japanese – Page 2 – PopCult Reviews

PopCult Podcast – Rebel Ridge/Evil Does Not Exist

Two recent releases are in the spotlight. Jeremy Saulnier presents an entertaining & tense action film about a Black man against the local law preventing him from helping his cousin. Ryusuke Hamaguchi delivers a complicated a story of a rural Japanese village facing an outsider developer.

Movie Review – Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One (2023)
Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki

There is a scene just before the big third-act finale where Godzilla Minus One lays out its core thesis through the words of Kenji, a former Naval weapons officer trying to end the monster’s reign of terror on Japan. He states: “Come to think of it, this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats, and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That’s why this time I’d take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.” And that’s the theme of this film, to live in the face of what seems like hopeless obliteration.

TV Review – Shogun Season One

Shogun Season One (2024)
Written by Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks, Shannon Goss, Nigel Williams, Emily Yoshida, Matt Lambert, Maegan Houang, and Caillin Puente
Directed by Jonathan van Tulleken, Charlotte Brändström, Frederick E.O. Toye, Hiromi Kamata, Takeshi Fukunaga, and Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour

I must confess that of all the Japanese media, the stories surrounding this historical period typically leave me cold. I can acknowledge that there is tremendous quality here, but the philosophy of life is so dramatically alien to me that I have difficulty connecting to it. Unlike the protagonist here, I do not feel the intense etiquette systems. It comes across to me as oppressive and suffocating. But then, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Japanese person who finds this perspective normal looked at how I lived my life and felt that I was in a sort of prison, too. All societies are, to an extent, prisons; they have rules relatively rigid to outsiders. And that’s kind of what this show is exploring.

Movie Review – Black Rain

Black Rain (1989)
Written by Shōhei Imamura and Toshirō Ishido
Directed by Shōhei Imamura

In a bizarre coincidence, two movies titled Black Rain were released in 1989. They both take place in Japan. They opened in theaters one week apart. The other Black Rain we won’t be reviewing is a Michael Douglas-led action picture about the Yakuza directed by Ridley Scott. No one involved in the writing of that film was Japanese. But they both derive their title from the same phenomenon: the black rain that fell after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This substance was nuclear fallout falling like rain from the massive pyrocumulus cloud left in the bomb’s wake. The U.S. picture uses the black rain as a plot point and doesn’t really provide context or give adequate respect to the victims. As is typical in escapist Western cinema, it’s exploitation from top to bottom. Not so with the Japanese film.

Movie Review – Grave of the Fireflies

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
Written and directed by Isao Takahata

Not all the horrors in Japan were the result of the two atomic bombings. What gets less coverage in U.S. history books are the ongoing firebombings of civilian areas. The same B-29s that would eventually drop the horrid nuclear weapon would also drop standard bombs and burn neighborhoods to the ground, creating orphans and widows. What made this so much worse was the fascist stance of the society. There was some community, but certainly not the level needed for people to recover. Whereas now we can see those who still survive in Gaza keep hope alive by caring for one another, these sentiments were not nearly as widespread in imperial Japan. Some people even found it within themselves to walk by dying children and not think to help them.

Movie Review – Barefoot Gen

Barefoot Gen (1983)
Written by Keiji Nakazawa
Directed by Mori Masaki

The moment when the bomb drops in Barefoot Gen shakes you. The film does an excellent job presenting itself as a slice of life initially. We follow a Japanese family. Learn their relationship dynamics. The parents discuss worries about the future. Mom is pregnant. Dad feels powerless in this fascist society. The kids argue & play. Then, without warning, the world turns into Hell. Flesh melts off bone. People are crushed to death. Some keep living, and we wonder if it might have been better if they died. You start to think about how little we’re taught in the United States about what happened after the bomb was dropped beyond “the end of the war.”

Movie Review – Godzilla, King of Monsters

Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956)
Written by Shigeru Kayama, Takeo Murata, and Ishirō Honda
Directed by Ishirō Honda

6 August 1945. Hiroshima, Japan. Three American B-29 heavy bombers passed over the city. One of them, the Enola Gay, dropped a 15-kiloton atomic bomb. That is the equivalent of about 15 thousand tons of TNT. Over 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. Those who didn’t die immediately were blinded by the flash of the bomb, were crushed under the weight of collapsing buildings, suffered radiation poisoning the following days and months, and more. The U.S. would drop another even larger bomb on Nagasaki. There were plans to drop yet a third bomb on Japanese civilians. Japan had been in talks with the Soviet Union to surrender and end the war. For the United States, a post-war era in which the USSR was seen as a hero was a danger. The atomic bombings of Japan are up there with the Holocaust as some of the most horrific acts of violence humanity has committed on itself. It’s no surprise that many films have been made about this event and the atomic bomb itself. In this series, I want to look at how the bombing is analyzed and made a part of the culture, both through the eyes of the Japanese and the perpetrating nation, the United States.

PopCult Podcast – The Boy and The Heron/Furiosa

A Japanese animation master delivers his potential swan song while An Australian filmmaking legend visits his apocalyptic sandbox once again.

TV Review – The End of Evangelion

The End of Evangelion (1997)
Written by Hideaki Anno
Directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki and Hideaki Anno

Apparently, a large enough contingent of viewers were dissatisfied with the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and creator Hideaki Anno produced this follow-up feature that exists parallel to that conclusion. From what I read, it sounded like Anno went back and forth between his original concept and some altered ideas. It is a very jarring experience for the central narrative to suddenly collapse into an internal dialogue between Shinji and mental projections of the important people in life. There’s also a meta-commentary on anime cliches that pops up and a weirdly upbeat ending. Several questions were left unanswered, so it was decided to go back and add more to the finale.

TV Review – Neon Genesis Evangelion Episodes 19 thru 26

Neon Genesis Evangelion – Episodes 19 through 26
Written by Hideaki Anno, Akio Satsukawa, and Hiroshi Yamaguchi
Directed by Masayuki, Masahiko Ōtsuka, Hiroyuki Ishidō, Akira Takamura, Shōichi Masuo, and Kazuya Tsurumaki

When I first started watching Neon Genesis Evangelion at the start of the year, I read that some fans hated the ending of the anime series. I wanted to know why that could be. Now that I have finished the show, I completely understand why some of the audience would not like this. I, however, am a big weirdo, and I loved it, yet I get that it goes in a wildly different direction and doesn’t provide the direct sort of conclusion you might expect from a show about giant “robots” fighting monsters from space. Of course, I will be watching and reviewing the two feature films that serve as a complementary ending next month, but for now, I just want to focus on the series.