Toshifumi Hinata - Contemplation

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

The strangest thing about director Jon Favreau's Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu isn't that Disney have decided to relaunch the big screen aspect of their ailing space saga with an adaptation of an off-the-boil streaming series, it's that in centring Jabba the Hutt's offspring, Rotta the Hutt (voiced here by Jeremy Allen White), this adventure now becomes something of a sequel to Dave Filoni's unwatchable animated feature Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Speaking of Filoni, Lucasfilm's new Chief Creative Officer gets a co-writing credit with Favreau and Noah Kloor for this film; voices a couple of characters; and even scores a distracting cameo in the X-Wing pilot equivalent of a staff canteen. Actually, returning to Hutts, it's definitely more bizarre that, in detailing the living arrangements of Jabba's massive, slug-like species, viewers are treated to repeated instances of these creatures - sometimes even a pair that are related - writhing and intertwined. 

When Pedro Pascal (actually seen as well as heard)'s bounty hunter first arrives at the palace of these intergalactic gangsters, he walks along corridors lined with darkened rooms that appear, very much, like they have recently hosted gastropod orgies. The participants are abashed; pulling apart and reorganising themselves as Pascal (or Brendan Wayne or Lateef Crowder) stomp past. Perhaps it's the confrontational nakedness of The Hutts that gives pause? The film's repeated demand that we appraise blubbery bodies that sometimes look like puppets and other times look like their primitively textured ancestor from the 1997 revision of Star Wars? The grown-up Rotta - a gladiator who battles scaled-up monsters from Chewbacca's chess board - sports pumped-up arms and bulging pectoral muscles, an explicit point of departure from every other reptilian mobster we've seen so far. If nothing else it seems notable that Rotta's acceptance into the ranks of the Galactic Republic pointedly comes with a promise of clothing that is big enough to fit, and therefore conceal, his enormous body. 

This preoccupation with minor variations and the three-dimensionality of the film's participants speaks to, really, the piece's core appeal: these are the kind of adventures dreamed up by children as they played with their Kenner action figures. The first instance of connection with Star Wars for this viewer was, in the mid-1980s, seeing the overstocked occupants of Jabba's sail barge, from Return of the Jedi, heavily discounted in open-air markets. You might never come across a Luke Skywalker or a Darth Vader on these stalls but if you wanted a 3.75 inch reproduction of a Gamorrean Guard or a Weequay, you were in luck. You could slowly amass an entire collection of these bystanders and background players; characters who made basically zero impact on the unfolding saga but held their own creepy visual appeal as pure merchandise. Keenly aware that his film is, at its best, a rolling bestiary, director Favreau finds umpteen ways - beyond previous speculation on the Hutts' sex life - to fascinate and entertain. To wit: Pascal's delivery may be flat; his action so expert as to be dull, with a face buried beneath a gleaming helmet, but his side-kick is often delightful. 

A mixture of puppetry and computer-generated imagery, Grogu is of a piece with the Mogwais from Gremlins when sharing his scenes with larger characters. He's rapid and chaotic; possessed of an insatiable hunger for luminous snacks. When the film contracts to accommodate his tiny stature though, we are regaled with a sustained, wordless sequence in which this frog-like guru fashions a clay barracks around his deathly ill parent then traverses an inhospitable jungle and the swamp beyond, stealing smoked fish from Stephen McKinley Henderson's kindly, reptilian medicine man. If Mandalorian and Grogu is a truncated season of streaming television then this interlude is its own little bottle episode, reminiscent of similar asides in the Lone Wolf and Cub movies. As time passes to Ludwig Göransson's pitch-perfect Amblin score, and the camouflaged structure around the unconscious bounty hunter grows, there's a brief sense of a different, more ambitious movie: a Star Wars in which we are confronted with a melancholic permanence rather than just a temporary setback. Grogu seems to toil for days if not weeks. What if Mandalorians had a constitution closer to human? What if they were a little more fragile? What would that film look like then, if Favreau completely gave himself over to the Jim Henson of it all? Baby Yoda living amongst the bones of its parent, slowly honing his extra-sensory skills and fashioning his own approximation of armour before walking his own, vengeful path.  

