This Week in Tickets: 1 January 2024 - 7 January 2024 (Happy New Year!)

I do like a nice clean break between years on a thing like this. Figuring in the leap years, I think the next should be 2029!

(At some point I'm going to have to replace my printer/scanner, because the A Town Called Panic stub isn't real, though I'd like to be able to copy them from my phone, print them, and tape them in.)

Starting the new year on a high note, and also making sure I got to see the big guy at actual size again, I hit Godzilla Minus One a second time, kind of surprised just how well it drew on a New Year's Day matinee. It also felt like there were a lot more folks of Japanese descent than I usually see for something otaku-adjacent, which is kind of interesting, since this is the first time I can recall something from Japan really getting a quick release the way Chinese, Indian, and some Korean movies do rather than having a distributor sit on it and calculate empty weeks and mid-week showcases. It certainly makes G-1 one of the year's most interesting box office stories.

(Of course, there was, also, one guy who was maybe hung over from New Year's Eve or something and was cheering like a sports fan at the start and finish and snoring during the middle.)

This interfered with my plan to be kind of cute with Letterboxd by starting the new year with A Fistful of Dollars after ending with For a Few Dollars More, but, oh well. Also, I thought I had accidentally moved backward with these over about a year but it turns out I watched the Kino Lorber 4K for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly back in 2001. Yikes!

Tuesday, I headed down to the Seaport for the A Town Called Panic twin bill, which was a ton of fun, but, man, that place is weird right now. They're not sufficiently staffed or licensed or whatever for a full house, which means I'm always sitting further back than I want and the "sold-out" show has us all crammed into an area comprising a third of the theater. And, I suspect, there's a vicious circle where because this led to things selling out when the place first opened, people with the season pass plan are booking a lot of stuff they may or may not see early to avoid missing out, knowing they can cancel if they're not feeling it without penalty, but leading to a really-not-sold out show.

Wednesday was a night I couldn't get out of the apartment early enough for what I wanted to see, but somehow managed for 6pm shows the next couple of days: Thursday was a Scorsese double feature of GoodFellas and After Hours at the Brattle, filling in a blind spot and a half. I'm mildly amused that back when it came out, GoodFellas was considered a pretty expansive movie, but people don't notice 145 minutes that much these days. Friday was Noryang: Deadly Sea, the latest Korean blockbuster about Admiral Yi Sun-sin, with plenty of fine naval action.

Saturday was meant to be Anselm day, but my bus to Kendall Square just didn't come, so I put it off a day, catching it Sunday afternoon.

And that's the week! As usual, the plan is to update my Letterboxd account as I see more, but since I'm on a work trip through Thursday morning, who knows how well that will work out?


Gojira -1.0 (Godzilla Minus One)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2024 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, laser DCP)

Godzilla Minus One is a downright terrific Godzilla movie - you can split hairs over it being a remake, a prequel, or something else to the point where "Godzilla movie" is the best description - which finds a new angle on what to do with the material and creates what may be the most intense film of the series on a human level, making each appearance of its title monster a powerful punch in the gut apart from its great kaiju action. It may only touch on the atomic fears of the original and Shin Gojira, but the shell shock angle works terrifically. It is, in fact, a really fantastic way to use a kaiju in a movie, having him represent the overwhelming, towering guilt Koichi Shikishima (a terrific Ryunosuke Kamiki) feels; even if it's never stated, one easily comprehends the idea that Godzilla is following Koichi around, punishing him for his survival, daring him to die, or at least that this is the way it feels to him.

Some folks would have made that literal, but writer/director/effects head Takashi Yamazaki seems to respect both Koichi and Godzilla enough to reduce the giant monster to serving narrative needs for one character whose demons are not fundamentally different than those of nearly everyone around him. Godzilla resonates best when he represents something humanity must grapple with, yes, but he also must be Godzilla, a challenge that lifts the story out of the conventional.

On top of that, the film is also a lovingly-made period piece that does impressive work in recalling the image of mid-century Japan without making it seem ostentatious in either its detail or squalor, even as it does good work blending in modern effects. There are moments as people go about their lives in the devastated and rebuilding Tokyo that the movie feels like it could have been made in the fifties, maybe sharing sets and props with something by Ozu shooting next door, capturing the cultural memory of this time and place if nothing else. The filmmakers show restraint throughout that they cash in when it's time for grand spectacle or an emotional wallop.

The closest thing I've got to a complaint is that this isn't exactly my favorite Godzilla design; he's all armor plating on top of a beefy torso but not much personality (there's often a moment in these movies when he'll pause and create tension as to where he goes next, hinting at some sort of malice or connection with the Japanese people, but he's too much a force of nature for that here, aside from how it would tie him too closely to Koichi when the point is that Koichi isn't responsible for Godzilla). The action built around him is fantastic, though, highlighting the scale but giving humanity some agency. It's fitted into the story insmart ways, and Yamazaki does an especially nice job of building to the finale in a way that not-quite-quietly says "let's go". The filmmakers are also extremely well aware of the response certain music cues will get and deploy them at the exact right time.

It's just downright terrific, worth multiple trips to the theater and hopefully a spiffy 4k disc in a few months.


Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Heh, I had forgotten this was Yojimbo/Red Harvest at first. That's kind of the movie's issue - one doesn't necessarily make direct comparisons, but Clint Eastwood doesn't quite bring anything to match the mischievous cunning of Toshiro Mifune to this role yet (to the extent that The Man with No Name is truly a single role). He's good, of course, and it may just be that the film around him is a little unbalanced, focusing more on one of the two bosses than the other and making the gangs so big that there's not a whole lot of individual animus as they get gunned down. It doesn't quite feel like "Joe" is playing two gangs against each other, so much as deciding he wants to free the pretty girl from the Rojos and finding the Baxters kind of useful in doing so.

Still, one can easily see how it propelled Eastwood to stardom and shifted the style of the genre. The idea of his character isn't exactly fully formed in this first appearance, but Eastwood and director Sergio Leone know they want him to be kind of amoral but also quietly charismatic, likely to do the right thing when there's a right thing to do and people who deserve better. One can also see Leone injecting Italian pulp and style into this naturally American genre- there's a lot of blood shared between spaghetti westerns and gialli - with an eye that turns the dirty border town into something grandiose and mythic, though not the myths America tells about itself.

Leone and Eastwood, of course, would refine all of this to an incredible extent over the next two years - an amazingly rapid evolution when you look at it that way - but there's just enough here of what is to come to make a western that still holds up pretty well sixty years (and even more evolution) later.


"La bûche de Noël" ("The Christmas Log" aka "A Town Called Panic: Christmas Panic")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2024 in the Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #3 (special presentation, DCP)

As per usual, an enjoyably absurd vignette, even if it feels a little bit off from the last one of these I remember seeing: Horse seems unusually testy and the misbehavior of Cowboy & Indian a bit more malicious than usual, I think (it's been a while). It's still a fun, fast-moving cartoon that gets delightfully intricate during a daffy plan to heist a yule log and is just anarchic enough to avoid the obvious ironic ending.

One thing I did kind of like is just how self-explanatory and built-out the whole thing is. It has, as mentioned, been a while since I saw the feature (or even the latest special, "Summer Holidays"), and while some of the characters were old friends, some had been completely forgotten, but the filmmakers are absolutely able to acquaint (or reacquaint) a viewer with their world and all the folks in the orbit of Horse, Indian, and Cowboy, almost instantly so that one can roll along and let it get silly.


"La rentrée des classes" ("A Town Called Panic: Back to School Panic")

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2024 in the Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #3 (special presentation, DCP)

"A Town Called Panic" is at its best when the creators max out the absurd impossibility of its slapstick, and this is some of their most genuinely peculiar work, climaxing in a surreal trip inside a classmate's brain to try and steal the answer to a test that packs enough weirdness and invention for a feature into, what, five minutes? It's even better because it follows up on some minimal bit perfectly precise animation as Pig studiously works a problem out.

Part of what's delightfully on display here is how they embrace the weird style they've established over the series's first 15 years and get weird or smash through it when it doesn't work. I don't think I'd noticed how the bases of the Cowboy and Indian figures kind of hang around near their feet when they sit or otherwise don't quite touch the ground before, for instance, and the school bus is very much retrofitted to work with the animation style. And while I suspect these have always had some CGI enhancement on top of compositing, it's generally seamless, and the growing/shrinking potions here really have to rely on that even more, even though it's just as invisible as ever.


