CORP81 - Dusk

Cobra by Monsieur Lamu

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies - 69th St. Bridge

Knights of the Zodiac

A sixty million dollar exercise in divining what an audience used to the drip-fed introductions of American superhero films might find appealing in a long-running, Japanese multi-media property. A bizarre and, apparently, fruitless strategy, especially given how well regarded the franchise is in any number of non-English speaking territories. Despite this embedded popularity, director Tomek Bagiński's Knights of the Zodiac monkeys around with Masami Kurumada's Weekly Shonen Jump serial, bending over backwards to find some rhythm or pattern of storytelling well-worn (and multiplex friendly) enough to smuggle in a story about sainted martyrs drafted into a cosmic-level war against, and alongside, Greek Gods. The crueller - and therefore more exciting - aspects of the manga are eliminated outright; a worrying shift since the entire tale is predicated on a similar sort of violent, religious malevolence as Go Nagai's Devilman. 

The tournament travails of battered and bloodied orphans are nudged aside for two vaguely defined factions battling over fully-grown cage fighters who are able to, accidentally, tap into strange, mystical abilities. Mackenyu, the son of big screen madman Sonny Chiba, stars as Seiya, a promising young scrapper blessed with pop star good looks and computer-generated vapours that roll off his body like a pleasant fragrance. Although positioned within the story as brash enough to inspire enmity wherever he goes, Mackenyu's Seiya is not only bland but actually pretty obliging. The young hero grimly submitting himself to a training regime that covers him in photogenic gashes and bone-structure accenting bruises after only the briefest of heart-to-hearts with Madison Iseman's trainee Goddess Sienna. The only actor transmitting the combative self-assurance typical of the fight comic genre is Mark Dacascos as Mylock, Sienna's Alfred Pennyworth-style attaché. When battle is joined Dacascos' swirling movements betray a confidence that goes beyond that of a drilled dance; further proof (if any was required) that Hollywood missed a trick with the actor. 

Sleepscreen - Headlight

Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen - Across the Ocean

Past Lives

Past Lives, the uncommonly assured feature film debut of playwright and Amazon streaming screenwriter Celine Strong, withholds its most obviously dramatic developments - the sort of moments that a lesser piece might construct explosive gear shifts around - then only refers to them in shy, past-tensed enquiries, years after they have taken place. Greta Lee's Nora, then going by Na Young, and Teo Yoo's Hae Sung formed a connection in their shared childhood; a first crush when they were both on the cusp of becoming teenagers. The pair walked a similar route home after school every day, a well-trodden track on which they would bicker and discuss their competing academic achievements. There's an obvious and easy rapport between the two, one picked up on by the children's mothers who arrange an idyllic playdate for them in a park. Even though both Na Young and Hae Sung carry umbrellas, it's not clear that it's actually raining. Any meteorological blemish on these perfect moments not quite penetrating the record of this foundational memory then. 

Nora and her family emigrate from South Korea to Canada not long afterwards, leaving Hae Sung in a desultory sort of repose that seems to last throughout the young man's adolescence and into early adulthood. Twelve years later the two reconnect through social media and Skype, quickly resuming the same sort of rhythms that defined their adolescent relationship. The length of this long-distance relationship is slippery: it could be months or a matter of weeks but it's obviously, painfully, significant in both of their lives. When it becomes clear, due to clashing work commitments, that a physical meeting will continue to be elusive, Na Young (now going by her chosen, Anglicized name Nora) asks for an end to the calls. A decade later, when discussing her and Hae Sung's relationship with her husband, played by John Magaro, this videophone era is pointedly elided. Nora preferring instead to talk almost exclusively in terms of them being childhood sweethearts. It's clear that this re-connection was deeply significant though. Both behave as if they are grieving when it ends, the couple quickly blundering into different relationships with varying degrees of success. 