Ludwig Göransson - Grogu's World

Vince Staples - White Flag

Binaltech Version Yellow Tracks by びー (@samhoshi7)

Scab - Bongo Man

Yusuf Gökcül - Untitled 87

The Punisher: One Last Kill

Although mercifully brief, writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green's The Punisher: One Last Kill, co-written with bellowing lead Jon Bernthal, is an aggressively wrongheaded take on Marvel's vigilante character. Set in a mouldering New York straight out of a Michael Winner movie, Green and Bernthal's take on Frank Castle is, God help us, subject to the kind of Campbellian archetypes that demand that this Punisher be a hirsute shrieker who repeatedly denies the call to adventure (slaughter). Heaven knows which comic runs Green and Bernthal have immersed themselves in but it is utterly bizarre to see minutes on minutes of screentime revolve around a stooped, drunken Castle breezing round a burning neighbourhood in which stunt performers are freely terrorising elderly day players. Not to pretend to be any great expert in The Punisher (the sum total of my experience with the character would be a Marvel UK Autumn Special, several US issues published in the early 1990s - #34, #37 and #48 - as well as Garth Ennis' Welcome Back, Frank, the Richard Corben collaboration The End, and the first trade of The Punisher MAX ) but I haven't read any floppies in which Frank wasn't, at default, completely consumed with his mission. 

The self-pitying, self-flagellating superhero seen in One Last Kill - who will soon be seen playing second fiddle to Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Brand New Day - then plays like shallow, student short pretence when measured against such an obsessive, elemental character as his four colour equivalent. Hasn't The Punisher always been something of the American comic equivalent to Takao Saito (and Saito-Pro)'s Golgo 13? An expression of middle-aged wish fulfilment so finely curated that the doubts and painful introspection usually ascribed to such expert extermination are judged completely superfluous? Green and Bernthal are, plainly, far too fixated on the martyrdom complex inherent to their nation's violent law enforcement to fully grasp such concepts. So, in their picture, an incredibly damaged soldier is given free licence by the smiling, appreciative children of America to work out his demons by bloodily mauling a rampaging, multicultural underclass. Similarly, the Brutalist, high-rise architecture and Soviet era weaponry seen in this film's action scenes recall stints spent in Call of Duty: Warzone (rather than, say, The Raid or Dredd) and, while the extended takes of this well-drilled ultra-violence are where Bernthal seems most at home, the computer generated sparks and muzzle flashes work contrary to any implication that we're viewing a dangerous sequence that has been captured, rather than a safe stunt that has been finely orchestrated. 

The Punisher Autumn Special by John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson

JPEGMAFIA - War Over Land

Ravi Shankar - Improvisations on the Theme Music from Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali

It takes a special kind of talent to depict grinding, relentless poverty without ever resorting to either an overwhelming sense of despondency or, swinging in the opposite direction, an unconvincing, simplistic parade of hardscrabble virtue. Writer-director Satyajit Ray has exactly that knack though, his Pather Panchali (or Song of the Little Road) is the tale of a crumbling ancestral home and the family who huddle shivering inside its draughty rubble. Adapted from a 1929 novel of the same name by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Pather Panchali may well be the first part of The Apu Trilogy but wide-eyed child actor Subir Banerjee is more of a deputy presence within this instalment. Thanks to his youth, an elevated social position within his setting - not to mention his mother's relentless toil to keep him fed - Apu gets to remain something of a cheery bystander to the harsh difficulties facing his family. 

He's the beloved son, given access to education and indulged enough to be able to wander around his rural duchy, playing with his bow and arrow. Apu is never expected to assist with the day-to-day work associated with keeping a destitute family's head above water. Similarly, Apu's father Harihar, played by Kanu Banerjee, is barely present, away from his home eking out a meagre living as, variously, a debt collector or temple priest. Even when he does deign to return, Harihar is an oblivious, even frustrating presence, who speaks with the certainty of the terminally blinkered. Instead it falls to three women to form the backbone of Pather Panchali: Chunibala Devi's extremely elderly aunt, Indir; Karuna Banerjee's Sarbajaya, the long-suffering mother; and Apu's older sister Durga, played by Runki Banerjee and Uma Dasgupta. If Apu's strengths are forthcoming, unlocked over the series' two remaining films, then Durga is life and vitality now, a child defying her diminished station through sheer force of personality. 

We meet a younger Durga 'stealing' from a neighbouring orchard that, in the fullness of this picture, we learn used to belong to her family anyway, before it was schemed away by greedy moneylenders. Although indulged by Indir, who Durga bequeaths her sweet spoils to, this child's youthful effervescence is resented by her penniless mother, a woman crushed by the unceasing responsibility to keep everybody fed while maintaining some sense of social propriety. As well as the fuss created in the nearby village by Durga's light fingers, Sarbajaya perhaps intuits a similarly bleak future for her daughter, left freezing and alone to raise ravenous offspring, but Durga doesn't seem to see her life in those terms. Like all children she is enjoying the now. She prefers to roam, instilling in the little brother who trails behind her a sense of adventure. The pair follow electrical pylons into marshland, chew on sugar canes and watch with awe as steam trains clatter by. Ray's film then as much a testament to curiosity as it is steadfast and unbreakable maternal love; the picture buoyed by the beautiful bird song compositions of Ravi Shankar. Pather Panchali, and Durga in particular, symbolise a dignity seized rather than conferred. 

