Big Man Japan

Tonight we saw Big Man Japan at the Alamo Drafthouse and I highly recommend it. It's a mockumentary about a sixth-generation tokusatu-style hero (think Ultraman in a fallen age). Sato is pitiful, broke, and his ratings are down, but he's still up for the daily grind: in his case, a jolt of electricity that makes him grow to thirty feet tall in order to fight the giant monsters that occasionally attack Japan. It's funny, but in that bleak Brazil type of satire rather than the more flippant Spinal Tap kind of satire. An amazingly smart movie, and also amazingly sad; as much about the strained internal battle Japan wages with itself over the worst of its consumer culture, and especially the disruptions facing the nuclear family, as it is about bizarro monsters.

It's a really Japanese movie--there were in-jokes lost on me and as gaijin go I'm relatively Japan-savvy--but if you're at all a Japanophile (or love kaiju or Super Sentai genre stuff), you really should see this. It's pretty amazing.