News You Can Bruise for 2024 March 3

• Dentist on the Job (1961): Dull black-and-white Carry On-style comedy is livened up somewhat in the last act, where the lads hijack Britain's first satellite launch. That was entertaining.

  I thought the setup was somewhat preposterous, and upon reflection, it is exceedingly preposterous. But afterwards I discovered this is a sequel to Dentist in the Chair (1960), so I'm a little less weirded out by the casual "I'm trying to find a sinecure for these two incompetent dentists who are best friends with a thief" setup in the opening scenes. Those characters have already had a whole movie to set their dynamic, and we're just shoehorning them in to this one.

• Moving Violation (1976): A movie full of car chases and carefully arranged stunts. I can't decide if it's a terrible or great idea to show a long shot demonstrating how unlikely it is that Car A would randomly hit Car B, but it was a cool shot.

  Kay Lenz reminds me of my sister Susanna, and Eddie Albert has another great role (cf. The Heartbreak Kid) that I really didn't expect from "the Green Acres guy." Of course, Fred MacMurray is best known for being in a dull sitcom, but he was great in noir and western roles. Actors take the jobs they can get, is what I'm saying.

• Dance With Me (2019): One thing I haven't mentioned on this blog is that I've started learning Japanese as a hobby. In support of this, Sumana suggested we watch some Japanese media to help me practice reading hiragana and katakana, which explains the rest of this Film Roundup. First up: a film I wanted to watch at the Japan Cuts festival in 2019, missed my chance, and then couldn't find this movie for years. It was worth the wait--a funny setup that goes in really weird directions instead of becoming repetitive. Big recommendation.
• River (2023): Dance With Me was good, but this is the best film we saw this month, by far: a time loop movie where each loop is shot in a single continuous take. Highly character-driven, but with a bonkers twist so you don't leave the theater thinking you accidentally saw an arthouse movie.
• Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2021): Turns out there's a boom of Japanese time loop movies right now, so we watched a couple more. This is a precursor to River, made by pretty much all of the same people, and with the same long takes of people going up or down stairs. It's kind of a simpler, easier-to-understand version of Primer (2004), but setup took way too long, with seemingly scene after scene involving new characters being introduced to the conceit of the movie. Compared to River where pretty much everyone's on board by the third loop.
• Mondays: See You 'This' Week! (2022): Office comedy as time loop movie. Pretty fun but it passes up some obvious critiques about office work... or sets it up and leaves you to finish the critique yourself, but in my experience most movies ain't that subtle. Like, the advertising agency in this movie is coming up with a campaign for a carbonated miso soup tablet--the sort of obviously unsuitable product you'd see in a filmed SNL skit.

  Good news for Leonard's Japanese reading practice, but bad news for any gaijin trying to watch this movie: there is so much on-screen Japanese text in this one that subtitles weren't enough to follow the story. When it was just corporate emails and text messages, it was usually clear from context what was happening, but once we started getting "we're in a time loop" Powerpoint presentations and Ken Burns pans over pages of manga, Sumana and I were pausing a lot and making heavy use of Google Lens.

  The only other movie I can think of that's so text-heavy was Shin Godzilla (2016) and there the details of the text, like all human efforts to thwart Godzilla, turned out not to matter. Also, as I recall there was an English translation layer superimposed over the Japanese text, like what you see in subtitled anime, so if you read quick enough you could catch it all.

Speaking of which, the Television Spotlight this month shines on Laid-Back Camp, a relaxing anime series that Sumana and I both enjoyed watching, and she didn't mind me constantly pausing to sound out signs or text messages. Fun and calming, with lots of katakana on the signs so I felt like I'd figured out what they were saying once I decoded the sounds.

BTW there's another movie I regret missing in the 2019 Japan Cuts festival: Samurai Shifters, the nerdy samurai librarian story, which I still haven't found anywhere. Just putting that here for my own future reference.