GoodFellas

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Warner Brothers in the 1980s: Enter the Blockbuster, 35mm)

Man, but does mafia stuff just bounce right off me, in a way that yakuza movies and British gangsters and a lot of triad movies generally don't. I'm not sure why that is, beyond the yakuza and triads being intriguingly foreign while the mafia seems establishment in some ways. It's so eager to present itself as respectable that even when Martin Scorsese is tearing that down - and this movie is all about screaming that these guys are amoral jackasses - it's drenched in nostalgia.

I can appreciate the craft here, don't get me wrong, and I suspect that I'd see it in a bit of a new light if I made myself sit through The Godfather and its first sequel without a heck of a cold battering my brain, because it almost seems like a response to those films, a reminder that the ugliness of the mob wasn't buried particularly deep. There's a story of someone maybe (or maybe not) realizing that the life he dreamed about as a kid was ultimately hollow, eventually, but the material itself, the stuff that gets Ray Liotta's Henry Hill to realize that the organization he loves will never love him back in the same way? Not interesting.

The execution, however, is legitimately terrific - it's a gorgeous-looking movie with a number of performances that rightly became iconic, and Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker are probably the best ever at making shocking, game-changing acts of violence feel repugnant rather than thrilling. It's talky to the point of just telling you what is about at points, though, and its great moments only scan as "pretty good" when you've absorbed them through the test of pop culture already, which I haven't found the case with other classics. Joe Pesci's character can't quite remain as far above being lampooned by a cartoon pigeon in the way that Casablanca still completely delivers even if one absorbs thirty different homages before seeing it.

This does have one of the all-time great "man, the casting director has a good eye" line-ups, though - check out early roles from Debi Mazar, Kevin Corrigan, Michael Imperioli, Illeana Douglas, and Samuel L. Jackson! Well, maybe not early-early for Jackson, as Spike Lee was already using him and he had more than a handful of other credits, but he hadn't really come up with the Sam Jackson delivery yet, either.


After Hours

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Warner Brothers in the 1980s: Enter the Blockbuster, 35mm)

I don't know that I was expecting a whole lot from After Hours, especially not as part of a double feature with the much more heralded GoodFellas, but I wound up loving it for what it is: A fantastically weird odyssey that kind of doesn't hold together, but is a mess in the way that works, like narrative rules don't matter after 1am either. Or, maybe, its cockeyed script reflects how the city kind of shrinks then - with only so many people up, coincidences happen and the eccentrics are a bigger part of the population.

Whatever the case, this is an impressively funny movie whose shifts straddle the line between the filmmakers warning the audience what they're in for and going off in completely unexpected directions. There's something about Griffin Dunne's lead that seems even more fitting years later, like he doesn't quite have what it takes to be a leading man even though he superficially has all the traits, and as such sort of wanders this place in between days, never able to bend it to his will or stake out a space the way that, say, Tom Hanks or Michael Keaton might have been able to. He's relatable, but we kind of don't want him to be.

The itinerant nature of the story means we wind up getting a lot less Rosanna Arquette as the girl he meets in a coffee shop and can't initially resist than one might hope, which is really a shame because she's got terrific screwball chops: More than anyone else here, she absolutely nails the overlap between conventionally charismatic and downright peculiar. There's a shot of her winking at Dunne that says she'll be more trouble than her weird roommate, but you're hooked anyway. Director Martin Scorsese and writer Joseph Minion set up what feels like it should be a great hangout flick/romantic comedy, but these two screw it up. There's just an inch too much distance between her seeming cool and him being square, and the city will eat you up.

I don't make lists, but I'd be tempted to put this in my top 5 Scorsese movies if I did (though there are plenty of large gaps in what I've seen). I genuinely love how all the dark, mean humor that gives his dramas a sting is out front and ready to play here, and kind of wish he'd do straight comedy more often.


Anselm

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2024 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

I don't usually react to a film with envy; I know full well on what side of the creator/audience divide on which I sit and I know just enough about the sort of work that goes into them and how it's not my thing that I don't identify enough with that sort of emotion. And yet, I've spent enough vacations over the last few years toting 3D cameras around, trying to capture sculpture gardens, statues, and other solid artifacts in such a way that I can revisit them as something closer to objects rather than just images but seldom quite feeling like I've succeeded that from the first few moments of the film, I found myself wishing I could do that. I spent a lot of time reminding myself that director Wim Wenders, cinematographer Franz Lustig, and stereographer Sebastian Cramer were using an enormously sophisticated camera rig and actually had the ability to put it where they wanted.

So, yes, if you are considering attending this movie as a fan of stereo photography, do so; it's really fantastic work as Wenders finds ways to keep the composition interesting despite how this medium works best on the thing right in front of you, moves about without making the audience nauseous, and doesn't just capture the obvious relation of things in space, but does so while also allowing the audience to focus on the texture of works, maybe enhancing it a bit so that even subtle ones are noticeable.

Of course, it does not hurt that Wenders is capturing the art of Anselm Kiefer, a German artist who moved from painting into sculpture and installations in the 1980s. Kiefer has spent much of the past thirty-odd years working at scale, often wrestling with what it means to be a German artist when the culture's folkloric language was so thoroughly tainted by association with the Nazis, knowing that he will never be able to completely reclaim it because he will always have to confront that use. There is violence in many of his works, both from the twisted, peculiar imagery itself and as an acknowledgment that even works inspired by the natural world must be created in the sort of former factories and facilities used for industry, including weapons production.

Which is not to say that the film is dour. There is, often, a sense of play as he walks around his massive atelier outside Paris, a warehouse where massive canvases sti on dollies that are pushed around and allowed to drift to their eventual place. Kiefer uses a bicycle to traverse from one end to another, and creates pocket worlds that are sometimes dark, but always grand, and occasionally whimsical. The viewer may not realize that he or she has wanted to see how one creates art using a flamethrower before, but will likely be glad that they have; it is unique.

One thing Wenders and Kiefer do not do to any great extent is to make the audience feel they know or understand the artist. There are recreations of moments in his youth and childhood, but the young Kiefer is mostly shown creating his art; the child is shown absorbing art, working in a sketchbook, and seeming confused by a world that contains the potential for beauty alongside actual cruelty, but not things like hanging out with friends or the ordinary times with family. There are recordings of interviews where a younger Kiefer defends his more provocative creations in the way artists often do, with arch words that don't necessarily connect with people who haven't studied the discipline. What commentary comes from the present-day Kiefer refuses to reconsider his youth and perhaps suggests that he cannot. If one wants to understand how much of the artist is in the art, this is not the film to lay it bare. Fortunately, what Wenders has done is so meticulously abstracted that it feels like a bargain that has been struck between him, Kiefer, and the audience, trading the ability to examine the work and the process closely enough that one can perhaps infer something about the artist's mind without necessarily entering his personal existence as a man.

It's a very specific way to approach this sort of film, and one that perhaps wouldn't satisfy if the high-resolution 3D images did not feel like more than what this sort of film generally offers. It's a detailed, close-up look, but also reminds one that all art, from the sculpture to the film about the sculpture, is made with intent and direction, omitting as much as it includes.

L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online and Ape

The Center for Stereoscopic Photography, Art, Cinema, and Education is an exhibition space/collection in Los Angeles which I'll have to visit if I make it out that way any time soon, most recently noted for crowdfunding the restoration of El Coranzon y la Espada (on the 3-D Rarities II Disc I reviewed a few weeks back. They've got monthly screenings, although that's obviously off right now. So, for Sunday's show, they had planned to show a selection of recent productions, and chose to do it online. There were options to stream it in anaglyph (red/blue) or side-by-side format, with the TV or projector un-compression the pictures so that they could be alternated, projected through polarized lenses, or the like (at one point, this was a way to distribute 3-D films theatrically, using a special polarized lens to project the two images atop each other).

You lose a bit of image quality that way, but it's not so bad, although with some of the selections being rough themselves, the effect can pile up. It's neat, though, and it's good to see that there are folks who enjoy 3-D enough to make new material. Is it better than the feature I popped in later, Ape? Well, some are, though I don't know if that's clearly a high bar (although upon hitting IMDB, I'm not sure what the knowledge that Joanna Kerns had a B-movie babe phase of her career before playing the wife of "Jason Seaver" on Growing Pains means to me).

The next one is set for the 21st of June, though I don't know whether that will wind up another livestream yet. One thing I found myself anticipating was the fact that it was a livestream - starting at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT, running for an hour, and then being more or less immediately set to private. With no sports, and no movies in theaters with ticketed times, everything can sort of be put off or piled up to pick up when one chooses, but this was a screening. Sure, it's not the only thing like that right now, but, honestly, it added more structure than the daily "stand-up" calls at work.

Yes, I've gotten to the point of missing almost being late for something. It's a weird time.

