School’s out for the summer—except, that is, for a group of schoolgirls attending a remedial math class that none of them care about.  While their teacher drones on in the morning heat, one of students—a girl named Tomoko—stares out the window, daydreaming.  She casually observes the school’s beloved brass band as they leave to help cheer on the school’s equally beloved baseball team as well as the deliveryman who arrives too late with the band’s lunches.

Seeing a chance for her and her classmates to escape their teacher’s lecturing, Tomoko volunteers to bring the lunches to the band as a show of school spirit.  Naturally, the girls are much more interested in having the day off than in actually helping out the band, and so take their time with the delivery.  By the time they finally deliver the lunches, it’s too late.  The food has become spoiled, and the band quickly succumbs to a severe case of food poisoning.

The only survivor is a reluctant young man named Yuta who is charged with putting together an interim band until the “real” band can recover.  Despite blackmailing the Tomoko and all of the other girls into helping him, Yuta still doesn’t have enough students to make a brass band proper, and so he improvises, deciding to start a swing jazz band instead.

Up until now, Swing Girls has been moving at a fairly leisurely pace, with a few little humorous asides thrown in here and there to establish the various outrageous characters.  However, as the swing band takes shape, the film slowly begins kicking things into high gear; the girls learn to love the music they’re being forced to play, work their butts off to earn enough money to buy instruments, and struggle to be taken seriously as musicians even after the real band returns from the hospital.

At it’s core, Swing Girls is essentially a stereotypical sports movie, and as such, you can basically guess every single story element and plot twist that will pop up throughout the film’s 105 minutes.  There’s the group of unruly misfits thrown together by outrageous circumstances and forced to train under a reluctant/unrelenting coach figure, who bond together during grueling circumstances, and who go on to triumph over various setbacks, learning a valuable life lesson or two in the process.

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One of the downfalls of having so much information concerning upcoming movie releases, especially foreign movie releases, at your fingertips (due to the likes of YouTube) is that it’s entirely possible to see all of the good parts of a movie before you even pop the DVD in your player.  That’s how I felt at first with District B-13 (aka Banlieue 13).  However, to its credit, the movie actually turns out to be a little more than I thought it might be.

Don’t get me wrong—District B-13 is still, first and foremost, a high-octane action movie.  The setting is Paris in the year 2010.  Crime has become so rampant that the government has resorted to walling off entire sections of the city.  The worst of these is B13, which is ruled by a ruthless gangster who has somehow come into posession of a nuclear warhead that he intends to use against the rest of the city.

Enter the two buddies: one is a by-the-books police officer with one helluva roundhouse kick; the other is a former citizen of B13 who has been selected to lead the other through B13 to defuse the bomb.  As you might suspect, the two hit it off right from the start.  Or maybe not.  While the cliches are pretty obvious, as are the movie references—Escape From New York, Lethal Weapon—the movie’s action sequences inject a whole new sort of thrill into the proceedings.

Of course, it helps when one of your leads is a bonafide martial arts expert who has squared off against the likes of Jet Li and the other is one of the inventors of “parkour”, a sort of martial arts/acrobatic regimen for urban environments.

Using very little CGI or wirework, the stunts and fights scenes have an edge and brutality that you just don’t see everyday, and the men scale buildings and fly across rooftops in a manner that makes Superman look clumsy by comparison.

There are a few unbelievable plot and character twists, but for the most part, the film keeps things lean and mean, becoming much greater than the sum of its parts.  And all of the business about ghettos and government indifference feels strikingly relevant given all of the urban unrest that France has experienced in recent years, which adds an interesting layer of subtext to the film.

Billed as the “50th Anniversary Commemoration Project” for mighty Godzilla, Godzilla: Final Wars is also the last Godzilla movie for the next decade or so.  Toho, the studio that brings us all of the kaiju loving, has seen fit to give the big guy a rest, due in part to diminishing box office returns.  And of course, it only makes sense to have Godzilla go out with a big bang, one last hurrah before taking a well-deserved vacation (after all, there’s been 5 Godzilla movies in the past 6 years).

However, after having seen Godzilla: Final Wars, the only thing I could think was “This is the best they could do?”

If I were Godzilla, and this were my “50th Anniversary Commemoration Project”, I’d probably go back and trample Tokyo two or three times, just on general principle.

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There’s really no use in denying it.  The simple truth about Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is that your enjoyment of the film will be almost entirely dependent on how well you knew and enjoyed Final Fantasy VII, the game.

If you’re the kind of person who has no idea who Aeris Gainsborough is, there’s a 99% chance that you can pass on this one and not really miss out.  If you feel inclined, simply borrow it from one of your gamer friends.

However, if you’re like me, and the name Aeris brings a little catch to your throat, than you can probably stop reading this review, because you’ve probably already watched the movie several times.  Heck, you’ve probably bought copies for friends.

Which leaves the two or three of you that don’t fall into either category.  So by all means, please read on…

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In his review of Café Lumière, Jeffrey Overstreet writes the more movies I watch, and the older I get, the more I enjoy a particular sight onscreen—people who are thinking.. I have to agree, it’s something that I’ve come to appreciate more and more myself. Granted, it can be difficult sometimes, but when you can slow yourself down enough to enter a movie’s world, it can be a refreshing and moving experience.

