing less than total carnage, leaving a woman permanently disfigured, and possibly more people dead in the fictional account of the event. We see Jupiter hiding under a table, watching everything, probably eleven years old at most. And we see how this shaped his life to come.

I don't think I've ever felt like I could understand the psychology of a character more, not by having it explained to me but simply by their actions, than I did with Jupiter. A word repeated throughout this film is spectacle. Jupiter constructs his entire life around being the spectacle, taking what he witnessed and internalizing it. Early on in the film, he tells Emerald about how the Gordy's Home incident was made into a Saturday Night Live sketch, and he tells her with reverence - not a hint of bitterness, not a hint of trauma, it is genuinely the highest honor to him that his ordeal has been turned into comedy fodder. Because it keeps him in the spotlight. As long as what happened to him is consumable, he doesn't have to look directly at it. He can instead frame it as the spectacle. He becomes the spectacle as a defense mechanism, because if he makes himself into something to be consumed, he is immortal as long as there are people to consume him. But it can't last forever. You can beg and plead to be seen, to be looked at, but as we'll see repeatedly throughout Nope, you can never, ever be the one doing the looking. Jupiter tells the SNL story while sitting in front of a commemorative T-shirt from Cape Canaveral, which of course includes the Challenger on its list of shuttles.

Race is not absent from this movie's concept of who is being seen and who is seeing. In fact, I think it's at the center. I know there are probably elements here that I'm not even aware of because I'm viewing this as a white person. Nope builds itself around a sequence of images strung together by Eadweard Muybridge of a horse being ridden by a jockey, often hailed as the first motion picture (the images shown in the film are not his first horse film, but a later, presumably better-looking sequence). The jockey - a Black man - is lost to history, almost definitely intentionally. In Nope, an identity for him is created, a Bahamian named Haywood, and OJ and Emerald's family are his descendants. So this is not only a movie about movies, about seeing, about consuming and being consumed - it is inherently a movie about the Black experience of being consumed. The story is the same from before the beginning of Hollywood through to today: white audiences will eat up simulated Blackness, will go wild for stories about cannibals in the jungle and caricatures of everything they fear about Blackness, but should that Blackness look back, should they be confronted, everything becomes chaos.

This is represented in the Viewer. A creature that consumes everything that beholds it, a giant eye (or what looks like an eye) scanning the landscape for what it perceives as encroachments upon its territory. By its very existence it is looking, but if you look back, it devours you.

The absolute genius of this is that not only is it an allegory for media consumption and race in Western filmmaking, it is also a deeply scary movie. It is horrific in a different way from Us or Get Out, in that its horror is actually, legitimately not of this world. It's also drastically less humorous: Peele's previous two films were similarly allegorical and serious, but there were moments of levity in them to be sure. Nope is practically a vacuum of humor (although that TMZ guy eating shit on the bike was pretty funny). The Viewer is really just ghastly: this unknowable, massive thing that watches you and refuses to be watched in turn, scooping people up whole and then flying around broadcasting their screams as they're being consumed alive. It's ghastly as an entity and it's also ghastly because nothing I just said about it couldn't technically be said about the machinations of the movie industry when you're an actor of color.

This is basically a perfect movie. If I had to find anything at all I disliked about it - and this really is the smallest thing - the interstitial title cards bothered me. They looked stock somehow, like a template that comes with a video editing software or something. Apart from that, it nails everything it tries to do. Seeing the Viewer unfold to its full, nearly incomprehensible form was breathtaking. OJ's final ride, with the best use (I guess one of the only uses) of Exuma ever put to film. Emerald's Akira slide (I cheered). And when he thinks he's not coming back, OJ's "I'm watching you" gesture to Emerald is deeply, deeply meaningful: In a world where everyone begs to be seen, where everyone is concerned with seeing the latest spectacle and becoming the spectacle themselves, in a "look at me" world, with that gesture he's saying "I'm looking only at you". Not "see me", not "I want to be seen". "I see you".

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.