Review: Bird and September Says

Posted on September 4, 2025 by philipbrasor

Filmmakers create alternative worlds in their work by both design and necessity, but often in their endeavor to recreate naturalism they do the opposite and show us things we’ve never seen before. It’s difficult to determine what Andrea Arnold’s intentions are in the somewhat fanciful Bird, which is centered on a community of squatters in an English suburb. The central family consists of a young single father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), and his two children, 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and 17-year-old Hunter (Jason Buda), who are products of two different women. Bug was obviously a teen when Hunter was born, and now Hunter, it seems, is about to be a father himself. Moreover, Bug has just gotten engaged to a woman he met 3 months ago, a prospect Bailey finds repugnant. Nevertheless, Bug insists she be a bridesmaid and asserts his admittedly dodgy parental authority, a turn that at first feels borderline abusive but, as it turns out, is more along the lines of Bug trying to be responsible in his own way. The dynamics here are both naturalistic and tragic, though Arnold’s purposes are murky.

Bailey is the movie’s center, and her view of the world is characteristically wondrous. She dreams of flying and seems attracted to birds in ways that have a magical quality to them. At one point she helps Hunter communicate with his pregnant girlfriend, who has been confined to her bedroom by her parents in an attempt to discourage Hunter. Bailey enlists the help of a crow, which delivers Hunter’s message to the girl by flying to her window. Bailey’s affinity for animals, especially feathered ones, is not primal but intuitive, as if she knew something about them other people didn’t, but it’s also easy to guess that it’s all in her young head. Still, she’s not a fantasist. She sees the awfulness of the situation across town at her mother’s apartment, which the mother shares with Bailey’s half-sisters and a truly abusive boyfriend who makes Bug look like St. Francis. But what to make of the title character, a man-child (Franz Rogowski) whom Bailey stumbles upon while walking in a field and who says he’s looking for the wastrel father who abandoned him as a child. Bird has learned he lives nearby, and Bailey offers to help him, though the viewer may wonder at times if Bird isn’t also at least partly a product of her imagination, even when he saves her life.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because it’s essentially Bailey’s movie. We’re just invited into those episodes that Arnold thinks are important for understanding how a girl living under such circumstances copes with those circumstances. Hunter copes by becoming a vigilante against the kind of serial abusers this environment engenders. Bailey is not so proactive, but she is honest, which is why she bristles at Bug’s striving for domestic normality amidst a life of economic and emotional chaos, even if she loves him in spite of the chaos. The world Arnold describes is both believable and confounding, and vivid to the max. 

Though it may be unnecessarily reductive to point out right off the bat that actor and novice director Ariane Labed is married to Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, such intelligence makes it easier to understand the weirdness of her first feature, September Says, which, like Bird, envisions a world conjured by adolescent sensibilities. Based on a novel, the story centers on two sisters who are inseparable due to their total self-isolation from conventional society, not to mention from their confused single mother (Rakhee Thakrar), who, as the movie opens, seems to have decided long ago that the world her daughters inhabit is unassailable. 

September is the name of the older sister (Pascale Kann), who lords it over the younger one, July (Mia Tharia), with the latter’s full consent. Often communicating in a language that consists of animal noises, the girls are summarily shunned at school as weirdos. Consequently, July counts on September to protect her from reality and thus submits to her sister’s every whim, no matter how strange it may be. Violence ensues, not out of necessity but rather as a function of inevitability given the odd universe these girls move through. Their mother moves them from what appears to be the English countryside to a cabin in rural Ireland, where things become even stranger. 

Effectively creepy and dramatically fascinating, September Says isn’t very coherent. The set pieces have power but feel like a series of non sequiturs—they don’t hang together in a way that would make sense of this rarefied world and the people who inhabit it. Had Labed attempted something like a horror movie, she might have found a more consistent tone and some relevant theme to latch on to. This is mostly mood in search of an idea. 

Bird opens Sept. 5 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (03-5367-1144), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707). 

September Says opens Sept. 5 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645), White Cine Quinto Shibuya (03-6712-7225).

