The 12 Day Tale of the Monster That Died in 8 (2020)

directed by Shunji Iwai

Japan

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Maybe the real covid vaccine... was... the friends we made along the way?

I put off watching this for a long time after reading a negative review or two, but it seemed like the beef a few of those negative reviewers had with it was simply not wanting to be reminded of covid lockdown, which is fair. Personally, the whole concept of this movie holds some specialness for me, because lockdown was the reason why I got into tokusatsu in the first place. I spontaneously decided, while everything was closed and I was stuck inside for several weeks, that marathonning every Godzilla movie was going to be the thing that got me through this. So a movie where people stuck inside during the lockdowns turn to telling each other stories about kaiju and aliens hits very close to my heart.

Takumi Saitoh (later of Shin Ultraman fame) plays Takumi, an out-of-work actor who buys some capsule monsters online and attempts to raise them. It's apparent from the start that this movie takes place in a world just slightly different from our own - one where kaiju and aliens actually exist, and the events depicted in shows like Ultraseven, while having taken place before most of our characters were born, are also factual. So Takumi gets his monster capsules (more like eggs, really) and documents the changes they go through over the course of several days. Other characters include a vlogger Takumi watches who's doing the same thing, with better results; Takumi's friend Non, who buys an actual alien online; Shinji Higuchi playing himself; and So Takei - who I am not familiar with - essentially playing himself as well. It's just Takumi and his buddies, basically, only they're all playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves.

Although the film shows only a narrow slice of what the worst days of the pandemic were like for a specific section of people, it really does capture that specific feeling of being quarantined and never having gone through anything like this before and just navigating yourself and your world within the confines of your own home. A lot of people made art during lockdown. A lot of people turned inward when it was no longer viable to interact physically with the outside world. Everything and everywhere felt empty - at least for a little while; I'm under no illusion that "lockdown" was ever total and that there weren't still people who had no choice but to continue their jobs as normal under the risk of sickness and death. But certain scenes in this film, like the drone shots of a semi-vacant Tokyo and the interludes of dancers out on the deserted streets, really capture a unique pandemic emptiness that is almost unthinkable today.

This is the kind of movie that gets very close to being ridiculous, but is saved by how earnest everybody involved in it seems to be about its concept. I love this idea of being stuck indoors and starting to just make stuff up. Getting people together over Zoom and making a movie where you all pretend kaiju and aliens are real. The end message of the film is one of personal responsibility in the face of the pandemic, and how something as small as wearing a mask and staying indoors can be a heroic act. If you're not buying into this I can understand how silly it might look from the outside, with Takumi naming his capsule monsters after covid treatments and the final form his remaining capsule takes being the shape of a face mask, but something about it is so authentic that I couldn't help but vibe with it.

I wouldn't call this a spectacular movie, but the concept is interesting, and it reflects an exceptional time not just in the history of one country or group but of the entire world. I don't know about anybody else, but I kind of expected there to be a glut of media about covid, so much so that we'd all get really tired of it, but that never actually happened. Instead, the media about covid that we did get remain little slices of a shared experience that everybody processed and interpreted in their own way, and I think, even if whatever media in question is technically "bad", all of those narratives are worth thinking about.

Rex: A Dinosaur's Story (1993)

directed by Haruki Kadokawa

Japan

106 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I probably shouldn't be reviewing this immediately after having watched it, because this feels like a movie that I have to sit with for a while. Which is a little ridiculous to say of a children's film with a baby dinosaur who gets a friendship bracelet as a reward for its first poop, but I'm seeing a lot of four- and five-star reviews, and it's making me second-guess my own, kind of lukewarm feelings about it. But I did like this! I liked it a lot. Let's talk about it a little more.

