Capsule Review, minimal spoilers (in green):

Mayday is a movie that’s rather hard to pin down. It’s several themes, which are all over the place. It’s almost an idyllic dream, but it’s comingled with some harsh realities. In the end, it’s satisfying and quite an enjoyable movie experience.

Ana (Grace Van Patten) is a downtrodden young woman. Through a series of worse and worse events, she disappears. Somehow, Ana wakes up on the shores of a faraway island, and is rescued by Marsha (Mia Goth). She is brought to Marsha’s home, a relic of the war. She lives with two other girls, Gert (Soko) and Bea (Havana Rose Liu). They live an almost idyllic life, but it’s marred by the war, which intrudes upon the island. What war, you say? Doesn’t matter. They do have to defend themselves. The island is obscured by horrible weather, and they have chosen to use that to their advantage, luring ships and planes in to their doom.

Ana is rather confused by it all, and Marsha tells her she shouldn’t worry, it’s all good. Marsha declares Ana will be a good fit to their team. Ana slowly starts to integrate herself, and gets to know the others, but she isn’t really satisfied with her role.

Review, continued

Mayday is a trippy film. As host of the Arthouse Film Festival, Chuck Rose, described it (and I’m paraphrasing), it’s “Wizard of Oz meets Greek Mythology meets the Hollywood Musical meets Hunger Games meets Lord of the Flies, meets ….” Many genres collide to make this movie work.

The movie’s about Ana’s growth. She’s extremely withdrawn and timid in the beginning of the film, and when Marsha takes her in, she encourages Ana to be more than she is, because she’s got the potential to become a force to be reckoned with. Slowly, but surely, Ana becomes aware of her power, but it becomes a problem when she begins to assert herself and her beliefs.

Making a film is challenging, making one with many themes is hard, and being able to integrate all of the themes well is nigh impossible, but this movie succeeds. There is violence. Almost all of it is never shown directly, but clearly implied. There is fear and confusion aplenty, and yet, it does make sense when you look at the bigger picture. It has an interesting soundtrack, invcluding such diverse musical artists as Laurie Anderson and Liberace. Mayday leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but when you think about them, some of them are answered, but others are not. You’ll find that the unanswered ones are not as important to the story line as you thought they’d be. You can just let them go, and appreciate the movie for what it was, a fine fantasy that relates to reality, quite well.

I do recommend the film.

Capsule Review, Minimal spoilers (in green):

Bought the movie Yamato (2005) and watched it recently. It’s yet another Japanese movie about the Yamato, and its demise. It is definitely better than The Great War of Archimedes, which I saw recently. Part of the movie takes place in 2005, the 60th anniversary of the sinking of the mighty battleship. A woman approaches the harbormaster, who’s trying to convince an old ship captain to attend the memorial service, for once. When she talks to the harbormaster, she just gives out the coordinates, and the captain perks up, but walks away. No one will do it, as it’s a 200KM trip. Later, she convinces the captain to take her. Yes, he’s a survivor of its last battle.

This triggers a lot of flashbacks to the time of war. Kamio (the ship captain) remembers his time as a young ensign, who volunteers for the navy while underage, and gets assigned to the Yamato, where his older brother serves. New cadets are treated severely, beaten for mistakes, but Kamio finds a way to make it through. It’s a harsh life. The story unfolds over time, and it’s part drama and part war. There are strong connections to the sailors’ families at home, and occasional times on shore, as the sailors return to family as they are permitted. There is a connection between the woman and the captain. It’s a good film, a bit light on the combat, but the finale is quite brutal and gory.

The film uses a lot of CGI, and this is where I was underwhelmed somewhat. Granted, the CGI of 2005 is nowhere near as good as the CGI of now (or even within a low res game of WoWs), but even the animation of the planes was a little unbelievable. This was a DVD release, so that may have affected what I saw when scaled up to my 4K big screen. Look at the cover art for the movie below, and you can get an example of the CGI. Not great, but passable.

What I did find impressive was about the main set, and here’s the copy from the Wikipedia page, “Filming for Yamato took place from March to June 2005 at a closed-down shipyard of Hitachi Zosen Corporation in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture. Approximately JPY 600 million was spent in building a 1:1 scale set of the forward section and the portside anti-aircraft guns. ” The set really looked good, and they could not have done it any justice with CGI.

So, if you like a bit of drama along with your war film, this one’s worth checking out. It’s funny, I think (and I’m probably wrong), but I was thinking that the opening of The Great War of Archimedes used some of the scenes on the deck.

Capsule Review, minimal spoilers:

The Great War of Archimedes is a Japanese film I found on DVD recently. You’d think this is a war film, but it really isn’t. Sure, the opening of the film is the last battle of the Yamato, and it’s pretty decent CGI, but that’s not what the movie’s about. A handful of minutes at the beginning, that’s almost all you get of the Yamato.

It’s really about the Japanese navy in the 1930s . As with the rest of the world, they are suffering a depression, and funding for military projects is low. At the forefront, Admiral Yamamoto is proposing to build a large aircraft carrier, while another admiral wants a super battleship. Only one can be budgeted. Yamamoto stumbles across a math nerd, and contrives a plan to have this civilian calculate the cost of building the battleship, which was for somewhat less than the carrier.

The navy stonewalls the man’s attempt to research the battleship’s costs at every turn, but he finds ways around the bureaucracy to get the data he needs, ruffling many feathers along the way. I won’t say more, but the final scenes (redeem the movie. One could argue that they were written in the present and include revisionist history. In theory, they may not reflect the actual thinking of the people at the time. It’s hard to say, but I think there was some tweaking of certain characters that made it possible.

I did watch it with English subtitles, as dubbed lines don’t necessarily reflect the original cast’s inflections and tone. I may go back one day and watch it in English, but I’m not in a rush to do that. There is also a scene or two of the IJN Nagato (in murky CGI), but that’s about all the ‘excitement’ of the battleships you get. The title is pretty misleading. As a war movie, I would rate it pretty low. However, I found the story was decent enough to give it a positive recommendation, if you’re not expecting a true war story.