So right now, two animated original stories have recently been released. One is Elio, a Pixar movie about a kid who gets abducted by aliens and… well, the plot doesn’t seem to have much more than that. The other is K-Pop Demon Hunters, which… is about K-pop stars who are also secretly demon hunters.
Now, I cannot speak to the quality of these two movies, since I haven’t seen either in full, except to say that the reception I’ve seen to Elio has been very mixed. Some people think it’s great, some people think it sucks. K-Pop Demon Hunters seems to have gotten overall a much more positive reaction despite a very silly premise, and as far as I can tell, that’s due to two things. One, it’s a well-written movie, from the clips I’ve seen. Two, it’s a genuine movie made out of someone’s culture and passions, not a soulless corporate product.
But I think one big contributor to the downfall of Elio and the rise of K-Pop Demon Hunters is the titles.
KPDH has a title that tells you, upfront and openly, what it’s about. It’s a movie about K-pop and demon-hunting. The premise is silly, like I said, but it doesn’t care how silly it sounds. You will probably know right out of the gate if this is a movie you are interested in. Furthermore, the title is eye-catching. It’s bold, it’s brash, it’s unapologetically different from every other title out there – and that makes it both memorable and attractive. It makes you want to know more.
On the other hand… what does “Elio” tell you?
Honestly, to me it sounds like the name of an indie dramedy about an older man (I keep imagining Tom Hanks) whose wife died and he’s been depressed ever since, but then he adopts a stray dog and it teaches him how to live again or something sappy like that. That dramedy would ultimately be trying to get an Oscar, but everybody would have forgotten about it by the time Oscar season rolls around.
That is what the title Elio says to me. It doesn’t say “wacky children’s space adventures with slug aliens.” It doesn’t say ANYTHING about the movie it’s attached to, or what to expect, or WHY you should see the movie. It’s just… a name. The movie could just as easily be called “Wally” or “Sean” or “Jake” or “Mike.” It tells you nothing except that it has a character named “Elio” in it, and that’s… not enough to really attract attention and interest.
And yes, I know that there are some very successful movies that are just the characters’ names – John Wick comes to mind. But there are also ones that definitely weren’t done any favors by their titles, like Salt.
I’m not saying that Pixar has to go full out K-pop Demon Hunters in their titles. But they really need to stop with the really bland, nondescript titles that are either names (like this and Luca), or they show a minimum of effort (like Soul). Their movies have been struggling for the past few years, for varying reasons, but the titles certainly don’t help.
Oh, and ditch the current art style too. The bean-mouth thing is tired.
Extensive spoilers for Death on the Nile, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” and BBC’s Sherlock.
So, I’m back again.
And earlier today, I was listening to a video someone made about the many flaws of the BBC show Sherlock, which was a massive success as a show but also a terrible Sherlock Holmes adaptation. For many reasons, but I think the biggest one is that they fundamentally got Sherlock Holmes WRONG as a character, depicting him as an obnoxious, self-absorbed sociopath who desperately needs to be taught about the wonderfulness of friendship and empathy and rainbows and sunshine and puppies, et cetera. Feel free to vomit.
And it occurred to me as I listened… this isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like that.
I saw it a few years ago in the absolutely heinous big-screen adaptation of Death on the Nile by Kevin Branagh, which absolutely raped every single character in it. Zero attempts to make it feel timeless, realistic or elegant, zero attempt to adapt Christie’s brilliant story, motives or characters; just trashy Hollywood crap. Seriously, if you want to watch the story, watch the old 197os version with Peter Ustinov, Mia Farrow and David Niven. Pretty faithful (they condense a few characters and add a motive, but mostly correct), visually stunning, and not as obnoxiously horny or preoccupied with current-day politics.
