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03-20-2021, 05:45 PM | #451 |
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Yeah I’ll admit, the movie isn’t going to crack my top 5 list, but compared to the Gekiranger movie that came out at the same time, I had a good experience watching it.
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03-20-2021, 06:00 PM | #452 |
Standing By
Join Date: Feb 2020
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KAMEN RIDER DEN-O THE MOVIE - “I’M BORN!”
It was always weird to me how many Riders are orphans, or have a dead parent. I’d joked back in Ghost that All Dads Are Dead, but it’s really prevalent over this franchise. It’s something I’d write off as some weird quirk, an overused trope, but it’s such a deliberate choice that it got me wondering why. The first reason you’d have a main character with dead parents is to create some unfillable void, some unresolveable wound. It’s not a loss that happened as a result of the character’s actions or inaction, give or take a Blade. It’s not some heroic thing, like you’d get over the course of the series. It’s a tragedy that befell them, and all they can do is live with it. It creates this absence within the character, a pre-show acknowledgement that loss is real and irrevocable. It’s also a way to bake into the hero a motivation to overcome hardship, to make the best out of what you have left. Dead parents… it’s a preexisting condition, a thing that the character can’t ever fix or undo, so they fight to keep other people from having to experience it. Oh yeah, we agree! Quote:
There’ve been some fun ideas in earlier films, and a few that were just generally entertaining, but they always felt at least minimally compromised. They needed to cram a season into seventy minutes, or create some goofy new world to explore. Here, it’s like Episodes 27-29 of Den-O, where there’s no time wasted on restating the premise or explaining relationships. (I mean, maybe to a fault? Sieg, a two-episode character, appears basically out of nowhere and everyone acts like he’s a main cast member. A couple lines of recap probably wouldn’t’ve killed Kobayashi!) Literally everything good about Den-O (and bad: Airimirers) gets shown off in this movie. It’s a giant, big-budget celebration of everything the show is about, and it’s not toning that down for newbies.
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-Gaoh! Great visual, huge villain presence, tons of charisma, absolutely zero character. There’s never a compelling motivation for what he’s doing, he’s already 90% done with his masterplan before the story even starts, and his death is just him going Oh Shit I Died. Kamen Rider Kabuki, he was not.
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-Really can’t say enough about how great it was to see a story that foregrounds the bond between Momo and Ryotaro. There’s a real pain to Momo when he sees his connection to Ryotaro severed, and the movie treats his loss seriously. There’s this shot of Momo wandering down an alley that is just heartbreaking for how isolated he looks. But, eventually Momo’s reunited with Ryotaro because Memory Beats Tragedy and we get a hell of an exciting climax.
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I think Mizoguchi's talents as Koutarou were wasted on Useless Monk Apprentice #1, just cause a lot of people unfairly compare him to Sato. If Watanabe was cast as Super-1, I would have a lot more incentive to watch that show!
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03-20-2021, 06:41 PM | #453 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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Location: Chicago, IL
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Anyway, it's interesting to have it pointed out how little the film cares to educate moviegoers about what Den-O is, because thinking about it, that's probably a direct sign of well, simply that Den-O was probably so successful by that point that they kinda legitimately could count on *everyone* knowing exactly what's going on?
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I guess sometimes a movie villain doesn't need to have much complexity, they just need to make an impression. Gaoh definitely left an impression on me, since he's one of my favorite Movie Riders. There's a lot of questions about him like why does he have an artificial arm and why does he want to destroy the past? I would love to watch a V-Cinema about this guy. Unfortunately, that amazing suit was scrapped to make something else.
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Does that mean you were joking when you said "They were integral to the start of at least half of Ghost's plots!"? I mean, they were a convenient way for Takeru to get alerts about the Ganma and a way for Saionji to infiltrate the temple, so they were technically useful to both sides, but they weren't really characters. Akari could have replaced them with a phone app and only two episodes would change.
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03-21-2021, 11:16 AM | #454 |
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Posts: 1,290
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Quote:
KAMEN RIDER DEN-O THE MOVIE - “I’M BORN!”
