Saw a Takashi Miike picture called The Great Yokai War. "Yokai" is a Japanese term for monsters from folklore, as opposed to the more familiar kaiju. It's a kids' picture, about a young boy from Tokyo sent out to live in the countryside with his older sister and his intermittently senile grandfather. When a vengeful spirit appears, the boy gets caught up in a war between warring groups of yokai and must find his courage to become the "Kirin Rider", the hero who will set everything to rights. It's not a bad picture - nothing deep, but an amusing story. Some of the yokai are really trippy, Japanese folklore can get pretty "out there", apparently.
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THE FOUR SHAOLIN CHALLENGERS (1977): "A local neighborhood and market are overrun by a gang of Triads who extort protection money from the local merchants and control the police. A young man comes to the town and opens a martial arts training gym in the hopes of helping the local youth and community. The teacher and his students end up beating the Triads over the control of the town."
It begins with a gang rape, but other than that there is no sex or nudity. It's just as boring as City Ninja, but with a more coherent "plot" than Spirits of Bruce Lee. I wish I had thought to time it, but the climatic battle goes on for at least 15 minutes. (It's like Destroy All Monsters in that respect.) If I'm ever in the mood for Kung Fu Fighting, I'll just pop in this disc and cue up the end of the movie.
One Battle After Another (2025): well-made, well-acted, politically-charged, bizarre, and rather long film, veeery loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, with some elements of the novel transported from its 60s/70s/80s settings to the twenty-first century.
I'll have to reread Vineland again now, after I get through my current reading, and a reread of The Odyssey.
THE BRAVE LION (1978): "During Japan's invasion of China in World War II, two disgraced Japanese soldiers are given a second chance. Facing execution for vafrious infractions, the two men are offered a repreive if they take a special assignment. Since they can speak Chinese and know the territory, the men are assigned the task of running a Chinese labor camp the Japanese operate in occupied territory. After the men take over, they work the prisoners so hard the labor force rises up in revolt of their treament."
I was ready to take a break from bad martial arts movies last night (and they arebad), but Tracy surprised me. She wanted to push on through to "get to the other side" of these kung fu movies to move on to a different genre of bad movies. Like the others we've been watching lately, this is endless back-to-back(-to-back) fight scenes linked by the barest amount of dialogue to move the "plot" along. If I were to compare the ending of this movie (in which the Chinese owner of the lumber mill where the prisoners are working) sets fire to his own mill to Bridge on the River Kwai, that comparison is more than this movie deserves.
I put a moratorium on kung fu movies for the night and watched...
BATTTLE CIRCUS (1953): TCM palyed a day's worth of Humphrey Bogart movies, and I recorded this one. Borgart plays the C.O. of a M*A*S*H unit during the Korean war. He's like Hawkeye Pierce and Herny Blake rolled into one, with one exception: he's "regular army." I grew up with "M*A*S*H"... the original novel, the movie, the TV show, the series of paperbacks... yet I was unaware of this movie until it came up on the listings. I used to like to put together double features, and Battle Circus would pair well with M*A*S*H.
Richard Willis > Jeff of Earth-JAugust 6, 2026 at 10:56pm
I just rewatched Battle Circus. I first saw it the last time TCM had it. I enjoyed it even more this time. I had forgotten the part when she needs a shower and the water’s all gone. (gravity fed from above the tent.) The scenes in the M*A*S*H TV show when Hawkeye takes long showers were ridiculous. Where I was in Vietnam, we had no plumbing and a mobile hospital would REALLY have no plumbing. Some time during the night a truck would come with unpurified river water. They put the water in a large tub on the roof of our shower room. There were six (?) kerosene immersion heaters that (attempted) to heat the water for our showers. First come, first served.
I can't stop thinking about this movie and how similar it is to M*A*S*H. The shower scene in Battle Circus reminded me of the one from the M*A*S*H movie in which the doctor's conspired to find out if Hot Lips' "carpet matched the drapes," so to speak. (They were doctors and really should have known that that's not a true test.) Compared to Battle Circus, the 4077th from the TV show was a Stationary Army Surgical Hospital.