Fun discovery made while looking for Amazon links to break up the wall of text and maybe, someday, have someone click: The "best short soundtracks" album, which is a cool thing to have exist, although I'm not sure who would be buying a whole album as opposed to just the individual ones which impressed them.

"The Whole Picture"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

This one looks too new to have an entry on IMDB (or, heck, any sort of internet footprint), but it's a nifty little thing that changes aspect ratios and color and depth in its three minutes before it goes a different route. Looking at IMDB, it feels like it might be a sort of calling card for director Zsolt Magyar, showing what he can do as a cinematographer and director when much of his career has been working in sound.

"Ghosts of the Pastures"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Another one whose internet footprint is awfully small, and three days later, I can't remember a thing about it.

"Stimulation"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Uh… OK? A minute of home-movie footage which is nice for the folks involved and interesting as a time capsule later but which makes me feel like I'm intruding a bit when watching it.

"Zerynthia Expedition 2"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Kind of a 3-D screen saver in a lot of ways, fun as a tech demo or as the rough draft for a bit of world-building in a sci-fi movie. Nine minutes is kind of a lot, though, especially when you're waiting to get to the next.

"Feline Paradox"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

One of only a couple things in this program that feels like a real movie, but also one that shows what a toll doing good 3D can take on your production - would there have been more resources available for animation if filmmaker Benjamin Reicher wasn't rendering every frame twice? It looks a bit rough throughout, although part of it is that the models for the humanoid cat-people just don't ever feel quite right compared to the humans and the actual cat.

It's kind of fun, though - Reicher has a lot of fun with time travel paradoxes and looping around to the point where it gets a bit out of hand, especially with all the different versions of the main character that keep popping up. It stretches out a bit too long and doesn't necessarily land on the most clever possible ending. But it's goofy and inventive and willing to get weird on occasion, enough that I'll probably grin if I come across something else of Reicher's later and follow the links back here.

"LIttle Planet"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Another fun little thing that plays like filmmaker Takashi Sekitani is kind of fooling around with some tech and seeing what he can get out of it. Here, that seems to be walking around with a 360-degree VR camera overhead and flattening it out in such a way as to make it look like he's on a fisheye-lens planet.

No particular story, and I don't know Tokyo enough to really get a sense of the different perspective this offers, although I kind of like the effect of how people getting closer to the person at the center become stretched out and more important as the number of pixels increases. It feels like a cool visualization of something, even if the filmmakers have only wound up at the "looks cool" stage.

Ape

* * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)

You think weird things watching a random B-movie like Ape, like how many of the giant-ape movies to come after it used CGI models based on real apes while the ones before used guys in suits or stop-motion and thus had human gaits, and this one often has its ape hunched over but not actually able to get its knuckles to the ground, like they kind of wanted to do better but, oh well, whatever. It's lazy and cheap, but sometimes just bizarre enough in how that pans out to kind of be fun.

It's flagrant in being a King Kong rip-off, although it basically starts with its 36-foot-tall ape chained up in the hold of a ship, being brought across the Pacific to be shown off at Disneyland. It wakes up early and angry, though, capsizing the ship and making its way to the coast of South Korea. Meanwhile, in Seoul, reporter Tom Rose (Rod Arrants) is surprising his actress girlfriend Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) at the airport, having wangled the assignment to report on her first international role. It's not his first time here, which is fortunate, because it means he knows Captain Kim (Lee Nak-Hun) of the local police and can ride along as he and U.S. Army Colonel Davis (Alex Nicol) try and figure out what the heck you do in this situation.

Writer/director Paul Leder gets right to the movie's main draw first, as the nameless giant ape wrestles with a rubber shark and then stomps on some miniatures, and while it never looks close to real - and to make things worse, it's shot in 3D in such a way that one's depth perception immediately reveals the proper scale when viewed that way. This stuff is, nevertheless, still kind of a blast, the kind of kaiju destruction that the audience can enjoy just a bit more because it's fake enough to reassure one that nobody gets hurt even as the first glance makes it feel real. It's lazy and sloppy enough to be frustrating, but there's also a peculiar meta joy to it, where one snickers at the ape flailing at helicopters that just aren't there and thus feeling like it's a victory when one gets in range and he smashes the hell out of that toy.

The whole movie is that sort of mess, not just cheap but stupidly so, like when Tom is pointing things out to Marilyn without getting an B-roll, or the way none of the ape bits seem to be connected, or how nothing anybody does ever makes a lick of sense. It's so comfortable being a King Kong rip-off that it often doesn't need much reason to do something other than "they did it in that other movie", and the ape's fights with giant sharks and snakes make one wonder whether such super-sized mutations are common in the film's world or if the filmmakers just didn't think this through. The laziness is much more apparent with the miniature city demolished at the end, with all the signage in Chinese despite the film taking place in South Korea.

Luckily, there are enough people having fun with the thing that it doesn't become completely insulting, which is kind of impressive, because most of the time when people try to get clever despite messing up the basics just make them look worse. Leder at least makes a few amusing detours as he inserts himself as the director of Marilyn's film - I have no doubt that he has had to sincerely ask actors to be gentle while filming a rape scene - and the cast is in large part just good enough: Rod Arrants and Lee Nak-Hoon are are pleasant without being bland, Alex Nicol does a bit better than mailing it in, and Joanna Kerns (using maiiden name "Joanna DeVarona") does okay for the sort of B-movie most actresses will eventually try to ignore.

There are enough movies with giant apes wreaking havoc out there that this one is mostly of interest for 3D enthusiasts; it's just not good enough at anything else to really stand out. Ape occasionally gets cock-eyed enough to be entertaining, but not enough to be a major part of the kaiju canon.

Also on EFilmCritic

This Weeks in Tickets: 27 May 2019 - 2 June 2019

Difficult conditions at Fenway this week.



On Tuesday, for instance, it was chilly and rainy and windy. I got there late enough to miss the start but early enough for a long rain delay. The game seemed to be going well enough, though, and then in the eighth inning the Red Sox pitchers absolutely forgot how to throw strikes and it just got miserable. No respect for how some of us weren't dressed properly or that the MBTA stops running sometime around 12:30am!

Although, I suppose, Fenway was worse off in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, where Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mothra converge on the park and then stomp around for a while. Did this at the furniture store, because giant monsters destroying your city should be seen in as close to actual size as possible. Shame no place had it in Imax 3D, though; there's some shots that look like they might be cool in third divisions.

The next afternoon was spent in the Somerville Theatre's main room. First up was Zaza, a rare DCP presentation in "Silents, Please" because the one print that exists in the Library of Congress is nitrate, and they not only don't let it out, but David doesn't sound eager to risk a fire in his booth, either. After that, a brief stop at Redbones and then back for Rocketman, which is pretty darn good, and I say that as a fan.

.. and that brings me up to what's on my Letterboxd page after a delay because my old computer finally gave up.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 June 2019 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run, Imax laser 4K)

Think my apartment is still standing? I mean, it does take me an hour to get to Fenway on the T, so Somerville may be okay.

"Dumb" is kinds of a relative term in giant monster movies, and this one moves fast enough to get past that most of the time, although the result is that it feels really thin, and you can see the filmmakers hitting their targets. You need something human-scale, so there's a dysfunctional family in the middle of the action that we never really quite grow to like, while on the other end characters are killed off because the template calls for a noble sacrifice at this point, or they could only get a certain actress for a few days. The writers seem to have learned what radiation does from the same teacher as Stan Lee (radiation = energy = life!). The Monarch Group (which I remember more from Kong than the 2014 film) is way too pervasive and vaguely defined.

The action isn't bad, though, especially when the effects guys figure out how to get the giant monsters to feel like guys in suits, which is something that a lot of other CGI-intensive movies sometimes seem to actively avoid, which is a shame, because it feels right, if only because there's sixty-odd years of history there (shame they likely didn't make a miniature fenway to crush). The classic Godzilla music kicks in at just the right time - right at the tail end of a sequence that is one of the times you can feel the movie going "hey, why the hell not?" rather than trying to make this all serious or consciously funny.

It fills an IMAX screen pretty well, and I might watch it one moe time on the big screen to see how well the stereo guys did (there's some stuff that looks like it would be fun this way). It's missing the bits that would make it a great giant monster movie, but not the ones that make it a good one.

Zaza

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 June 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, DCP)

Would I have noticed that the song in this movie (which an accompanist can't really ignore, as its name and sheet music are displayed on-screen) was adapted into one of Elvis's greatest hits if I hadn't been told? No, but it probably would have eaten at me.

