Hello folks, and welcome back to the Week in Review! I worked through a solid pile of fresh films this week, including a mix of anime tie-ins, strong genre features, and one of 2019’s fan favorites, and I’ve got plenty of thoughts to share with you all. Incidentally, I’d like to thank you all for accepting this season’s shift in Week in Review structure, as from my perspective, it’s been very rewarding to simply write about whatever recent art has actually inspired me, rather than limiting myself to the scope of the current anime season. Anime’s great, but there’s an infinite horizon of art out there, and I plan to explore as much of it as I can. Let’s get to it!

First off, I caught the second My Hero Academia film this week, Heroes Rising. While the first Academia film was a perfectly fine experience, Heroes Rising felt markedly superior in a variety of ways. Most importantly, Heroes Rising embraced the ensemble potential of My Hero Academia like never before, offering a narrative where every single member of class 1-A was able to contribute to the larger battle. “How would these heroes work together” is one of the most powerful latent hooks of your average superhero narrative, and with 1-A’s diverse powers, along with the proficiency and confidence they’ve gained over the story’s first year, Heroes Rising was able to consistently revel in the rich, untapped potential of My Hero Academia’s larger cast.

Along with its fundamentally fan-pleasing structure, Heroes Rising was also just far better directed and animated than most of the show proper. The My Hero Academia anime is frequently hobbled by its rigid loyalty to the source material; rather than fundamentally reenvisioning manga fights with an eye for the unique strengths of animation, it generally just copies the manga panels faithfully, with perhaps a free-form Yutapon cut tossed in for seasoning. In contrast, Heroes Rising’s battles were composed from a genuinely cinematic perspective across the board, resulting in numerous sequences that felt more visceral and dynamically structured than virtually anything in the show proper. I can only hope Heroes Rising’s flair for cinematic staging eventually bleeds into the sometimes frustrating seasonal production.

Jumping over to horror territory, I watched the 2006 film Noroi: The Curse, a Japanese found footage film staged as a sort of in-depth paranormal investigation special. I’ve had mixed experiences with found footage horror, but I can say without question that Noroi is one of the most inventive and dramatically effective found footage films I’ve seen, and one of the few I’d recommend to anyone with a general interest in cinematic craft.

While most found footage films tend to have a pretty narrow scope, as they’re generally just following one camera or group of cameras’ journeys through some specific trial, Noroi combines paranormal investigation clips, archival images, clips from TV shows, news briefs, and much else to illustrate an ambitious ghost story rich in chilling details and interesting characters. The film’s flexible interpretation of “found footage” both facilitates its narrative ambitions and creates a strong sense of immediacy between film and audience, with the diverse fragments of footage actually coming across as more believably “discovered” than many of its genre compatriots. This structure also allows the film to tap into some very underutilized veins of horror, like watching a chipper TV special slowly become infected with the surreal and malevolent – something I’ve rarely seen exploited outside of SCPs and Adult Swim’s high concept horror shorts.

And format aside, Noroi is just a really good ghost story – the scares are never overblown, the specific details of the “monster” here are chilling, and the film rises to a series of staggering crescendos. There are even shades of The Babadook’s strongest hook, wherein the monstrousness of the central creature is given texture through its variable illustration across a variety of different media – a reflection of one of Noroi’s own strongest worldbuilding conceits, the idea that psychics and paranormal specialists are all tapping into a common “veil” that should probably never be lifted. I watch a good number of horror movies, and I rarely find a new one that feels genuinely essential, but Noroi certainly qualifies.

Continuing in a quasi-horror vein, I also watched 2019’s Ready or Not, which apparently completes my investigation of 2019’s Class War Capers. Ready or Not is far more akin to something like Knives Out’s genre pleasures than Parasite’s genuine class critique, and even that is probably giving it a bit too much thematic heft . For the most part, this film is just a fun, bloody chase sequence, as a family of monstrous and monstrously rich people attempt to hunt down their prodigal son’s new bride. The story and characters are lightly illustrated, but the desperate setpieces have a fine energy, and the film’s cinematography and color design are miles better than you might expect from a film like this. It’s pure adrenaline, and more than a little bloody, but if you’re looking for a dose of excitement with a dash of “man, fuck rich people,” Ready or Not’s a fine time.

And lastly, I checked out the original Drunken Master, one of Jackie Chan’s earliest and most beloved films. I’ll admit, I had a hard time with the first half of this one; Jackie Chan’s style of slapstick can only hold my attention for so long, and the first half of this movie is largely consumed with him being a marvelously flexible buffoon all across town. But things perk up considerably once the titular drunken master appears, and the sequence of Jackie Chan demonstrating the eight styles of drunken kung fu in an open field counts as one of the most entertaining and emphatically “Jackie Chan” martial arts sequences I’ve seen.

Jackie Chan’s unique talent stems from his understanding that both martial arts and slapstick, as performance, come from the same root mastery of the body’s movements. His actions are half martial artist, half Charlie Chaplin, and watching him synthesize those two inspirations into a martial art that embodies both, while simultaneously celebrating his own dazzling control over his movements and physical flow, felt like witnessing a master of an utterly unique form of dance. Like a fair number of martial arts films, Drunken Master’s appeal surges and dips wildly depending on how action-packed a given scene is – but watching Jackie Chan demonstrate his stunning mastery of combat-as-comedy was well worth the price of entry.