Reviews

Great find at my public library: eye-poppingly gorgeous restored print of Kinogasa Teinosuke's 1953 "Gate of Hell (Jigoku Mon)" out in Criterion edition, UPC: 7-15515- 10451-7

Has everything visually that drew me to classic Japanese cinema when I was a kid. The color and pattern sense of 12th century clothing and home décor and the use of light and shadow one was more likely to see in a b&w film than in most Technicolor films of the early 1950's.

The story is based on a contemporary historical account of the Heiji Rebellion of 1160 and its aftermath, intertwining images from a picture scroll depicting the rebellion with the live action of the movie. The plot centers on the lives of three people caught up in what would have been a love triangle if the lady in question had agreed to it. Instead, she is the victim of Travis Bickel-like stalker who won't take "no" for an answer.

May not be for all tastes: not as much chambara (sword fighting) as some people like in their jidaigeki (historical dramas), and a little over the top on the melodrama, but still worth seeing, especially from the technical standpoint of benchmarking a great job of color film restoration. Not garish, but jaw-droppingly accurate.

Getting used to the rhythm of the storytelling in the beginning of this movie may prove to be too much of an obstacle to enjoying it for non-Japanese audiences. The way characters are introduced, as if seemingly unrelated to each other, is something of a head scratcher. However, being left in the dark puts the viewer in the same position as several of the characters whose varying points of view about the same set of events are presented. As in the classic Kurosawa film, "Rashômon," the audience has no way of deciding which of several more or less plausible explanations of a gruesome crime is accurate, and, like "Rashômon," the least plausible turns out to be true. That said, this is no "Rashômon." However, it is stylish and entertaining as teen-oriented horror flicks go, and refreshingly not peopled with characters you want to yell at for being stupid. It's also a relief that most of the gore is off- camera and well enough represented by sound effects.

I wish more people in the U.S. could see the diversity of Miike's work. He's unfortunately lumbered with the reputation of his shocking "Audition." It seems to me after seeing almost a dozen of his movies, that his signature style is his ability to work in any style, now confirmed by this stage play peopled by film actors who are just as good in live theater as they are in his and other directors' films.

This play updates a traditional Japanese folktale about the consequences of not complying with the gods' wishes. It's eerily predictive of the 3/11 string of disasters, not so much in exact detail, but in the way some elements of society can't be bothered to respect the power that nature can bring to bear on human-created structures and institutions. In this story, nature is chiefly represented by a tantrum-prone, love-struck demon princess, and her minions. That's pretty telling. For millennia, the Japanese cosmology has sought to ease humanity's relationship with the capriciousness of nature. This is deeply ingrained in Japanese daily life, but as seen with the aftermath of the 3/11 Tôhoku earthquake and tsunami, putting a bunch of nuclear reactors on earthquake-prone stretches of coastline is modernism and human hubris gone amok. Nature just is what it is. The way it's written in kanji, 自然 (shizen), is telling. The kanji mean "self" and "as it is". People disregard it at their own peril, and to the detriment of others around them.

The leads are played with heart and skill by Tomoko Tabata, Shinji Takeda and Ryûhei Matsuda. Miike makes good use of a supporting cast of other well-known movie actors in multiple roles: some human; some animal; some shape-shifting demons, gods and other supernaturals--without major adjustments in their appearance (unlike all the technological, costume and makeup resources he availed himself of in his other big supernatural story, "Yôkai Dai Sensô"). Likewise, the stage set is simple and uses lighting and sound (not so much naturalistic in either case, as evocative) to indicate locale. Where there might be bloodshed, he doesn't even make use of stage blood, trusting the audience and his actors to make the experience real.

Although this is a stage play, the camera work is closer to that of a TV production, well coordinated to make the best use of small moments in close-up. However, it never tries to be anything other than a stage play, and the audience's response and participation are critical to appreciating it as a real-time work. It's the next best thing to being there.

