Rewatched after a trip to New York City, where unfortunately the accents of this film are now broadly extinct.

I feel even more confident that this movie is a comedy being inconveniently interrupted by a crime thriller. What other kind of movie ends like that!

Why bother adapting High And Low to do this to it? Almost every quality of the original is degraded here. The one novel and successful contribution is the recording studio battle sequence. In that moment, it's easy to see the Spike Lee that's impressed me so often in the past.

But here, there's this desparate flinging of Black Excellence imagery at the screen, hoping that some of the aura of those works ("Oh, I love The Bluest Eye!") will leave its residue on the accompanying sequences. Aretha Franklin, Kehinde Wiley, Basquiat, and Zora Neale Hurston deserve better than that.

A highlight: the pleasure of seeing the Predator here pull an Arnold (in Predator) adapting the environment to his purposes, replacing the conventional accessories of the Yautja with scavenged equivalents.

The previews before the film had me worried, as it was all very, cutesty, children's movies. But the film proved to be, not not a children's movie, but a remarkably respectful one.

The film dedicates meaningful time to some heavy topics, but considers its (child) audience capable of, for example, dealing with death, and why remembering pain is useful.

There's also a couple bits of Police Squad style humor, like the visual gag about steep discounts for local businesses.

This movie, recommended by my ESL student, took me down fascinating path of discovering the Ogigami Naoko industry. So many shared actors! All very similar vibes!

Despite the factory-like churning out of these, there is something interesting and prickly here, a feeling shared by my student. The mother character is just not a stereotypical Japanese woman, and my student sees something of a reflection there, if only in part. The liberatory feelings of encountering a sympathetic unconventional Japanese mother on screen.