celluloid consommé

[Japan Cuts 2023] Shinya Tamada’s  I Am What I Am  is a tender journey. The film covers Kasumi Sobata’s (Toko Miura) journey of self discovery, making the path easier for viewers like her who may also struggle to take those first steps. It opens on a double date between some guys and Kasumi, accompanied by her sister Natsumi (Naki Sakai). Things get awkward for her date when he presses forward in asking her out to a movie after an amusing exchange about the way Tom Cruise runs in  War of the Worlds . Kasumi doesn’t miss these cues but instead meets them with confusion and doesn’t engage with them, asking why this person wants to be alone with her just to see a movie. Kasumi is aromantic and doesn’t experience the feelings of affection we attribute to traditional relationships, and we are learning this about her just as she is. In the middle of this, her mother constantly gets in her face about meeting someone and getting married, picking apart and analyzing nearly everyth...

  [Japan Cuts 2023] It’s difficult for a movie to create something new and exciting within the dog-eared concept of time loops without resorting to lifting from  Groundhog Day ,  yet again, and   slapping on a fresh coat of paint and calling it a day. But there’s something special about Ryo Takebayashi’s  Mondays: See You “This” Week!,  and it only has a little bit to do with time resetting itself. It utilizes the tropes in ways we’re used to, but is ahead of us already by the time we catch on. The film has such an admirable nature to it even if it’s a little inconsistent. It strikes a visual style at its start that it doesn’t maintain, to a slight detriment of its own tonal development, but  Mondays  excels in its writing–that fun, quirky tone that is established visually stays constant in its script. What it manages to accomplish there is a tireless development of the community that the characters within support and represent, which extends beyo...

Ignite Films releases their stellar 4K restoration of the 1953 science fiction classic in time for the film’s 70th anniversary. 4K box art image courtesy of MVD Visual. As a result of a long labor of love, the iconic 1953 science fiction film  Invaders From Mars  has been restored to the best available version thanks to Scott MacQueen, heading the visual restoration, and Ignite Films. It’s a film everyone sort of knows even before they’ve seen it, and some may be more familiar with Tobe Hooper’s remake in 1986 than the ’53 original.  Mars  is especially notable as one of the first science fiction films in the US to have been released in full color (rather than two-tone color processes that came before), the other being  War of the Worlds  at that time, which came out 4 months later in theaters. Press enter or click to view image in full size Screengrab courtesy of MVD Visual. Invaders From Mars  is, simply put, a sci-fi feature that evokes the fears an...