We both enjoyed the movie. While it has the continuity chaos that plagues the Marvel movies (I'm looking at you, The Marvels), it works because they've focused on the protagonist and his relationships, the cast is excellent, the film does a decent job of quickly establishing the players (though I'm hardly coming into this one with missing information, save that we didn't see the last Hulk movie, and I'm pretty sure that even the little kids running around in their pajamas know who the Hulk is), and the film has a coherent plot.
And, obviously, a lot of action sequences.
More than most superhero films, it's the cinematic equivalent of reading a storyline in a comic, with bits of continuity and cameo characters dropping in along the way. You might not know them all, but they serve the film's narrative and the main characters' story arcs.
I did the quick-check of the web this morning and, yeah, my main complaint has been discussed and redditted to death. Mirrored Spoilers: .ylqqɒ ƨɔiƨyʜq ʞood ɔimoɔ ɘɿɘʜw blɿow ɒ ni nɘvɘ ,ɘlqoɘq ƚnɘɔonni ʇo ƨɘiɿuႱni ǫniƚɒƚilidɘb bnɒ ƨʜƚɒɘb ni ƚluƨɘɿ yliɿɒƨƨɘɔɘn bluow ɘnɘɔƨ ʞnɒƚ ǫniƚiɔxɘ ƚɒʜƚ bnɒ ,ɘlqoɘq bɘƨudɒ yllɒnoiƚomɘ bnɒ yllɒɔiƨyʜq ,ƨǫniʜƚ yɿɒƨƨɘɔɘnnu bnɒ ɘldiɿɿoʜ bib ɘʜƨ ƚud ,ƚɒɘɿᎮ .ɘɿɒ ƨniɒlliv "lɒɘɿ" ɘʜƚ oʜw nɿɒɘl ɘw bnɒ ,nɘɘƚ ɒ ƨ'ɘʜƨ ,ƨɘviƚom ɿɘʜ nɿɒɘl ɘw ɘƨuɒɔɘd ɘbiƨɒ llɒ ƚi ǫnivɒw ,ƨnoiƚɔɒ ƨ'yɒɿᎮ nɒɘႱ ʇo ƨɘɔnɘupɘƨnoɔ ɘʜƚ ʇo ƚol ɒ ɘɿonǫi yllɒɘɿ yɘʜT
It's always good to return to the drive-in, at least once in the summertime:
Caught up on a bunch of movies we've been meaning to see (some for decades):
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003): Great cast and great sets. I've read that the story combines several of the novels it's based on, but it seemed coherent enough, and plausible enough for the time. (I didn't notice any social anachronisms.) I liked that they let the naturalist doctor play on Galapagos, but didn't defile history by letting him beat Darwin to the punch. Russell Crowe was definitely the star and carried the movie, although I don't remember his strabismus being this bad before. Maybe he had surgery. Anyway, it's hard to dislike a movie that has Vision, Jarvis and Peregrine Took in it. I wish they'd made more, but alas.
Event Horizon (1997): Since the story is being continued in comic books, I thought I'd take a look. IIRC, the reason I didn't see it when it came out is that the reviews were bad. I can see that -- it definitely lifts too much from Alien. It's got some interesting ideas and a nice cast, but the F/X haven't aged well. Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill were the standouts, of course. Joely Richardson looks familiar, but I don't see anything in her CV where I would have become familiar with her. (Sandman? Only three episodes, but maybe.) Of course, seeing Neill again as a youngish man immediately after his death made me a bit melancholy.
Troy (2004): Another movie whose reviews steered me away when it came out, but it's actually pretty good. Brad Pitt developed a unique fighting style as Achilles that could have been ridiculous but instead made it reasonable that everyone was terrified of him. I had no idea Sean Bean would make such a terrific Odysseus, and yet he does, in his few scenes. Brian Cox, who has made a career playing odious characters, is particularly odious as Agamemnon. Orlando Bloom had a tough job as the cowardly Paris -- not a character that would endear himself to audiences -- but handled it as well as can be expected. The surprise to me was Eric Bana, who I found so unimpressive a year earlier in Hulk, but was awesome as Hector.