Bird home page in Japanese

September Says home page in Japanese

Bird photo (c) 2024 House Bird Limited, Ad Vitam Production, Arte France Cinema, British Broadcasting Corporation, The British Film Institute, Pinky Promise Film Fund II Holdings LLC, FirstGen Content LLC and Bird Film LLC

September Says photo (c) Sackville Film and Television Productions Limited/MFB GmbH/Crybaby Limited, British Broadcasting Corporation, ZDF/arte 2024

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Review: How to Train Your Dragon

Posted on September 3, 2025 by philipbrasor

One of the disadvantages of advanced age is that the past is increasingly telescoped, and when it came to my attention that DreamWorks had made a semi-live version of its animated hit How to Train Your Dragon, I immediately thought, “Didn’t the original just come out a few years ago?”, only to soon discover it was released in 2010. Not sure if 15 years justifies a new version that is, story-wise and, from what I dimly remember, visually almost exactly the same except that maybe a new generation of kids is ripe for something like this—if they didn’t actually see any of the sequels, the most recent of which came out in 2019. What I also remember is that the original Dragon, dreamt up by the guys who created Lilo & Stitch for Disney, was as close as DreamWorks got at the time to Pixar’s potent mix of character self-actualization and viable humor, but only by a stretch. It’s still closer in feeling to Shrek.

To recap for those who live on a remote island like the characters in the story, a colony of Vikings is constantly terrorized by dragons who swoop out of the sky and kill their cattle and burn their houses, so over the centuries a dragon-hunting culture has evolved. The leader, Stoick (Gerard Butler, who voiced the same character in the original), is a dyed-in-the-wool dragon hater who hopes his adolescent son, Hiccup (Mason Thames), takes up his mantle, but Hiccup is a bit of a wuss, and while bumbling through his dragon-slaying lessons he happens upon a wounded lizard he nurses back to health and names Toothless. Of course, you see where this is going and it ends up exactly where you’d expect it to end up. The director, Dean DeBlois, slightly skews his interpolation of Hiccup’s romantic interest, Astrid (Nico Parker), who is the total opposite of Hiccup—a kickass dragon killer in the making who has to have her mind blown in order to understand why dragons have been harrassing the islanders for centuries and that they shouldn’t be slaughtered. 

The fact that everyone puts their all into this cash grab gives it more heart than it probably deserves, and because CGI has improved by leaps and bounds in the years since the original came out, in a way it’s an improvement. After all, you come for this kind of fantasy to be viscerally impressed, and the dragons are not only ridiculously cute, but pretty lifelike. The same can’t be said for the human characters, who are perhaps even more cartoony than the ones in the original.

Opens Sept. 5 in Japanese subtitled and Japanese dubbed versions in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

How to Train Your Dragon home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Universal Pictures

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Media watch: School teacher pedophile group seems to have been around a while

Posted on September 1, 2025 by philipbrasor
Online meeting of education ministry July 10 (Mainichi Shimbun)

In early July, the education ministry called an emergency meeting with local school superintendents asking them “to strictly enforce teacher discipline and eradicate sexual violence against students.” The meeting was called in the wake of media reports that two public elementary school teachers, one from Nagoya and the other from Yokohama, had been arrested for allegedly secretly recording female students and sharing the videos and images with other teachers via a group chat. Later, teachers in Hiroshima and Fukuoka were also arrested for the same offense.

It’s believed that these individuals and others belong to a group of about ten male teachers who share upskirt photos of elementary school girls and videos of girls with emphasis on their undergarments. On June 30, the Nagoya municipal education committee revealed that a 34-year-old teacher who worked at an elementary school in the city had been arrested for multiple counts of “vandalism” after he “deposited” a bodily fluid on the backpack of a 15-year-old girl in Nagoya Station. It should be noted that it wasn’t the first time this teacher had been accused of such behavior. He’d already been suspected of doing the same thing twice before, with a musical instrument and then a school lunch bowl being the targets of his bizarre folly. He is also believed to be a member of the aforementioned teachers group. 

If it sounds odd that the teacher may have gotten away with his act twice before being arrested, prior to the meeting on July 10, Education Minister Toshiko Abe called on any teachers in Japan who were carrying out such offenses to come forward and identify themselves. Obviously, it took time for the ministry to develop a sense of crisis over the matter. In any case, media have indicated that whatever the police and prosecutors do, the ministry will definitely punish the teacher this time. 

