Movie Reviews
Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe Anime Movie Review
Modern folklore-focused anime and manga owe a huge debt to the work of 1960s manga Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro‘s artist and writer Shigeru Mizuki. A second world war veteran, the traumatic amputation of his left arm, due to an air raid explosion, never held back his pre-existing artistic ambitions. An avid researcher of international folklore, he poured his encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural not only into his wildly influential manga, but also into countless factual tomes – some of which are available in English. Mizuki made his journey to the otherworld in 2015, at the age of 93, leaving an unparalleled legacy that this movie attempts to do justice to, acting as a prequel to the most recent anime adaptation and as an entry point for newcomers.
I’ll admit it now – before watching this, I was only familiar with Kitaro, and Mizuki’s work in general. Mainly on the strength of Scotland Loves Anime’s presenter Jonathan Clements‘ urgings, in preparation for this review I sought out several volumes of the original manga and episodes of the 2018 TV anime. It appears I am now very much a Mizuki fan, though not necessarily due to this movie.
Oddly, while Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro‘s TV incarnation is aimed primarily at children (with a theme song that claims it’s more fun to be a ghost because school attendance isn’t required), Birth of Kitaro is a grim and gritty horror film targeted at an adult audience. It loosely adapts a short manga chapter from 1966, however only uses the most basic of elements from it, crafting a mostly original story, tonally removed from the progenitor TV show. There’s even an “uncut” version, released only very recently in Japan, that dials up the already bloody violence even further. Birth of Kitaro has an unusual pedigree: it’s written by Hiroyuki Yoshino of Macross Frontier and Dance in the Vampire Bund, while directed by Gō Koga, best known for Precure and Digimon.
We’re first subjected to a baffling non-sequitur of a prologue that clumsily attempts to tie into TV show continuity with an appearance from Kitaro and pals in the “modern” day before jarringly segueing into the film’s primarily historical setting – it’s not a promising start. Most of the action transpires in 1956, during Japan’s post-war Showa-era economic recovery. Protagonist Mizuki (who is apparently a stand-in for author Mizuki himself) is an ambitious middle-management businessman who works for the “Imperial Blood Bank,” a company run by the mysterious Ryuga family. When the family head dies, Mizuki is summoned by his boss to the Ryuga’s remote mountain village estate to observe the transfer of power to the deceased head’s nominated heir. As expected from this genre, events don’t exactly proceed according to plan.
It’s immediately obvious this village is a strange place – accessible only by dangerous, unmaintained mountain roads, even locals from nearby areas avoid it entirely. Mizuki’s arrival is viewed with either novelty (from a village child), interest (from the main female character), or outright hostility (from most of the rest of the cast). His status as an unwelcome outsider is constantly reinforced by various senior Ryuga family members. Once poor Mizuki realizes he’s now trapped in a Hinamizawa/Twin Peaks/Royston Vasey-esque situation, it’s too late. This section of the film is slow-moving, perhaps as an attempt to build dread, but so many characters involved in random mafia/yakuza movie-style politicking are introduced that it’s extremely hard to follow. Eventually, this doesn’t matter, as most of the extended cast are murdered horribly anyway. There’s a lot of death in Birth of Kitaro, probably unsurprising for a character that fans already know will be born from the corpse of his mother, as the last of his kind. (So, spoilers for the uninitiated… I guess?)
Kitaro himself only barely appears in this prequel – instead, the focus is on the horribly-out-of-his depth Mizuki who finds an ally in the mysterious, white-haired, googly-eyed interloper he named “Gegero”. (The Japanese sound “ge” typically means “creepy” or “icky”, and when repeated like “gegege” it adds emphasis.) Gegero is really Kitaro‘s father, Medama-oyaji, who is destined to become a talking, disembodied eyeball who resides in Kitaro‘s empty left eye socket.
Mizuki and Gegero investigate the creepy Ryuga family’s secrets to discover the truth of “Substance M,” an experimental blood product marketed by Mizuki’s employers. It doesn’t take a doctorate in hematology to intuit that the Ryuga are up to no good. Once all of the narrative pieces are in place (and various Ryuga family members are either impaled by trees or otherwise mutilated horrifically), the plot finally rushes headlong into batshit insanity. The final forty minutes or so are a relentless descent into stunningly animated violent hell, with some truly breathtaking action sequences. A particular highlight is Gegero’s battle with an army of armored ninja dudes atop a multi-leveled tower, depicted with stylish, fluid, incredibly kinetic animation. A final confrontation centered around a demonic underground tree almost reaches Evangelion-esque levels of surreal metaphysical nonsense.