Troy varies from The Iliad in a number of important ways, especially the endings for most of its characters. For example, Paris was supposed to die, but didn't; while Menelaus was supposed to have lived and didn't. Patroclus wasn't Achilles' younger cousin, he was his older mentor. Agamemnon was supposed to be killed by his own wife after the war, not by Achilles in Troy. And so on. Oh, and there aren't any Olympian gods. (Achilles, in particular, makes fun of people who believe in them. Needless to say, he's NOT invulnerable.)
We're going to watch The Odyssey as soon as we can get an IMAX seat and watched this as an appetizer, but it's good all on its own. They don't exactly match, and neither reiterate Homer perfectly, but myths do have to be amended to speak to each new generation, or they will fade away as irrelevant. Something comic book fans know about intimately.
Supergirl: We enjoyed it, but if you want a good superhero movie with a female lead, Captain Marvel is better. It's not bad by any means, but it doesn't rise above "well done." The lead villain needed to be a bigger deal than he was, and the movie suffered a bit from being shot entirely in front of a (murky) green screen. After a while. all that Star Wars background just blends together into meaningless visual noise. And it wasn't particularly inspiring, as Kara's hero's journey takes too long and doesn't quite complete. It does, however, deal with Argo City pretty well (creating a rationale for kryptonite) and lays the groundwork for Kara to overcome her PTSD and become a hero. That makes it more of an interstitial film than a standalone, which is probably another reason audiences were unmoved. But if you've heard that Milly Alcock turns in an award-winning performance, you heard right.
Battle of the Bulge: I saw this as a kid and liked it, we were looking for something to watch, and there it was. It's just as I remembered it -- one of those star-studded '60s films that tries to stay historically accurate and generally ends up too long and occasionally boring. But it's World War II, which makes it awesome. Henry Fonda is the putative star, but Robert Shaw steals the show. After this, it's going to be hard to talk my wife into The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far and TheGuns of Navarone. I may have to re-watch those solo.
Valkyrie: Better than I expected, and I wasn't expecting much, since I knew how it ends. (I'm talking about Von Stauffenberg, not the war.) Tom Cruise is to be commended for his utter commitment to the role.
Shin Godzilla (2016): I can see why this movie got such rave reviews. The F/X were old-school Toho cheesy in the beginning, but they got much, much better by the time the Big G was walking around. I liked the pseudo-science, and also the critique of a hidebound, bureaucratic government that can't really respond to an emergency. (Somebody must have said, "Nobody wants to take responsibility" at least three times.) It didn't hate on the Americans, but it did get in some justified digs. I loved the nerds, who were not only described that way, but took no offense. (We took to calling the severe, humorless girl "Wednesday.") Satomi Ishihara was hilarious as the envoy, who was constantly voguing. (I hope we were supposed to laugh at that, because we found it very entertaining. And yes, she is gorgeous, too.) It's a huge leap from previous Godzilla movies, and deserves all the praise it gets. It would be my favorite Godzilla movie by far, if it hadn't been eclipsed by Godzilla Minus One only seven years later.
The Baron > Captain ComicsAugust 6, 2026 at 4:16pm
Shin Godzilla is a favorite of mine, as well. It was made by Hideaki Anno, who made Neon Genesis Evangelion, and if you're an NGE fan, you can tell. (He even used a tune from NGE in this picture.) When I first saw Godzilla's first form come galumphing ashore, I was like, "Anno, what the Hell have you done?", but his final form was the scariest Godzilla I'd ever seen.
I've seen all of the Harryhausen Sinbad movies, and the second, The Golden Voyages of Sinbad, remains significant to me as the first film I saw without an older relative. I would have been 9 or 10. I went with a friend; we were either dropped off and had to walk back, or walked to the theatre and were picked up afterwards. Some guys from a grade ahead were in the house, coincidentally, and we had a great time. I saw it again on TV at some point. My wife had neither seen any of them, so I showed her Golden a third time, back in the 1990s. It holds up, in a fashion, as a kid's movie based on the sensibilities of another era, and not even the era in which it was made. It also features Tom Baker as the villain.