It's a fun footnote to a romantic melodrama that probably seemed familiar a hundred years ago, with an entertainer falling for a rich patron only to run afoul of rivals and discover secrets. It deserves the bit of eye-rolling it gets at the end when someone gets an extremely unfair ending so others can get a nice one tacked on, a scene that ties things up too conspicuously neatly. You've seen this movie a lot and it seems too early to subvert. Gloria Swanson is having a ball, though, playing big and at her best when she gets to do some physical comedy. It's not a funny movie all around, but she and the filmmakers know how to make some of the sillier bits work.

Shin Godzilla

Finally!!

I've got a number of theories as to why screenings were so sparse that it took until my third try, on a day of extra screenings added after the original eight-day run, to actually get a ticket to this. The cynical/sarcastic one is that, because they normally distribute anime that has become increasingly insular in recent years, FUNimation Films had no idea what to do with something that actually had broad appeal among the general public, although it's just as possible that they did recognize the appeal, but the release pattern that got Shin Godzilla in theaters across the country (booking it as a Fathom-style or four-walled "special presentation" rather than a regular release) meant that it was severely underbooked in places like Boston and other larger cities. I also vaguely wonder if Warner Brothers/Legendary having the American rights to make and distribute their own Godzilla movies might have put an upper limit on what FUNimation could do before running into the much bigger company's territory. It was a frustrating situation for me - I tried to go to Fenway Wednesday the 11th and Sunday the 16th, only to get shut out, and would have tried Fenway on Tuesday the 18th, except I was sent to Texas for company meetings. Seeing that extra shows got added for the 22nd (and, apparently, through the 27th in some territories) got me excited, but I made damn sure to buy my own ticket at the Kendall as soon as they showed up rather than waiting to see if Fenway would get shows and didn't tweet about it until I had my own.

Totally worth it, though, and surprisingly so, considering that I have not exactly been a fan of the "Rebuild of Evangelion" movies that writer/director Hideaki Anno has been doing for most of the past decade, although I did like what I saw of the guy in The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. He makes a surprisingly great movie, though maybe it's not for everyone. It's genuinely exciting to have a Godzilla movie with enough going on that it's worth arguing over, though - it's fascinating to me probably only recognizing about half of what's going on there; it must seem especially rich to the local Japanese audience.

And while the big final action sequence isn't perfect, I kind of love where it ends up - the final shots of Godzilla are great visuals but they set up a situation that not only provides the next filmmakers to take the series on both a great place to start their story but a "five minutes to midnight" atmosphere that will almost certainly be something they can use to reflect the times. And, despite all that, the film does not feel incomplete or excessively open-ended - it's a perfect, fitting finale.

I don't know how many folks reading this will still have a chance to see it in theaters, but if you can, do catch it on the big screen. It's a genuinely great giant monster movie, showing just what the genre can do in thoughtful hands.

Shin Gojira (Shin Godzilla, aka Godzilla Resurgence)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 October 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #1 (special presentation, DCP)

It was a little bit surprising when venerable Japanese film studio Toho announced plans to make a new Godzilla movie soon after the 2014 American version; while not perfect, it was fairly well-received and expected to spawn its own sequels. What's even more surprising is that the one they wound up making feels daring and modern in unexpected ways - a thoughtful and satirical thriller that is still able to embrace that it's the latest in a series of movies built on guys in rubber suits stomping a scale model of Tokyo.

It starts out suggesting a shift in format to a found-footage or documentary-style flick, as a Coast Guard ship finds a seemingly abandoned pleasure boat in Tokyo Bay. That's soon followed by plumes of boiling water, and while high-ranking members of Japan's government ponder what sort of reassuring explanation to give the public, Deputy Secretary of Disaster Management Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa) picks up on chatter that it might be some sort of gigantic life form. Absurd, they say, at least until footage of a massive tail appears during the press conference. While the more senior politicians debate procedure, Yaguchi is put in charge of the research team with Hiromi Ogashira (Mikako Ichikawa) from the Nature Conservation Bureau as his science expert. The trail leads to an expatriate scientist, with American diplomatic envoy Kayoko Ann Patterson (Satomi Ishihara) offering to fill the Japanese staff in, although neither she personally nor the government she represents does anything for free.

One of the common complaints about the recent American Godzilla was that it worked too hard to hide the giant monsters, although that is something people say about nearly every kaiju movie worth a damn with the possible exception of Pacific Rim. Those expecting Shin Godzilla (aka "Godzilla Resurgence") to be a rebuke to that are in for a surprise and potential disappointment - it is almost wall-to-wall meetings and debates among elected officials and bureaucrats, often cutting back to the Prime Minister's Residence even while massive property damage and loss of life is happening in another part of Tokyo, generally the opposite of what one wants during a monster rampage.

And yet, by focusing on this part of the story, writer and primary director Hideaki Anno does something intriguing and unexpected: Even as he gives obvious examples of how bureaucracy can often be hidebound and seemingly counter-productive, getting plenty of jokes at the government's expense, it's also clear that he's fascinated by the process. While fast talk in a Japanese movie is often one person raising his voice to bury another under a barrage of words, it's back-and-forth here, like something Aaron Sorkin would write. Politicians worrying about how their actions will be perceived, rather than being played as cowards, are in over their heads and often paralyzed with fear at not knowing what the correct course of action is, especially since their government is explicitly structured in such a way as to make the use of force difficult, while Anno's script is uncommonly realistic about the logistics of evacuating a city the size of Tokyo. Indeed, it doesn't take much scratching beneath the surface to see in this movie as an examination of what Japan is at this point in history and what it must concern itself with. It is very clearly post-Fukushima in its attitudes toward atomic energy - while most previous versions of Godzilla posit the creature as being awakened or mutated by radiation, Anno's is a living nuclear reactor leaving a trail of contamination in its wake. The focus on details highlights just how tied Japan is to the United States, even though it is very clear that America may see Japan's well-being as an afterthought - more broadly, much of the film's homestretch is built around very real fears of being surrounded by massive, aggressive powers, waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing that their allies may walk away (Donald Trump's comments during the 2016 American presidential campaign only serving to make this fear more timely). Finally, by making Shin Godzilla the first complete Japanese reboot (while most other sequels would change the mythology to a certain extent, the 1954 original was always in-continuity), it highlights how the flip side to Japan's preparedness in the face of disasters can be rigidity, and that unforeseen challenges may require new, less hierarchical and more improvisational approaches.

That set-up leads to a sprawling cast - there are something like a dozen familiar character actors among the senior ministers and Self-Defense Force officers alone - but also one that's dynamic enough to make the long stretches between giant monster attacks entertaining. Hiroki Hasegawa does an impressive job of implying that other characters' comments about Yaguchi's ambition have something to them even while always his actions are about the common good. Of the team that forms around him, Mikako Ichikawa is perhaps the most memorable as Ogashira; she really nails the nervousness of a relatively low-ranking employee called on to brief the Prime Minister in a crisis even though some of that timidity disappears as she dives into the work. Not timid at all is Satomi Ishihara as the brash Japanese-American envoy whose apparent shallowness barely covers a sharp mind that feels no need to hide her own ambition; as in co-director Shinji Higuchi's Attack on Titan films, she steals nearly every scene she's in, even if she's the roughest with English-language dialogue among the cast despite her character being a native speaker.

But enough about the human cast - most seeing the movie are doing so for Godzilla, after all! That's a bit tricky, at times; tasked with both bringing the Japanese series into the 21st century and doing something a bit more traditional in style than the American film, he settles on evolution and mutation as a mechanism to serve both masters, and it's surprisingly effective - the first appearance is gloriously rubbery and tactile, just this side of silly as it plows through streets, pushing cars away and wrecking buildings. It takes a while to morph into something like the traditional Godzilla, albeit darker in tone and more imposing, almost invisible eyes robbing it of a bit of the humanity traditionally ascribed to it, a design change that heightens the danger when it becomes especially clear that it's not only smashing uninhabited buildings. Higuchi heads up the special effects team, and he's just as aware of the tightrope he must cross, and he winds up delivering a combination of man-in-suit miniature work and digital artistry that manages to capture the strengths of both, blurring the line between them and making Godzilla's rampaging just the right blend of gleeful and scary fun. The filmmakers' take on its atomic breath is especially nifty, and while one might complain a bit about the third and final major action sequence not being quite as exciting as the previous two, it's still got moments of gleeful abandon, such as bullet trains used as actual bullets, and there's a genuine delight as composer Shiro Sagisu "evolves" the music into Akira Ifukube's classic Godzilla theme as the monster becomes more recognizable.

