Lost in Translation
Coppola’s wry, magical opus. Maybe falling in love has never been like this, but you’ll believe that it should be.
Japan
Movies which take place in real or fictional Japan, or which are highly influenced by Japanese culture, or which are made by Japanese filmmakers
Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna)
A captivity film about entire cultures. And the best sand photography ever filmed.
Battle Royale
Fukasaku proves to be a master of the micro-story, the combinations of tiny joys and creeping terrors into one huge, fleeting, emotional whole. After decades of cultural regression, he evokes Japanese cinema’s desperate, horrific roar. It has a primal beauty, of the kind that will always be repressed, misunderstood.
Godzilla (2014): Methodical Monsters
Edwards treats Godzilla like he’s looking at a cultural monolith. If it’s not worthy of your enjoyment, at least give it your respect.
Ghost in the Shell (2017)
What DreamWorks have done with Ghost in the Shell, if it is a cultural invasion, is more potent than catering to an international market (or their idea of it). The new film is an inversion of its material, to an extent that its entire symbolic framework has been hacked by the virus of three-act Western superhero stories.
Gojira (1954)
Gojira is all performance. Yes, the monster film’s propensity for overacting is here to some extent, but its images still reflect the power that must be innate in the language we cannot hear, which cannot be ignored any more than Serizawa can ignore the child’s prayer over the radio, calling him to fight destruction with destruction.
Kubo and the Two Strings
By remaining outside after dark, Kubo invokes the inevitable quest for three sacred pieces of armor so that he may defeat the Moon King. Kubo weaves its story with the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s pattern, which he called the “monomyth,” by telling a story about a boy and his Mother as though it represented all boys and all Mothers.