When Nora and Hae Sung do eventually meet-up they are both in their mid-thirties and deeply entangled with other people. As they walk under a bridge while on their tour of New York, Shabier Kirchner's camera adopts a telephoto perspective. At first it seems as if this viewpoint has been chosen to evoke the idea of spying, as if we are watching on from some creeping vantage point as two celebrities enjoy a clandestine meeting, one charged with a potential for infidelity. The more the two talk though the more information, and therefore unaddressed longing, we are privy to. Nora had returned to Korea previously we learn, she had also tried to re-establish contact with Hae Sung. She did so while introducing her prospective husband to her family. The unspoken insinuation then being that she was indirectly asking Hae Sung to intervene and talk her out of this marriage. Since writer-director Song has decided not to dramatize these developments, we can only know about them if the characters talk about them. Past Lives' strength is that this coded demand for an explanation of inaction is completely consistent with both of these characters. Nora does, to some degree, see herself as the subject in a swirling fiction; Hae Sung is much more gently romantic, seemingly content to have simply let this other, wonderful person touch on his own ordinary life. 

Yoichiro Yoshikawa - Cold Devil Conspiracy

Slash by Ian Higginbotham

Billie Eilish - What Was I Made For?

Barbie

Writer-director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach have absolutely pulled a fast-one with Barbie. The silver-tongued devils have somehow managing to talk toy manufacturer Mattel and the ever-mutating Warner Bros. Discovery entity into bankrolling a prickly pink piece that talks about misogyny and plastic self-determination. Conceptually, Gerwig's film has much in common with 90s tentpoles and the smaller scope comedies that supported them: Barbie has the all-star soundtrack and the expansive, physical sets of a Batman sequel; the poppy irreverence and bonhomie of a Clueless. The ever reliable Margot Robbie stars as Stereotypical Barbie, a standard issue doll who exemplifies the escapist glamour of the playset brand. She does not hold a job role specific enough to completely distract her from the creeping neurosis that come to her in the evenings though. This Barbie isn't a doctor or a president - those are the positions held by Hari Nef Barbie and Issa Rae Barbie - Robbie's role is more about a perpetual adulation. One both directed out to her peers then returned to her in kind. 

Existing outside this ultra-positive feedback loop is Ryan Gosling's Ken, an accessory cursed with enough basic cognition to be able to develop his own unhealthy desires. He covets Robbie's oblivious Barbie, desperate to possess her for reasons he cannot even begin to articulate. Gosling, slathered in product that somehow manages to evoke both the bronze glow of the beach and the pancake make-up of Paul Reubens, is the male equivalent of Robbie's Barbie in the sense that he has a faint awareness of the ineffable frequencies emanating from the real world. While Barbie journeys into our reality for reasons of self-reflection, Gosling's stowaway does so as a way to tighten his grip on a Barbie who has stepped outside her natural habitat. This green-eyed monster instantly becomes an acolyte of the toxic masculinity he witnesses, returning to his birthplace, ahead of the heroine, to scour his shire by spreading the doctrine of the mini-fridge to other dim-witted appendages. Easily the most financially successful film of the Summer, if not the whole of 2023, Barbie has achieved all this while laying bare the strange inadequacies driving men who seek unquestioned power; the demand they have for a world pressed into monotonal servility. And it doesn't even make them happy. 

Crystal Cola - RUN 2 U

Inescapable by Peach Momoko

Kenji Kawai - City of Shadows

Patlabor: The Movie

Mamoru Oshii's big screen adaptation of his (more overtly comedic) Mobile Police video animation series uses its technologically advanced, near-future setting to tell an information era ghost story. Set in 1999 (ten years after the film was originally released), Patlabor: The Movie opens with hotshot programmer Eiichi Hoba taking his life; the software developer hurling himself off the enormous artificial island that now sits in Tokyo Bay, supporting the massive land reclamation initiative that will allow the city to drain its waters and expand far beyond its current boundaries. This late 80s vision of the twentieth century's concluding year is predicated on a boundless and consistent growth, one supported by the co-mingling of robotics and heavy construction equipment. The fragment of himself that Hoba leaves behind is mutinous, self-replicating data; lines of rebellion written into a faulty labour robot operating system that has been rushed to market by a floundering company with a dubious grasp on proper safety protocols. 