The quick-cutting, information-heavy style Anno uses here may not be for everyone - if you don't speak Japanese, it often leads to competing subtitles on the screen - especially those who just want monster fights and not examinations of leadership and difficult decisions. Fortunately, the action this has is good enough to make this the best Godzilla movie since Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, even as it's possibly the smartest since the original. And even if that's still not enough, Anno gives it an iconic and satisfying finale that nevertheless is also a heck of a place for the next guy to start, and I kind of can't wait to see where Toho decides to go from here.

(Dead link to) Full review on EFC.

Fantasia 2016.08 (21 July 2016): Aloys, Kaiju Mono, and She's Allergic to Cats

Sometimes, you know just from looking at the schedule that you're making a bad decision, but you figure, hey, do I want to see a likely-good movie that seems like a bit of a downer or the fun movie with a crowd that's into it? That's the logic that had me choosing Kaijyu Mono over Fourth Place, and, no, it wasn't really satisfying. I probably would have also chosen Train to Busan over She's Allergic to Cats if the former was only playing once, since some of the praise I was hearing is the kind that film the first couple times.



Best picture I could get of Cats director Michael Reich, who is, in fact, just this animated on stage. It's the kind of Q&A that convinces you that the guy is just as out-there as his film because he almost seems to jump each time he's got to say something, whether it be answering a question or describing what he's done and how he hopes we'll react.

Aloys

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Filmmaker Tobias Nölle initially entices viewers with a version of Aloys that is not quite so internal, with a mystery to sole and perhaps an unnerving way of things playing out, before settling into something that better matches its withdrawn title character, and it's the mark of how well he handles the film that this never feels like a bait-and-switch; it smoothly moves into more reflective territory while still being more interesting to watch than just a man lost in self-contemplation.

Not that Aloys Adorn (Georg Friedrich) really spends much time considering his feelings or place in the world. A private investigator by trade, he works to be hidden as he follows cheating husbands, although he'll often put something small in his pocket and shoot video of what he sees unrelated to any case - the daughter of a neighbor (Yufei Li) claims he got his cat this way. He ignores her and most everyone else, from Julie (Agnes Lampkin), the old classmate at the funeral home where his father will be cremated, to his next-door neighbor Vera (Tilde von Overbeck). One day, he falls asleep on the bus and awakens in the garage, his camera and several tapes stolen. When the thief calls, she says that he is now the one being watched and they're going to try "phone-walking", an unusual therapeutic technique involving guided visualization. Oh, and that his cat is dying and needs magnesium supplements.

Aloys could probably use some help, there's little doubt about that. What makes him an unusual case is that he doesn't seem to be introverted so much as absent, with no sense of self at all. He seems to eat nothing but plain white rice and his home and office, to the extent that they betray any sense of individual personality at all, would seem to reflect that of his late father Harald; the decor and equipment seems about a generation out of date (at least). It may just be a quirk of the subtitles, but Aloys never refers to himself in the first-person singular, always saying "we". He's been an extension of his father/employer all of his life, it seems, and in some ways it's like he's trying to create an independent self by stealing little tokens or moments, even if he does initially resist the voice's attempts to mold him, at least until he knows who he is dealing with.

Full review on EFC.

Daikaiju Mono (Kaijyu Mono)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016, DCP)

There are a lot of things that are fun to mash up for a couple of minutes or a still image but whose appeal starts to flag as the joke plays out and the folks who like one thing have their fill of the other over the length of even a short feature. On the other hand, I'm guessing that there's a big overlap between the admirer sides of giant monster movies and professional wrestling, enough that there's more of an audience for something like Daikaiju Mono than might first appear. Those folks will have a fair amount of fun with this one, while the rest will most likely nod and say that looks about like what they expected.

As is de riguer when giant monsters are about to appear, Japan is besieged by calamitous weather and seismic activity, on top of plants that haven't been seen for millions of years reappearing. Disgraced Doctor Totaro Saigo (Ryu Manatsu), his daughter Miwa (Miki Kawanishi), and their research assistant Hideo Nitto (Syuusuke Saito) were on the right track but lost funding for their experiments, at least until the monster "Mono" starts tunneling from Monster Pass to Tokyo. Then, they have the chance to put "SETUP X" into action, injecting Nitto with a formula that scales him up to full kaiju size to fight Mono - and makes him more muscular and sexy, much to Miwa's delight! But don't worry, moviegoers - he's also perfected a fabric that allows Nitto's underpants to grow with him.

Director Minoru Kawasaki is an old hand at this sort of thing, even considering that having people dress up in goofy costumes and grapple is kind of a specialized line (he is, after all, perhaps best known for a movie by the name of "Calamari Wrestler"). More generally, he's built a career on skewed but fond takes on the pop culture of his youth, and here he takes giant monsters, pro wrestling, and sentai superhero adventures and sews them together in pretty much the exact way one would expect, but the shared DNA makes it work pretty smoothly, without distracting gear-shifts. He's canny enough to know when to go with decent effects and when cheap is funny, because while there's a giggle or two to be had from pulling out the obvious toy tanks from Mothra for a quick scene or two, Mono looking bad would get old fast.

Full review on EFC.

"Fuck Buddies" (2016)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016, digital)

This particular short by the name of "Fuck Buddies" (there are a lot of them, and a lot of other movies that had the name at one point but changed it because there are a lot of festivals that will happily play something that uses the term constantly but won't print it in their program) has moments when it feels like a real shotgun approach to short filmmaking, as writer/director Nate Wilson takes a simple premise - two roommates/best friends (Sharon Belle & Alexander Plouffe) find that a lot of seemingly innocuous things are triggering the urge to hook up, and as the reason makes itself known, Joseph finds himself growing more attached than Ellie.

Wilson is young - around nineteen - so he's likely still learning what works, so I'm inclined to applaud his ambition in taking what starts out as a goofy gag and running in three orthogonal directions, playing out the comedy that goes with this too-casual compulsive sex, revealing a weird horror plot behind it, and trying to get into what it means for the emotionally all at once. It's kind of a mess, as Plouffe's attempts at sincerity and lovesickness just don't wind up complementing Belle's terrific glibness, and both have problems trying to play against the horror elements, which most clearly betray how little margin there is in terms of production values here.

Still, when the group is going straight at funny, whether in terms of witty narrative banter are gleefully raunchy cartoon sex, they are really good at it, blowing past chuckles and getting the big, guffaw-level laughs, amping up the ridiculousness with ease. So maybe they can't also increase the pathos at the same time; everybody is young enough that it seems likely to come with time.

She's Allergic to Cats

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia 2016: FantasiaUnderground, DCP)

The main character of She's Allergic to Cats spends his time making lo-fi video art and dreams of remaking Carrie with cats, and while it doesn't always work out this way, there's probably a decent correlation between how much a potential viewer finds this a reasonable use of one's time and how much he or she will be into the movie. It aims to be peculiar, so it is probably fortunate that its particular flavor of weird is not exactly hidden away.

Mike Pinkney came to Los Angeles to make movies, but that's a pretty competitive field, especially considering his fairly esoteric ideas, so instead he's barely scraping by grooming dogs and making plaintive entreaties about the ray infestation to his landlord (Honey Davis), who is not particularly inclined to let responsibilities to his tenant distract him from his music career, such as it is. It could be worse, though - he may not be a particularly good pet groomer and most people think his ideas are crap, but Mickey Rourke's daughter's assistant Cora (Sonja Kinski), who takes their dogs to the ship where he works, seems to like him. Maybe a date wouldn't be a disaster.

If writer/director Michael Reich were interested in making a more mainstream film, it's not something that would be terribly far out of reach. Though the details will occasionally emphasize the grimy elements of the life where Mike has landed and his artistic ideas are eccentric at best, he actually approaches the film as a very grounded comedy much of the time - the audience isn't going to spend a lot of time wondering whether or not something really happened or having to work their heads around impossibly surreal sequences of events. The folks Mike encounters may be weird or selfish, but they're kind of familiar comic types at heart - Honey Davis (as himself) and Flula Borg, as Mike's bluntly skeptical German agent, could drop into a more conventional Hollywood story without much issue.

Full review on EFC.

Fantasia Catch-Up #04: Love & Peace, Shinjuku Swan, and Tag, a Sion Sono triple feature spread out over nine nights

Last year, someone at Fantasia mentioned that they had been showing two Takashi Miike movies a year for the better part of a decade, and that must have served as a jinx of some kind, because there wound up being zero from that particular Japanese workhorse on the schedule for 2015. But, as if to make up for it, they got three from Sion Sono, who is making films so quickly that this is only 75% of what he has released in 2015 so far!

