For It Is Man's Number: kyôko kagawa

Showing posts with label kyôko kagawa. Show all posts

Friday, 1 March 2024

The Three Treasures (1959)

It’s quite a coincidence that I spent time this week finally watching Poor Things, a Frankenstein-like work, and then made room in my viewing schedule for this, a film essentially about gods and monsters. The Three Treasures has some of the former, one of the latter, and a lengthy runtime that allows the director to give due respect to a creation myth that shows Japan being formed.

The great Toshirô Mifune is the lead here, an individual named Prince Osu who will soon become Prince Yamato Takeru. As Osu, he embarks on a deadly quest. As Takeru, he starts to evolve as he finds out more context about his place in the world, whether of his own doing or at the hands of others.

I am not going to lie. I watched this because it was on the list of kaiju movies I am currently using as a main reference point for my 2024 journey through the films of Godzilla and co. It wasn’t long until I realised that this was quite different to the other films I have been watching recently. This isn’t a monster movie. It is a classic tale, a hero’s journey that also includes a memorable encounter with a creature that is very close in design to the Hydra (although it “only” has eight heads, and is known as Yamata no Orichi). That creature is well-realised, Harryhausen-like in feel and execution, but it is one very small moment in a film that is more concerned with fate, selflessness, love, and fighting for your place in history.

Written by Ryûzô Kikushima and Toshio Yasumi, who both have MANY films worth exploring, this is an enjoyably overblown bit of melodrama, almost an entire film seemingly designed to celebrate the gods responsible for creating Japan, but it’s also a film that just reaches a bit too far. I never felt truly invested in the story, and I didn’t care for any of the characters, although I would remain interested in Toshirô Mifune simply due to him being Toshirô Mifune.

Director Hiroshi Inagaki looks to have made a nice little career out of churning out historical dramas for a decade or so, and there is clearly a good use of resources here to show every main set-piece, but the end result here doesn’t feel like the best work from anyone involved. Maybe, and it is a big maybe, a rewatch would be beneficial. Maybe watching it in a better presentation would help (this was hard to track down, but is tucked away on the Internet Archive). Sadly, all I have to go on is this particular experience, and it was lacking something special.

Mifune is wonderful though, and I will also mention the likes of Yôko Tsukasa, Kyôko Kagawa, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura, and Setsuko Hara, and there are many more excellent performers in the stuffed cast, but very few get to make much of an impression amidst this sprawling tale of tales.

Certainly not terrible, and rarely dull, this just wasn’t as good as other historical epics I could suggest. And I’ll admit it, I was hoping for more screentime for that multi-headed snake monster, dammit.

5/10

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews
Or Amazon is nice at this time of year - https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/Y1ZUCB13HLJD?ref_=wl_share

Thursday, 1 February 2024

Mothra (1961)

Okay, first of all, I need to apologise. In making 2024 a year of Godzilla on the blog, I soon realised that I wanted to cover every connected kaiju film. It's a task as momentous as the creatures themselves, and I have already missed out some key movies I wanted to cover on the journey. So there will be a little bit of backtracking before we move further forward. And this is my resource for planning the rest of the year (or however long it takes to cover the movies I want to review here) - https://www.tohokingdom.com/genre_movie_lists/kaiju_listing.htm - and any input, especially from those who know much more than I do, is always welcome.

Go ahead and make all the jokes you want (particularly if you are already envisioning the size of the giant bulb you would need to lure away a giant moth), but Mothra holds up very well today as another fantastic Japanese kaiju film. Based on a book by Shin'chirô Nakamura, it's the tale of greedy and exploitative individuals who bring the titular beast upon their heads when they fail to heed warnings against uprooting two tiny young women from their island home. These "twin fairies" aka Shobijin (played by Yumi Itô and Emi Itô) don't lash out at their captors, but they make everyone aware that the situation will lead to dire consequences. Those dire consequences start off in the form of a giant egg, which hatches a giant caterpillar, which eventually builds a cocoon and prepares to become, as you may have surmised already, Mothra.

Another film from the kaiju master, AKA Ishirô Honda, Mothra is everything you want from this kind of film. The screenplay, by Shin'ichi Sekizawa, mixes the usual messaging with a good smattering of atmosphere throughout the first half before delivering the fun spectacle in the second half. It somehow manages to deliver the goods without feeling like a lazy retread, thanks to the use of the Shobijin, and Mothra makes a hell of an impact in both main, destructive, incarnations.

The cast make much less of an impact, although both Yumi and Emi Itô are delightful every time they appear onscreen. Jerry Itô is the evil capitalist, Clark Nelson, Hiroshi Koizumi plays Dr Shin'ichi Chûjô, someone who might come up with whatever plan is needed to deal with/placate Mothra, and Kyôko Kagawa is a photographer named Michi Hanamura. They all get one or two decent moments, but the film always steps up a notch when showing us either the Shobijin or Mothra.

I don't have much more to say. Although I was familiar with the titular beast, I'd only ever seen the modern Mothra in the American "monsterverse" movies, which is a different, but beautiful, visual feast. Finally seeing the original creature in the original film was a real treat, and I was smiling from start to finish as the pieces of the plot were moved into place, paving the way for the expected third act of panic and large-scale catastrophe. Mothra deserves to remain such a beloved film (and I know it is, considering how many friends of mine are fans of it) so I encourage others to avoid delaying a viewing of it for as long as I did.

9/10