Chie (played by Yumi Adachi) is a young girl whose paleontologist father (I've only ever seen Tsunehiko Watase in yakuza movies, so it's weird to see him in loafers and a grandpa sweater) takes her into a mysterious cave, where their party - mostly by accident - crashes into a chamber deep underground. There they discover a dinosaur egg being held in stasis by some kind of severely '90s glowing energy triangle. Unable to resist, Chie's father and his partners take the egg back to their lab and try to hatch it. More specifically, Chie's mother, Naomi, apparently a world-famous embryologist (played by the lovely Shinobu Otake), arrives on the scene to try to hatch it. The family dynamic is very strained between Chie, her father, and her mother, Naomi having left at some point when Chie was even younger to pursue dreams of being a scientist that raising a child did not allow time for. There's a strong and implicit parallel between Chie becoming Rex's foster mother, stepping up to raise a baby with no one else to care for it, and what the film sees as Naomi's need to realize her role as Chie's mother.

It's... really kind of weird and uncomfortable, the way this movie deals with motherhood and femininity; it's not a huge enough problem to have completely ruined everything for me, but I kept thinking about it throughout the film and being like "ugh". The way the movie treats Naomi is kind of harsh, honestly. I can't even imagine how many more women scientists we would have had throughout history if society didn't force this idea of choosing either to do the "right" thing by staying home and being a good mother or continuing your career. Yeah, it does suck to abandon your child, but it also sucks that there's this double-standard where Chie's father does science and stuff while still actively parenting her, and there's no problem there, but for some reason Chie's mother can't be shown doing the same thing.

But anyway. A goofy little dude hatches out of the dinosaur egg, despite all odds, and very quickly they've got it doing microwave dinner and topical painkiller commercials. The Rex puppet is one of the best things about this whole movie for me, because I am a tokusatsu freak and if there's a guy in a suit or a puppet involved I want to examine it closely and reverently. Rex goes through different stages of growth, which is always really interesting to see depicted onscreen, from a newborn to a bipedal adolescent played by somebody whose back probably really really hurt. The articulation is pretty spectacular, allowing for very realistic movement, but you can tell in a lot of scenes where they were hiding the person puppeting Rex - not a problem to me, but it makes Rex's appearance less seamless. Rex is adorable, though, there's no denying that. It's a Minilla type of cuteness, but its constantly wagging tail and facial expressions make Rex more personable than kind of gross-looking Minilla.

The third act of the movie is where I felt like it began to fizzle out a little. Chie objects to having Rex do television commercials over and over, but we see from the Rex plushies in the background and the billboards and museum exhibits that Rex is still immensely profitable, and the people who are profiting off of it do not take kindly to any interruption of their cash flow. The main villain is a guy trying to argue that he has full rights to Rex in perpetuity, and his goons (Dinosaur Sentai Koseidon fans rejoice, it's our man Morii Mori), who are hindered by a children's choir throwing snowballs at them and a lengthy snowmobile chase. It felt like the constant activity after Chie decides to take a break from her parents was the result of somebody going "this movie needs more chase scenes". Maybe I'm just boring but I enjoyed seeing Chie and Rex's one-on-one interactions more than that type of thing.

The other thing I had a problem with was this movie's mixture of esoteric, New Age mysticism and real-life Ainu culture. This is really something I don't know a lot about, so I can't speak to how Ainu people feel about seeing themselves depicted onscreen like this, but I can say that if this were set in the U.S., and the Ainu character in this movie was substituted with a Native American character - who would then be played by a non-Native actor - people would have an obvious and justified problem with that.

Aesthetically, this is a great movie. It's got that big-budget feel with small-budget toku sensibilities. I love the aerial shots of gorges and forests and the inside of the cave, especially the ice slide, which looked really fun. This is one of those movies that is packed wall-to-wall with stuff, and all the set decorating feels authentic; every residential house looks lived-in, every lab looks utile and real, it all just feels like it takes place in the physical world - with a dinosaur, of course. I love the escapism of this, the way it challenges you to pretend that a little girl really could wake up a baby dinosaur by playing the ocarina for it. Even though Christmas isn's the main focus, it's a good Christmas movie because of its themes of togetherness and mutual care. I just wish some of that didn't feel vaguely misogynistic, but I'm a stick in the mud about that. Maybe next year I'll rewatch this and try to get out of my own head a little more, and then I'll enjoy it better. Until then, merry something, may we all get dinosaurs this year.

(edit: I forgot about Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds. I guess that means this is part of the Tsunehiko Watase Doing Stuff With Dinosaurs Cinematic Universe.)