This thought came to mind as I was watching Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows. The story seems rife with possibilities for saccharine melodrama and heartstrings-tugging: 4 young children are abandoned by their selfish mother, and are forced to fend for themselves in a cramped apartment. Thankfully, Koreeda resists that urge for the most part. Instead, he eschews any drama altogether and instead just immerses us in the world of these children, who act, refreshingly, like children (no Dakota Fanning-esque “wise and precocious beyond their years” nonsense here, thank you very much).

At times, they seem blissfully unaware of anything going on. They play in the park, plant seeds in cups on the window sill, dutifully do the laundry, and eat noodles from the nearby convenience store, even as disconnection notices from the utility companies pile up on the table. But what do we expect for them to do?

The only one who seems really aware of their situation is 12-year-old Akira, who despite being big for his age, is really at a loss at what to do. Being 12 years old, he’s unable to really fend for himself. He can’t make his case to the adults, and even his attempts at expressing his dissatisfaction to his mother are small and trite at best. Which, in many ways, feels far more honest and realistic to me.

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Vital might be the first Shinya Tsukamoto film that I’ve seen in its entirety, but I have seen and read enough about some of his other films to know that a few terms can accurately be applied to Tsukamoto’s films.  Terms ranging from “transgressive” to “taboo shattering”, “disturbing” to “harrowing”.

This is, after all, a guy whose first major film, Tetsuo: The Ironman, featured a mild-mannered office worker slowly turning into a monstrosity of metal and wires complete with a drill-like penis, and whose previous film, A Snake Of June, centered around a woman blackmailed into performing various sexual acts, including masturbating in public.

So I suppose, from the perspective, that it sort of makes sense that Vital is, at least on the surface, about an amnesiac who begins regaining his memories while dissecting his girlfriend’s cadaver.  However, to just leave it at that is far too simplistic, and far to dismissive of this film, which, while quite disturbing, is also quite haunting and surprisingly tender and beautiful at times.

The always-stellar Tadanobu Asano (Last Life In The Universe) is Hiroshi, a young man who has just survived a terrible car accident.  However, when he wakes up from a coma, he has no memory of the wreck, his life, anything.

Only after discovering some medical textbooks does he begin to sense some purpose to his life, some sort of calling.  He enrolls in medical school, much to the delight of his parents, and quickly becomes a star pupil.  But he still remains a lonely cipher, brilliant in his studies but essentially empty, unable to recall anything else in his life and constantly living in dread of the alien world around him.

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After hearing so much about his writing, I finally got around to reading Haruki Murakami for myself, beginning with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I wasn’t disappointed.  Murakami’s writing style is lethargic and surreal, full of intriguing characters whose obtuseness and alienation make them all the more compelling.  I found myself completely captivated.  And as these things go, I naturally found myself wondering what a movie based on Murakami’s work might look like.

So when I found out about Tony Takitani, it immediately jumped to the top of my list, and doubly so when I found out that it would be coming out on DVD here in the States in early 2006.  And the movie did not let me down one bit, living up to all of my expectations, and then some.

Based on a Murakami short novel—the man is apparently very guarded about his other, more famous works being translated into film—Tony Takitani tells the story of a man named, well, Tony Takitani (Issei Ogata, Yi Yi).  The thing about Tony is that he is lonely, very lonely.

His mother died shortly after he was born, his jazz musician father only drops by every couple of years, and while Tony’s fastidious attention to detail may serve him well as an illustrator, it doesn’t really help him when it comes to human relationships.  The result is a man who is so alone, he doesn’t even know he’s alone—he knows nothing else but solitude.

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Set in New York City circa 2095, Immortal opens with a mysterious pyramid suddenly appearing in the skies above the city.  The ancient Egyptian gods have returned to Earth in order to judge Horus, the god of heaven.  Horus has 7 seven days to find a “compatible” mate and sire offspring, or else he will lose his immortality.  Of course, the humans, aliens, and mutants below know none of this.  All they know is that a mysterious artifact is floating above their heads.  That, and a mysterious serial killer is stalking the city streets, killing their victims by making them explode.

Meanwhile, a mysterious white-skinned, blue-haired woman named Jill has been picked up by the malevolent Eugenics Corporation.  And a noted anarchist named Nikopol has just escaped from prison, causing all manner of anxiety with the city’s government.  Meanwhile, Horus continues his search for a someone with whom to mate, and for a body that he can possess in order to do so.  I think you can see where this is heading.  Horus “joins forces” with Nikopol, who then tracks down Jill so Horus can have his way with her.  Jill and Nikopol, who are both a little out of their league, begin falling for eachother.

Meanwhile, there’s a great deal of confusion and obtuseness going on as well.  Adapted by Bilal from his own comic books, Immortal oozes style, atmosphere, and ideas.  Unfortunately, the result is less heady and mindblowing than it feels like it should be.  Rather, it feels more like a trainwreck, albeit a one that looks pretty cool.  Ideas and concepts are tossed about, always tantalizing the viewer but never really giving any satisfactory answers.

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