Continue reading →
Posted in Media | Tagged | Leave a comment

Review: Love Lies Bleeding

Posted on August 28, 2025 by philipbrasor

My reaction to the overall visual and aural aesthetic of Rose Glass’s thriller was obviously affected by other recent movies that looked and sounded the same, in particular the work of the Safdie brothers and Mandy, the Nicolas Cage vehicle that many feel is some kind of genius reworking of the splatter genre. There’s something both gritty and calculated about these films, which put on a show of minute-to-minute risk-taking that can spin your head around. And in the present case for once I think the Japanese title matches the movie better than the original one. Love on Steroids is more accurately descriptive of the film’s presentation than Love Lies Bleeding, which, after all, is the title of an Elton John song. For one thing, a character actually injects steroids and suffers mightily for it. Her love, however, is not only undiminished in the process, but becomes as enhanced as her physique.

Her name is Jackie, and she’s played by Katy O’Brien, who juggles acting with a passion for martial arts, which comes in handy in the film. It’s 1989, and Jackie, an adopted orphan, has left what sounds like a broken home in Oklahoma in order to participate in a bodybuilding contest in Vegas, stopping off along the way in a beat-up New Mexico town to sleep rough and get in some workouts at a local gym, where she hooks up with the manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart), a cynical but vulnerable loner. They embark on a passionate love affair before Lou realizes that Jackie has scored a part-time job at her father (Ed Harris, with ridiculous hair extensions) Lou Sr.’s shooting range. Lou is effectively estranged from her dad for reasons that soon become clear, but in any case, Jackie finds out that the dysfunctions of Lou’s family are more serious than even hers, since Lou Sr. is the town’s resident crime kingpin whose main line of work is running guns into Mexico. But the dysfunction is mainly represented by Lou’s mulleted brother-in-law, JJ (Dave Franco), who is abusive toward her beloved sister, Beth (Jena Malone). Once Lou starts passing on human growth hormones to her new lover in an attempt to help her with the contest, things get hairy fast, with Jackie redirecting her urge for retribution against those who once abused her. 

The most convincing element of Glass’s and Weronika Tofilska’s script is the love story. We only learn of these two women’s backgrounds in sparingly offered tidbits of information, but the two actors are so into their roles that we can see the damage their characters have suffered in every gesture and line. Their coming together feels not only natural but somehow preordained, and that passion makes up for a lot of the silliness that drives the plotting, which turns gory and campily regressive as the movie proceeds. People die in gratuitous fashion, and some of the killings are morally questionable, especially when they’re carried out by sympathetic characters. The aforementioned style seems designed to get us to accept these inconsistencies, as if they’re the sort of things that should happen in a movie that looks and sounds like this, but while I enjoyed it up to a point, by the end the violence aims for nothing more than sensation. 

Opens Aug. 29 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

Love Lies Bleeding home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Crack in the Earth LLC; Channel Four Television Corporation

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Media watch: Loan or lease, you pay for it all in the end

Posted on August 24, 2025 by philipbrasor
Toyota Alphard

Earlier this month Asahi Shimbun reporter Yotaro Hamada, whose specialty is social welfare, commented on an editorial he had written in July about Japanese opposition parties’ campaign pledges to reduce the consumption tax and social security premiums. Hamada insisted that such cuts would lead to other cuts in pension payouts and social welfare for health care. Later, a physician mentioned Hamada’s editorial on social media, saying his comment reminded him of the “zankure Alphard” phenomenon. Hamada was unfamiliar with the term and had to go to the internet to find out what it meant. His research led him to an animated song on YouTube.

Alphard is a high-end minivan manufactured by Toyota, the price of which starts at ¥5 million. “Zankure” means “residual credit,” meaning the balance of money owed after a payment on a loan or revolving credit plan is made. The animated song depicts a young family that has bought an Alphard using a special type of loan plan where the buyer pays off the loan for a new car until the end of the fifth year, at which point the buyer gives the car back to the maker in a trade-in deal. It’s apparently a very popular credit scheme because young families really like Alphard, which has a certain high-class cachet, and the scheme allows them to afford what is in essence a very expensive vehicle. The gist of the scheme is that when the buyer signs the contract for the car, the projected trade-in value is subtracted from the price and the loan is based on the difference. Consequently, monthly payments are lower than they would be for a normal loan. 