The writers never met a gender, ethnic or racial stereotype or clichéd plot device they didn't want to embrace and exploit. I feel sorry for Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks for being so at loose ends that they felt compelled to take on this assignment. It's undoubtedly one of the worst American cop shows I've ever seen, and rivals a couple of the lamer Italian cop shows ("L'ispettore Coliandro" and "Montalbano," to name names) for sheer dreadfulness. It doesn't have the wit to be truly funny, and the drama is ludicrous. The dialog reads like a very early rough draft of a high-schooler's idea of a teleplay. It's sad when the commercials are wittier and more entertaining than the program.

This film carries the same spirit and almost the same story as "Nobody Knows" (Daremo Shiranai) by Hirokazu Kore-Eda. It is truthfully told without resorting to feel-good plot twists, and earns its laughs and tears honestly. If anything, it continually points the viewer to the underlying rottenness of anything or anybody superficially attractive. Children's laughter is stained either with cruelty, substance abuse or deep sorrow. The adults are either mean and domineering, self-absorbed, or kind but powerless to help. There's only an ineffectual hint of adult protectiveness of a throw-away child, and even the police respond with annoyance rather than genuine concern for the welfare of the 11-year-old boy who is at the center of this story.

Unlike other reviewers, I don't think this movie is too pretty. It's mostly dark and grimy. Even scenes at the water's edge and in the woods are dotted with refuse, which the kid harvests for useful items and things he can sell. I got the sense that any residual beauty that this child perceives is what keeps him from committing suicide or joining the other lost boys getting high on inhalants. His ambition is to be a poet. I took the visuals to be his poet's-eye view of his hard-scrabble life.

He's Pinocchio made flesh with no Geppetto or Jiminy Cricket in sight. As with the kids in "Nobody Knows," his ultimate fate remains un-foretold. Both movies left me in tears. I was surprised to see this aired on MHz Worldview's excellent film series, "For the Family." I wouldn't let children watch this without a trusted adult also watching. In that sense, it is a family movie, not boob-tube babysitting fare.

I found this movie to be intriguing enough to hang on for the ride. The production design alone--rendering perfectly various historical periods in Tokyo--was worth my time.

If you like your stories tied up neatly at the end, it's probably not the movie for you. Likewise, if you can't handle non-linear time structures, give this one a miss. However, if you like riddles that can't be solved, you will probably enjoy it. In that regard, it is similar to "(The Mystery of) Rampo" (1994) and "Jacob's Ladder." However, I don't think it was as honest as those films, because forgiveness seems too easily given. As difficult as the relationships are in this movie, and given the unsolvable riddle, I don't think it was necessary for the protagonist to forgive his antagonist as unequivocally as he does in this movie. That said, given the character through-lines the actors had to work with, everyone did a terrific job... perhaps with the exception of the stiff who was hired to portray a crooked U.S. occupation forces officer. How hard could it be to find an American to play an American, or at least someone with a credible imitation of an American accent? Thankfully, he's the only clunker and only in one scene, and maybe I'm being too hard on him because of his bad rendering of an American accent. Nothing else in his performance was terrible.

The only reason I'm not giving it a 10 is that it uses some kid actors whose skills were not a match for those of the principals. Japanese children's movies are a little edgier than G rated movies in the U.S., so if I were giving it an MPAA rating, I'd have to give it a PG. I saw it with English subtitles, so it wouldn't be accessible to younger non-Japanese speaking children, in any case. This movie does not have a Hollywood/Disney ending, but it is a moral tale about doing the right thing and true friendship.

The story takes place in the 1970's and centers on three 11 year olds who attend a rural elementary school, Akira Ohta, Hideko Komaru and a new girl in class, who makes an impressive entrance, interdicting a bullying episode on the playground, and then introduces herself to her new classmates as Rumiko Tezuka.

