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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Big Man Japan

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#1 of 1 Posted 4/29/09 9:27 PM

From harveykarten Posts 744 Last Nov-19
To All [Msg # 23808.1 ]

BIG MAN JAPAN (Dai Nipponjin)

Magnet Releasing
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: C
Directed by: Hitosi Matumoto
Written By: Mitsuyoshi Yakasu, Hitosi Matumoto
Cast: Hitosi Matumoto, Riki Takeuchi, Ua, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Itsuji Itao
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 4/29/09
Opens: May 15, 2009

What the movie does not mention is significant: that the writer-director-star, Hitoshi Matsumoto, deliberately misspelled his name in the credits. He calls himself Hitosi Matumoto. He may be a popular stand-up comedian in Japan, but you might ask yourselves this: do you think that this name change is funny? If so, you may appreciate his film. If not, you’ll be tempted to say—as I did—that Japanese humor does not travel well across the Atlantic (or Pacific) to the States.

“Dai Nipponjin,” which means literally “Great Japanese,” looks and feels like a Japanese version of a Walter Mitty fantasy. To clarify for cinephiles under the age of forty, Norman Z. McLeod’s 1947 movie about a milquetoast man, a comic-book writer played by Danny Kaye who is living with his mother. He leads a secret dream-life in which he performs as a superhero. (A remake is due next year co-written by Mike Myers.) Another explanation is that “Big Man Japan” comes right out of Matumoto’s subconscious, perhaps from his colorful dreams. Still another is that everything that appears on the screen is actually happening, but for the welfare of the Japanese nation, one surely hopes not.

While the CGI tech credits are as super as its heroes, the humor, such as it is, falls as flat as the products of the International House of Pancakes. (If you’re Japanese and reading this, that does not apply to you.)

The film, shown at the prestigious Cannes festival and considered by at least one major critic to be its strangest entry “even by Japanese standards,” takes the form of a mockumentary in which an invisible interrogator follows Dai Sato (Hitosi Matumoto deliberately misspelled) around his graffiti-soaked neighborhood. Sato literally sees the writing on the wall as signs on the highway and on buildings condemn the activities of the Big Man for destroying much of the city’s skyscrapers. Sato looks normal enough despite his love for dried seaweed and the small umbrellas he’d probably tote even if he were touring Egypt. Our principal character is a lonely guy with a cat. He eats in the same restaurant every day, alone, ordering the same noodle soup. He sits on the park bench. But then his vivid imagination (maybe, but maybe what happens is for real) takes hold: he gets a call from the Defense Department that a monster is on the loose terrorizing buildings. Sato takes his bike into a secure plant, is zapped by electricity, and turns into a Far-East version of the Incredible Hulk with voluminous hair standing fashionably high as though he has just seen a ghost. He tackles one monster after another: first one with a huge neck who likes to wrap large arms around buildings, sending the bricks and glass tumbling to the ground.

Between monsters we see more of Dai Sato’s mundane life, incidentally the better parts of the film, including a meeting with an Alzheimer’s afflicted oldster who is able to turn himself into a hulk, allying himself with Sato though with a tragic end for the octogenarian. The epilogue, for those who have not used the final credits as an excuse to bolt, is a humdrum discussion among a team of superheroes representing the U.S., Japan, and North Korea.

Meant perhaps as to send up Japanese movies like “Godzilla” and the way that TV and advertising shape a people’s culture, “Big Man Japan” will likely find an audience more hip that this critic, doubtless seeing the story at a midnight cult screening.

Rated PG-13 113 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

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