In the song, which has a parodistic quality to it, the lyrics say that even though you only make ¥200,000 a month, you can buy an Alphard. However, the song also points out that the interest on this special loan is higher than it would be for a typical car loan, and that if during the five years of “ownership” the buyer exceeds a certain limit on the amount of kilometers driven, then more money must be paid, meaning that the “zankure” or residual credit must be reimbursed to the maker. The same thing happens if the car is returned with any damage, and according to some commentators, even the slightest scratch in the finish could require large post-trade-in payments. Apparently, there is a lot of fine print in the zankure contract, which is why the doctor likened it to Hamada’s explanation of the consequences of tax cuts and reduced premiums—in the end, you’re still likely to pay the full amount. 

Continue reading →
Posted in Media | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Review: Land of Happiness

Posted on August 23, 2025 by philipbrasor

The assassination of President Park Chung-hee in 1979 has received a lot of cinematic attention in South Korea recently, as if floodgates had been opened. Several years ago there was The Man Who Stood Next, which thoroughly probed the background of the killing, and the end of 2023 saw the box office hit 12.12 The Day, which dealt with the post-assassination coup. A third film, Land of Happiness, opened about a year ago in Korea and mainly focuses on the court martial of one army officer who participated in the assassination. It was shown at last year’s Busan International Film Festival as part of a Special Program dedicated to the films of actor Lee Sun-kyun, who committed suicide some months before the festival. It was Lee’s last movie, and while he does play the soldier in question, he’s not the star, which is Cho Jung-seok, the actor who plays his lawyer. It’s quite a workout, in fact, and given Lee’s typically subdued acting demeanor, it surely overshadowed the late actor’s performance. As for the film, it’s well made and jerks sufficient tears, but the story has been over-fictionalized just for that purpose. More interesting is the casting of Yoo Jae-myung as General Chun Do-hwan, the man who led the coup explicated in 12.12, and as in 12.12 the producers decided to change his name, though everybody knows who he’s supposed to be. In that movie he was played by Hwang Jung-min as a mad villain, whereas Yoo sees him as a slick mafia kingpin whose evil is more sedate and cunning. It’s quite a contrast, and only proves how much the Korean film industry is willing to manipulate history in accordance with its aims.

Lee plays Col. Park Tae-joo as someone who was understandably reluctant to take part in the assassination, as shown in numerous patchy flashbacks that cover the incident. He was arrested and eventually executed for treason, and much of the film covers the trial, which was a court martial since Lee was still an active soldier at the time, even though on the day of the murder he was working for the KCIA, whose chief plotted the killing. Consequently, many people, including the hot shot ambulance chaser, Jeong In-hoo (Cho), thinks the trial should be a public one, but that would make it more difficult for future strongman Chun to manipulate the proceedings. It’s obvious from Choo Chang-min’s expressionistic direction that the military tribunal is as corrupt as a Trump land deal, and most of the intrigue involves Jeong finding legal ways to get around the judges’ pronouncements. As a result, the plot has a furtive, incoherent quality, what with all the jurisprudential eureka moments followed by dramatic deflations. Korean audiences know the fate of Col. Park, who doesn’t do much to defend himself, having resolved to accept whatever punishment he receives because he’s a military man of principle. This nature drives the wily Jeong crazy, because he can’t convince him to stand up for himself. The conflict is compelling on paper but renders Lee’s last performance even more enervated that it usually is. You shrug at his compliance.

As already mentioned, much of the story has been contrived for maximum effect, but the transparency of that contrivance has the opposite effect: What can you do about the past, especially when everyone is over-acting? 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Land of Happiness home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Next Entertainment World & Papas Film & Oscar10 Studio

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Ballerina

Posted on August 22, 2025 by philipbrasor

The John Wick cinematic universe was built piecemeal in that it started out with a standard revenge story that was so popular it spun off its own underlying mythos. The problem with this methodology is that it was difficult to drop into any separate narrative, be it one of the sequels or the spinoff TV series, and understand what was really going on since the mythos was deep and wide and rather pretentious, what with all the talk about arcane codes of honor and blood rituals. It went beyond the standard assassin story into some kind of extra-dimensional realm with its own moral dogma. So what’s refreshing about Ballerina, a spinoff that takes place within the exact same world, is that it lays out its own mythos in one convenient package, and while it doesn’t say anything new about the world it describes, at least it’s intelligible.

