Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. The fall season is churning along at this point, accompanying a general dulling of the sky and dimming of the sun as we slip into another year’s depressive winter huddle. That bleak transformation has served to underline the urgency of my annual catch-up process, which has most recently seen me diving into the charming and nostalgic Goodbye, Lara. Bold anime-original dramas are precious gems in our demon-haunted era, and so far Lara is impressing on a variety of fronts, from its cel-aping aesthetic to its charming cast to its gentle interrogation of various forms of love. I’ll surely have more to say on that when I get deeper in, but for now, let’s run down the week in films!
First up this week was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the recent far-flung sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 gothic fantasy. The continuing story finds Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz now hosting a sleazy paranormal talk show, to the frustration of her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Returning to the family home after Lydia’s father suffers a fatal shark attack, Astrid finds her disbelief in ghosts tested by a local specter, who convinces her to help him return to the world of the living. Of course, you should never take a ghost at their word, and thus her mother is swiftly forced to call upon the dubious support of Beetlejuice, who still yearns for Lydia’s hand in marriage.
Beetlejuice was absolutely not a film that screamed for a sequel, but all of its principles seemed to understand that; Burton, Keaton, and Ryder have all expressed consistent interest in continuations, but were also all unwilling to commit to an inferior retread. Well, it seems the missing ingredient was “a high-profile actress who was clearly born to play Lydia Deetz’ daughter,” and with Jenna Ortega (plus an extremely game Willem Dafoe) joining the crew, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice maintains the whimsical energy, fantastical visual theater, and underlying warm-heartedness of its predecessor.
This sequel would likely still feel a touch unnecessary in the abstract; there’s enough reprised here that you’re not going to get the same sense of total boundlessness as the original Beetlejuice, nor a feeling that the land of the dead is a genuinely threatening place. But every single principle is just so clearly happy to be here, and commits to their material with such enthusiasm and personality, that it’s hard not to be charmed by even a somewhat reheated reprise. I’m not sure Burton’s truly back, but he’s absolutely trying; after over a decade in the Disney mines, it is delightful to see him taking real swings again.
We then checked out Twisted, a psychological thriller starring Ashley Judd as a San Francisco police officer who just rose to the rank of inspector, having solved a serial killer case that culminated in her briefly being taken hostage by the killer. Aiding her through this tumultuous period is her mentor and foster father, played by Samuel L. Jackson, as well as her new partner (Andy Garcia). However, coincidences stack up as she takes on a new case, and begins to suspect the killer just might be… herself!
I’m sorry, I tried to keep a straight face through the end, but hoo boy is this a stinker. You’ve got a great cast of leads and the accomplished Philip Kaufman behind the camera, but Twisted’s script is simultaneously so contrived and so obvious that there’s really no saving this feature for any of them. It conjures the perfect mixture of “psychological drama means we can just invent lots of shit that didn’t happen, right” and “you can call the killer within the first three minutes,” meaning basically the film’s entire running time is spent sitting there checking your watch, waiting for Judd to catch up with the rest of the class, disbelieving the interiority or emotional consistency of every character along the way. Ultimately, Twisted only proves the essentiality of a good script, as well as the ease with which “psychological misdirection” can drift into “random shit happening.”
We then continued our journey through the Gamera filmography with Gamera the Brave. Set in a new timeline unrelated to the ‘90s trilogy, the film centers on Toru Aizawa (Ryo Tomioka), a young boy who develops a connection with a fast-growing baby Gamera. As Toru contends with a lonely home life and the impending heart surgery of his neighbor Mai, Gamera grows large enough to face off with the dread-lizard Zedus, only to be terribly injured in the battle. Ultimately, Toru will be forced to risk his own life in order to restore Gamera’s strength, and help the protector of all children defeat his foe.
It’s been an odd, rambling journey for Gamera, from Godzilla also-ran to friend of the children to whatever was going on with that ‘90s trilogy. The franchise’s highs and lows are inextricably intertwined; every victory feels hard-won, and every peak discernible only by the depths of the ensuing valley. Thus, while Gamera the Brave isn’t a perfect movie, I’m glad the live-action productions concluded on an exceedingly Gamera movie, one where he successfully embodies the underdog qualities and youth-aimed sympathies that separate him from his kaiju contemporaries.
Gamera the Brave wisely spends much of its running time detailing the texture and tone of Toru’s home life, drawing its camera back down to the children-led narratives of the franchise’s golden era. As a result, we see the calamities of this world through Toru’s eyes, wherein a kaiju rampage and the sickness of a close friend are calamities of equal seismographic measure. This mixture of monster-scale and human drama pays off on both fronts; Toru feels like the most significant human protagonist Gamera has ever seen, and his presence gives the eventual clash of titans a sense of personal consequence. Having Gamera’s final victory emerge from the children’s collective understanding of his feelings felt like the ideal place for this series to end; ultimately, Gamera is at his best as an icon of childhood wonder, the big friend you can trust in a world beyond comprehension.
My trawling of anime OVA history next led us to Desert Rose: The Snow Apocalypse. Based on a manga by Kaoru Shintani, the short film follows the exploits of the all-female mercenary group C.A.T., as they are commissioned to guard a meeting of world leaders at a remote mountain lodge. It’s a fairly unexceptional work on the whole; both the brewing terrorist plot and C.A.T.’s efforts to spoil it are pedestrian thriller fare, the animation is quite limited, and director Yasunao Aoki does little to mix things up in terms of cinematography or pacing.
All that said, C.A.T.’s mercenaries make for a charming group of heroes in a sort of knock-off Dirty Pair kinda way, with the perpetually unimpressed Irene Sanders in particular consistently stealing scenes from more plot-relevant characters. And I found a somewhat quaint charm in the feature’s depiction of terrorism, which sort of treated it as an amorphous force existing independently of history or motivation. “My family was killed by terrorists, and so I’ve dedicated my life to defeating Terror” is a child’s understanding of geopolitics, and the disconnect between that self-serious absurdity and the film’s otherwise lighthearted capers made for a breezy, if ultimately unfulfilling watch.
