The Bullet Train Explosion

Shin Godzilla co-director Shinji Higuchi returns with The Bullet Train Explosion, a streaming update of a 70s thriller (Junya Sato's The Bullet Train, starring Ken Takakura and Sonny Chiba, glimpsed here in expositionary flashbacks that transmit a hand-held, live wire energy) that goes out of its way to foreground human decency and professionalism rather than the tense bloodletting that audiences might otherwise expect. Although lacking the satirical bite of his and Hideaki Anno's task force-packed pass at The King of Monsters, Higuchi's Bullet Train is similarly concerned with detailing how expert collective action, as well as unexpected bureaucratic hurdles, can be entertaining (if impersonal) solutions to the action movie premise of a bomb having been strapped to a high-speed train. So, while Tsuyoshi Kusanagi may be front-and-centre on Netflix's ads, his train manager isn't detailed or decoded in any way other than an unfailing dedication to his job: he's in charge of delivering these commuters safely to their destination. 

The passengers trapped on this snaking Shinkansen do cater to archetypal disaster movie roles as well - imperiled children, disgraced politicians or a crowd funded spin on a boastful business magnate - but any greater investigation into their background rests on how crucial they are to the placing of an explosive speedometer on the Hayabusa 60's undercarriage. Actress-model Non, playing the train's driver, is outright underutilised though. Despite an obvious ability to imbue a dry demonstration of cockpit management with a genuine charm that speaks to the drilled-in determination required to keep this train rolling, Non's Matsumoto never leaves her cab. This deliberate lack of specific, personal focus, coupled with a tonal approach that ensures that nearly every character behaves as if they are taking part in an extended job interview, does mean that the sheer length of this two and a quarter hour journey is felt whenever one of the train's clanking carriages is not shaking itself apart. Higuchi and his cinematographers, Yusuke Ichitsubo and Keizo Suzuki, do compensate for any lulls with perspectives that always prioritise the physical machinery of any rescue attempts being made and, when any compartment is given cause to detonate, the audience is treated to blossoming computer-generated fireballs and vintage tokusatsu sound effects. 

Samia - Carousel

Janemba by Manabu Yashiro

Sharp Pins - I Can't Stop

Feeble Little Horse - This is Real

Cloud

Viewed as the concluding chapter of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's unusually action-packed 2024, Cloud takes on a note of summation, as if the writer-director had set himself the task of combining the queasy, thwarted machismo coursing through Chime with the stark, neutron bomb-level alienation seen in Serpent's Path. Masaki Suda plays Yoshii, an internet scalper who sips at water and seemingly takes all of his other nourishment in the form of digital fleecing. Yoshii is completely absorbed in this work, his flat crammed with metal shelving and bursting with cardboard boxes. Product flows in and then out; reduced to clear if the police begin making inquiries. There is very obviously a kind of discipline to Yoshii's scamming though. His less successful peers are packed into similarly cramped spaces but they all drown in convenience store refuse, the instant spoils of their ill-gotten gains. Comparatively, and although he somewhat cohabits with a woman he hasn't the slightest interest in touching, Yoshii is unusually frugal, viewing each successive windfall as a way to expand into his next swindle. 

After a particularly lucrative investment in an antwacky wellness device, Yoshii browses an off-brand Amazon for video games. Not to purchase them in the singular and enjoy the app for himself you understand, Yoshii instead plans to scoop up as much of a vanishing supply as possible then hold other, less plugged-in buyers to ransom. Yoshii is so absorbed in the bland rhythms of his work that he doesn't really take the time to disentangle the stray acts of hostility that he is beginning to encounter. The sodden rat wrapped in newspaper and left on his doorstep or the steel wire that someone has tied between two posts on his scooter route home. He may recognise in these incidents a pressing need to flee Tokyo but he doesn't stop to truly consider if there is organisation or planning behind these escalating attacks. Here Cloud dabbles in the mechanics of urban horror, specifically the shared kind of hypnosis we saw in Chime that compels half a dozen men, of varying age, to break with their social programming to violently pursue Yoshii across the country. Although this gang's motivations vary wildly - from a workplace snub or unrequited crush to indirectly landing one dud in trouble with a criminal gang - they all willingly burn their lives down to intimidate a nonentity who posts out counterfeit handbags. 