Boards of Canada - Prophecy at 1420 MHz

You & The Explosion Band - Silhouette

The Horror of Godzilla by ZORNOW MUST BE DESTROYED

Father John Misty - The Payoff

The Rolling Stones - Rough and Twisted

Cure

Around fifteen minutes into writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, our perspective character, Koji Hashimoto's police detective Takabe, strolls into a brightly lit dry cleaners on his way home from work. The clerk apologises to him, indicating that he is already busy with another customer. As the clerk disappears into the back of the shop this other customer, a haggard looking salaryman, begins mumbling to himself. This strange, murmured autocommunication is a stream of pure venom. Takabe glances at him, taken aback, then stares straight ahead as this blank-faced professional loses himself in a whispered, discursive invective. Initially, and based on the subtitles present, this rambler appears to be addressing absent colleagues who've disagreed with his way of approaching work. He then changes tact, directing his hisses at an absent clerk who has, maybe, lingered too long picking out the man's laundered clothing. The salaryman snarling the kind of accusatory insults that basic propriety demands he otherwise keep to himself. 

When the clerk returns, apologising profusely, the salaryman accepts his plastic-wrapped clothing with flat thanks, then exits the shop. The scene concludes without comment from a clearly bemused Takabe. In a sense, this is the crux of Cure: the idea that, in this paint-peeled Tokyo, everybody harbours bubbling resentments that they cannot express. The city crammed with unfailing polite people who are neither seen nor catered to and, precisely because of that, this engenders in them a terrible but untapped anger. Which brings us to Masato Hagiwara's Mamiya. Seemingly an amnesic vagrant and, therefore, someone so vulnerable that they have slipped out of any implied social order. When conversations with Mamiya end he cannot recall the beginning of these queries; he responds to every question directed at him with increasingly incisive prods of his own. Despite his dishevelled and disorientated demeanour, Mamiya proves himself a powerful broadcaster, apparently able to either intuit the deeply personal prejudices of who he is addressing or, perhaps, even able to craft them for a receptive person out of thin air. 

Linked to a series of murders in which unconnected persons have each carved x-shaped gashes into their victim's throats, Mamiya, in his every action, represents a disquieting break from the hierarchical norms that underline society. Formerly a psychology student, Mamiya faded away from school as his obsession with mesmerism grew; amassing a library on the subject and even fashioning fetishes out of caged animals. To converse with Mamiya, to even attempt to dissect his motives - the crux of all police procedural - proves to be alarmingly dangerous. The resilient Takabe, seemingly used to discursive conversation and droning, domestic undertones thanks to a mentally unwell wife, doesn't react to Mamiya in quite the same way as everybody else though. He is, at least up to a point, able to resist the suggestions that this Svengali is attempting to plant. To strike back at Mamiya's interrogations, not just verbally but physically, when others would slip under his somnambulic spell. As Kurosawa's film presses on, and Mamiya's power within the piece grows, significant sequences are given over to hallucination and paranoid fantasy, blurring the line between waking life and manufactured dreams. Through clipped scene assembly and ominous, overbearing noise we are made to understand what it is to experience intrusive thoughts and even a kind of growing, murderous psychosis. A sense of menace prevails in Cure, transforming every dangling sentence - every ellipsis recorded on the subtitle track - into an implied, imminent threat. By now Kurosawa has trained us to expect catastrophe. 

Miyako Kobayashi - One Sunny Afternoon

Horse Lords - First Galactic Utopia

Farewell, Tears! by Akahana Dragon

The Womack Sisters - Chauffeur

Futureworld

Futureworld, director Richard T Heffron's inert Westworld sequel, eschews any of the onscreen pleasures associated with barging around a theme park that caters to violent, randy divorcees to spend the majority of its screentime sneaking around in dimly-lit back-of-stage locations. These pipe-packed caverns look less like the credibly advanced maintenance and service tunnels you might expect to be threaded through a futuristic retreat and more like the leaking interior of a massive aircraft carrier. Somehow able to bounce back from the lawsuits implied by the complete extermination of its customer base a few years earlier, the android manufacturing Delos Corporation have actually increased their prices and expanded the operation. As well as the criminally underutilised Medievalworld and Romanworld, the restort now offers - just in time to host Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner's snooping reporters, as well as Soviet and Japanese dignitaries - a woozy Spaworld and an antwacky attraction called Futureworld. The latter of which demands that guests be packed into padded outfits then tasked with miming some half-hearted space exploration. 