Birth of Kitaro‘s ultimate antagonist is somewhat difficult to take seriously (the audience audibly laughed when they revealed themselves), but really isn’t that incongruous when viewed in the context of the often goofy manga. I do wonder that if there had been a bit more of that unselfconscious goofiness added to this film, it might have been more entertaining. Without author Mizuki’s more whimsical influence, at times Birth of Kitaro feels disappointingly like a more by-the-numbers anime horror without much personality of its own. Its overall seriousness meshes uncomfortably with its more outlandish character designs (such as the Mizuki-accurate cartoony undead, who appear later on), and its overly complex story really doesn’t amount to anything by the end, considering the literal mountain of corpses left in the film’s wake.
Japanese folklore fans will enjoy the glimpses of yokai, like the water-borne Kappa who briefly appear, while there are plenty of rich cultural references likely to fly over the heads of most Westerners. By the time Kitaro himself arrives, we’ve seen so much death and destruction that we’re almost numb to it, so his birth scene plays as more silly than tragic. That part is adapted more or less panel-for-panel from the original manga, even if the circumstances leading up to his birth are completely different. A bookending flash-forward epilogue re-contextualizes the odd prologue in a genuinely emotionally affecting way – but doesn’t make up for the tonal disconnect that makes the opening so off-putting. It would have been better to move the prologue to the end, uniting it with the epilogue.
While I enjoyed the action aspects of Birth of Kitaro, I can’t say it works that well as an entry point for new fans. Tonally, it’s completely different from both manga and TV shows, plus it’s also quite dull and plodding in its first half. Existing fans might get a kick out of this darker, more violent incarnation of the franchise, but I’d recommend newcomers start with the manga or 2018 TV series, which a lot more fun.
Movie Reviews
Review: Denzel Washington steals the spotlight in Gladiator II
Gladiator II
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by David Scarpa
Starring Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Lior Raz, Derek Jacobi, with Connie Nielsen and Denzel Washington
Classification 14A; 148 minutes
Opens in theatres November 22
Hail Denzel Washington. He understood the assignment, as they say.
Washington, decked out in flowing gold lined robes and oversized jewels, brings his swagger and more to Ridley Scott’s gleefully inaccurate ancient Rome in Gladiator II, a creaky and bloated sequel that mostly falls flat whenever it strays from the Training Day star’s orbit.
Like Oliver Reed in the original, Washington is playing a calculated slave trader with a shady past. As Macrinus, he scans for talent among ravaged bodies, those who can hack each other to bits in the Colosseum but also be his “instrument.” The man’s hiding ulterior motives. Washington has a field day teasing them out.
He dances between lounging and lurching forward, his every posture, movement and gesture filled with intention. While so many of his peers in the cast feel like pawns reciting monologues, and often bellowing them out amidst the movie’s noise as if that would add impact, Washington negotiates with each line, like he’s searching for the music and the surprising notes of meaning in each word. He’s putting on a show. And the audience is going to love him for it.
Showmanship is of course a core tenet to the original Gladiator. Scott’s swords-and-sandals Spartacus-lite throwback, which won best picture at the 2001 Oscars, was all about playing up the theatricality in violence and even politics. Those thrilling battle sequences in the arena, with Russell Crowe’s Maximus leading diamond formations against chariots and swinging swords around with a grandiosity, looked incredible. The movie built its whole narrative around what can be achieved not just by feeding an audience’s bloodlust, but indulging it with artistry, while resoundingly asking, “Are you not entertained?”
This time around, Scott throws a lot more in the arena. CGI rhinos, apes, sharks and warships take up space in his digitally re-rendered Colosseum, but he’s at a loss with what to do with them. It’s just a bunch of pixels at war with each other, with human stakes left to bleed out.
Finding an anchor in Gladiator II’s stakes is also kind of hard since the movie undoes so much of what we were invested in as far as Maximus’s achievements in the first film, which ended with him killing Joaquin Phoenix’s prophetically Trump-like Caesar and handing control of Rome to the senate so the people can rule.
And yet here we are, finding Rome under the control of two new emperors, twins played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, who basically split Phoenix’s incredible performance in two. How they came into power despite Maximus’s best efforts is barely addressed. It’s especially baffling because the two come off as a pair of clownish puppets. One of them holds conversations with a monkey.
Never mind the way Scott flouts historical accuracy – like a newspaper appearing in 200 A.D. before the invention of the printing press. Gladiator II’s betrayal of the original movie’s satisfying conclusion is even more egregious. The sequel even contradicts Maximus’s final words, which I’ll leave you to revisit.
At this point I should warn you, if you want to see Gladiator II completely unspoiled, don’t continue reading. Though if you’ve seen recent trailers, or even googled who Normal People star Paul Mescal is playing, you already know what I’m about to write.
The actor, so tender and affecting in smaller films like Charlotte Wells’s sublime Aftersun and Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers, is in his beefcake-era playing a grown up Lucius, the young child of Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla. His life was in peril in the earlier movie because he was heir to his murderous uncle Commodus’s throne.
In Gladiator II, we meet Lucius in Numidia, a warrior battling the Roman empire, living under an assumed identity after he had been squirreled away in hiding from his family and lineage. His return to Rome, as a vengeful gladiator seeking retribution for his dead wife, rejigs the plot from the first movie, with the Maximus role now shared between Mescal’s Lucius and Pedro Pascal’s war-weary general Marcus.
Mescal and Pascal are both fine; though they often seem too overwhelmed by the tired plot machinations to really make an impression beyond how fine they both look in Roman garb. Mescal is especially distracting, his blue eyes piercing through all the dirt mingling with sweat on his face. And yes, it’s easy to be distracted by these details in a movie that never finds its footing as a spectacle or any conviction in the emotions its storytelling is supposed to conjure; except of course, when Denzel is in the room.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)
Movie Reviews
‘Singham Again’ Review: Bigger Doesn’t Mean Better in Rohit Shetty’s Overstuffed Indian Action Sequel
Scale is everything in Singham Again. The Hindi-language action film has eight stars, six screenwriters and three additional scribes who worked on dialogue, including director Rohit Shetty. The hardware on display is similarly expansive — there are battleships, helicopters, dozens of cars that get blown up and smashed. And weapons both large and small — missiles, guns, machetes.
At one point, Tiger Shroff brandishes the Urumi, an Indian sword with a whip-like blade which originated in modern-day Kerala. There is so much to fit in every frame that wide shots are the default mode, with Ravi Basrur’s score filling and underlining every beat. The ambition seems to be sensory overload.
Singham Again
The Bottom Line Forgets to deliver a cinematic high.
Release date: Friday, Nov. 1
Cast: Ajay Devgn, Akshay Kumar, Ranveer Singh, Tiger Shroff, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Deepika Padukone, Arjun Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Ravi Kishan, Shweta Tewari, Dayanand Shetty
Director: Rohit Shetty
Screenwriters: Yunus Sajawal, Kshitij Patwardhan, Sandeep Saket, Anusha Nandakumar, Abhijeet Khuman, Rohit Shetty
2 hours 24 minutes
Then there’s the story. Shetty’s Cop Universe, of which Singham Again is the fifth installment, is built on the idea of the police officer as superhero. His men — Singham (Ajay Devgn), Simmba (Ranveer Singh) and Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar) — are upright sons of the soil. (An additional female officer, Deepika Padukone’s Shakti Shetty, makes her entry in this film.) All of these characters are unblemished; while Simmba started as corrupt, he is now an honest officer and sworn ally of Singham.
These are steely, courageous law enforcement authorities who operate as their own judiciary. Encounter killings in these movies are not just routine, but celebrated.
In Singham Again, the cops are bestowed celestial status — the seeds for which were sown in 2011 with the first Singham, when Singham emerged from the temple tank as a deity. The latest film takes it further. The plot is inspired by the Ramayana, with a theatrical production of the Hindu epic being used as a framing device. What plays out on stage is echoed in real life.
Singham is a personification of Lord Ram, and his wife Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan) of Sita. Simmba represents Lord Hanuman, ACP Satya (Shroff) is Lakshman, Sooryavanshi embodies Garuda, and so on. While Jackie Shroff is back as Omar Hafeez, the terrorist chief, the main agent of mischief this time is Arjun Kapoor’s Danger Lanka — who, naturally, describes himself as a modern-day Raavan.
These parallels are underlined again and again, as the characters journey to locations where the events of the Ramayana are said to have taken place. Subtlety has never been Shetty’s forte.
Nor is he a proponent of nuance, depth or progressive politics. When you go into Singham Again, you’re signing up for shrill patriotism and lectures on tradition and culture as well as exploding vehicles and a cheerful lack of logic. In one scene, one character says to another, you’ve been shot. The other replies not to worry, nothing will happen to me — which is exactly right, because gods might bleed in this story but it means little.
I’d be willing to make peace with all of it, but what rankles is the lack of entertainment. This film spends so much effort juggling star appearances, action sequences and Ramayana parallels that it forgets to deliver a cinematic high — a requisite for a larger-than-life, designed-for-whistles feature like this. Singh is the most playful and inventive of this gargantuan star cast, and just as he did in 2021’s Sooryavanshi, he brings in some buoyancy as Simmba. But Padukone gets a smashing entry and little else, as does Tiger Shroff. Avni is a damsel in distress — a pretty prop, like Katrina Kaif in Sooryavanshi. It’s a far cry from Kareena Kapoor Khan’s recent searing turn as a cop in The Buckingham Murders.
Devgn, however, is back in his element as the man of granite. In my review of 2014’s Singham Returns, I described the character as Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man crossed with Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, and Devgn works Singham’s supersized masculinity well. What Singham Again lacks, though, is a villain who can rival that. Arjun Kapoor works hard to summon menace, and he shows some spark, especially when he puts on a malevolent smile. But he is unable to evoke the same dread as Suriya’s Rolex in Vikram or Vijay Sethupathi’s Bhavani in Master.
While there are a few ambitious action set pieces, designed by Rohit and Mayyank Taandon, balancing the many actors proves too much a challenge, especially in the climax.
It’s telling that the best movies in the Cop Universe are remakes. Shetty’s first Singham was a reworking of the 2010 Tamil actioner Singam, starring Suriya. The second, Singham Returns, was loosely inspired by the 1993 Malayalam film Ekalavyan. Simmba was a reworking of the Telugu-language N. T. Rama Rao Jr.-starrer Temper. The two original entries — Sooryavanshi and Singham Again — are also the weakest.
It might be time for Shetty to seek inspiration in South Indian cinema again.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: 'Red One' tries to supersize the Christmas movie
Ah, the Christmas movie. That old chestnut. That cozy perennial pastime where — let’s just pick one scene from “Red One” — Dwayne Johnson, playing Santa’s body guard, faces off with a witch-possessed mercenary (Nick Kroll) and ice-sword-wielding CGI snowmen on the sandy beaches of Aruba. Can’t you just taste the eggnog?
Such are the ugly-sweater clashes of “Red One,” a big-budget gambit to supersize the Christmas movie. Countless movies before have wrestled with who Santa is. Does he really exist? But “Red One” is the first one to answer doubters with a superhero-like St. Nick who runs his North Pole operation like the army, who bench presses and counts carbs and who, given that he’s played by J.K. Simmons, looks like he could teach one heck of a jazz class.
There is ample time during “Red One,” which opens in theaters Thursday, to ponder who, exactly, put a Marvel-ized Santa on their wish list. The movie, directed by the “Jumanji” reboot filmmaker Jake Kasdan and scripted by the veteran “Fast & Furious” screenwriter Chris Morgan, was conceived by producer Hiram Garcia as the start of a holiday franchise for Amazon MGM Studios — presumably to satisfy those who have pined for a Christmas movie but with, you, know, more military industrial complex.
“Red One,” which is brightened by its other A-list star, Chris Evans, is a little self-aware about its own inherent silliness. But not nearly enough. There is a better, funnier movie underneath all the CGI gloss. But overwhelmed by effects and overelaborate world building (there are trolls, ogres and a headless horsemen here, all loosely connected as mythical creatures), “Red One” feels like an unwanted high-priced Christmas present.
“I love the kids. It’s the grown-ups that are killing me.”
So announces Callum Drift (Johnson), a long-serving security operative for Santa. He’s not an elf but a member of ELF, Enforcement Logistics and Fortification. (Don’t you just feel the holiday cheer welling up inside?) But after years, even centuries on the job, Callum’s faith in Christmas traditions is waning. For the first time, those on the naughty list outnumber the nice. On a mall visit two days before Christmas, he looks despondently at adults bickering over presents, if not outright stealing them.
Callum and other operatives with earpieces shuttle Santa (“Red One” in their secret service-styled lingo) in a fleet of Suburbans to his sleigh, which, while pulled by reindeer, moves more like a spaceship. Back at the North Pole — picture a sort of wintery Abu Dhabi — Santa is kidnapped. The culprits leave only spilt milk behind. The ensuing hunt, overseen by the chief of a special ops group protecting mystical beings (Lucy Liu), leads immediately to a hacker who helped an anonymous client geolocate Santa.
The for-hire hacker, Jack O’Malley (Evans) is a deadbeat dad to his son (Wesley Kimmel), and, we’re informed, a “level-four naughty-lister.” Evans might be most famous for his Captain America, but smarmy smart-aleck (like in “Knives Out”) is really his wheelhouse. And he gives “Red One” some comic energy as it transitions into a sort of buddy comedy with him and Johnson.
But “Red One” keeps overdoing it. As they race to rescue Santa before Christmas Eve, the hunt brings in the villainous Christmas Witch, Gryla (Kiernan Shipka) and Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), here defined as Santa’s brother. The sensation, with these characters and others, is of stuffing too much into an already gaudy stocking, and yet somehow forgetting to add any charm.
“Red One” comes off a little like the holiday version of “Cowboys and Aliens” — enough so to make you nostalgic for leaner tales about folkloric figures starring Johnson, like “The Tooth Fairy.” But if we’re to have every possible brand of Christmas movie, it seems a shame that when the phrase “The North Pole has been taken!” Gerard Butler is nowhere to be seen.
“Red One,” an Amazon MGM Studios release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for action, some violence, and language. Running time: 133 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
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