すずめの戸締まり
Watch afterEvil Dead Rise (2023), The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023),
Like the Oracle said to Neo, "Everything that has a beginning has an end." But "ending" is not synonymous with "annihilation." Whether it's a literal, physical remnant (say, an amusement park that remains standing even years after being shut down) or patterns that folks continue out of habit or the hopes of feeling something (think Yūsuke Kafuku continuing to rehearse for Uncle Vanya with his late wife's recording years after her death in Drive My Car—whose co-lead Tōko Miura was a key contributor to the soundtrack of Makoto Shinkai's last film, Weathering With You). Continue Reading →
「鬼滅の刃」上弦集結、そして刀鍛冶の里へ
A year before The Village’s release, a copy of the script was stolen and distributed to sites with zero compunction about reviewing stolen materials. If you were on the internet in the naughty aughties and a fan of movies, you know exactly the type. The flurry of reviews that followed riled up readers of such sites. It reached the point that, by the film’s 2004 release, a considerable legion of film nerds already stood poised to carve up a movie they were certain would be a turkey. Continue Reading →
劇場版 呪術廻戦 0
SimilarHellboy (2004), Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006),
StarringKotono Mitsuishi, Marina Inoue, Shizuka Itoh,
Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is a darn-good adaptation of manga artist and author Gege Akutami's equally-darn-good dark fantasy shonen battle manga. Its protagonist is compelling, his peers likable, the villain hateful but not without shading. The action is excellent. Alisa Okezahama, Yoshimasa Terui, and Hiroaki Tsutsumi's score rules. The storytelling is overstretched in places, and narrative jumping during the climax gets frustrating, but 0 works far more than it doesn't. Continue Reading →
PSYCHO-PASS サイコパス
For acclaimed actress turned first-time writer-director Rebecca Hall, her debut feature Passing is more than her first furtive steps into another facet of her expanding career. It's a deeply personal odyssey, one rooted in her own questions about her racial identity: Hall, whose grandmother is part-Black and whose mother has Black, Native American, and Dutch ancestry, has presented as white for much of her career. With this, her adaptation of the 1929 novella of the same name by Nella Larson, Hall gets to explore those myriad facets of herself, as well as the broader implications the phenomenon of 'passing' has for all of us in our respective negotiations with our identity. Continue Reading →