Akira is a bit of a misfit and a dreamer who doesn't quite gel with his male peers. Hideko is a shy outsider who is the butt of everybody's jokes at school. Her tormentors call her "Wolf Girl", inspired by her seemingly feral demeanor and also by the presence of a Wolf Girl act in a carnival freak show encamped next to the town's Shinto shrine. Rumiko is a city girl, beautifully dressed, speaking impeccable, Tokyo Japanese and with a take-no-prisoners style of standing up to bullies. She seems an unlikely candidate to befriend both Akira and Hideko, which sets off a wave of gossip among both male and female peers, leading to more physical attacks and counter attacks.

There is a side plot involving the strained relationship between Akira's parents that contributes further to Akira's sense of isolation and emboldens him to violate school rules and find out who the carnival wolf girl really is.

Dreadful script sinks a good cast. I'm sure the story is serious enough, and I regret that I couldn't hang in there long enough to see Terrence Stamp. And they call women whiny! I can see how Gary Cole got the part he had in "Office Space." He whines exceptionally well, which is all this script gives him to do until he falls down the recapturing-his-youth rabbit hole.

Gary Cole plays a nearly suicidal attorney whose best friend, played by William Petersen, takes on as his rescue project, having been through his own nervous breakdown earlier. The first half hour does not reward with much but a headache. The script to that point apparently never met a class, age or ethnic stereotype it didn't want to exploit, employing only the choicest clichés available. It has no emotional depth, but if it was meant to be satirical, it also lacks the wit to pull that off.

This is "Save the Tiger" as a buddy road flick. That movie gave me a headache too, but I was able to sit through it, because it had the one thing going for it this one didn't, at least in the first half hour, i.e. decent writing.

There are so many other movies and plays that have handled this topic with better grace, even when showing middle-aged men behaving badly.

If I can skip the first half hour, I may be persuaded to sit through it to catch Terrence Stamp's performance, but I'm afraid of what lurks behind that curtain.

My one word review: Blecchh!

I've never seen the two male leads in anything else. I was most impressed with Shosuke Tanihara because he had the actorly and comedic chops to show the character's gradual seduction by, and eventual disillusionment with, the trappings of being one of the "beautiful people." The best comedy acting should look effortless, but it is also the most difficult to pull off--more so in live performance than in film, where a performance can be sliced and diced to sharpen timing. Tanihara is the real deal, OR, at least, this director was able to get this high-level of work out of him. I look forward to seeing him in other kinds of roles and hope that he doesn't fall into the trap of being too handsome to not look like a trademarked version of himself. I especially would like to see him in dramatic roles, because the best comic actors make the best dramatic actors, more often than the other way around.

Muga Tsukaji as Takuro is no slouch, either. This is a character who wears his heart on everything--most literally on his restaurant, which is called Kokoroya (Heart Shop). The actor does this in such an organic way that the exaggeration required to make him a heightened caricature in no way robs him of his believability as an ugly duckling everyman. Just as much, I hope to see him in dramatic roles, and not limited to playing a Jabba the Hut type villain.

I agree that the cheesiness of some of the plot devices was forgivable, but not necessarily because it's a Japanese picture. I think the cheesiness effectively serves the aims of caricature required to make this not just a sweet little romantic comedy, but also a sharp satire on consumerist superficiality. I especially liked the sly little dig at the Japanese preoccupation with incorporating English into conversations solely for the purpose of being fashionable. Americans do this with Japanese and other languages, though perhaps not to as great an extent. I don't think American filmmakers are any less capable of producing this type of pointed commentary, but the type of production that can do this has to be relatively free of commercial obstructionism, and there appears to be less of that, at least in the Japanese export market. Not having regular access to the standard Japanese cinematic fare that doesn't make it overseas, it's not for me to say that Japanese film, in toto, adheres to some higher standard of independence than U.S. film. I'm just happy that we're getting the good stuff.

