It’s literally been years since the last good kaiju film. I’m not one of those who counts Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) as one of them, so don’t get me started on that bloated piece of poop. Somehow though, the subgenre lives on albeit in different (and larger budget) forms. There was Hitoshi Matsumoto’s meta-kaiju film Big Man Japan (2007), Bong Joon-Ho’s monster hit (pun intended) The Host (2006), not to mention Hollywood’s yuppie stomp flick, Cloverfield (2008). But, as far as pure old-school kaiju fun goes, fans have been forced to be more excited about throwbacks such as the moptopped Long Haired Giant Monster Gehara (2009), the Guilala retread, Monster X Strikes Back: Attack of the G8 Summit, Continue Reading…
Archives For Film Reviews
“Don’t let anyone tell us that when we’re no longer kids, we grow up. When we grow up, we won’t quit being kids. Where are the real we? Should the real we be here? We’ve only got a little more time to be the real us…”
The opening lines to the movie pretty much sums up the feel of Linda, Linda, Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005). It is a film about being young, the energy and passion you get from doing something you love, and the friendships built in high school. The film is simple, a group of girls had a band but the guitarist and lead singer quit three days before they were to play at the school festival. The film is simple: a group of girls had a band but the guitarist and lead singer quit three days before they were to play at the school festival. Kei (Yuu Kashii), Kyoko (Aki Maeda), and Nozomi (Shiori Sekine) decide that instead of canceling the show they will play covers of The Blue Hearts (a Japanese punk band) and recruit the Korean exchange student Son (Bae Doona) as she walks by. Son joins even though she is not fluent in Japanese (which leads to some very funny sequences) and the girls spend the next three days practicing. However this simple plot hides a strong emotional core and it made me fall in love with this little film, to the point that just writing about it now finds me with a smile on my face quietly humming the tune to the titular track. Continue Reading…
I will admit, Toru Matsuura’s Synesthesia has a really cool premise: A serial killer afflicted with synesthesia – a disorder that scrambles/rewires the human body’s five senses – is leaving mysterious markings in blood at the scenes of his crimes. The police are totally baffled (naturally), and the only way they can crack the code is to get into think the same way he thinks. The last victim’s adopted daughter Mari runs away and is found by two men who make a living selling hidden footage from cameras they plant around the city. Coincidentally, one of these voyeur men, named Shin, is a fellow synesthesia sufferer. Shin can see a meaning to the killer’s methods, and even though he doesn’t understand why, he wants to meet him – a man he’s labeled as “Picasso”.
But what happens when Picasso comes looking for him? Continue Reading…
Naturally, someone had to volunteer to do a Takashi Miike film, and I’m not afraid to be that guy this time around, since I’m a big fan of Yakuza films, and it’s got Riki Takeuchi in it so awesomeness is to be expected. Still, I prepared myself for the moment by throwing down an Arrogant Bastard Ale before diving in.
Oh, and Cheez-Its. Yeeeeah.
True to crazy fashion, Miike opens the film with the assassination of the head of a Yakuza family, a man who is so badass that even after he’s dead, his killer has to wait hours before the man’s severed hands fall away from his throat. The boss’ son, seen flipping out in the police station while his father is being murdered, is warned early into the film that his family is in the process of negotiating a truce. “Kuni[sada], make sure you don’t pull anything funny… if anything happens, there will be bodies everywhere.” You see, due to his “Korean blood” Kuni is quite the hothead – much like his father was – but with everyone begging him not to cause trouble, you would think he’d listen… right?
Wrong. Continue Reading…
Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano, 1999) is easily one of my favorite Japanese films. At a time when all I could find was the standard J-Horror on the movie shelves Kikujiro, as a movie of a vastly different genre, was a welcome change to me. As I watched, I was immediately absorbed–which is saying something, sometimes movies don’t hold my attention totally.
After his friends leave for summer vacation, leaving him alone with his grandmother (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) decides to try to find his mother (Yuko Daike), who his grandmother said is away working hard for him. When Masao is found by a former neighbor (Kayoko Kishimoto), she tells him he needs to have someone go with him on his trip. She volunteers her husband, the titular character, Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano).
If there’s one genre of film that very few expected to make a comeback, it’s the exploitation film. Long thought to have died in the grindhouses of the ’70s which were themselves paved over for mainstream multiplexes, exploitation secretly stayed around via direct to video and overseas fare. Then, faster than you could say “Quentin Tarantino”, exploitation stormed back onto North American screens under a different guise, “grindhouse”, the name of the seedy theaters that these films once called home. Continue Reading…
Starman: man from the stars...
Starman (1984), a movie that feels like a middle road between The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Thelma and Louise (1991), is John Carpenter’s attempt at a love story, John Carpenter style. It’s a science-fiction film in the same way that Phenomenon (1996) is sci-fi. Both take sci-fi premises and shift the focus to that of feel-good character-based dramas. This isn’t to knock Starman (or feel-good character-based dramas in general); it’s just to say that you can’t approach Starman in the same way that you’d approach a movie like–say–Independence Day (1996). Featuring the talents of Jeff Bridges (as Starman) and Karen Allen (as Jenny Hayden), this movie got a fair amount of critical applause in a time when science fiction wasn’t necessarily taken seriously. Bridges was even nominated for an Oscar (Best Actor in a Leading Role) for his inhuman portrayal of the extraterrestrial visitor. Continue Reading…
Lee Sang-woo’s Little Pond may have been the most controversial film to play at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. At long last I finally review it. It explores the No Gun Ri massacre which took place between July 26 and 29, 1950, when US troops killed Korean civilians fleeing south as the North Korean army advanced. Official Korean numbers place it at 218 dead, and the incident sparked a long round of debate when it was released as a story by the AP in 1999 after it was found that it was partially based off of falsified reports. The US claims only 50 were killed while the North Koreans reported only three weeks after the incident that 400 were slaughtered. The film takes a more human look at the incident and for the most part succeeds. Continue Reading…
Sometimes it all comes together.
Back in my teens, I played guitar in a beautiful mess of a band. We were one of those bands who formed out of friendship rather than a want to play good music and also who had a gig before we actually had songs. Continue Reading…