Morrigan + Spider-Man by Alfredo Cardona

ErgO1* - shortertape...

Addison Rae - Headphones On

Broken Rage

Ostensibly a split piece with equal time apportioned to telling the same story, first as an action thriller then immediately again as a comedy, Takeshi Kitano's Broken Rage is - thanks to its writer-director-actor - equally hilarious in either half. Basically, everything that Kitano does (at least to this viewer) has inherent comedic value. His physical performance, honed over decades spent capering first as a bawdy television funny man then later as a highly feted arthouse idol, is always acutely impassive or expressionless. His characters, frequently career criminals with only a vague grasp on social norms, can often be read as acutely vacant or even buffoonish. Kitano's deadpan presence always suggests some unquantifiable but crucial absence in the psychological make-up of these men. As an actor, Kitano is particularly well attuned to portraying sociopaths then. The alarming bluntness with which his characters behave is always at least darkly amusing, largely for an obvious lack of caution in how they present themselves.

So, when performing a night club assassination as he called upon to do twice here, Kitano doesn't necessarily even need to fumble his firearm to elicit a titter. Just him standing over his quarry, carelessly firing into the shrieking human mass that squirms beneath him is strange and pig-headed enough to raise a smile. Kitano's is a comedy predicated on manners or, perhaps more accurately, the explosively violent disruption of serious or ceremonial situations. He is the wildcard element that has suddenly been introduced into these hemmed-in environments, only to then trample all over everybody's carefully curated behaviours and personas. Similarly, he is an indefatigable pest who is completely immune to the irritations his presence arouses. Kitano's now obvious and advancing age is no hindrance when essaying this kind of performance either. If anything his rounder face and stout, creaking ambulation only enhance it. Whether viewed through the lens of a crime film or a slapstick comedy, Kitano remains an incredible proposition: a big, blindingly bright shining star that pulverises everything in its orbit. 

HOME - Twisted Light (Memorex Memories Mix)

Vega by Kandoken

Taji and Gavin Brivik - Fail Forward (Instrumental Edit)

Phases - Desideri

Battle of Okinawa

Sword of Doom director Kihachi Okamoto applies his command of apocalyptic foreboding to World War II's Pacific Theatre, specifically the stresses and traumas experienced when attempting to repel the advances of a thundering, technologically superior force. Battle of Okinawa then is a despairing docudrama-style account that mixes squished, monochromatic newsreel footage and narration (courtesy of Kiyoshi Kobayashi, the voice actor used to dub James Coburn and Lee Marvin for the Japanese market) with bullet-point scenes featuring soldiers and civilians that slowly detail the sheer hopelessness that these people face. Comparatively, the encroaching American forces are rarely seen and certainly never investigated. Their presence is vividly felt though, predominantly through the genuinely relentless sound of whistling shells that batter the land and populace of Okinawa or, as the film winds to its excruciating conclusion, the small squads of middle-distance figures who taunt and turn their machine gun fire towards Battle's surviving cast. 

Although crammed with dozens of actors, all sweating (but not necessarily rotting) in under-ventilated caves, and buoyed by brief special-effects interludes courtesy of Godzilla whizz Teruyoshi Nakano, Okamoto's film doesn't position itself as an epic extravaganza. Instead of attempting to compete with the enormous logistical scale of similar Hollywood productions, Battle is a simmering, piecemeal experience that uses broad characterisations and humorous archetypes as a way of wringing maximum pathos from the non-stop human carnage. Very obviously told from a purely Japanese perspective, with scant reference to that country's violent, imperialistic recent history, Battle may be ambivalent about the uncaring orders issued by military dictatorships - that have very much hung these people out to dry - but it greedily catalogues any and every intermingling of suicide and nationalistic (or perhaps regional, even prefectural) pride. Under threat of extermination by a foreign entity, that may as well be a natural disaster, Okamoto's film relays that the people of Okinawa judged it better to sip poison on the beach or drive a blade into their trunk than to be cooked alive by a GI's flamethrower. 