Tiger boasts excellent Harryhausen effects and Jane Seymour, but its plot is even more outlandish than its predecessor, the Orientalist tropes feel even more dated, and Patrick Wayne as Sinbad is about as wooden as his ship.
Replies
THE FOUR SHAOLIN CHALLENGERS (1977): "A local neighborhood and market are overrun by a gang of Triads who extort protection money from the local merchants and control the police. A young man comes to the town and opens a martial arts training gym in the hopes of helping the local youth and community. The teacher and his students end up beating the Triads over the control of the town."
It begins with a gang rape, but other than that there is no sex or nudity. It's just as boring as City Ninja, but with a more coherent "plot" than Spirits of Bruce Lee. I wish I had thought to time it, but the climatic battle goes on for at least 15 minutes. (It's like Destroy All Monsters in that respect.) If I'm ever in the mood for Kung Fu Fighting, I'll just pop in this disc and cue up the end of the movie.
Here's a clip of the FIRST THREE MINUTES.
One Battle After Another (2025): well-made, well-acted, politically-charged, bizarre, and rather long film, veeery loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, with some elements of the novel transported from its 60s/70s/80s settings to the twenty-first century.
I'll have to reread Vineland again now, after I get through my current reading, and a reread of The Odyssey.
THE BRAVE LION (1978): "During Japan's invasion of China in World War II, two disgraced Japanese soldiers are given a second chance. Facing execution for vafrious infractions, the two men are offered a repreive if they take a special assignment. Since they can speak Chinese and know the territory, the men are assigned the task of running a Chinese labor camp the Japanese operate in occupied territory. After the men take over, they work the prisoners so hard the labor force rises up in revolt of their treament."
I was ready to take a break from bad martial arts movies last night (and they are bad), but Tracy surprised me. She wanted to push on through to "get to the other side" of these kung fu movies to move on to a different genre of bad movies. Like the others we've been watching lately, this is endless back-to-back(-to-back) fight scenes linked by the barest amount of dialogue to move the "plot" along. If I were to compare the ending of this movie (in which the Chinese owner of the lumber mill where the prisoners are working) sets fire to his own mill to Bridge on the River Kwai, that comparison is more than this movie deserves.
Here is the FIRST FOUR MINUTES.
I put a moratorium on kung fu movies for the night and watched...
BATTTLE CIRCUS (1953): TCM palyed a day's worth of Humphrey Bogart movies, and I recorded this one. Borgart plays the C.O. of a M*A*S*H unit during the Korean war. He's like Hawkeye Pierce and Herny Blake rolled into one, with one exception: he's "regular army." I grew up with "M*A*S*H"... the original novel, the movie, the TV show, the series of paperbacks... yet I was unaware of this movie until it came up on the listings. I used to like to put together double features, and Battle Circus would pair well with M*A*S*H.
I just rewatched Battle Circus. I first saw it the last time TCM had it. I enjoyed it even more this time. I had forgotten the part when she needs a shower and the water’s all gone. (gravity fed from above the tent.) The scenes in the M*A*S*H TV show when Hawkeye takes long showers were ridiculous. Where I was in Vietnam, we had no plumbing and a mobile hospital would REALLY have no plumbing. Some time during the night a truck would come with unpurified river water. They put the water in a large tub on the roof of our shower room. There were six (?) kerosene immersion heaters that (attempted) to heat the water for our showers. First come, first served.
I can't stop thinking about this movie and how similar it is to M*A*S*H. The shower scene in Battle Circus reminded me of the one from the M*A*S*H movie in which the doctor's conspired to find out if Hot Lips' "carpet matched the drapes," so to speak. (They were doctors and really should have known that that's not a true test.) Compared to Battle Circus, the 4077th from the TV show was a Stationary Army Surgical Hospital.
Spider-man: Brand New Day (2026)
We both enjoyed the movie. While it has the continuity chaos that plagues the Marvel movies (I'm looking at you, The Marvels), it works because they've focused on the protagonist and his relationships, the cast is excellent, the film does a decent job of quickly establishing the players (though I'm hardly coming into this one with missing information, save that we didn't see the last Hulk movie, and I'm pretty sure that even the little kids running around in their pajamas know who the Hulk is), and the film has a coherent plot.
And, obviously, a lot of action sequences.
More than most superhero films, it's the cinematic equivalent of reading a storyline in a comic, with bits of continuity and cameo characters dropping in along the way. You might not know them all, but they serve the film's narrative and the main characters' story arcs.
I did the quick-check of the web this morning and, yeah, my main complaint has been discussed and redditted to death. Mirrored Spoilers: .ylqqɒ ƨɔiƨyʜq ʞood ɔimoɔ ɘɿɘʜw blɿow ɒ ni nɘvɘ ,ɘlqoɘq ƚnɘɔonni ʇo ƨɘiɿuႱni ǫniƚɒƚilidɘb bnɒ ƨʜƚɒɘb ni ƚluƨɘɿ yliɿɒƨƨɘɔɘn bluow ɘnɘɔƨ ʞnɒƚ ǫniƚiɔxɘ ƚɒʜƚ bnɒ ,ɘlqoɘq bɘƨudɒ yllɒnoiƚomɘ bnɒ yllɒɔiƨyʜq ,ƨǫniʜƚ yɿɒƨƨɘɔɘnnu bnɒ ɘldiɿɿoʜ bib ɘʜƨ ƚud ,ƚɒɘɿᎮ .ɘɿɒ ƨniɒlliv "lɒɘɿ" ɘʜƚ oʜw nɿɒɘl ɘw bnɒ ,nɘɘƚ ɒ ƨ'ɘʜƨ ,ƨɘviƚom ɿɘʜ nɿɒɘl ɘw ɘƨuɒɔɘd ɘbiƨɒ llɒ ƚi ǫnivɒw ,ƨnoiƚɔɒ ƨ'yɒɿᎮ nɒɘႱ ʇo ƨɘɔnɘupɘƨnoɔ ɘʜƚ ʇo ƚol ɒ ɘɿonǫi yllɒɘɿ yɘʜT
It's always good to return to the drive-in, at least once in the summertime:
Caught up on a bunch of movies we've been meaning to see (some for decades):
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003): Great cast and great sets. I've read that the story combines several of the novels it's based on, but it seemed coherent enough, and plausible enough for the time. (I didn't notice any social anachronisms.) I liked that they let the naturalist doctor play on Galapagos, but didn't defile history by letting him beat Darwin to the punch. Russell Crowe was definitely the star and carried the movie, although I don't remember his strabismus being this bad before. Maybe he had surgery. Anyway, it's hard to dislike a movie that has Vision, Jarvis and Peregrine Took in it. I wish they'd made more, but alas.
Event Horizon (1997): Since the story is being continued in comic books, I thought I'd take a look. IIRC, the reason I didn't see it when it came out is that the reviews were bad. I can see that -- it definitely lifts too much from Alien. It's got some interesting ideas and a nice cast, but the F/X haven't aged well. Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill were the standouts, of course. Joely Richardson looks familiar, but I don't see anything in her CV where I would have become familiar with her. (Sandman? Only three episodes, but maybe.) Of course, seeing Neill again as a youngish man immediately after his death made me a bit melancholy.
Troy (2004): Another movie whose reviews steered me away when it came out, but it's actually pretty good. Brad Pitt developed a unique fighting style as Achilles that could have been ridiculous but instead made it reasonable that everyone was terrified of him. I had no idea Sean Bean would make such a terrific Odysseus, and yet he does, in his few scenes. Brian Cox, who has made a career playing odious characters, is particularly odious as Agamemnon. Orlando Bloom had a tough job as the cowardly Paris -- not a character that would endear himself to audiences -- but handled it as well as can be expected. The surprise to me was Eric Bana, who I found so unimpressive a year earlier in Hulk, but was awesome as Hector.