The meat of this Patlabor then is a procedural, one that largely abandons the franchise's showier aspects - namely massive, battling mechanoids - to examine how different kinds of police process the same, unfolding disaster. Naturally, those working under the Special Vehicles team are more attuned to tackling the problem from a technical perspective, crowding into cable-snaked apartments to run diagnostic simulations that slowly blot out their expanding mega city. The film's most arresting investigation though belongs to a police detective tasked with following up on the physical addresses that Hoba had previously inhabited. Matsui, and an unnamed partner, slowly traipse around Tokyo's slums on foot, mantling dried out canals and waltzing through dilapidated, partially abandoned buildings to a sickly shuffle courtesy of composer Kenji Kawai. Unlike the more moneyed areas of the city, these flop house streets are not lit by buzzing greens. The shadows here are black and long; sunlight burnt into the cracking concretes and mouldering wooden houses of these junk neighbourhoods. 

Bracketed by the glass and steel buildings that stretch off into the sky, Matsui stands contemplating the refuse that piles up beneath them. The people and places left behind when money migrates across town. Elsewhere, a canny police Captain takes a break from fishing in what's left of Tokyo's inner sea to talk about the cyclical nature of progress: how today's expensive technical advances are, inevitably, transformed into tomorrow's inconvenience. This drastically different, and less obviously apocalyptic, take on the temporal whiplash experienced when living in an ever-changing city isn't just philosophical flavour either. Oshii builds the concluding thirty minutes of Patlabor: The Movie around a violent and expediated demolition of the state-of-the-art facility that Hoba took flight from. With a typhoon fast approaching, Ryunosuke Ohbayashi's Captain Goto orders his gung-ho police division to the artificial island - armed with, variously, two towering robots and the pistol from Sudden Impact. The idea being that, when the Mobile Police scuttle this island factory, any political inconvenience arising from this demolition can be chalked up to the natural disaster. Oshii's bravura take on the collapsing complex conceit, so beloved in 1980s science fiction, forgoes the typically explosive outcome. Instead, this enormous factory dies by inches. Slowly transforming from a staffed and industrialised skerry into an expensive pile of disorganised debris. 

Crystal Cola - Last Chance

Zangief by Quasimodox

Daniel Deluxe - Prototype

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies - Chariots of Pumpkins

The Sky Crawlers

Surprisingly, given the idyllic scenery, Mamoru Oshii's The Sky Crawlers ends up being something of a companion piece to the director's two citified Ghost in the Shell films. Premised on an unending tit-for-tat war fought exclusively in the skies by chain-smoking teenagers, Oshii's film is another examination of what it is to be somebody who has slipped out of alignment with the rest of humanity. Sky Crawlers' spotted dogfights, arriving with the unhurried progression of serialised television, set small teams of aircraft - some of which look like chromed and customised Spitfires; others closer to Japanese prototype craft, by way of the player ship from Sega Saturn shooter Battle Garegga - against each other for no clear tactical advantage. The people steering these planes are adolescents with stock personalities; children arrested in physically and emotionally underdeveloped bodies who are, given the facile nature of the indulgencies available to them, prisoners in their very own Land of Toys.

Although housed in a lush Irish countryside and clearly based on a British World War II era barracks, common rooms come complete with enormous (and incongruously modern) refrigerators, packed with bottled lager. A cheap way to manage these already docile youngsters. Similarly, sex workers from a nearby brothel are available to the boys - and they are boys, rather than men - initiating them into a safe but emotionally inert approximation of adulthood. Everything in The Sky Crawlers reeks of this tranquilised façade, even down to the towns and cities that the children are briefly permitted to interact with. The local diner is staffed by extras who serve up anachronistic delicacies, while the one city we see is little more than a barren playground. Prior to one particularly enormous sortie, the team billet in an undamaged central European sprawl filled with restaurants that require no patrons and a bowling alley that just so happens to attract a small group of excitable women, happy to whisk away one of these hotshot pilots. Glacially paced, Sky Crawlers has the somnambular rhythms of a Soviet science fiction film. Like, say, a Solaris, that which initially appears cold and emotionally impenetrable eventually takes on a hypnotic quality, leaving the viewer feeling unusually bereft when the film reaches its conclusion.