But one thing that really galled me was the need to depict Hercule Poirot as being a detective ONLY because he’s traumatized and grieving. Apparently Kenneth Branagh… cannot grasp a human being who wants to understand the mechanics of a crime, who wants to unlock a puzzle, who relies on rationality, intelligence and deduction. He evidently thinks that a person who has those qualities must have been traumatized into it, because otherwise he’d “care” more and abandon being a detective.
And I think the same thought process went into Sherlock. Spoilers for a show that’s been out for years and everybody has already heard about it, but in case you haven’t and you still want to watch it, I’m going to spoil the final episode.
Ready?
Ready?
Ready?
Okay, in the final episode of Sherlock it’s revealed that Sherlock’s entire personality has been shaped by the fact that his sister murdered his best friend when he was a then-normal little boy, and that’s why he’s a “high-functioning sociopath” who’s obsessed with solving crimes. Everything he does, everything he is, is once again the result of horrible trauma that made him a “broken” person who needs to be shown the power of friendship and empathy. Gag me with a spoon.
… not to mention that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss seem to think that superior deductive abilities are essentially a precognitive superpower. They pretty clearly have a surface-level-only understanding of what an intelligent person’s mind is, and how it works; that kind of intelligence apparently seems like magic to them, whereas the original Holmes stories always explained Holmes’ deductions in detail, and the character himself always emphasized that other people could learn to do what he did.
These two depictions of legendary detectives are… really weird. The people making them seem to think that only a broken, mentally-scarred person could become a pragmatic, intelligent, deductive person, and that something is “wrong” or “missing” from them. That’s… a scary attitude to have. Not scary to the people who have it, but scary for the wildly anti-intellectual bent that it shows.
I think what both of these abominations show is that some people are extremely frightened of people who are genuinely intelligent – not just smart or clever, but geniuses or in some sort of elite field. They themselves are not intelligent – sometimes they’re really, really stupid – and so they try to defang what frightens them by imagining that those scary, scary smart people are actually just broken and scared, and that’s why they value intellect.
Furthermore… I think this is also coming from people who not only are scared of intelligence, but genuinely devalue it. I think they’re people who mainly value “feelings” and emotions and empathy, and think those are the most important factor. The existence of characters like Sherlock Holmes (the patron saint of deductive reasoning) and Hercule Poirot (he of the little grey cells) upset them, because those characters rely primarily on rationality, deduction and knowledge, not emotions and feefees. Even their knowledge of emotions and feelings tends to be psychologically based – they analyze and they apply their knowledge to figure out motives and actions. They do NOT turn into neurotic emotional messes who need extensive therapy because of their crippling personal problems.
And contrary to the stereotype of Holmes, he and Poirot are not people devoid of emotion or connection to others. In Death on the Nile, one of the most striking series of interactions is Poirot’s interactions with Jacqueline de Bellefort, a young woman seemingly stalking her ex-lover and his new wife (who was also her best friend). Due to his knowledge of psychology and the nature of evil, Poirot recognizes that Jackie is falling prey to evil, but knows she still has the chance to turn back and save herself. He genuinely wants her to not put her murderous plan into motion, not just for the sake of her victim, but for the sake of her own soul. She doesn’t do as he urges, and it genuinely saddens Poirot by the end that this bright young woman ultimately chose to destroy herself and several other people, when it could have been avoided easily.
Sherlock Holmes doesn’t usually get quite as personal in his stories, but he often shows sympathy and compassion for others in his stories. “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” is notable for ending not with an arrest, but with Holmes letting the thief go because it’s Christmas, and he’s confident that the man won’t offend again. That’s not the actions of an emotionally stunted sociopath, but of someone who does care very deeply about others, even if he tries to stay detached.
So making these stories, you have people who are not very smart… and who rely on emotions and empathy for everything, including their storytelling… while ironically being so un-empathetic that they can’t grasp the mindset of a person who is rational, intelligent and deductive, so they depict someone different from themselves as “broken” or “defective.”
