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Wed Jun 10 2026 19:39 May Film Roundup:
- Cops vs. Thugs (1975): How much of a movie can you carry with a lead actor who looks really, really cool? The answer is: about 25%. Bunta Sugawara (previously known to me as the boiler operator from Spirited Away) looks like a badass this whole movie, but it's not enough. There are also cool car stunts, which often involve cars driving right up into a crowd of regular, non-stunt actors. Still not enough. A Taxing Woman has the same police-war-room feel and is a much better movie, without the showiness.
Director Kinji Fukasaku directed a lot of movies with great titles, most notably Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) which is definitely on my to-watch list. Not currently on my list: Hepcat in the Funky Hat: The 20,000,000 Yen Arm (1971), and The Green Slime (1968), which formed the basis for the pilot episode of MST3K!
- K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025): Watched, effectively, on a dare. Sumana auctioned off our Monday morning at a Wiscon charity auction, and the Wiscon-going public shelled out for us to see this movie, while reacting in real time on Discord. Final verdict: it's a fine kids movie. I liked the animal sidekicks. I was totally convinced Celine was going to have a villain turn at the start of act 3, but in the end she was merely misguided. So... well played?
Except now I'm not sure why Celine was in the story at all if she's not going to have a villain turn. It feels like part of her story was cut from the original screenplay. No doubt because the rising cost of 3D graphics hardware made it impractical to render whatever cool thing was going to be shown on screen.
- Conclave (2024): Sumana has been wanting to watch this since the recent real-world conclave, and we finally went for it. It's a fun political thriller with very little (but not zero) violence. This may fade over time, but I'm finally able to visualize Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci in my mind rather than seeing them as indistinguishable actor-shaped blobs.
I think they should follow up the success of this movie with a sequel modeled after the super-long conclave of 1268-1271, where the staff starts making things more and more uncomfortable for the cardinals. People are setting up bootleg wi-fi routers, smuggling food in with drones, etc. Could get kind of Ballardian.