I'd also like to comment on the use of color, since no one else has mentioned it yet. There was an intentional manipulation of color in the sequences where the transformed Annin encounters the barely real world of "Let's Handsome." The clothes' colors are saturated, and the skin tones are desaturated and tinted gold. Still photos of all the handsome men at the beginning of the movie are hand tinted with obvious makeup effects. This sets up a dramatic irony for the mind of our hero to miss and the audience to pick up, on a subliminal level. He's enamored of the "Let's Handsome" experience and doesn't recognize its artificiality for what it is until (as he says) it's too late, but the audience is clued in from the get-go and has to watch him helplessly as he gets sucked into that world. However, this isn't an alienating device, because anybody who's ever felt inferior because of his or her looks can also feel the power of that seduction and find it hard to resist, and therefore completely empathize with him.

The only serious downside I found with this movie is that it was obvious how it was going to end, so if they were going for a surprise, that didn't work. The details were mildly surprising, but the outcome wasn't. Apart from that, a couple of stereotypical gay character expositions were mildly annoying more than blatantly offensive, and the Japan-specific references to worn-out jokes from old TV shows were a little baffling, but more of a blip than a buzz kill.

I think this would be particularly good movie for adolescents and the parents of adolescents to see, not necessarily with each other. Kids who are on the cusp of doing something stupid to themselves because of poor self image could benefit from the underlying message, especially the ending.

The acting is fine. The cast is great. The script is lame, lame, lame. And did say it was lame? If the writers could exploit any ethnic stereotype in shameless fashion, they did. This story about culture clash and crime could have been told intelligently without resorting to over-the-top, sniggering, Hollywood-style bigotry. How could anybody take seriously a crime drama where two of the young mafia types' last names are Isabella and Rosselini? The only thing worthwhile to me was looking at all the Chicago exteriors and spotting the errors in geography.

It is kind of fun to see a young Ben Stiller as a baby mafioso. I am relieved that this movie didn't wreck Adam Baldwin's or Liam Neeson's careers.

The English title, "Samurai Rebellion" might be a little misleading if you're looking for straight-ahead chambara. It's more of a family drama with a few well-staged fight scenes near the end, so it may be more appealing to drama fans than action fans.

Mifune gives a restrained performance, and Nakadai almost does, as well. I'm so glad he found his "off" button as he got older. I'm not sure Kobayashi knew how to direct women as well as men. I think they come off more caricaturish than his male characters, but the caricatures work.

The reason I find this film a little forced is because the camera work--all of it gorgeous--occasionally calls too much attention to itself ("look at me, I'm an arty shot") and threatens to pull the viewer out of the story. The sound track, on the other hand, is just right.

I wonder if this event actually occurred, since Matsudaira was a real historical figure, and he's been depicted elsewhere in film ("Sharaku") as a hypocritical pervert.

Fun in the same sort of teeth-gnashing way Mitani's "Minna no Ie" is. I found myself wanting to rescue both films' main victims of everybody else's machinations. Similar plot in both movies about what happens when your dream falls into the hands of supposed experts. Both movies have leading characters who work in commercial entertainment, so I suspect the satirical elements of both scripts relating to this career path are very near to Mitani's experience.

The rest in both movies is stock-character-driven farce, over-the-top, as all well-wrought farce should be. This picture was derived from the work of a live sketch comedy troupe, so it has that wild, loosey-goosey feel you get when actors get to improvise major chunks of the plot, reined in just enough to make it a coherent movie, while still nodding to the art of improv in the script-within-a-script.

Look for Ken Watanabe somewhat reprising his role in "Tampopo." He doesn't do nearly enough comedy anymore. His early work is a hoot. This is only a small taste of it.

Overall, the casting choices were excellent. I absolutely loved the on-screen chemistry between Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding, Jr. The script certainly helped, but their work together went well beyond the words and brought the arc of their characters' relationship to life.

I'm not at all put off that I never forgot that this is a movie and not real life. This film is artifice in the service of truth. Apart from cinematic technique, this had enough of the theatrical to it to remind me of the power of performance to shake up an audience.