The ballerina is Eve (Ana de Armas), whose father was assassinated by representatives of a death cult whose leader, the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), accuses him of betraying the cult by trying to withhold Eve from its designs. Eve barely escapes and come to the attention of Winston (Ian McShane), the manager of the Continental Hotel, which services the needs of the international assassin elite. He delivers the girl to the director (Anjelica Huston) of Ruska Roma, a ballet school-cum-assassin academy, where she learns how to pirouette and kick ass, though she seems better at the latter than the former. During her tutelage, Eve makes the brief acquaintance of super assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves), who is presented to her as someone who has strayed from the precepts of this world and thus isn’t to be emulated, but somehow Eve is changed by the encounter and while she does as she is told and stoically completes her murderous assignments (which always seem to take place in high-end dance clubs), she’s not entirely a team player, and during one particularly gnarly fight she spies a tattoo on the arm of an assailant and recognizes it as belonging to the cult that killed her father. The director forbids her from pursuing the matter because, apparently, the Ruska Roma and the cult have an ages-old understanding that they will not interfere in each other’s butcherous affairs. Naturally, Eve does not obey, and with the underhanded help of Winston searches out the cult.

At this point there is still more than an hour of movie left, meaning plenty of time and opportunity for the violent set pieces that the Wick franchise is famous for—though I have to say, much of the action here is less balletic than it was in the last John Wick movie. At this point, I can’t say I’m any more impressed by the facility with which these set pieces are staged and edited, if, in fact, I ever was, but there’s something to be said for a simple revenge story told in a linear fashion with all the essential plot points spelled out clearly and logically. Not sure if that should be the qualifying requirement for a good action flick, but it was enough for me. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Ballerina home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Review: Parthenope

Posted on August 21, 2025 by philipbrasor

Paolo Sorrentino may not be the most characteristically Italian filmmaker, but he’s obviously the most self-conscious one, an attribute that could be extended to his status in post-New Wave European cinema. Many of the themes of his latest film, the title of which is the name of the lead character, a woman (played until her early 30s by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta) whose beauty is so “disruptive” that it makes it a challenge for her to live anything like a normal existence, come across as cliches: the search for meaning (or, in Parthenope’s case, “answers to all my questions”), the enigma of “home,” the future as an uncharted land. Sorrentino explores these matters with a visual gusto that eventually fails to make the kind of intellectual points he seems to be driving at. Parthenope remains a cipher whose main interest for the viewer is in whether or not she is sexually available, because that quality seems to be hard-wired into every scene.

Born to a well-to-do Naples family whose patriarch runs a shipping company for an older man—her godfather, thus giving him the right to name her (after a mythical figure associated with Mt. Vesuvius)—Parthenope is blessed with more than just female pulchritude. She is both intelligent and remarkably intuitive, but also, as her off-and-on would-be boyfriend from childhood, Sandrino (Dario Aita), tells her before they part forever, “presumptuous and ruthless.” She majors in anthropology in university though she claims, even to the much older professor who recognizes her talents, to have no idea “what anthropology means.” It’s difficult to tell if Sorrentino is deriding academic self-seriousness or showing off his own considerable worldliness in the clever banter between Parthenope and her professor-patron (Silvio Orlando), and this ambiguity of intention affects other plot points as they develop. There’s a totally gratuitous sequence where, while on vacation in Capri with her brother, Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), and Sandrino, she meets John Cheever (Gary Oldman, constantly surrounded by dozens of empty liquor bottles), an author she has always admired. At first I thought Cheever was a figment of her imagination, but Sorrentino doesn’t make that apparent. Likewise, in the midst of her studies, Parthenope is scouted by a talent agent, who hooks her up with a veteran film star (Isabella Ferrari, mostly in shadow due to the character’s botched cosmetic surgery) to turn her into an actress, a gambit that falls flat after a comically acidic encounter with an embittered starlet (Luisa Rainieri) who goes off on how lowly the people of Naples are (she should know, since she left the place as soon as she could). So it’s back to university where Parthenope soon outshines her fellow thesis candidates with a study of “the cultural frontiers of the miraculous.” 

But while Parthenope’s life journey does encounter potholes (the suicide of her brother, who is in love with her; the failing fortunes of her father; an abortion) professional success seems to be her birthright, and Sorrentino can’t quite make us believe that it doesn’t have everything to do with her sexual allure. While conducting research for her thesis, she interviews a priest (“the devil, actually,” comments her professor) who will introduce her to the secrets of the Miracle of San Gennaro but who also manages to seduce her, as if her yielding to him was not just part of her sentimental education, but a prerequisite for understanding the crux of her thesis. Sex in pursuit of intellectual rigor: How Italian can you get?

