June kaiju frenzy

I don't think I've been intentionally tailoring my viewing to what can broadly be defined as kaiju movies, but the fact remains, June is only half over and I have already seen four movies that can be said to feature kaiju. 

Two of them have Japanese origins and two do not.

The first -- chronologically, but also in my heart -- was Godzilla Minus One, whose title made think it was going to be some sort of high concept movie. Having watched the movie and gaining no clearer understanding of what "minus one" means, I've decided that it must be a numbering convention to indicate a prequel, although I don't know what it would be a prequel to. (I looked up if there was a movie called Godzilla Zero, but there are no exact matches for that on IMDB.) Anyway, I thought it was great.

The next weekend, it was Netflix again as Ultraman: Rising debuted. This film has game-changing animation, but still gives a nod to its anime origins. It involves the titular superhero from Japanese comics, who is about the size of a kaiju and whose purpose is to save Japanese cities from them. In this instances, he also comes into possession of an orphaned baby kaiju and tries to raise it, though even the baby kaiju is massive and can do a lot of unwitting damage. As a cherry on top of this, it's also a baseball movie as Ultraman's alter ego is a massive baseball star in the mold of Shohei Ohtani. (And incidentally, this also has a title that sounds like it should be a prequel.)

The same night that I finished Ultraman, which I had started too late on Friday night, I also watched The Mist, which I wrote about yesterday. Although you would not call the creatures in this movie traditional kaiju, mostly because the movie is set in Maine, some of these beasties are as tall as a kaiju and just as bloodthirsty.

Then finally on Sunday afternoon I watched the original King Kong from 1933. That's right, just like that without any fanfare. I say "without any fanfare" because for some ten years now I have been considering this the movie I am most embarrassed about never having seen, so I thought when I finally did see it, it would have to be some special occasion. The special occasion was that I still that the projector set up from watching the Celtics game the day before, and this had been in my Kanopy queue for too long. I ended up being pretty wowed by how much they were capable of doing, only six years into the sound era -- and I use that just as a general gauge of cinematic sophistication at the time, not specifically because King Kong's achievements are groundbreaking from a sound perspective. But I found the stop motion pretty damn good, and was surprised they could do it as well as that at the time. I can only imagine the movie magic people must have felt when they went to the cinema that night.

Now that I've noticed the pattern, any future June kaiju movies will be tainted.

Which Japanese movie should I watch?

I'm going out for dinner tonight with some old co-workers, something we do semi-regularly but actually failed to do even once in 2023. It's long overdue.

We're going to Carlton, whose Lygon Street is lined with Italian restaurants with outdoor seating. I love eating out on Lygon Street and also do it too rarely. It feels like an event. 

Carlton is also where Cinema Nova is. Cinema Nova used to be my favorite theater when I lived a lot closer to this area, but they stopped accepting my critics card. Combine that with moving farther away and it too became a very infrequent venue for me to visit, much as I like it.

Since I'll be right in the area, I won't hesitate to drop the $20 on a movie when we finish dinner tonight. The question will be, which of two Japanese movies I'd like to squeeze in before my list closes should I watch?

The obvious option is Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, which I only recently determined is the same movie that was originally described to us as How Do You Live? I suppose the new title is a bit more user friendly.

I have never actually ranked a Miyazaki movie in real time. For the longest time, the only Miyazaki movie I'd seen was Spirited Away, which I watched two years after it was in theaters, though I've been steadily correcting this blind spot over the past decade. I'm now down to the point where the only features he's directed that I haven't seen are his oldest (The Cabinet of Cagliostro) and what had been his newest (The Wind Rises). Now I've got a third blind spot that I feel like I should correct, especially since this is probably my last opportunity to rank a Miyazaki feature.

I'd always planned to watch it, as it has already been out for more than a month here. But I'd wanted to watch a subtitled version rather than a dubbed version, and the screening I got invited to was dubbed. This additional layer of logistical complexity just caused it to slip through the cracks. Nova has both, and the subbed version starts at 9:10, well clear of our anticipated 6:30 dinner meeting.

But in checking out the times at Nova, I also noticed Godzilla Minus One is playing. This is a movie I only started to hear about maybe three weeks ago, but I immediately heard good things. It's directed by Takashi Yamazaki, whom I've never heard of.

How much do I need another Godzilla movie? Not very much. I rolled my eyes when we were the movies the other night and saw a trailer for the next Godzilla vs. King Kong movie. Haven't we exhausted this IP yet?

But a Japanese-made movie, which has a twist that I can't remember at this point (and don't want to look up because the surprise might be delightful), is another story. I don't know that I've ever seen a movie about Godzilla made by the Japanese, and that includes the 1954 original. Godzilla Minus One starts ten minutes later at 9:30.

It may come down to how much wine I drink at dinner.

If it's not very much wine, the doubtlessly slower-paced Miyazaki movie may not be too much for me. If it's too much wine, a Godzilla movie may be more my speed.

There are some pretty high stakes to this -- or at least, high stakes by the very low stakes baseline of my year-end list. Because there are three must-have movies that open here on January 18th -- Priscilla, The Iron Claw and All of Us Strangers -- it's likely that whichever Japanese movie I don't watch tonight won't get watched at all.

If you are reading this in timely fashion, post me your thoughts and try to sway me one way or another.