I guess it’s not surprising that such Moffat, Gatiss and Branagh can’t grasp the value of a steel-trap mind, or detective stories written by two of the greatest masters of the genre. Their own minds are mush. So I’d like to ask them, most politely: stop adapting mystery stories. Stick to bad melodrama, which is more your speed. You’re not good at mysteries, and you’re not good at writing geniuses.
Every author has a trail of half-finished outlines, ideas or books that just didn’t work out. Books in embryo, which may or may not eventually be finished and released to the public. And apparently Brandon Sanderson is no different… he’s got whole novels that just aren’t published.
I’ve been reading them lately, and honestly, it’s a shame that these books weren’t published and canon to the Cosmere, because they’re pretty good overall. Although I understand why, obviously, Way of Kings Prime isn’t – it’s basically an earlier draft of a now-published novel that is drastically different in form now. It’s interesting as a look into the evolution of the novel we eventually got.
But the other two books are different. One was revised and released as a graphic novel, with some significant changes (such as a supporting character’s gender and family life) and the other just hasn’t been published officially in any form, although as I understand it, the worldbuilding is canon. White Sand takes place on a tidally-locked planet where half of it is in darkness and half in light, and the main character is a very weak sand mage who ends up accidentally becoming the leader of his order. And also they’re on the verge of being disbanded, and most of them have been murdered, and he has to somehow fight with sand-magic without being able to do more than a small amount of it.
The other is Aether of Night, kind of a cross between a Shakespearean comedy and a high-stakes high fantasy. It follows a prince/priest who ends up becoming king when his identical twin brother, who was the actual heir, is killed by mysterious shadow creatures, along with their father and a lot of other people. And those mysterious creatures are constantly invading their country and trying to overwhelm the populace, and they’re associated with a pair of feuding gods.
… and at the same time, there is also this comedic aspect, in that the former-priest-turned-king has to also select a wife from several candidates. They’re from different countries, religions and cultures, with different attitudes towards getting the prize, and some of them have their own agendas, and there are diplomatic repercussions to his choice. So as much as I enjoyed the book, I can see why Sanderson wasn’t really satisfied with the combination of high-fantasy potential apocalypse/Shakespearean comedy. You’re like, the world is potentially ending and over half the population is gonna die… so why are we hearing about some guy trying to figure out which girl he’ll marry?
And I just found out that he has another unpublished book called Dragonsteel, which I do not know anything about and which I now have to read. So stay tuned.
So, watch the above video before reading more. Be sure to see other videos by KrimsonRogue – he’s one of the few Booktubers I follow religiously, and watch every video he makes.
I am not entirely sure what this man he’s talking about is on. I have personal experience in this, because – not to boast – I was a pretty advanced reader as a young child. In first grade, I read The Hobbit. The next year, I read The Lord of the Rings. I read so quickly and at such a level that my teacher effectively stopped expecting me to read the books supplied by the school for a book club, because I blew through them too fast. Then she tried to hold me back from surpassing my peers, but that’s a tale for another day.
And then there was the library. I went there at least twice a week, and over the next years, I was able to find plenty of books that were appropriate for kids, but advanced enough for my reading skills. Just in the kids’ section, there were the Chronicles of Prydain, the Dark is Rising Sequence, Diana Wynne-Jones, the Riddlemaster trilogy, the Green Sky trilogy, the Earthsea books, and so on.
And I did not restrict myself to the adult section – I prowled through the teen section and the adult sections as well, and picked up a number of authors that I still read – stuff like Arthur C. Clarke. Not just in fantasy and sci-fi either. I developed a love for murder mysteries then, thanks to Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Elizabeth Peters, etc. I also checked out biographies of various people who sounded interesting. And, of course, I checked the new arrivals religiously, in case there was something there that I might be interested in.
And the options for reading for kids were far, far more limited back then. There was no Rick Riordan, no Five Nights at Freddy’s, no Shannon Messenger, no Marissa Meyer, Garth Nix was early in his career, etc.