In Italian and English. Opens Aug. 22 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

Parthenope home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 The Apartment Srl-Numero 10 Srl-Pathe Films-Piperfilm Srl/Gianni Fiorto

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Review: Land of Bad

Posted on August 15, 2025 by philipbrasor

Not as awful as its title, this military actioner mainly gets by with the help of Russell Crowe in another of his late career moves into B-movie territory. He plays a U.S. Air Force officer named Eddie “Reaper” Grimm whose lack of normal social niceties (he’s now on his fourth marriage) has stalled his career. Though once a promising fighter pilot he’s now stuck behind a desk in Las Vegas remotely piloting drones in faraway lands. The plot has to do with a team of soldiers sent into the jungles of the Philippines to extract a captured CIA operative. None of these pros like drones, which are supposed to provide reconnaissance and pick off ambushes, because, well, they don’t like being watched. Consequently, they rail on the rookie in their midst, J.J. “Playboy” Kinney (Liam Hemsworth), because he’s the drone liaison and has never been in this kind of situation before. 

Suffice to say that the mission goes sideways really fast, leaving only Playboy to complete it with Reaper’s help. The enemy is a Muslim militant group that likes to cut off heads and torture anyone they meet, so naturally Playboy has his work cut out for him, as does Reaper, who is constantly being distracted by superiors who don’t take him seriously enough—he is an asshole—and the fact that his current wife is about to go into labor. Crowe is the perfect fit. 

The movie’s action particulars are pretty rote, but the drone stuff is interesting, since the movie, through Reaper, explains both the limitations and the advantages of the technology in a combat situation. Obviously, it’s not infallible, but when it’s down you really miss it.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).

Land of Bad home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 JTAC Productions LLC

Posted in Movies | Tagged | Leave a comment

Review: Jurassic World: Rebirth

Posted on August 8, 2025 by philipbrasor

I’ve never expected coherence from the Jurassic franchise, and the 7th installment didn’t challenge those expectations at all, though its development is at least linear. Whatever associations its story has with past chapters either don’t exist or flew over my head, but at this point in the renewed dino saga, the giant lizards are no longer terrorizing urban centers and have somehow been banished to uninhabited territories around the equator, where they live in relative peace because it’s illegal for humans to visit them. Sounds like good sense to me, but, of course, you can’t build a movie out of that sort of premise, so along comes a guy named Krebs (Rupert Friend) who works for a pharmaceutical company that wants to tap some mutant dino DNA for a miracle heart medication, and that means sneaking onto the tropical island featured in the last Jurassic World movie where there was a laboratory carrying out doomed mutant experiments. Krebs enlists a so-called extraction expert, Zora (Scarlett Johansson), a large boat for hire and its skipper, Duncan (Mahershala Ali), and the usual bespectacled paleontologist, Dr. Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), to help him with his mission by promising a lot of money. As Loomis so helpfully explains, the public’s interest in dinosaurs has diminished greatly in recent years, so work for people in his profession isn’t as plentiful as it used to be. I’ll have to hand it to screenwriter David Koepp: Cynicism was something else I never expected from the franchise. 

For what it’s worth, the set pieces by director Gareth Edwards do the trick, though many of them involve a family on a sailboat cruise who are attacked by sea-dwelling dinosaurs and end up being rescued by Krebs’ contingent. It’s a complication that provides for the kind of chase-and-gobble incidents the franchise is famous for, but the family—a dad, two teenage daughters, and one daughter’s ne’er-do-well BF—never really justifies its presence except as dino bait. Zora’s gymnastic feats to secure dinosaur blood samples using Loomis’s boomeranging dart invention is more interesting in the way she employs geometric common sense to get what she needs rather than brute force or firepower. When she’s set upon by pteradactyls while raiding a nest, Edwards makes the most of the cliffside vista. In fact, Rebirth may be the most beautiful Jurassic movie simply because it’s all in the wild—except for a cheap joke scene in an abandoned convenience store. 

In addition to the requisite T-Rex pursuit and the cute baby dino-as-cat-stand-in, there are a few mutants that look nothing like dinosaurs so you have to hand it to the SFX crew: Like Loomis, they may wonder if there’s still an audience out there for dinosaurs, so they hedge their bets.

In Japanese subtitled and dubbed versions. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Jurassic World: Rebirth home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Universal Studios

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment