Logs

No Other Land is a movie that isn’t so sure who it’s for, just that it needs to scream. we see genuine human conflict and are simply left to judge and introspect on our own, much akin to how i imagine giving every palestinian a hidden camera to wear all day would look.

so it does not make any remarks on its own or try to feed us a philosophy, just to come and see. i’m especially noting how flexible and wide-mouthed humans can be, after watching this. so much is left unsaid but clearly written on the wall, i think it’s as perfect a call to action as you can make: here is what you need to know.

got to see the restoration in a theater recently, was a great time. hadn’t seen since high school

i loved a lot about it. i struggled to abide the slapstick. glad to have seen it and would watch again, though.

several great scenes and some good comedy but long slog sections

A lot of directorial debuts will either be pretty safe, or end up feeling stylistically unrefined, this movie didn’t feel that safe, but SABU still managed to pull off the style. Its not as bonkers as what SABU would do with Monday, but it still feels like a SABU film. I’m also noticing a pattern that SABU likes dead characters continuing to be relevant to the story. It’s cool that it’s so prevalent through what I’ve watched of his. The plot is very much intentionally driven by coincidence, but I didn’t feel like it happened too much to be annoying.

An annoying thing about SABU’s work is that so few of them have modern releases. Your choices are either: bad DVD rip, or (sometimes) terrible web quality streaming. I would pay an arm and a leg to get Blu-ray releases of this stuff, but the demons (Netflix) that have ruined movies don’t want me to.

Its very slow to start with the fan-service for the Yamato, which I didn’t like all that much. In the first Star Trek movie they did a similar thing, but there they did some closeups of the Enterprise, showing it off in ways you wouldn’t have seen in the show. But with Yamato I didn’t feel they made effective use of it, it just felt like stuff I’d seen before.

The crew solves basically every problem with the Wave Motion Gun, which is opposite of the show— where they fire it like three (3) times. The crew seems to magically know what the next option is most of the time, which gets a little annoying. You’re in an alien spaceship, how do you know this room is the power core without asking the robot that DOES magically know everything?

Its 2 ¹⁄₂ hours long, which is pretty crazy for anime standards, but it really should’ve been trimmed down. I would’ve rather the time spent making an extra hour be put into making the plot less shakey. I saw online that the reason they made the 2nd TV show was due to a disliking of the ending, but I actually kinda liked it. Overall its really not that great, but its fun to root for the Yamato.

Something interesting I’ve heard about Leiji’s works is that the stories get repeated over and over, which is considered a feature. Story-wise this movie is very similar to the original show, but it does enough new that I don’t feel like I’ve already seen it. I’ll be excited to go through Leiji’s next stories.

INVOKED ESSENTIALISM: https://lateen.org/txt/movie/2026-06-05/

The original show had these pretty weird concepts for how the science fiction stuff worked, which they would explain with the characters slowly figuring things out, but it never felt too overbearing. Like they would theorize why a certain thing happened but they would move on pretty quickly—probably due to the 22 minute run time. But with a full 90 minutes to explore everything, I feel they ended up explain a little too much. Let me fill in the gaps!

The show would occasionally have episodes with some pretty gorey moments, but this movie has lots throughout.

INVOKED ESSENTIALISM: https://lateen.org/txt/movie/2026-06-05/

Just like with my Eva 1.0 rewatch log I also took forever to write this. This time I’m not exactly sure why. With the previous one I hadn’t committed to writing a log for every movie, but with this the only thing I can think of is that I’ve been stressed out lately. Because of that I’ll do a much more boring log and not get too deep.

With this movie they still follow the general arc of the show but they deviate enough from it making it more interesting than what 1.0 did. Shinji is as a character is much more active and actually gets stuff done (which will work well for him I’m sure). This felt much more overt with its theming, almost reaching Hollywood levels—but it didn’t get insulting (like with Hollywood). The ending felt a little forced at times much like the ending to this movie l

Again like Trava, cool sci-fi concepts and great characters, I feel like all of them could have their own movies. If you like anime you just will like this movie. 7 years of production made some of the most beautiful hand-drawn animation I’ve ever seen.

When I look at people’s reviews of this I see them complaining about the writing saying the characters are shallow. Huh? Did I watch the same movie? I really should stop reading reviews, especially for anime.

ANIME EXTRAVAGANZA: https://lateen.org/txt/movie/2026-05-23

I’ve committed a grave sin by watching this. My big plan is to watch Gundam (and anime as a whole) in (mostly) release order. So far I’ve only seen the original 1979 Gundam, so by jumping ahead 43 years I’ve already broken that rule. There was a couple things that referenced stuff in the franchise’s 4 decades of history, but I wanted to give a good show for my friends and introduce Gundam so I can subject them to more movies if I want to.

Compared to the episode the plot was much more ‘epic’ which is to be expected, its a movie. The new content not found in the show felt very non-obtrusive. The warships (water, not space) and new mobile suits felt pretty in character for the original show, so it was nice they didn’t inject any crazy new stuff.

Amuro’s voice actor sounds exactly the same as from the show, despite it being >40 years. I liked the contrast between Amuro living on the island to the Zeons doing their murder shenanigans. There was lots of fan service when the Gundam finally got into action, it was bordering on too much but I thought it was fine since Amuro had been going so long without the Gundam.

I really don’t get why they added Sleggar to the movie. I don’t think he was introduced at that point in the series, but I can get over that. Plot-wise he doesn’t really add anything that can’t be fulfilled by other characters, so it just felt like they added him in because he was a character people wanted to see again. Kai was much more silly than I remember him being in the show, but I fucking hate Kai and I want him to rot in hell so I don’t care.

Something I didn’t really like about the film was how at the end for the big battle they just add a couple antics with the children and people no longer fighting, that felt too disruptive and dare I say makes for… bad pacing? (audible gasp). I said it. I said the thing. I’ve never really liked when people mention pacing in talking about movies. I feel like they don’t understand what it means. When I watch a movie that I thought had fine pacing, and I hear someone say it had bad pacing I get very skeptical. A lot of times I feel like when people mention bad pacing they just mean they got bored when watching the movie, and at that point I don’t care about their opinion. Either stop looking at your phone so much or reevaluate your relationship with art, you’ll probably enjoy things more.

After the children’s shenanigans they just… walk over to see the Gundam fight the Zeon, which I don’t think makes much sense.

ANIME EXTRAVAGANZA: https://lateen.org/txt/movie/2026-05-23

A kinda average story that’s elevated by some amazing characters. I feel like every character in this could have their own movie, that’s how great they are. However, the only character that felt pretty flat was the main guy, he just feels like a normal yakuza character. Which sucks… cause he’s the main character. Has that WOAH WE’RE IN THE 90s/00s feel, but its kinda toned down which is nice.

There are some random abstract stuff thrown around that felt very… raw? Its Katsuhito Ishii’s 2nd movie so I’ll give him a break. Maybe it’ll make more sense as I watch more of his stuff and get a better feel for his style.

When I was first introduced to Tampopo, I was asking for movie recommendations so I looked it up and saw that it was listed as a comedy. I mentioned to the person who recommended it that I wasn’t really in the mood for a comedy, but they said it isn’t really a comedy. It’s about food. After watching it I wouldn’t agree that it’s ABOUT food, I’d say it was about humanity, told through the pseudo-genre of food.

I would say a similar thing for this movie. It’s listed as a comedy, but it isn’t one. It’s about a funeral. Err.. I mean.. It’s about humanity, told through the pseudo-genre of funerals.

It’s quite Japanese and I feel like there were some things that I missed from not knowing the culture. It’s not as overt as Tampopo—there’s no funeral equivalent of having sex involved with food—but it still has the Juzo Itami flavor I fell in love with.

pathos squeezed out as if from a nearly empty toothpaste tube but metatextually interesting

Such a ridiculously good movie. I couldn’t stop smiling while watching it. Not just because of the enthusiasm of Goro and the Gang helping out Tampopo, but from the all the stories showing the beauty of the human connection. I want to be surrounded by people who are this genuine, and be able to reciprocate. If you walked up to me, and told me that by some magical coincidoink that the next movie that I watched would be my last, and I didn’t get to watch another for the rest of my life, I would choose this movie. I don’t think I could’ve written this log when I first watched it. So I’m glad I’ve grown to the point where I’m comfortable talking about this.

Genuinely one of the best films I’ve ever seen. I have nothing bad to say about it. ¹⁰⁄₁₀

For a thriller movie its good to make sure the viewer doesn’t exactly know where you’re gonna go next. This movie does that fine, but I felt like it kind of left behind the opening premise of the movie in the process. Did the first half of the movie really matter plot wise? It matters for the characters of course, but it feels like an afterthought. This could be intentional, with the movie using it to say that the character doesn’t care about what happened anymore, but like… that’s too wasteful.

Its a Park Chan-wook movie so of course its got good editing, cinematography, the whole 27 feet.

sallright

p good

real good

forever haunted. ¹⁰⁄₁₀