I love that it worked on both the from-the-gut and up-in-the-head levels, which is, I think, the point Anthony Hopkins' character was trying to make: not that he'd been transformed into a gorilla but that he was a human being who had come to be accepted as a human being in gorilla society and became more authentically human because of it. The polemic is not anti-human. The polemic is anti- humans fooling themselves into thinking that the trappings of modern "civilization" are essential to one's identity as a human, and that being human is tantamount to being an overlord to other beings.

BTW, isn't this the movie where they said the tagline should have been "Show me the monkey"?

I could only stand to watch the first 30 minutes or so. Apart from its intellectual gifts, all I could say to myself about this was "pretentious schlock." Or, better still, "pretentious, annoying schlock." How many over-acted reaction shots did we actually need of each of the various dirty old men lusting after Tuesday Weld's character (including her character's daddy)? That's what sank the movie for me. Subtle it's not. I suppose if I were in the mood for wretched excess I could have sat through the whole thing. Pity, both Weld and Roddy McDowall threw a lot of craft at it. It looked like they were having fun, too. I may revise my rating upward if I can actually sit through the whole thing in the future. Then again...

Someone said something about it being remade. Oh, please, don't. It's definitely of its period: at the point when the general popular imagination regarding the sexual mores of teenagers in the U.S. was on the cusp of going from Eisenhower-era prudishness to the Summer of Love. I suppose that in 2008 it works as a museum piece, but certainly not as a satirical window on present-day sexual hypocrisy. I think you could get more of that kind of mileage doing something about Henry VIII as serial polygamist and archetypal trophy wife killer.

Most of the comments have focused on direction. I'm more interested in the acting. Naturally, that is a function of how the director shapes performances on the set and in the editing suite, but the director has to have something to work with.

Tatsuya Nakadai has, for his long career as a performer and teacher, a justifiably great reputation. But there's an arc to his development as an actor that has him starting out by chewing scenery as a younger performer and gradually becoming a decent, and then sublime, actor.

Sometimes in his early performances a director was able to rein in and/or harness Nakadai's excesses to good effect. For instance, I don't think Kurosawa brought him under control at all in "Sanjuro," but managed to make the best of his hamminess in "Yojimbo," largely by having him channel Elvis Presley's swagger and sneer.

The situation is similar in "Sword of Doom," except in this case Nakadai is channeling James Dean's brooding intensity, but with not nearly the subtlety James Dean was famous for. That sort of subtlety comes a lot later in Nakadai's career, most notably in "Kagemusha," when Kurosawa, or Nakadai himself, found his volume knob and turned it down. We don't realize how fortunate we were to have Dean in full-blown genius mode from the beginning. He was a preternaturally old soul. Nakadai just had to age the normal way in order to uncover that inner core that makes a screen performance transcendent.

Well, I liked it better than Robert seems to have. But it WAS formulaic (in an anti-Hollywood way), basically "The Commitments" or "Hula Girl" with classical music. As was the case in "The Commitments," Hisaishi used real musicians to good effect in some of the key roles.

I do disagree with Robert about Hisaishi's visual story telling choices. It may not have been terribly original for MOST of the picture, but the opening scene was very inventive. Perhaps Robert was disappointed that Hisaishi didn't maintain that level of novelty throughout the movie. I actually liked the music better than some of Hisaishi's scores for Miyazaki movies.

On a completely Nihon eiga geek note, are we sure this was shot in 2001? I've seen a number of these actors (Yoshihiko Hakamada, Tomokazu Miura, Reiko Kusamura and Yoji Tanaka) in much earlier films, and they all looked too young in this one for them to be the ages they would have been in 2001. If it was, they should bottle whatever it is that keeps them young.

Not a great movie, but the scene between Sutherland's character and his brother in the brother's office is worthy of the best Marx Brothers material.

Unlike the other commentators here, I found Peter Boyle's work in this movie annoying and overwrought, and that's why I gave it an 8. But everything Sutherland did in this movie was comedy magic and totally unexpected, given his reputation as a serious actor.

