Favorite films

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2018

★★★ 1

Me, the first time I saw this: “Holy shit there’s Akira Takarada and the dude from those Gamera movies!”

Me, this time: “Holy shit there’s Peggy Neal from that Crazy Cats Las Vegas movie!”

1995

★★★ Watched 20 May 2025

I can’t really find any evidence of Yoji Yamada’s direct involvement with this series, but the way it echoes his work is hard to ignore. The cast has always borrowed heavily from his stable of actors, but this special has a blatant shoutout to THE YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF, and the beginning of the film repeats a setup from TORA-SAN’s Mitsuo/Izumi storyline when Jun’s girlfriend tells him she was proposed to and he acts like he doesn’t care.

The theme of this…

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1965

★★★★½ 3

Tomu Uchida hasn’t let me down yet! This, THE MAD FOX, and BLOODY SPEAR AT MOUNT FUJI have all been excellent. 

This film reminds me of Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW. Long swaths of the movie are police procedural, where the focus isn’t on the mystery of who did it, but around the details of the suspect and how the police are going to nail him. And the film wanders from protagonist to protagonist as we follow the fugitive himself, a…

2023

★★★★½ 2

A good counterbalance to SHIN GODZILLA, which is a great procedural film as much as it is political commentary. This is one of, if not the most emotionally charged GODZILLA films. 

Great ing cast. A real Avengers assembled out of the different corners of my Japanese film fandom — Hidetaka Yoshioka from TORA-SAN, Yuki Yamada from GOKAIGER, and Sakura Ando from, I don’t know, good movies. Dragged down a bit at times by the two leads. I liked Ryunosuke Kamiki…

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