Despite utterly failing to work up a similar sense of chilly inevitability as its Michael Crichton directed predecessor, Futureworld does manage a few stray notes of interest, largely due to this viewer's overfamiliarity with The Terminator. It's difficult not to wonder if James Cameron's film (and its sequel) were working both with and against this piece. Cameron has spoken in interviews about being disappointed with the FM radio transistors powering these improbably lifelike robots; the implausibility of their blinking circuits and wiring splayed on hospital beds leading him to speculate what kind of skeletal machinery would actually be required to ambulate the muscles of an artificial human. Even the top-of-the-line T-800 designation assigned to Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg seems to have some root in the models described in this film: the primitive, unconvincing 500 series and the laser-focused 700s, who fill out the Delos rank and file and pass for human. A third act in which Fonda's Chuck Browning is followed through a factory by an emotionless duplicate foretells Leslie Hamilton's role in the climax of Terminator 2: Judgment Day while Futureworld's bizarre, revisionist use of Yul Bryner's stalking cowboy - he's the centrepiece in a televised sexual fantasy in which Danner's Tracy is protected then bedded by a reprogrammed gunslinger, who kisses with his blazing eyes open - anticipates the rehabilitation ascribed to Schwarzenegger's leather jacket wearing assassin. 

Seven Samurai by Tony Stella

Cocu* - Universal Friends

The Fantastic Four by Peach Momoko

Nia Archives - Boys in Blue

David Matthews - Main Theme from Star Wars

They Will Kill You

If Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is the Dante's Peak of action comedies based around rich elites kidnapping women for Satanic sacrifice, then this piece - director Kirill Sokolov's They Will Kill You - is the slightly later, much goopier Volcano. All of which is to say that neither film is particularly good but at least one of them (this one) is extremely interested in depicting hot, red liquids blasting out of ruptured structures. At the outset, Sokolov's film uses ornate buildings and inky, rain-lashed voids to prickle memories of Italian horror films directed by Dario Argento. When battle is joined though, Sokolov's reference points are instead the engorged violence and fitful flashbacks seen in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. 

Although Zazie Beetz maintains an impressive physical presence throughout, these stray notes of reproduction invite a level of comparison that does this film absolutely no favours. Sokolov's genre cross-fading plays photostat and Beetz is never given the opportunity to play anything like the plucky, Falconettian vulnerability that underlined Uma Thurman's signature performance. They Will Kill You is to The Whole Bloody Affair as 2 Days in the Valley is to Pulp Fiction then. As well, the crunchy invulnerability bestowed upon the hooded devil worshippers that hunt Beetz's vengeful housekeeper not only rob the audience of any satisfaction associated with a well-earned dispatch but this impermanence even undermines some cracking body detonations too. Still, Heather Graham's enucleated eyeball creeping around, while her headless trunk clatters about in an air vent is, at least, pretty funny.

Hi-Posi - あと何日

The Punisher by Frank Miller

Ayako Udagawa - Just Fallin' Love

3mitsu x Suyo - Pt.2

Ballad of a Soldier

At the height of The Great Patriotic War, a boyish Soviet soldat is given limited leave from the frontline to journey across a war-torn nation and help his mother fix her leaking roof. This unexpected and unlikely boon issued in recognition of the soldier's bravery in facing down, and wounding, a column of advancing German tanks. Writer-director Grigory Chukhray (co-writing with Valentin Yezhov)'s Ballad of a Soldier initially wrongfoots thanks to the sheer earnestness of Vladimir Ivashov's Private Alyosha Skvortsov. He's a guileless, likeable youth who cannot resist mucking in and helping all those who cross his path. From injured veterans to elderly truck-drivers, Alyosha is such easygoing sunshine that he either nudges these people away from self-destructive actions or he literally plants his feet and physically lifts them out of the mire that traps them. 

All too quickly, Chukhray's film expands its tonal scope from Children's Film Foundation pleasantries to consider warfare in starker, far less celebratory terms: how uniformed men present as inherently threatening to unaccompanied women or the ways in which solemn vows, made during peacetime, might then crumble in the face of the brutal, day-to-day realities of industrialised conflict. Beautifully composed by cinematographers Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savelyeva - the blocky, black and white Academy screen is equally at home examining Zhanna Prokhorenko's luminous face as it is peering at the twisting, urban wreckage that has been wrought by aerial bombardment - 1959's Ballad of a Soldier proposes that, in lads like Private Skvorstov, something deeply precious to the Soviet Union has been lost forever. An entire generation of gallant young men have been claimed forever by the foreign lands in which they fought and died.