Fonda, on the other hand, seemed to be phoning it in, doing a watered down caricature of her Bree Daniels persona in "Klute." Too bad, there was a lot of talent in this picture.

Very sweet, wryly funny in spots, but always haunted by war (described sparingly but never shown). It was based on a stage play and betrays its theatrical roots in some of the pacing and staging. It's slow, perhaps too slow for action film fans, but it's not boring. Rather, it's delicate and precise like tea ceremony.

This is the story of an elderly couple told in flashbacks to a few weeks in the spring of 1945. The two main characters, Etsuko Kamiya and Nagayo-san are played by 40-ish actors who convey their younger 20-something selves convincingly. The literal translation of the Japanese title is "Etsuko Kamiya's Youth." The actress who plays Etsuko looks too young, however, as her elderly self (who appears first in the movie), so much so that I was confused at first when she called Nagayo "tô-san" ("Dad"), so that I thought he might be her father or father-in-law, instead of her husband. He looks considerably older than she in the scenes that show them as elderly. It's not uncommon for Japanese women to call their husbands "Dad" when they have children. However, no offspring appear on-screen, nor are there any direct allusions to children in the dialog. It takes the flashbacks to reveal who these people are to each other through showing us their younger selves.

If you need your endings tied up neatly, this movie will frustrate you. If you don't mind not knowing the answers at the end, that is if the questions are sufficiently compelling, this movie will haunt you. I agree it's wise to watch it more than once, especially if Japanese is not your native language. This was Michiko Hada's first movie role; she had been a super-model. I don't know if she can act, but Okuyama captured a tremendous, multifaceted performance on film, which leads me to think she can. In keeping with the plot entanglements, she is the true focus of the story, as she portrays both a real and an imagined Shizuko. What makes the mystery a mystery is not who dunnit, but where does reality leave off and imagination take over. If you can handle being unable to solve a tough puzzle, you might also like "Jacob's Ladder" for the same reason.

"Shimotsuma Monogatari" is somewhere between "Thelma and Louise" and "Wayne's World," with a bit of the "Odd Couple," "The Wild One" and a very brief Spike Lee quote thrown in. Ostensibly a coming-of-age chick-flick, its appeal for me is mainly as a wicked satire on fashion consumerism, and it does a pretty thorough job of demolishing female stereotypes in broadly comedic, but plausible, ways. In a rather unflattering product placement for two giant Japanese retailers: Jusco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JUSCO/ ) and Parco (The Wal*Mart and Bloomingdale's of Asia), they're both slammed. The Lolita-look obsessed Momoko calls their customers twisted, but I guess the "I don't care what you say about me, as long as you spell my name right" version of PR is in play here.

Sadwo Abe plays a dual role, and it's nice that in at least one of them you can see his face, unlike in his brilliant turn in "Yôkai Daisensô" as Kawatarô, where he's under four hours' worth of turtle-esquire latex. He's a full-body actor, one of those people who could probably steal a scene just using his pinkie toe. In his case, he's a scene stealer with a heart who makes everybody he works with look that much better on-screen. Abe-san is already a full-fledged actor. I look forward to Kyôko Fukada and Anna Tsuchiya becoming as skilled. They're well on the way.

I give this movie a 9 for the clichés it succumbs to, although it smashes most of them to bits. I'd tack on a half star for its self-awareness.

A friend sent me this movie without any explanation. I didn't know anything about it, or any of the actors, or Wong Kar Wai when I saw it. The only thing I wish I had known beforehand is that it's part of a series of related films. Other than that, I am grateful for my naiveté.

A concise description, I think, would be to say it's the cinematic twin to Bob Dylan's song "Tangled Up in Blue," a fractured, non-linear "Heartbreak Hotel." If you like the Dylan song and can live with its scattered mirror shards of plot, then "2046" will also appeal to you.

