"I'm going to reach the top!" RT & 馃挋 for the rising star of the Yakuza Pfp by @rnna_7
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ALT Might be the most chuuni movie I've ever watched in my life and I'm completely eating it up. I really like how it frames the codes of honor like Ghost Dog's samurai code and that of the mobsters as means of grounding them in the midst of an ever-changing reality that's hard to keep up with. Ghost Dog is the kind of protagonist where following him feels like wading through a dream. He's a hitman who only communicates through carrier pigeons, he hijacks cars with a universal hacking remote and listens to sick R&B as he drives, he sheathes his guns like a katana. He's fascinating as a fusion of past and present, being very in-touch with his community while adhering himself to this ancient code. It's expressed best through his relationship with Raymond, where they're able to understand each other perfectly even as they speak different languages. I feel a bit all over the place writing this cause there's so many angles I want to tackle it from. But the bottom line is that it's so damn cool.
ALT Doing my best to kill any and all comparisons to Shin Godzilla in my head and I can say I quite like this. Its commentary on the impacts on war was a little simplistic for my liking but I think its emotional core of learning that it's okay to want to live even with crippling survivor's guilt works very effectively. Koichi actively being given the choice of if he really wants to keep going after his battle continues on is a really powerful assertion of its message. It feels much more squarely focused on the human drama aspect of it than the kaiju part, I don't see Godzilla as much of a character on his own here and more of a wild creature representing the peoples' individuals' trauma. It's overall a fairly solid period piece/monster movie even if I wasn't totally blown away by it.
ALT Found it a considerable improvement over Minus One. Still feels a little safe directing-wise but it goes for some more ambitious setpieces from time to time. The kaiju battles especially are wonderfully brutal and capture their sheer scale quite a bit better. Writing-wise it feels very aware of the issues MO had and directly improves them. The side cast has greatly expanded roles when before I felt like they were signposts for Koichi's arc. Noriko especially had a far more compelling role here with choices that she had to grapple with. It expands on MO's theme of grief and trauma by intertwining it with the sense of responsibility you feel to never let what caused it happen again and the urge to use that trauma as an outlet to exact that hatred onto others. I still don't find it that politically biting but I'm pleasantly surprised that it does try to approach that angle rather than sidestepping it like before.
ALT The end of a journey I've been following for 4 years wound up being less of a melancholic last walk and more of a test of patience. All of this adaptations worst instincts are here in full force, along with some new issues like embarrassingly bad editing. It was already fighting a losing battle since I don't like this stretch of the manga that much, but most decisions made for it do extremely little to actually address its core issues and instead compound on them or even introduce entirely new ones. I'll go into more detail about this in a review that I'll link in a qrt. At least hopefully now I can dedicate more of my energy towards Bleach to the parts I love about it instead.
ALT A satire movie that's maddeningly confrontational about the nature and purpose of satire itself. The depictions of Rockwell and everyone else involved in this farcical climate disaster are hammy as hell, ultimately ring hollow, and the movie wouldn't work nearly as well if it didn't. It's incredibly in our faces about why we're satisfied with laughing at bumbling caricatures of the people ruining our world and just living on in those ruins. I've seen so many responses to this film be "yeah we're fucked" and I find that such a shallow read of a movie that wants to prompt you to think about why you accept that as the way it is. It's opening the door for that train of thought, but it knows that's about all the power it has to do. The virtual smear campaign put on it makes a lot more sense after having seen it on the big screen myself. Other rapid fire thoughts: Sound design is immaculate, Tom Cruise is very nuanced in his role, really love the set design's attention to detail.