Reviews

The title of the film for distribution in Japan was utterly horrible. If it is translated directly into English, "The abnomal night with white skin". Who came up with it? It looks just for the attraction of stimulated erotic interest. When I was a student of Junior high, I saw this film for the first time at the TV cinema theater, with some hectic expectations. However, the impression of the film was something different from the initial thought, just like the feeling when I finished reading good old literature. Also there remained sentimental scents from both of the two actresses, Elizabeth Hartman and Jo Ann Harris. And another important thing is that the combination of Siegel and Eastwood fruited in the later Dirty Harry and its sequel. In addition, it is amazing that the film was found to have been re-made in 2017, with Nicole Kidman, Kirstin Dunst and Colin Farrel. The new one was directed by Sophia Coppora, who thought that she needed to dipict the original novel from the view point of women.

Some of the Japanese couldn't let themselves be convinced with the axis of the story. That way of appealing fear of nuclear weapons seems not sufficient for us.

Meanwhile we can see the fact from the viewpoint on perspectives at that time surrounding Oppenheimer, the sooner and perfect the best. And was preferred to anything else.

Also curious to find that Oppenheimer belonged to the Copenhagen interpretation, stood as the opponent of Einstein, who showed deep apology to Yukawa after the war.

Then we need to learn further about the procedure made by Truman next.

The real buck may have passed through him.

I could see the obvious progress of quality from "Shin-Godzilla" and other Legendary's Godzilla series. It's no doubt thanks to all new creators' mindset to try to outperform the previous works, based on and standing at the established brand "Godzilla". All the successors can benchmark the prior ones and analyze their successful points and failures. Yamazaki learned a lot from Anno's work and made some improvements and corrections particularly on the point that it couldn't catch on overseas. One of them is the music. He succeeded in taking on Naoki Sato, who is the graduate of Tokyo university of the arts, paying respect to the alumni and predecessor Ifukube and understanding his music deeply. In this film, vision and music are fantastically synchronized. And of course, the main character is Godzilla, but Yamazaki has done well in letting him act simply as a fearful object. Therefore, we can empathize fully with characters competing with Godzilla. Yamazaki who has suffered a streak of bummers in making films looks to be recovering his confidence, and is expected to deliver another sequel of Godzilla film, in which we can see a "real" duel with monsters like Ghidra or Mothra.

Regrettably, this work also couldn't meet the expectation of his enthusiastic fans once again. Aside from his earlier works, he has been continuously facing difficulties in expressing and conveying his own inner images and feelings precisely as he felt in Hayao's own brain to his loved spectators, maybe it started from "Spirited away". It's easy to say that it's simply because of aging though. But he's already lost creativity to attract his spectators no reason to the level of ecstasy. His long term right arm, producer Toshio Suzuki decided to eliminate any advertising campaign on this movie, seemingly because he figured anticipated box office stagnation prior to the release. Learning from aged Hayao, we would know the style to suit to his old days should be "aged but matured" one. We can't feel such a touch that we could taste from good old directors.

The Academy Award 2023 was filled with the momentum of "Everything Everywhere all at onece". Not just the best leading and supporting actor and actress, but also the best director and the best film were dominated by this film. Over the past several years when the US film academy was criticized and accused of lacking sense of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the academy continued effort to sit along with DEI. They suddenly appreciated Korean film "Parasite" and to my surprice, they began to value colored actors and actresses. As for "Everything Everywhere all at once", I think that they got too conscious about DEI to evaluate the genuine value of film itself. Many of critics said that "Everything Everywhere all at once" is something tough to figure out what it should say, because of its environment surrounded with multi-universe, which is the concept normally dealt in state of the art physics being really arcane to understand for normal spectators. As in the vision and creed of US film academy, comprehensibility of film might have been stated, "Everything Everywhere all at once" was sort of way-out. Even if the DEI shoud be weighed in, it looks apt to be out of fair valuation. How deep do you think the academy weigh in CEI for fair valuation of performances and contents?

I saw this film on NHK TV in the midnight when I was in fifth or sixth grade. The story and the ambience might have been filled with a sort of bizarre, brought me a strange and stray feeling. Marianne herself was really attractive but made me figure that she is the existence beyond the actual universe. And the ending always leaves elusive feeling over me even for now, almost 50 years later. I really have been crazy about movies since I was a kid, fair to say, all sort and genre of movies. But I always had an unsolbed aftertaste lingering deep inside of my heart. That is this "Marianne of my youth". Until I got a university student, I couldn't reach this film once again and review it. As is often the case, I remembered that I had some sort of nostalgia but sense of lost at a time when I eventually encountered the film again and finished watching it.

It was really Marianne "of my youth".

Great master of Manga, Reiji Matsumoto died. And found that his representative character "Maetel" was created originally modeled by this "Marianne".

"The human Vapor" is the fine work in 1960 directed by Inoshiro Honda. This is the third and last film of TOHO's metamorphoric human series. I saw this film on TV when I was in 6th grade and remember the sad finale. Also known as succeeded pretty well in the US box-office.

However another side of the striking impression of this film is the breath-taking beauty of Kaoru Yachigusa, leading actress as female Japanese conventional Noh dancer. Three years ago from this film, she got married with Japanese prominent director Taniguchi, who divorced with his second wife Setsuko Wakayama for the marrige with Yachigusa. For a while, the couple was forced to be aside from show business as a social sanction. So this film was positioned as her resuming acting. In her latter half of her life, Yachigusa turnrd out to suffer from the feeling of guilty of Wakamatsu's suicide at her age of 55 in asylum.

He and she were told to have lived happily, but 10 years after Tanigichi's death, Yachigusa might have spent her rest of her life alone with sadness. This sad love of "The human vapor" reminds me of the shadow hidden behind her beauty.

The Film premiered today in Japan. Although I am a Japanese, I have not read the novel that based this screenplay. No preconception on this film would have led me infatuated fully about the content. Actually in the earlier stage, I felt uneasy about the course of the story. But I found myself ended up to be hooked on the back-to-back actions and shticks in the last 30-min. I am not sure, but I saw the stereotype story structure in this film providing many foreshadows to be concluded in the last, which is familiar cases in recent Japanese drama. Maybe SONY pressed the staff to tune the story to secure consistency in real Japanese culture. However, I enjoyed slight deviations from fluency in Japanese for every Japanese characters except for Hiroyuki Sanada. This time, we the Japanese can enjoy exotics in this film, just like Tarantino's "Kill Bill".

Although there were several points to argue about this film, first I must confess that totally its progress, backdrop and details still includes something immature if it'd deserve Oscar. The most conspicuous point was performance by actor Nishijima. I think if he'd acted a little bit more properly: I mean if he had exposed Kafuku's feeling outside bit tactically, total impression of this film might have become a different taste. I'd say I wanted him to make spectators empathized with the feeling of protagonist. Kafuku was too intangible, elusive for me to share empathy with him. Some cases may require necessity of being elusive in a story. But in this case, I guess, the more we can share feeling with Kafuka, the deeper we can merge with this film.

It revealed that Anno's fundamental Policy for his "Shin-" world must be "Full of pedantic, which aims at making spectators puzzled and then feel inferiority leading to illusion making his work deserve great appreciation by overwhelmingly arcane jargons. His screenplay is tactically woven at the level where audience can follow quite marginally. That tone of his work would work as a hypnotic pill making audience anxious first, but finally amazingly excited with full of dopamine. I remember that he confessed the strategy once in certain TV program. We will see the same culture in coming next Shin-Masked Rider.