The first reason you’d have a main character with dead parents is to create some unfillable void, some unresolveable wound. It’s not a loss that happened as a result of the character’s actions or inaction, give or take a Blade. It’s not some heroic thing, like you’d get over the course of the series. It’s a tragedy that befell them, and all they can do is live with it. It creates this absence within the character, a pre-show acknowledgement that loss is real and irrevocable. It’s also a way to bake into the hero a motivation to overcome hardship, to make the best out of what you have left. Dead parents… it’s a preexisting condition, a thing that the character can’t ever fix or undo, so they fight to keep other people from having to experience it. Quote:
The other reason, though - and maybe the main reason - is because the character can try to fill that void with a found family. Those parents are never coming back, but you can make a new family out of a sister, some imagination monsters from the end of time, a time-displaced version of your almost-brother-in-law, an eccentric train owner, and a vinyl-clad timepiece-enthusiast. It’s not about replacing anything, really. Your parents that are gone will never come back. But you can keep their memory close while still creating something positive in the present.
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Like, the first sequence is a Ryutaros dance scene that now includes a kick-line, because Movie Budget. That is such a statement of intent, moreso than any extra explosions or whatever. Everything’s plussed, everything’s sweetened. You like Form Changes? Here’s every goddamn Form Den-O ever used, and every Form Zeronos ever used! You like Hana kicking ass? Here’s her fighting ninjas and spanking Imagin! You like Owner eating fried rice? He does it twice! You like Ryotaro? Here’s him twice.
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Kotaro! Man, I think Sword Form Junior is my all-time favorite Movie Form. Did that thing ever get a Figuart? Money left on the table if it didn’t. Kotaro’s a fantastic part of this film, in all respects. He’s great at channeling Momo, absolutely nailing that Ore Sanjou pose. But he’s also interesting for what his performance tells us about Ryotaro. It’s weird, him being so energetic and excitable, knowing that Ryotaro is neither of those things. But that works for me, because it invites concern about what the last few years have been like for Ryotaro: the choices he’s made, the burdens he’s carried, the regrets he’s ignored. There was this kid who was happy once, despite everything he’d lost, and now there’s this soft-spoken young man who lets his emotions lie fallow. There’s a disconnect between the kid he was and the man he’s become, and I’m curious if the show’s going to tell more of that story.
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THE BAGGAGE CAR
-Super funny that the movie spends a bunch of time having characters ask why Sieg is hanging around, since thematically he’s the absolute best Imagin to have in this story. Sieg’s whole story is about the value of found family, about how what you get may not be what you wanted, but it can still have value. Of course he’s going to be in a story about Ryotaro trying to explain why he’s able to move on from his parents’ death because he’s still got people who care about him! Quote:
-Gaoh! Great visual, huge villain presence, tons of charisma, absolutely zero character. There’s never a compelling motivation for what he’s doing, he’s already 90% done with his masterplan before the story even starts, and his death is just him going Oh Shit I Died. Kamen Rider Kabuki, he was not.
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-Oh, right, Ryotaro’s Narratively Convenient Amnesia. Ehhhhh. I love that the kick from Gaoh only eliminated the Den-O stuff from Ryotaro’s brain. That is the hackiest shit! The movie gets away with it by a) playing up the schism with Momo as incredibly sad; b) spending some time with Ryotaro and Kotaro bonding over their shared trauma; and c) making the whole point of this thing that Memory Beats Tragedy, so we need Ryotaro to lose and regain memories. Thematically it works, but kicking off the plot with a kick to the head is pretty lazy.
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The most complete non-wiki encyclopedias for Kamen Rider series (currently only found Ryuki and OOO's). Last edited by DreadBringer; 03-22-2021 at 04:00 AM.. |
03-21-2021, 12:16 PM | #455 |
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Wrong word (unless there’s a fanfiction out there I’m unaware of)
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03-21-2021, 12:20 PM | #456 |
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Huh! I hadn't considered that. Yeah, maybe!
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03-21-2021, 05:34 PM | #457 |
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So one other thing I forgot to mention about the movie: this is the Den-O premiere of Toei's Edo set. This set would go on to appear in so many Kamen Rider films in the early 2010s that it became maybe not a meme, but at least a running joke.
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03-21-2021, 06:19 PM | #458 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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Location: Chicago, IL
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I've probably seen that set ten or twelve times by now, so it's nice to see when it got its start. If any Rider show needed to do a time travel storyline, it was more likely than not that they'd end up in the Edo period. I wonder if folks in the Edo period are completely sick of tripping over time travelers?
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03-21-2021, 07:08 PM | #459 |
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03-21-2021, 07:38 PM | #460 |
Showa Girl
Join Date: Jun 2018
Posts: 9,064
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To this day I STILL don't know why he did that. It's perfect! It's very Deneb! I love it! Why did he do it!
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