BIG MAN JAPAN -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 7/19/09

 

Well, here's something for those with a really big taste for the unusual. Part mockumentary, part giant-Japanese-monsters spoof, BIG MAN JAPAN (2007) is one seriously weird movie. And watching it is like discovering a chest full of really cool toys that were designed by crazy elves on acid.

The mockumentary part follows a reserved, unassuming man named Daisato (director and co-writer Hitoshi Matsumoto) around as he makes his way through a seemingly ordinary life. He lives in a dumpy home with a stray cat and makes pointless conversation about how he likes things (folding umbrellas, dehydrated seaweed) that are small until you need for them to get big.

Sometimes he wistfully talks about his 8-year-old daughter, whom his ex-wife will only let him visit twice a year because that's as often as she can stand to be around him.

Rocks crash through the windows as he speaks. His house is adorned with strewn garbage and graffiti such as "Die!" and "We don't need you!" Why? Because Daisato is Big-Sato, or "Big Man Japan", a widely-reviled superhero who is also small until the government needs for him to get big and fight the giant monsters that constantly invade Japan, and it's no longer the glamour job that it was for his predecessors. In fact, his reality TV show is currently getting lower ratings than the weather channel.

The interview segments, while very funny, are also dry and sometimes seemingly interminable. I couldn't wait for Daisato to get the next call to action from the government, because then, things really get fun. He travels by moped (passing more graffiti such as "You're annoying" and "Fall off a cliff!") to the nearest electrical station to "power up", standing inside his gigantic purple shorts and getting zapped with millions of volts until he grows to colossal proportions.

With his long hair standing straight up and his pudgy body adorned with tattoos and advertising (his avaricious agent sells ad space to various sponsors and pockets most of the profits herself), Big Man Japan is ready to stomp into action again.

Each monster that he encounters is a wonderful and fascinating creation. The first one we see is The Strangling Monster, whose arms form a loop of elastic steel cables that he wraps around skyscrapers before hoisting them up and gleefully piledriving them into the ground. The Leaping Monster is another extremely happy creature with very expressive features--the facial CGI motion-capture on these things is really good.

This is especially true for The Stink Monster, a female monstrosity who engages our hero in a heated verbal exchange filled with withering putdowns while leaning against a building and petulantly nudging automobiles with her foot.

Most of the monsters have some kind of disturbing sexual component that adds an extra layer of strangeness to their activities. Strangling Monster extrudes a pointed metallic shaft from his posterior that deposits slimy eggs into the gaping holes left from uprooted buildings. Evil Stare Monster's telescoping eye-stalk, which he uses as a swinging mace-like weapon, originates from his groin.

Not to be outdone, Stink Monster is actually in heat, which attracts the frantic attentions of yet another grotesque monster who's beside himself with hilariously hyperkinetic lust. "What the hell!?" Daisato cries in horror as she turns around and "presents." What happens next results in tabloid press headlines decrying Big Man Japan as a "Monster Pimp."

Each of these segments is a feast of weirdness for us to gorge ourselves on--irresistible confections of stylized photo-realistic CGI, mind-bending monsters, and cartoonishly surreal situations. When Daisato's senile old grandfather, once the highly-popular Big Man Japan the Fourth, zaps himself with electricity and gets back into the act, he goes on a wonderfully irrational rampage in which he takes on Tokyo Tower and shuts down the local airport by playing with the planes, while headlines scream "Big Man Japan Destroys Japan!!" and "Big Man Japan Salutes the Sun?!"

Even the somewhat melancholy mockumentary sequences start to get more outrageous as Daisato deals with all the various controversies and public outcries while trying to keep his personal life together.

Hitoshi Matsumoto does a good job directing the film while giving a nicely subdued performance as the put-upon Daisato. His supporting players, including several non-professionals, are natural and funny. The more mundane segments look as though they might have been shot for some PBS series, while the monster scenes are so lush and colorful that they're quite visually sumptuous. Adding to the film's appeal is a score by Towa Tei that is often beautiful.

A 68-minute bonus featurette (with commentary), "Making of Big Man Japan", shows the years-long collaborative process in which the story and its characters were developed, and follows the cast and crew to Cannes for the film's successful premiere. Also included on the DVD are several deleted scenes plus trailers for this and the other films in Magnolia/Magnet's "6-Shooter Film Series" (five of which we've reviewed right here at HKCFN, counting this one). The 1.85:1 widescreen image and Dolby Digital sound are good. Soundtrack is in Japanese with English and Spanish subtitles.

With the appearance of a redskinned, seemingly invincible demon-monster that may mean the end of our hero, BIG MAN JAPAN has a final surprise in store for viewers which will either delight or confuse, or both. (At any rate, it should get you to thinking about what the heck it all means, including possible political implications, blah, blah, etc.) Like the rest of the film, it's unexpected and totally off-the-wall. And if you're like me, you may find it hard to believe that somebody actually made a movie that's this much pure, silly, unadulterated fun.