The Constructicons! by AZOINAB

Deki Alem - Leave Me Alone

Madara 1000 - Halb 8?

A Minecraft Movie

Quite apparently tied in knots by teams upon teams of writers (the finished piece is, variously, attributed to Allison Schroeder, Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta), director Jared Hess' A Minecraft Movie betrays very obvious traces of this chronic overthinking and re-wiring. Denied entry to his beloved mines as a child, Jack Black's Steve, upon growing to manhood, returns with his pickaxe to tunnel his way into another, much blockier dimension. His ability to pass between this computer rendered world and ours thanks to a shining cube that, eventually, finds its way under Steve's childhood bed. A significant amount of time later, Emma Myers' twentysomething Natalie and her little brother, played by Sebastian Hansen, seem to move into Steve's long deserted home, whereupon they will find his precious gem and go on their own, Amblin-inflected adventure? Well, not quite. 

Turns out they didn't reckon upon actor-producer Jason Momoa, whose star presence demands that the tragic (and admittedly pat) backstory sketched up for this Movie's younger actors be obliterated to concentrate on detailing why Garrett, Momoa's tassel jacketed buffoon, thinks so highly of himself. It's not that Momoa particularly detracts from a film that might otherwise be completely given over to Black's increasingly monotonous honking. If anything it's sort of amusing that Momoa, a recently divorced father, can wield so much behind-the-scenes power when assembling a vehicle through which he might hope to win the eternal adulation of his own children. Although it would be impossible to adequately adapt the totality of Mojang Studios' enduring, Twitch-streamed juggernaut, it does seem notable that, when outfitting this Swedish video game property for the American big-screen experience, the filmmakers have overlooked plaintive pianos and unbridled creativity (but not the sudden transformation of sentient beings into tools that power the various mechanisms of Minecraft) to concentrate on invading subhumans and explosions. Speaking of which, can you guess how Hansen's Henry contributes to the teeming lexicon of this deliberately pre-industrial sandbox realm? That's right: he bashes together a firearm. 

Depeche Mode - I Just Can't Get Enough

I-No by 404 Ikasaurus

Bohūko - Juntos

The Monkey

Adapted from a short story by Stephen King that plays around with themes and ideas inherited from The Monkey's Paw, writer-director Osgood Perkins' The Monkey wrings any last remaining fragment of wish-fulfilment out of WW Jacobs' original, finger curling tale. Perkins' take then not so much a cautionary yarn about attempting to interfere with fate but rather a funhouse ride through which is transmitted a relentless, and hilariously arranged, kind of syrupy malevolence. We are never more than a couple of minutes removed from a body detonating into a flowering, ruby viscera. And how! Actors Christian Convery and Theo James both pull double-duty as a pair of twins seen at two, disconnected eras in their lives. We see the Shelburn boys as infighting children and estranged adults, both stages of life stained by a clattering toy monkey whose frantic drum playing foretells a swift and impending doom. Unusually, it is the younger of the two actors who gets to play more of the depressive trauma generated by such a horrifying object. The young Convery ably assisted here by Tatiana Maslany's turn as the twins' single mother. Comparatively, as an adult, James is able to lean into the numbed, ironic distance that his character has used to cope with having meddled with such unwieldy power. To everybody's credit these two fragments marry together well, with James comfortable and amusing in the role of the frustrated patsy who sits rocking at the centre of this comedy. Perkins' film may be episodic and dramatically slight but it moves like the clappers; the basic shape of this story could easily be moulded into a The Outer Limits episode, or a Treehouse of Horror for that matter. Pretty high praise. 

Nina Simone - I Shall Be Released

Nuthin' but a "J" Thang by Makoto Ono

Endless Withdrawal - Flawed Reflections (Piano Version)