Troy varies from The Iliad in a number of important ways, especially the endings for most of its characters. For example, Paris was supposed to die, but didn't; while Menelaus was supposed to have lived and didn't. Patroclus wasn't Achilles' younger cousin, he was his older mentor. Agamemnon was supposed to be killed by his own wife after the war, not by Achilles in Troy. And so on. Oh, and there aren't any Olympian gods. (Achilles, in particular, makes fun of people who believe in them. Needless to say, he's NOT invulnerable.)
We're going to watch The Odyssey as soon as we can get an IMAX seat and watched this as an appetizer, but it's good all on its own. They don't exactly match, and neither reiterate Homer perfectly, but myths do have to be amended to speak to each new generation, or they will fade away as irrelevant. Something comic book fans know about intimately.
Supergirl: We enjoyed it, but if you want a good superhero movie with a female lead, Captain Marvel is better. It's not bad by any means, but it doesn't rise above "well done." The lead villain needed to be a bigger deal than he was, and the movie suffered a bit from being shot entirely in front of a (murky) green screen. After a while. all that Star Wars background just blends together into meaningless visual noise. And it wasn't particularly inspiring, as Kara's hero's journey takes too long and doesn't quite complete. It does, however, deal with Argo City pretty well (creating a rationale for kryptonite) and lays the groundwork for Kara to overcome her PTSD and become a hero. That makes it more of an interstitial film than a standalone, which is probably another reason audiences were unmoved. But if you've heard that Milly Alcock turns in an award-winning performance, you heard right.
Battle of the Bulge: I saw this as a kid and liked it, we were looking for something to watch, and there it was. It's just as I remembered it -- one of those star-studded '60s films that tries to stay historically accurate and generally ends up too long and occasionally boring. But it's World War II, which makes it awesome. Henry Fonda is the putative star, but Robert Shaw steals the show. After this, it's going to be hard to talk my wife into The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far and The Guns of Navarone. I may have to re-watch those solo.
Valkyrie: Better than I expected, and I wasn't expecting much, since I knew how it ends. (I'm talking about Von Stauffenberg, not the war.) Tom Cruise is to be commended for his utter commitment to the role.
Shin Godzilla (2016): I can see why this movie got such rave reviews. The F/X were old-school Toho cheesy in the beginning, but they got much, much better by the time the Big G was walking around. I liked the pseudo-science, and also the critique of a hidebound, bureaucratic government that can't really respond to an emergency. (Somebody must have said, "Nobody wants to take responsibility" at least three times.) It didn't hate on the Americans, but it did get in some justified digs. I loved the nerds, who were not only described that way, but took no offense. (We took to calling the severe, humorless girl "Wednesday.") Satomi Ishihara was hilarious as the envoy, who was constantly voguing. (I hope we were supposed to laugh at that, because we found it very entertaining. And yes, she is gorgeous, too.) It's a huge leap from previous Godzilla movies, and deserves all the praise it gets. It would be my favorite Godzilla movie by far, if it hadn't been eclipsed by Godzilla Minus One only seven years later.
Shin Godzilla is a favorite of mine, as well. It was made by Hideaki Anno, who made Neon Genesis Evangelion, and if you're an NGE fan, you can tell. (He even used a tune from NGE in this picture.) When I first saw Godzilla's first form come galumphing ashore, I was like, "Anno, what the Hell have you done?", but his final form was the scariest Godzilla I'd ever seen.
Re-watch: Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).
I've seen all of the Harryhausen Sinbad movies, and the second, The Golden Voyages of Sinbad, remains significant to me as the first film I saw without an older relative. I would have been 9 or 10. I went with a friend; we were either dropped off and had to walk back, or walked to the theatre and were picked up afterwards. Some guys from a grade ahead were in the house, coincidentally, and we had a great time. I saw it again on TV at some point. My wife had neither seen any of them, so I showed her Golden a third time, back in the 1990s. It holds up, in a fashion, as a kid's movie based on the sensibilities of another era, and not even the era in which it was made. It also features Tom Baker as the villain.
Tiger boasts excellent Harryhausen effects and Jane Seymour, but its plot is even more outlandish than its predecessor, the Orientalist tropes feel even more dated, and Patrick Wayne as Sinbad is about as wooden as his ship.
Never mind. It's fun, for what it is.
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