Tony Leung's character, Chow, is the first womanizer in a movie I have ever respected. If there is such a thing as an honorable cad, this guy is it. On the other hand, His alter ego, Tak (played affectingly by Takuya Kimura), is his polar opposite: a man who loves a woman enough to tear himself in two for her. I think the most powerful message of this movie is that, with men, you don't get one without the other.

I loved this movie when it came out. Haven't seen it since, so I'm operating from memory, but one of the strongest impressions I got from it (and even wrote a letter to "Esquire" disputing that magazine's review) was that Morgan was not psychotic. Eccentric, sure, but crazy like a fox, a sort of McMurphy for swinging England. My impression then was that everything around him and Leonie was out of whack, and that Leonie was more inclined to submit to the dominant cultural mishigas because the life of an eccentric's wife was too hard to take, as much as she loved him.

I felt that the story challenged conventional notions of what is normal, and the "normal" that Morgan was an outsider to was insufferably stifling to the human spirit. My fellow IMDb commentator who recoiled from the "weird politics" of this movie, missed the point. Morgan wasn't a Communist. He was the son of Communists. He was a lot freer than any ideologue. The sight gag at the end of the picture is not about him being a Commie. It's about him being an outsider and a prankster to the core.

I don't think the movie makes light of real mental illness. I think it skewers overly enthusiastic diagnoses of psychosis when someone's behavior is socially inconvenient. I don't know that I'd find an assessment of Morgan Delt as a harmless flake to be any more appropriate, in that it's still an incredibly patronizing view of the guy, but at least it wouldn't land him in the rubber room. Although, I found that last scene so encouraging in showing his ability to transcend institutionalization on his own terms.

Thinking in terms of what would happen next if the movie were to continue, my biggest fear at the time was that institutionalization would eventually break his spirit. He reminded me of so many of my peers who were dumped in psych hospitals because their parents didn't know what to do with them. It was easier to call them sick than to deal with the real people they were. In that sense, this is a very '60's movie, because it seemed that the psych hospitalization rate was spiking among young people of that time.

Yeah, you had to be there. And, indeed, how can you go wrong with a movie that has a Johnny Dankworth score?

The only reason I'm giving this a 9 is that the other kid actors who played Tadashi's tormentors were not up to the job. I presume they were just kids who happened to be the right age and handy, but they were not well coached, and their scenes were a minor annoyance.

I say not to judge this by U.S. standards because it's full of ambiguities and the kinds of equivocations that Japanese culture readily embraces, and is not beholden to the black-hat/ white-hat moral constraints U.S. kids' films are routinely subjected to. For example, there is a preciously funny moment when Tadashi's small band of yokai companions finds themselves let down and abandoned by the other yokai, and Shojo--the avuncular Kirin herald--does what many a stressed-out Japanese adult would do. Hint: this would not happen in a Disney film. This picture also has the best product placement for beer you will ever see in a kids' movie.

Early on, there's a moment where a school teacher smacks a couple of bullies on the head with her attendance book. There was a TV commercial in Japan a couple years before this movie came out. It was a stop-motion clay animation about a kid who's depressed and playing guitar and singing the blues in his room. His mother yells at him from downstairs to shut up. Then, someone gives him a candy bar and he cheers up and sings a happy tune, but his mother comes in and tells him to shut up again and gives him a dope slap that leaves a dent in his forehead. I mention this commercial, because it was considered funny, and I didn't hear any objections to it while I was there. There is a lot more bloodshed and physical cruelty on screen in "The Great Yokai War" than one would find in a Disney movie. As a parent, if this were a U.S. film, I would be up in arms about such things, although not necessarily the moral lessons drawn at the end of the picture, which, of course, are also not black and white. Since it's a Japanese movie, I accept that those cultural norms allow for imagery that would not get past the standards and practices cops in a U.S. production. However, I'd probably be a little uneasy taking young kids to see it without giving them some sort of pre-show briefing and/or post-show debriefing about the violence and other off- color stuff, or I'd wait till they're older to show it to them.