BIG MAN JAPAN
Directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto
Produced by Akihiko Okamoto
Written by Matsumoto & Mitsuyoshi Takasu
Released by Magnet Releasing
Japanese with English subtitles
Japan. 113 min. PG-13 for inappropriate-looking monsters
With Hitoshi Matsumoto, Riki Takeuchi, UA, Ryunosuke Kamiki & Itsuji Itao  
 

Japan is probably the world’s leading exporter of WTF cinema. From over-praised Tarantino wanna-be Takashi Miike’s stylized, ultra violent oddities to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bright Future—a film about existential angst, juvenile delinquency, and a toxic jellyfish epidemic—it’s hard to think of a country with a higher output of strange flicks per capita.

Big Man Japan, standup comic Hitoshi Matsumoto’s uneven debut feature, might be Japan’s weirdest contribution yet. A mockumentary spoof of the campy ‘60s giant superhero genre, BMJ follows Daisato (played with convincing nebbishness by Matsumoto). A middle–aged loser abandoned by his wife, Daisato is forced by the government to receive massive electric shocks, which cause him to grow to Ultraman proportions — all so he can defend Japan from the monsters that, as one knows, invade it from time to time.

But this is obviously not your father’s Ultraman. Daisato, a national pariah with little appetite for danger, spends much of his time loafing around the graffiti–covered hovel he shares with a stray cat, giving an off-screen documentarian deadpan accounts of a lifetime of miseries and humiliations. And the fight scenes, rendered, with one hilarious exception, in passable CGI, involve creatures that would not have made it past network censors—such as a jumping, enlarged penis-shaped boy trying to get it on in the middle of downtown Tokyo with a similarly Brobdingnagian, flesh-colored octopus woman.

Despite a meandering pace, a flabby running time inappropriate for a movie this bizarre (it clocks in at almost two hours), and some painful longueurs, BMJ has a few moments of truly inspired madness. Its laser-accurate genre observations, including title cards that introduce each monster, will delight anyone with mildly nostalgic memories of wasted childhood afternoons with the Power Rangers, yet Matsumoto steers clear of the film-school knowingness that tends to sink pictures of this sort.

One also has the feeling that Matsumoto’s true target isn’t the half-forgotten kitsch of his youth. In an early scene, Daisato tells his interviewer that he’s not exactly anti-American, but he was ¨raised with certain ideas.¨ Those ideas are never spelled out clearly, but the movie is careful to show how much has changed in Japan since the time of Daisato’s beloved grandfather, the original “Big Japanese,” whom we see in faux archival footage posing with the Emperor and having his gargantuan needs met by scores of devoted servants. Daisato, unlike grandpa, meets with nothing but loathing from his countrymen, who are more worried about the environmental destruction he causes than the monsters he fights. Far from living it up in opulence, Daisoto has to rent out space on his enlarged body for advertisements in order to stay in the black.

All these ideas come to a head in the brilliant, bizarre final 10 minutes, when Matsumoto jettisons the painstakingly observed documentary realities for an uproarious return to the old-school roots of the genre. What at first seems like a loopy cop-out is really Matsumoto slyly mocking Japan’s subordination to the reigning global superpower—all while letting us enjoy the spectacle of a man in a rubber suit stripped naked before getting his brains knocked out by a giant toy school bus. 

So, yeah, it’s pretty weird.
Brendon Nafziger
May 15, 2009