The programmers spread them out a bit - one Saturday, one the next Thursday, one on Sunday - but put all three at the 9:30pm slot, which kind of seems like an odd thing to do for something that is a noteworthy chunk of the festival. Maybe if Sono were to make an appearance, but it appears he's busy making movies.

Still, it was kind of funny that, I think the day Love & Peace showed, there was a fair amount of talk among the folks I hung out with in line that it was a fun festival, but nothing had really wowed them up to that point. Then this thing hit and had the crowd roaring, and I remembered that, oh, yeah, there were three movies from this guy I really like who never delivers something that's not at least interesting on the program for the last week and a half. That changes things, even if the next day someone groans that they had felt like they could go home and get some sleep because there hadn't been a lot worth staying up for.

As soon as I realized I wasn't going to get a next-day thing up for Love & Peace, I decided that they were all going to be reviewed together, and I'm glad that's what I opted for; as much as the program pointed out how diverse the offerings were - gentle fantasy, street-level drama, bug-nuts sci-fi/horror - they fit together fairly well.

For instance, it's interesting that Tag is so flagrantly about women getting the short end of the stick in pop culture, but the female characters in Love & Peace and Shinjuku Swan are rather sidelined, especially with the latter being set in and around an industry that exploits the heck out of women. It's not as if Sono really condones it - though it can seem that way - but it still has them pushed to the side.

The other thing that really pops, though, is how well Sono keeps movies rolling. All three have moments where Sono wouldn't be blamed if he stopped, let the audience get comfortable with the new situation, and then started rolling again, but they all just keep rolling, seeming to deliberately overlap in ways to make that not an option. You're seldom going to see a "four months later" caption in a Sion Sono movie, because even when there is that kind of time-jump, Sono makes it feel like he's charging through. It reminds me of when Love Exposure played the festival, and Mitch announced before it started playing that if you're going to use the restroom, you'd better do it now, because they looked for a spot where you could insert an intermission into the four-hour film and couldn't find one.

It's funny, though - I think it was just a couple of years ago, with Why Don't You Play in Hell? and Tokyo Tribe, that I really started to like Sono in large part due to how he had really mastered action, but I think it's his zippy not-letting-up pacing that I've come to truly love, and that's always been there. It certainly makes me want to revisit a few of his movies I didn't love at the time and catch up with the ones I've missed.

Rabu&Pisu (Love & Peace)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

The first of three Sion Sono films being shown at this year's festival is a joyous, crazy delight, piling whimsy ever-higher even while Sono reveals a darkness behind it. The great bit, though, is that the pieces that may make an audience uneasy never poison the joy surrounding it, even as Sono finds himself springing imagery on the audience that could horrify if handled differently.

That's doubly impressive, because the film really starts out feeling really loose, as Sono follows loser former musician Ryoichi Suzuki (Hiroki Hasegawa) through a series of embarrassments, including missing out on connecting with the girl at the office who might kind of like him (Kumiko Aso), until he buys a turtle, involves it in some weird fantasies, and then flushes him down the toilet as his co-workers continue to bully him, only for "Pikadon" to have his own adventures in the sewer. What he finds there is almost unbelievable, but amazing, and draws so much attention that it's easy to miss that there's important stuff going on topside.

The films doesn't split entirely in half once Pikadon goes down the drain, but there are two fairly distinct tracks. Topside, Sono makes a great story of ambition and desire for something out of reach corrupting pure instincts, of extreme self-confidence and self-doubt being equally destructive. Losing his turtle brings a raw, powerful anger out of Ryoichi, and that fuels him as a musician in the way that constant grinding disappointment never did, though success has a way of eating away humility. Sono presents the music industry "Wild Ryo" plunges into as a force of nature that is less cruel than something that had enough momentum to be unstoppable before he ever got near it, and Hiroki Hasegawa changes up his game to match it: Where his sad-sack nerd seemed a bit like exaggerated mugging at the start, his unelashed ego is monstrous but entertaining later. Hasegawa's Ryo becomes a broad caricature of the worst that rock stardom can bring out in a person, right down to how Kumiko Aso's Yuko gets pushed back into the corner because, as correspondingly nerdy as she is at the start, she's strong enough in her convictions not to go on that ride.

Full review on EFC.

Shinjuku Swan

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)

Like a lot of movies adapted from long-running manga, Shinjuku Swan shows a lot of telltale signs of screenwriters Rikiya Mizushima and Osamu Suzuki trying to cram a lot of storylines and fan-favorite characters into a couple hours. It's a process that has torpedoed a lot of movies, but works out all right here in large part because the script is handed off to Sion Sono, who knows a little something about making dense-but-exciting movies with a fair bit of darkness.

He's got his work cut out for him telling the story of Tatsuhiko Shiratori (Gou Ayano), a frizzy-haired loser who, after getting into a brawl with six goons on the streets of Tokyo's red-light district, is recruited by Mr. Mako (Yusuke Iseya). Not to be gangster, but to be a talent scout, looking for pretty girls who can work in the neighborhood's nightclubs, massage parlors, and even more unsavory spots. Of course, even if they're not quite gangsters, the rivalry between the "Burst" agency that employs Mako and the "Harlem" agency the employs Hideyoshi Minami (Takayuki Yamada) and Yutaka Hayama (Nobuaki Kaneko) is still about to explode into a fight that often involves Tatsuhiko getting the crap kicked out of him.

By focusing on Tatsuhiko, the filmmakers often seem to be seriously downplaying the fact that he and his colleagues are in the business of exploiting women in every way possible, with Tatsuhiko being a cheerful, friendly face for the argument that prostitution and related activities aren't so bad so long as it's handled with care. That's the spoken case made, although I don't think there's any missing that a lot of these girls are not having their interests seen to, with pretty horrible results. So what to make of Tatsuhiko, who gets down about this but is always assured that he does more good than harm? That's kind of what makes the movie interesting, because Ayano does a pretty nice job of making him a guy who really needs to believe that he's doing the right thing and is probably eventually able to do a good job of convincing himself that this is the case. Ayano plays Tatsuhiko as somewhat naive, but his optimism tends to be draw smiles more than sneers, with the moments where he briefly seems to grasp that he's involved in a business that chews people up seeming genuine and appealing even if ephemeral.

Full review on EFC.

Real Oni Gokko (Tag)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Tag is the most recent of three films at the festival by Sion Sono, who is having an absurdly productive year (four films total released in 2015!), and there are points where it seems like this frantic pace is overtaking him, like you can't expect him to crank this much out and still expect all of it to have some sort of plot that makes sense. He almost seems to be asking us to just take the often jaw-dropping scenes, accept that the weird ways they're being strung together have some weight, and accept that such an assembly is more entertaining than most movies. If that were the case, he wouldn't be wrong, but there's a bit more than that.

The movie starts with one of the bloodiest school outings ever, as a strange wind sheers the buses carrying an entire class of a girls' high school in half, decapitating everyone but Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) - who was bending over to pick up a pencil. She sensibly runs away, but the wind seems to chase her, until she finds her school, where best friend Aki (Yuki Sakurai) and the rest of the class mysteriously seems okay. That's not the end of it for Mitsuko, though, as she soon finds not just the world around her changing, but herself, right down to her face and name (Mariko Shinoda plays bride-to-be "Keiko" and Erina Mano distance runner "Izumi") - the only constant is that something is always trying to kill her.

Nothing seems off-limits, and the over-the-top absurdity initially seems to have no pattern other than the complete lack of men on-screen, and just as soon as that seems firmly established for the audience to start to wonder if there's something to it, it's time to change things up again. Though Sono sets the bar for creative mayhem high with that opening sequence (the festival gave it a special award), he's far from done, as all three actresses are going to spend a good chunk of their time on screen running. The stuff they're running from changes up even more often than they do, from a completely disembodied hypothetical threat a demon groom to... Well, there are certain things a horror-ish movie can't lead out. These scenes seem impossible to link up even though Sono has them run right into each other; it's a contradiction that says amazing things about what a filmmaker of Sono's innovation and energy can do.

Full review on EFC.

This That Week In Tickets: 12 May 2014 - 18 May 2014

Time flies when you're having fun.

Stubless: The Signal, 7pm Wednesday 14 May 2014, in the Brattle Theatre, and The Machine, 7:30pm Saturday 17 May 2014, in the Somerville Theatre micro-cinema.