I’m sorry, but I don’t buy for a second that there’s some sort of shortage of books for children who read at a more advanced level. It doesn’t make sense logically, because a child who can read above their grade is capable of reading books for older readers… AND FOR KIDS. The pool of available books is not diminished, it’s INCREASED. I was capable of reading books like Lord of the Rings, sure, but I still read plenty of high-quality, intelligent, challenging books aimed at kids.
I can think of a number of books for younger readers that are as complex and well-written, if not more so, than many adult works I’ve read. Take Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles – I would have eagerly devoured a series about a cyborg Cinderella. Such books are usually aimed at young adults and kids not because they lack the qualities supposedly required by adult fiction, but because their protagonists are young.
Evidently this guy didn’t learn the lesson that the Harry Potter franchise supposedly taught us – that you’re not locked into a particular age group’s reading material. Adults can read kids’ books, and kids can (if properly screened) read books for older readers. I read books for 9-12-year-olds, young adults AND adults – and I do not have a dearth of books to read these days. Even though a lot of the new releases don’t appeal to me, I still have a to-read pile that is dauntingly huge.
And yet, with countless people telling him how wrong he is, that kids are not doomed to have nothing to read if they’re more advanced readers… he still is willing to die on this hill. Insisting that having kids who are academically advanced – especially in reading – is bad for them and is only inflicted on them by borderline-abusive parents. Considering that the American school system is a global joke that regularly churns out illiterate adults with no skills or relevant knowledge, we could use a lot more kids who are not just learning, but learning beyond what could be expected of them.
And as KrimsonRogue points out, the professed cost of constantly obtaining books is easily offset with a library card. Fun fact: library cards are free. So is checking out anything with them. For a bookish child, there’s nothing more delightful.
Despite protestations to the contrary, I have to wonder if he truly has kids who are ahead of their grade, or whether they’re dead average… and that bothers him, so he insists that it’s actually better for kids to NOT be smart and advanced to offset his discomfort. Maybe I’m wrong. But he seems very insistent that this is the case, and not willing to listen to anyone else’s perspective.
I don’t understand a word of any language spoken in India.
But somehow, that isn’t really a barrier when watching the Village Cooking Channel, a pretty major channel with 26 MILLION followers. Sure, the only part of the video I can really understand is “always welcome you,” but the content is so much fun and so wholesome that it doesn’t really matter.
The contents of the channel are pretty simple: half a dozen Indian men from a rural village go out into a remote field, start a fire, and cook. They cook a lot. They cook very, very large quantities – sometimes it looks like they’re cooking enough for their entire village. Whole goats filled with biryani, five hundred fried chicken legs, giant whole tuna, dragon fruit milkshakes, the world’s largest popsicles, hundreds of quail, and huge quantities of popcorn.
And some of the dishes are either unusual or unknown to American palates – think chickens cooked inside watermelons, soan papdi, goat brains, chicken in bamboo, stingray, rose cookies, goat feet, kizhi parotta, jelly cake, and so on. It’s a fascinating glimpse into how other cultures eat and the wide variety of foods that have developed in India. And despite the frequent deep-frying, most of it is probably much healthier than the average Western diet.
The guys in it are pretty fun to watch – they’re energetic and shout out the names of the ingredients as they prepare the food. They harvest some of it themselves, and so everything they make is pretty much entirely made out of whole ingredients that practically glow with freshness. Even the water looks delicious in these videos. I don’t know how you make water look delicious, but they’ve managed it.
And the best part? After the men have eaten generous portions of the food they’ve prepared, they always give what they haven’t eaten to elderly poor people living in their community. It’s heartwarming to see, and a reminder of what actual organic community looks like.
I’ve been watching a lot of Nigel Ng’s Uncle Roger videos lately. If you aren’t familiar with these, Uncle Roger is Ng’s comedy character, a divorced middle-aged Asian man who critiques videos (mostly about cooking various Asian dishes, but sometimes other stuff like dating reality shows), complains about his cheating ex-wife, makes odd sex jokes, rhapsodizes about MSG and complains about British chefs doing strange things to Asian food.
