“‘Yasuke’ Is A Violent, Haunting & Beautiful Animated Series Led By A Captivating Lakeith Stanfield”

Cutting lesser jidaigeki productions down to size. Continue reading →

“‘Pacific Rim: The Black’: The Companion Piece To Guillermo Del Toro’s Original Film That Fans Deserve”

I guess it takes a code black (the Pacific Rim TV series) to make up for a code blah (the Pacific Rim sequel). Continue reading →

Review: The Night is Short, Walk On Girl

Add The Night is Short, Walk On Girl to the canon of “great drinking movies.” The characters here drink more liquor than any mortal human could possibly imbibe without dying, much less without blacking out; they also have better adventures than most of us do when under the influence, though most of us don’t do the … Continue reading →

Review: Lu Over the Wall, 2018, dir. Masaaki Yuasa

I struggled to put my thoughts about Masaaki Yuasa’s Lu Over the Wall into words, which is really bad, because putting thoughts into words is sort of my thing. It’s not that I don’t like Lu Over the Wall, but rather that Lu Over the Wall is what I imagine your run of the mill psychedelic drug trip looks like … Continue reading →

Review: Mary and the Witch’s Flower, 2018, dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi

I’m sort of a career goof, and so I have a natural inclination toward characters who are also career goofs. Meaning, there’s more than one reason why I compare Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower to Harry Potter. There’s the obvious reason – they’re both about schools for young witches! – and there’s the secondary reason, which … Continue reading →

Review: Miss Hokusai, 2016, dir. Keiichi Hara

Maybe you like anime. Maybe you don’t. Maybe if you do, you think of “anime” in myopic terms and consider anything that doesn’t feature robots or monsters or other weird shit “anime,” but that’s dopey as fuck because “anime” is a word of pretty broad meanings. Besides that, Miss Hokusai, this little ditty I reviewed for … Continue reading →

Review: Casshern, 2004, Kazuaki Kiriya

I don’t know if  “live-action anime sci-fi operatic drama” can be considered a genre of its own, but assuming it is a thing, then 2004’s Casshern could well be considered the Citizen Kane of films bearing the same aesthetics and sensibilities. Whether or not that has any meaning whatsoever is up to you, but what’s … Continue reading →