Things were actually going to be arranged a little differently, as I had planned to catch Short Peace on Monday, but its 8pm show was cancelled and I didn't see this until it was too late to see something else. So, the next day it was, also nixing the plan to stay up late and write a review that would hopefully convince people to go to that second screening. It also meant I wound up at the Brattle on two consecutive nights, as I caught The Signal on Wednesday as part of a preview, though I held out on writing it up until closer to its release and because I wasn't sure what the embargo rules would be considered to be. I'm having a weird time with how I feel about it - disappointed as I watched it, wanting to defend the good parts as I wrote the review but watching the anger sort of take hold in the writing, and not really wanting to tell people to stay away now that it's out. Probably due in part to the filmmaker being there and being a pretty likable guy - as much as I can't help poking holes in his movie, I don't want him or his career hurt by doing so, you know?

Friday wound up being a double feature at the Harvard Film Archive, as I saw Ugetsu & Song of Home, the first two movies in their Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective. It was an impressive night, and I wish I'd been able to catch more of the series than I did.

The next day was sci-fi at different ends of the spectrum. I started off by heading to Reading for the new Godzilla, because "actual size" is a consideration one tries to take into account. The theater was packed, making me glad I'd taken the risk of buying my ticket online ahead of time (I'm often loath to do that because missed MBTA connections have made me eat those tickets more than once). Since I was looking for the big green guy to fill up as much of my field of vision as possible, I didn't mind being in the second row too much, and even scooted over one when some late-arrivers came in. They didn't wind up taking the seats I'd vacated, though - some folks just can't handle that much monster, I guess. In the evening, I went to the Somerville Subterranean screening of The Machine, because for as much as I tried to get people to come out to it (not nearly as much as I might have hoped), I also wanted to see it on the big-ish screen again and support it with money. Only a few of us there, sadly, but Chris let me have one of the one-sheets XLRator sent. Apparently, they were really glad to just have it screen somewhere in Boston and maybe generate a little word of mouth. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: We really need to carve out a spot in this city where movies like this can not just show up as a blip, but thrive. Ideas welcome.

Finally, I headed out to the Embassy in Waltham for God's Pocket, which I saw a bunch of trailers for despite it only opening in the suburbs. It would, eventually, pop up in Kendall Square, but since I spent a fair amount of time away that next weekend, this was a good gamble as well. It's a bit of a bus ride out, though, so I wound up making it back to the city just in time to see the pretty great Chef downtown. That was a loooong circuit of the 70 bus and Red Line with a couple of movies in the middle.

Godzilla (2014)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2014 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run, Imax 3D)

Writing this now, almost a month after seeing the newest film to bear the name "Godzilla", it's hard to escape all of the links I have been sent which defend a fair amount of the effects-driven, character-light final act as a clever bit of commentary on the part of the filmmakers - it's not really what I would have written myself, but it's well-argued enough that it has shaped my thinking since... Even if I do kind of expect a fair amount is critics trying to justify enjoying the sort of movie that they usually have knives out for.

It's hard to blame them; when director Gareth Edwards brings the kaiju action, right up to a deeply satisfying final fight, it is just about everything one could want it to be: Well-choreographed and staged, combining the comforting solidity of men in suits knocking over models with the endless possibilities of digital imagery like few attempts to do so have managed. It feels like the classic monster movies we enjoyed when we didn't know any better without the cheese, and the impulse to cheer that is a good and correct one. This is great action/adventure filmmaking, from teasing the audience with what it expects, giving it something else, having a character acknowledge that the filmmakers are on the same wavelength by saying "let them fight!", and supplying plenty of action on the way without diluting the main event.

But, man, its also not possible to overstate just how much of another sort of energy drains out of the movie when a crucial character makes an early exit. It makes a blockbuster with an unconventional hero not just conventional, but kind of mechanical, with a human protagonist who does more than can really be believed but doesn't seem to accomplish anything. The cast whose names promised some interest just never get the chance to shine that they deserve, and the way they are ultimately unimportant compared to the monsters despite getting just as much screen time does make one appreciate just how good Pacific Rim was in how it balanced those demands.

Still, Godzilla '14 is its own thing, and it's a pretty good thing. I like that the filmmakers apparently set out to make "a Godzilla movie", not really remaking the original at all but still establishing something. Edwards and screenwriter Max Borenstein give the film some weight - there are obvious echoes of the Fukushima meltdown early on, and while that means there is still an element to the series that warns against messing with atomic forces, the central metaphor has shifted toward climate change (partly cyclical, greatly exacerbated by man's activity, quite possibly out of human control now that it's started) - but not so much that the audience can't enjoy a monster fight on its own terms. Because, on a certain level, that's what we want to see, and give this entry credit for keeping both itself and any more refined taste the audience might have out of the way.

This Those Weeks In Tickets: 21 April 2014 - 4 May 2014

IFFBoston stretched over two weeks, so we may as well run them together.

Not to be all snobby or anything, but if you can possibly swing a badge at a film festival, do so! I think I saved a little bit of money by purchasing individual tickets instead of a Film badge (although not as much as remembering to get my request for accreditation in for a press pass, obviously), but being able to wait in fewer lines for less time during the inevitable spring mist is nice, but for me the big one is being able to change plans on the fly. It's very nice to be able to wait on the TBA slots without worrying about others selling out. Still, I can't say that I didn't have myself a pretty good festival:

23 April: Beneath the Harvest Sky
24 April: Trap Street, The Skeleton Twins
25 April: Big Significant Things, Palo Alto
26 April: Jon Imber's Left Hand, We Are the Best!, The Search for General Tso, Wild Canaries, A For Alex
27 April: 9-Man, Ayiti Toma, Fort Tilden, God Help the Girl
28 April: Dear White People, Wicker Kittens
29 April: The Trip to Italy, The Double

Amusing bit: It looked like Beth was just going to keep the ticket I presented her for Trap Street, but said, no, you're going to want to keep them.

The festival influenced a few things around it on the schedule, too - I went to Under the Skin at the Coolidge on Monday because I was worried about it being gone when the fest was over. I don't regret seeing it, but I'm not sure it was worth worrying about. I was going to go back to the Coolidge on Tuesday for the silent movie, but worries about fitting everything on a page not being able to get there from Burlington in time had me turning back to Harvard Square to catch the John Hubley Centennial shorts, and that was a good decision; many of those are fantastic.

On the other side of the festival, I had opted to skip the final day because I had foolishly bought Red Sox tickets during the winter without checking to see if the dates conflicted with film festivals (I've got two or three others like that; not clever this winter). Of course, it rained, and they actually called the game off early enough that I probably could have gone to Mood Indigo if I'd been willing to do the rush line (or had a badge). Ah, well. At least it was early enough that I could put in for time off the next day and see a grinding, 3.5-hour 2-1 loss. And the bobblehead I got wound up missing a piece!

Afterward, though, I had time to get to Brick Mansions, a kind of fun remake of District 13. I finally kind of collapsed and did non-movie stuff at home for a couple days after that (I think it was too rainy to make walking to a theater too appealing) before finally seeing Noah on Saturday. Great stuff; it would probably go on my best-of list at the end of the year if I did such things.

Sunday, I hit opposite ends of Somerville - first up, checking out the new Assembly Row theater with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on their Imax branded screen (these movies are starting to get me mad) and then checking out the original Godzilla at the Somerville. That was better!

Next up: A nifty week which included the end of the Somerville's 100th Anniversary celebration!

Under the Skin

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)

It's hard to argue with those impressed by Under the Skin as a pure art-house movie, but the hair on my back starts to spoke when they start to call it great science fiction, or use superlatives, as a number of posters and standees I've seen for this one were prone to do. I may even have heard someone blathering about it "transcending its genre" or having insight into "the human condition", and that latter one is when you know somebody's blowing smoke. It sounds profound, but it actually means nothing, the vaguest of vague generalities.

Which, in many ways, seems to be what the film version of Under the Skin aspires to: None of the characters are named, and while it certainly seems like Scarlet Johansson is playing an alien of some kind, her personal goals and those of her species are left utterly vague beyond a gore-soaked moment or two. In a way, what goes on as this visitor goes around, picking men up of the streets of Glasgow and the surrounding area and taking them back to a nondescript house where the shocking stuff happens, is pretty retrograde: It is straight-out fear of the unknown Other, who only becomes sympathetic as she assimilates and becomes more like us, turning her back on her own savage, inscrutable culture (although her dark, inhuman soul can still be seen underneath). There's also a pretty rich vein of fearing female sexuality - she just wants to trap poor men helpless at the sight of a pretty girl and then eviscerate them, - and while you can argue about how the climax of the movie plays into that, it's still fairly ugly. Honestly, the more I think about this movie's subtexts, the uglier I find it.