And I recommend you watch his videos. He’s very funny, very witty, and provides a lot of insight into the proper preparation of different dishes which Americans/Brits may not be entirely familiar with, like Thai curries.
And one thing he also did was introduce me to Jamie Oliver’s cooking. Now, I was previously aware that Jamie Oliver existed. But because I don’t cook much (and most of what I make is taco meat, frozen pizza or salads) and he doesn’t have a primetime reality show where he yells at chefs a lot, I didn’t know anything about the man’s cooking abilities. It turns out that… he’s not very good. Not very good at all.
For one thing, he makes food oppressively healthy. I understand he’s a health nut and on a personal mission to make everybody eat the way he thinks we should, but he cooks “healthy” food the way a person who hates health food would imagine it to be. He tries to make things vegetarian sometimes, and tries to cram vegetables where they aren’t wanted or needed. Jamie, listen – if you want to eat vegetables in a dish that doesn’t have vegetables in it… just eat a salad on the side. No need to inflict a “dense ball” of spinach on anybody.
And he seems to be on a one-man crusade against flavor, which both British cooking and healthy cooking are notorious for lacking. He uses low-salt/low-fat ingredients, makes spicy dishes as bland as possible, and seems to try to use water instead of stocks or oils sometimes.
And what flavor there is… is wrong. He often makes massive changes to the core recipes, leaving out important elements and adding random new ones for inadequate reasons, like “it’s a red curry, so I will put in red bell peppers to make it red” or “it’s an Asian food, so I need to put soy sauce and bok choy in it.” He adds ingredients to dishes that don’t work with the other flavors on it, without regard for how it’s actually going to taste – like when he made Thai green curry and half of it was mushrooms. Or when he made a Pad Thai and the sauce was made out of mashed-up silken tofu (WUT?), soy sauce and sweet chili sauce. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t like the idea of soy sauce and sweet chili sauce mixed together and… nobody cooks tofu that way!
I’m honestly not sure why he does this, aside from trying to make things healthier. Especially since some of his errors are just…. being wrong, like when he used the wrong noodles for ramen.
But some of these are just… changing things. Is he really so filled with hubris that he thinks he’s improving on these recipes by changing so many things about them? Because it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when a chef’s attitude is, “Hey, these are beloved and well-regarded dishes from other cultures, but they’re not good enough to be faithfully reproduced. I have to FIX them to make them acceptable!” It feels gross and condescending. Kind of like ranch-sauce pizza, which is also an abomination.
When you make alterations to a recipe, you need to actually stop and think about whether it NEEDS to be altered. From all across the world, very few classic recipes need to be “fixed” or updated, because they are often the result of decades, centuries or even millennia of development and experimentation, and flavors that work harmoniously with other flavors from the same region.
That’s not to say that food shouldn’t evolve or adopt new things. Organic growth is amazing, like how Indian cuisine has integrated tomatoes and potatoes, and married them to other uniquely Indian flavors. In fact, potatoes have been embraced worldwide, in many cultures which had no contact with them until fewer than five hundred years ago. But that was about embracing something new and finding new and culturally unique ways to cook it as a part of the existing cuisine, not trying to avoid the established and beloved flavors and foods that already existed.
Anyway, that was my unhinged rant on the subject, and maybe I’m being too harsh, but the man annoys me.
Imagine if your ancestors had the power to curse you for… well, general discomfort after death.
That premise forms the bedrock for the South Korean horror movie “Exhuma,” in which a quartet of shamans, geomancers and morticians join forces to deal with vengeful ghosts. This is a movie that could never be remade in another country – not just because it relies on tension and dread rather than jump scares, but because the historical and cultural backdrop are so uniquely Korean.
Shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her tatted apprentice Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) are summoned to Los Angeles to investigate a newborn baby who has been cursed by one of his ancestors. Hwa-rim makes arrangements with the family patriarch to exhume and cremate the child’s great-grandfather back in South Korea, with the help of her friends: feng-shui geomancer Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and experienced mortician Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin).
But the job turns out to be more complicated than expected. The grave is on a mountaintop near the North Korean border, surrounded by malign omens: foxes, an unmarked stone, rumors of graverobbing, and a snake with a human head. The only way the corpse can be exhumed is with a complex ritual that draws out and dissipates the malignant energies (involving knives, a drum and several dead pigs), so they can dig up and then cremate the unopened coffin. Sounds simple, right?
Not so simple, because some brain donor opens it, unleashing a vengeful spirit that decides he wants to kill his entire family – and our heroes have limited time to save the remaining kin from meeting gruesome ends. But it turns out that ironing out this family debacle is only the beginning of the horrors to come, as another coffin is found buried beneath the first – and dealing with this angry ghost will not be so easy.
“Exhuma” is the kind of movie that horror needs. No jump scares, even when something shocking and unexpected happens. This is a movie that slowly builds up a sense of pervasive, eerie dread, filling every shadowy corner until it suddenly flows with splattered blood and soaring fire. It’s also a uniquely Korean movie – without revealing some of the plot twists, the story relies heavily on both Korean history and Korean folklore, so it couldn’t really be told anywhere else.
Director/writer Jang Jae-hyun slowly layers mysteries and atmosphere (so many foxes!) on top of each other, then slowly peels away those layers like an onion. Some of the scenes in the second and third acts of the movie are deeply disturbing, especially when Bong-gil speaks for the angry ghosts. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that it feels a little weird that we go through the entire cycle of dealing with the cursed family… and then, suddenly, that plot Trojan-horses an entirely unrelated evil ghost for the third act. It’s kind of odd. Not bad, exactly, but disorienting.
The actors are all uniformly quite good: Kim Go-eun is cool and collected as an intelligent, businesslike shaman, which makes it all the more unnerving when the character is stricken with bone-chilling fear in the third act. Lee Do-hyun plays a secondary role to her throughout most of the movie, but gets to show his acting chops when Bong-gil gets possessed a few times. And Choi Min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin have delightful chemistry as a couple of old buddies who specialize in exhuming and reburying troublesome dead people, swinging between easy camaraderie to harrowing battles against the supernatural.
“Exhuma” has a slightly odd plot structure, but that doesn’t keep it from being a harrowing, suspenseful movie that slowly builds its way up to the blood’n’fire. Definitely worth watching for those who appreciate atmosphere in their horror.
I didn’t really expect a series about Godzilla to go into detail about the nature of time.
In fact, the series has a distinct lack of Godzilla about 90% of the time, which my brother found to be its biggest flaw – if you’re going into it to watch kaiju punching each other in the face, you will be sorely disappointed. There are kaiju, sure – there are a bunch of pterodactyl-like Rodans, there’s an Anguillas, there are some sea monsters and giant monster-spiders and so on. But they are more like unstoppable forces of nature whose origins and nature are a mystery, and who scare the pants off us feeble humans.
About 90% of the time, the story is divided between dealing with various non-Godzilla kaiju, and examining nonlinear timestreams, such as receiving information from the future, and particles that can’t be detected, and artificial intelligence. It’s a very intellectual series with Godzilla as the primal draw and the ultimate culmination of everything it’s building towards, so if you just want Godzilla in particular punching monsters you are not going to enjoy it. There’s a lot of talking.
Also red dust. Sooooooo much red dust. It makes sense in context.
The rest of the 90% is divided pretty evenly between trying to unravel the mysteries of time and trying to stop kaiju in creative ways. Especially since there are different people with different motives, and different knowledge, sometimes working together and sometimes kind of undermining one another. The story mostly revolves around a small group of oddballs – a nerdy girl majoring in imaginary creatures (now THERE’S a complete sink for your student loans), a crazy old man building a giant robot to save the world (because Japan), and a young man who seems to have a real knack for figuring out the kaiju and programming artificial intelligence.
