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.
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