Conceptually, that is. On a sheer "just look at this thing" level, screenwriter/director Jonathan Glazer puts a great-looking movie on the screen, both from how he shots much of what's going on with cinema-verité immediacy and how things will suddenly take a turn for the fantastically trippy as the sci-fi/horror elements make themselves known. He does fall in enough love with a few bits of imagery that he simply repeats them a couple of times, but the documentary style shooting and the accompanying performance by Johansson - who is on a pretty amazing run between Her, Captain America, this, Chef, and hopefully Lucy - at times makes it feel like a twisted hidden-camera show. The music by Mica Levi is suitably unsettling in helping to establish the mood.

So the emperor isn't completely without clothes, and this movie certainly isn't the sort of abomination that Glazer's previous film Birth was. It's just the kind of movie that can look a lot more clever than it is by applying an artistic sheen to a rather hollow core.

The Hubley Centennial

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Kids' Movies Not Just for Kids, 35mm)

The Hubleys are occasionally called America's First Family of Animation; John Hubley and his wife Faith produced a number of highly memorable animated shorts, often involving their kids, and while not all of those children have taken up the family business, Emily is still making animated shorts and I think there's a third generation active as well. The touring package that landed at the Brattle for this evening, assembled and restored from several sources, is quite cool indeed, both in the films selected and that they played in 35mm, an unfortunately rare occurrence. These films included:

"Windy Day": Speaking of Emily Hubley, she and her sister Georgia provided the voices for this 1968 short, although they may not have known it at the time: It certainly sounds like George & Faith recorded an afternoon of the pair playing and then animated to that. The result is predictably adorable, with costumes and settings in the backyard that change as quickly as a little girl's imagination.

"The Tender Game": The first of several in the package built around some great jazz, this short from 1958 has Ella Fitzgerald on the soundtrack and looks like watercolors on-screen in a soothing picture of city life.

"Urbanissimo": This 1967 project for the government of Ontario isn't quite so bullish on the city, depicting it as a sort of cast creature that both displaces and seduces a nearby farmer. It's a whimsical take on the idea that makes its point of how urban sprawl demands resources but consumed those who would provide them as well without necessarily having the knives out, functioning as a sort of animated editorial cartoon with a fun, jazzy score.

"Moonbird": It turns out "Windy Day" was not the only animated short that the Hubleys built around their kids' imaginary adventures; this one from 1959 follows songs Mark and Ray "Hampy" Hubley as they sneak out of their bedroom one night to capture the mythical bird of the title. It's a cute bit that does wind up stretched out a bit at ten minutes, although fun of the premise and the occasionally nifty ways that the animation shows them sneaking around in the deep dark certainly make it worth remembering.

"The Adventures of an *": Another bit of 1950s oddness, this one plays with moving typography to the music of frequent collaborator Benny Carter. It's a fun thing that may be long for an animated short at ten minutes, never feels it because of the constant motion.

"Eggs": This peculiar piece from 1971 blends fantastical and science-fictional takes on the threat of over-population, a threat people were just starting to grapple with at the time (and which, in the years since, we've more or less moved on to ignoring). Death and a fertility goddess share a car and both attempt to shape the landscape, a couple awaits information on whether they will get a pregnancy license in the lottery, and an ancient man describes his first organ transplant. It's a mishmash of ideas that at times seem to be tossed off too casually (although better that than characters acting shocked about the world they live in), but I do like the Hubleys' detachment where others might find shrill panic and outrage. A nifty score by Quincy Jones certainly does not hurt.

"Of Men & Demons": Another with a score by Quincy Jones, this one was commissioned by IBM and certainly feels like an advertisement for their services. That's a bit of a disappointment, because things like "Urbanissimo" certainly show that Hubley had the ability to use a light touch even when given the job of advancing someone else's agenda. It's an amusing short, at least, with plenty of energy.

"The Hat": Almost long enough to be a half-hour TV special at 18 minutes, this features the voices of Dizzy Gillespie and Diddley Moore as two soldiers guarding opposite sides of a border whose admirable relationship turns contentious when the wind blows one's hat into the other's territory. It's a commentary on the absurdity that crops up along borders, especially during the time of the Cold War, but it's also an enjoyably laid-back bit of banter, the sort of thing Moore often did with Peter Cook, with the apparent improvisation of the voice cast seemingly reflected in the animation. The Hubleys give the impression of the camera wandering and animals just hopping through randomly, even though the medium requires solid planning. It's the longest film in the program, but still enjoyably low-key, and continues the pattern of getting good music with Gillespie and Moore (famous as a pianist before taking up comedy and acting) adding good sound even when not talking.

The whole package ran a little more than an hour and if presumably available for other houses to book. With any luck, someone will be able to put together a DVD collection by the end of John Hubley's centennial year - he and his family made some nifty short films, and unlike many famous animators, Hubley experimented with a lot of different styles, enough so that this often feels more like an anthology than a career retrospective.

Noah

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2014 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)

I really wish I had managed to see this during its run in Imax theaters, because, wow, is Darren Aronofsky working on a big, eye-popping canvas with this one. Unfortunately, it premiered during BBUFF and only had the giant screens for a week before Captain America came out, and then I wound up putting it off because the scheduling wasn't right, or IFFBoston, or really not wanting to see it on Easter weekend around a bunch of Christians.

Especially since, as it turns out, they might have been complaining, since Noah not only takes even more liberties than is strictly necessary to turn a few paragraphs in Genesis into a two-hour-plus movie, but presents that story in such a way as to make the religious - especially the conservative and religious - uncomfortable: It links the pre-Flood state of the world with modern images of environmental cataclysm, specifically referencing deforestation and resource depletion due to mining. Noah is shown not as a kindly old man ostracized for his beliefs, but a fundamentalist who is incredibly callous toward those who do not share his convictions, and ultimately a doomsday cultist celebrating the End Times (a function of his interpreting the Creator's will to fit his own mind). He's a fusion of environmentalist hippie and evangelical extremist, and even with Ray Winstone's Tubal-Cain around, there is a real argument to be made that he's close to being the villain of the piece, and a reminder that if you believe in the literal truth of the Bible, you believe in some horrifying stuff.

Russell Crowe commits to this, and as a result creates the most interesting take on the figure that has likely ever been presented on the screen, about supported by the like of Jennifer Connelly, Emma Roberts, Logan Kerman, and Anthony Hopkins. And, odd course, in my favorite credit of the year, "Frank Langella as the voice of Og", Og being one of the stone Watchers who come to Noah's side, stone giants who were encased in earth when they fell to the planet to aid humanity rather than remain in the heavens, only to be betrayed by the children of Cain. They are awesome, asymmetrical creatures with the feel of being stop-motion even if they are digital, and they provide a stunning sense of scale and weight just standing there.

They don't just stand there, though, but get involved in some of the most eye-popping action sequences you'll see this year, and that's not all the visual amazement Aranofsky has in store. The history of the universe - retelling Genesis in one stunning montage that casually combines scripture and science - is beautiful, and the devastated landscape where the whole thing takes place is simple but devastating effective world-building. All of that is an important part of what makes Noah such an unusual grand-scale movie for anyone who oops too take it in - it stuns with spectacle, but all the while challenges the audience to look at a familiar story in a new way.

Gojira (1954)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2014 in Somerville Theatre #5 (60th anniversary, DCP)

Every time I see the original 1954 Gojira, it changes a bit for me. Going into this viewing at the Somerville (not part of their own anniversary celebration, but in the spirit), I had been thinking of it as fairly somber and disconnected from the franchise it would latter spawn. And while you can certainly see it's serious roots, that really undersells what a remarkable fusion of genre this is: The pulp is unabashedly front-and-center, while much of the front half does play like the sort of intimate, unadorned Japanese drama one expects from Akira Kurosawa or Kenji Mizoguchi, and Ishiro Honda deserves a ton of credit for how well he reconciles all those tones.

After all, for all that Godzilla is a force of nature, it's easy to forget that he's got big, humanizing eyes here, something that both American versions have perhaps necessarily downplayed but which are probably an important part of why the beast's appeal has persisted for a half-century. It should make him look goofy, but it instead somehow adds just enough unreality to the movie to make its more serious-minded material palatable.

That material itself gets better on repeated viewings, too; though it probably marks me as slow on the uptake, I must admit that this was the first time I've really seen Serizawa's agonizing over whether to use the Oxygen Destroyer as analogous to Truman debating the use of the atomic bomb; it's always been buried under Emiko's decision to betray his trust and tell her father and lover about its existence (layers!). It's not a perfect equivalency, obviously, but it's close enough in many respects, which makes it seem like a ballsy way to go with the script, considering just how much the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hangs over the movie.

Anyway, the point is that Gojira just keeps getting better the more you look at it, and it's a rare movie that can say that.