It also takes notes from Shin Godzilla by having Godzilla evolve through different forms over the course of the series. In fact, sometimes you can only tell it’s him because of that classic Godzilla musical sting. His final form has a mouth that could eat an entire meatball sub in one bite.
Also: my brother noted that the female lead reminded him of Velma from Scooby-Doo… and I kinda see it. Nerdy, clumsy, chin-length hair and glasses, into weird esoteric stuff… she’s like Velma turned into a cute anime girl, only her interest is insects who are their own grandpa instead of the occult.
I’d say that its biggest flaw, aside from a lack of Godzilla, is that it probably takes a few viewings to understand the theories behind it. The concepts and theories are a bit dense at times, and it sometimes treats viewers as if they are already aware of the science, or the explanations sort of dart by so fast that you might not notice.
If you like thinking-style anime like Steins;Gate and a hefty dose of kaiju chaos, then Godzilla Singular Point is something you might enjoy. Even if you don’t know if you might like those things, it’s worth checking out simply because it is such an unusual beast.
Sometimes, a classic franchise needs to get back to its roots.
And after a highly unconventional outing in “Shin Godzilla,” Toho and director/writer Takashi Yamazaki, decided to do just that in “Godzilla Minus One.” This may be the best Godzilla movie ever made – an emotionally deep, historically-rich tale of disaster, loss, grief and guilt, which just happens to center around a giant nuclear reptile.
Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a young kamikaze pilot, stops at remote Odo Island with the claim that his engine is malfunctioning… but the truth is, he just doesn’t want to die. That night, a large hostile reptile nicknamed Godzilla comes ashore and kills all the engineers, and Shikishima believes it’s because he froze up instead of shooting the creature. More guilt, on top of his belief that he failed his country instead of dying for it.
After returning to Tokyo to find his parents dead, Shikishima finds himself living with a young homeless woman named Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned baby, Akiko (Sae Nagatani). He gets a job as a minesweeper to support the three of them, though his guilt and feelings of worthlessness keep him from explicitly forming a family unit. And he’s still haunted by what happened on Odo Island, and vivid dreams of the men he didn’t save.
Then a vast, mutated creature ravages U.S. ships on its way to Japan – and Shikishima realizes that it’s none other than Godzilla. Not only is he vast and strong, but he regenerates from almost any injury, and he’s able to shoot a nuclear blast from his mouth that can vaporize a heavy cruiser. With only the slimmest chance of success and very few resources, the chances of destroying Godzilla are virtually nonexistent – but if Shikishima can overcome his demons, Japan’s people might have a chance.
It may be a controversial opinion, but I feel that “Godzilla Minus One” actually tops the original 1954 classic, which spawned the entire Japanese kaiju genre. That’s because it’s not merely an outstanding kaiju movie with a slow-simmering allegorical message about the horrors of nuclear war, much as the original was, but a deeply personal story about survivor’s guilt, PTSD, love for one’s people, and what a government owes to the people who serve it.
Director/writer Takashi Yamazaki weaves together all these threads without being heavy-handed or slowing down the story. The slower-paced, more personal parts are never boring because they’re so richly characterized (including the parts with real-life Japanese military ships and aircraft). And the parts with Godzilla are electrifying, like when he monches on a train or chases the minesweeper ship with a look of pure hate on his face. This is a Godzilla who wants the human race dead, not the lovable world-saver of many other Godzilla films.
Much of the movie rests on Kamiki’s shoulders, and he gives an absolutely stellar performance here – he embodies the painful guilt, the fear, the terror, the trauma, the longing for love and fatherhood that he can’t bring himself to embrace because he doesn’t think he’s worthy of happiness. The other characters are drawn with equally loving complexity, such as the sweet-natured Noriko played by Minabe, tormented engineer Tachibana, Shikishima’s lovable fellow minesweepers, and Sumiko, a neighbor who initially blames Shikishima for the deaths of her children but helps care for Akiko despite that.
