They won't let me embed the super misleading trailer. It wisely focuses on the monster fights, which range from pleasantly bizarre to actively funny, before a completely inexplicable ending that boggles the mind, but probably in a good way.Problem is, they're maaaaybe ten percent of the movie.
The rest of it is the big man in his normal sized human form, and plays like a Japanese version of those unwatchable Ricky Gervais comedies where nothing is actually funny, just depressing and excruciating and painful as such great length that you start laughing a little to avoid slitting your fucking wrists.
Only worse, because at least the characters in those shows express themselves coherently.
This dude is the saddest, most boring motherfucking in the history of time, and he just mumbles half-spoken phrases that speak volumes without saying anything, and then plays with his stupid, foppish hairdo for a while. Not that anyone else who shows up is any better. It is like an entire 'comedy' based around all the worst conversations I had in Japan, conversations where you simply can't get the fucker to give you anything to respond to, anything to make you care or laugh or do anything but feel slightly sorry for how anyone can get to be a grown man and be this fucking pathetic.
Every now and then they'll manage a moment that veers so heavily into irony that your brain recognizes they've actually left a joke under the non-stop torment, but even then, the shit-tastic translation tends to butcher it. (Pro tip -- if they have a lengthy conversation about how he refuses to accept sponsorship on his back, and they then cut to a shot of a sponsor logo on his back, the joke, such as it is, is completely ruined if you translate 'koshi' as 'hips' instead of 'back.' Koshi does not even mean hips. Under any fucking circumstances. Moron.)
It's probably worth going and watching the monster fights on Youtube, which seems to conveniently have them all up, but stay the fuck away from the rest of the movie. At best, it is deathly boring, at worst, it makes you want to put all these fucking characters out of their god damn misery.
Yeah, that trailer makes it super bizarresome, but I was aware of the mockumentary conceit already. I'll probably check it out anyway, just because I've been waiting so long to see it.
ReplyDeleteWatched it. Yeah, I agree with absolutely everything you said. I was hoping to legitimately enjoy this movie, but outside the psychotronic monster fights it's mostly just sort of pointlessly squirmy. He doesn't even have a downward spiral, he just kind of meekly absorbs each fresh indignity that comes his way until they run out of footage, and an hour and a half of that in one sitting sort of grinds all the humor away.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably indicative of the director's sense of humor that he didn't cut a commentary track for the actual feature, but there is one for the featurette about the making of the movie.
Also, the deleted scenes from the final sequence of the movie are actually even better than the stuff he left in. What!?
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