BIG MAN JAPAN -- DVD Review by Porfle

SHIN GODZILLA -- Movie Review by Porfle

 Originally posted on 10/8/16

 

I never was a huge kaiju fan, but I always thought GODZILLA and other Japanese monster movies from Toho Studios were pretty cool when I was a kid.  I remember titles like KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, RODAN, and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS showing at my local theater when they were new and the place being packed with happy, excited kids (we really loved our monster movies back then!) I rarely missed these and other such films as MOTHRA and GAMMERA on television as well.

I did pretty much miss out on the middle period in Japanese monster movie history, namely the updated stuff from the 80s and beyond.  I had the misfortune of seeing the Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin GODZILLA remake in 1998, the less said about which the better except that it was, in two words, horribly ill-conceived. 

With that in mind, I must say that I found Toho's latest 2016 remake, SHIN GODZILLA (or "Godzilla Resurgence"), to be a welcome throwback to those old-fashioned kaiju epics of my childhood which I recall most fondly.

 

For one thing, even though the giant green lizard is purely a modern-day CGI creation, he's designed to resemble the man-in-a-monster-suit Godzilla of old.  I find this both delightfully nostalgic and somehow just plain right.  He sounds the same too, and his appearance is usually heralded by the familiar strains of his original theme music. 

What I found intriguingly different this time around is that the beast is in a state of accelerated evolutionary flux.  When we first see him, he's a purely amphibious fish-eyed creature--sort of a cross between a turtle and a seahorse--whose intense body heat causes a steam cloud to erupt in Tokyo Harbor and inflict extreme tsunami-style damage on the coastline.  After it makes its way out of the water, it morphs into a being that can exist on land. 

After its initial rampage and a brief return to the sea for its final stage of evolution, the monster returns fully transformed (more or less) into the Godzilla we've always known and loved.  At this point the movie kicks into high gear with scenes of devastation that are absolutely breathtaking and, this time, completely convincing.  (No more cardboard buildings and flimsy pagodas with wind-up toy military vehicles skittering around, as endearing as they were.)

 

In his third of three major appearances, Godzilla lets loose all of his radioactive fury with both heat breath and photon beams from his tail and dorsal fins that slice right through buildings and blow military craft out of the sky. 

There's one sequence in particular in which several skyscrapers surrounding Godzilla are detonated and brought down upon him all at once, resulting in a scene so utterly catastrophic yet realistically rendered that I found it strangely exhilarating.  If you have a sweet tooth for scenes of full-scale destruction, this movie should satisfy it and then some.

That said, SHIN GODZILLA resembles the Godzilla movies of old in another, less positive way--it's often incredibly boring.  Remember all those long, talky scenes they'd always put between the monster action to pad out the movie?  This one has those in abundance, and they're talkier than ever. 

Much of the talk consists of a lot of overwrought political and scientific chatter spouted by an endless succession of uninteresting and resolutely unmemorable characters.  The only two who make any sort of lasting impression are young Mr. Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa), who assembles a crack team of geniuses to figure out how to neutralize the radioactive beast before it has to be nuked along with the rest of Tokyo, and Miss Patterson (Satomi Ishihara), a winsome, headstrong Japanese-American woman acting as liason for the American President.

But even these two characters are too busy yakking about boring stuff (Mr. Yaguchi seems particularly stiff-necked) to develop much interesting character interaction, and the rest of the old fogies do nothing but sit at long tables endlessly gnawing on all the political knots with an almost comical nationalistic fervor.

These scenes with all their rapid-fire exposition really are a calcified bore despite attempts by co-directors Hideaki Anno (EVANGELION) and Shinji Higuchi to make things interesting by keeping the camera moving a lot. 

The only time the non-Godzilla scenes liven up is when the monster's approach throws all of the earlier formality into utter chaos during the mad scramble to evacuate in time.  Some suspense is also generated late in the film with the impending decision whether or not to use nukes as the Americans (natch) and UN are urging the Japanese to do. 

But all of this is forgotten during the three major monster sequences in the film, the third of which begins with 15-20 minutes of the 120-minute running time left and features some of the film's most amazing SPFX including several explosive-laden commuter trains crashing into Godzilla, a missile attack involving jet planes and ground-based vehicles, and a nail-biting attempt by Yaguchi's team to defeat the beast via their own highly unorthodox scientific methods. 

After the dust has settled over Tokyo, SHIN GODZILLA emerges as both a modern update and a welcome throwback.  Just like the old Godzilla movies, it's boring as hell between the monster stuff.  But when Godzilla starts stomping his way through downtown Tokyo as millions of terrified civilians flee for their lives, with the added benefit of today's state-of-the-art effects making the massive devastation all the more perversely thrilling, it makes me feel like a little Monster Kid again.

Official website, ticket info, etc.

Our previous coverage of the film

Trailer

SHIN GODZILLA -- Movie Review by Porfle