And since “Godzilla Minus One” won an Oscar for best visual effects, it would be unfair not to praise them. The effects on a movie that cost a mere $10-12 million are absolutely superb – Godzilla has rarely looked this good, and the widespread destruction looks painfully realistic. Even without being compared to the kind of half-baked VFX that currently comes out of companies like Disney, this is a masterpiece.
“Godzilla Minus One” is a movie that is deeply, richly satisfying, both as a kaiju movie and as a human drama – a triumph for Toho and the Godzilla series, and an outstanding film overall.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
If I could succinctly describe Taran Matharu’s new book, it would simply be: “Eragon” if it were written for adults, by an adult.
Which is to say, “Dragon Rider” is a high fantasy with a lot of cultural richness and depth rather than Star Wars/Lord of the Rings tropes. It’s set in a world reminiscent of our own, but with soul-bindings to fantastical creatures like gryphons, dragons, chamroshes and various prehistoric beasts, and gives us a suitably underdog hero with the odds against him – and a baby dragon to help him bounce back.
As the third, least important son to the dead king of the Steppefolk, Jai is kept as a hostage in the Sabine Empire’s court. Specifically, as the personal attendant to the elderly, neglected ex-emperor Leonid. It gives him a front row seat to the dynamics of the new emperor’s court, but no respect – and a lot of hostility from the crown prince Titus and his friends, who see the Steppefolk as their barbarian inferiors. When Jai catches wind of a conspiracy against the visiting Dansk king, whose daughter is to marry Titus, he does his best to stop anyone from dying… only to lose everyone important to him.
And soon he finds himself lost in a freezing wilderness, surrounded by corpses… and most unexpectedly with a dragon egg. Without meaning to, he ends up soulbinding to the white infant dragon – and also ends up running into a prickly Dansk handmaiden named Frida, who knows something about being bound to a dragon. To save himself and his hatchling, Jai needs to get back to the Steppefolk, but staying alive in Sabine territory is the bigger immediate problem.
Taran Matharu’s fantasy world is reminiscent of our own in a lot of ways, mostly culturally: the Dansk (Northern European), the Steppefolk (Central Asians), the Sabines (Southern Europeans) and hints of other cultures like the Phoenix Empire (East Asia). It lends a lot of richness and depth to a fantasy story that is basically about becoming the spiritually-bonded partner of a mythical creature, and Matharu manages to evoke the feeling of a lot of history and complexity behind his tale.
It’s also distinctive because it takes some cues from Chinese cultivation fiction; it’s not a precise copying of its tropes, but the general ideas are there and integrated into the idea of soulbinding. The person in question learns how to acquire and store magical energy in a physical core, becoming stronger, physically purer and in possession of magical abilities. But it doesn’t make them all-powerful, and having a dragon doesn’t really keep Jai from being in constant danger (especially since she’s so small). So there’s plenty of suspense, action, grit, gore and dramatic confrontations.
Jai himself is a good underdog hero – not particularly exceptional, but he starts off as an ordinary kid that nobody expects anything from, relegated to a role nobody wants (which involves wiping an old man’s butt). He first starts to flower when he deduces that a conspiracy might be afoot, and tries to do the right thing – only for everything to implode in front of him. His relationships with other characters are pretty well-developed and enjoyable – his potentially romantic, slightly prickly connection with Frida, his immediate loving bond with Winter, and the quasi-father/son relationship he has with Leonid (who, to complicate things, personally executed Jai’s actual father). And then there’s Rufus, the mysterious old warrior with his own motives and complex history.
“Dragon Rider” takes a little time to get to any serious draconic action, but the destination is well-worth the journey. Well-rounded, vibrant and gritty, with plenty of room to flower in the future.
The Forest 