Godzilla Minus One (2023)

  This was one of the Oscar nominees I didn't get to last year and I missed it again when it came up in Movie Club, so this has been kind of a catch-up week for me.  (Also, I completely missed the nominations for both the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards so my TBW list has jumped up like 100 slots.  Thank God the Oscars don't drop until the 17th.)  

Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) chickened out of being a kamikaze pilot at the end of WWII, landing instead on a small island for "repairs" and inadvertently witnessing a local monster, Godzilla, which rampaged over the island and killed all the maintenance workers.  Shikishima returned to a war-torn Tokyo to find that his family is dead and his neighbor (Sakura Andô) hates him.  He takes in refugee Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and orphaned Akiko (Sae Nagatani) but refuses to allow himself to care for them.  And then Godzilla returns, angry over nuclear testing and even larger than before.  Shikishima needs to come up with a plan to stop the giant lizard before it ruins his life even further.

Maybe this was just overhyped to me, but I didn't think it was nearly as good as Shin Godzilla.  It felt more cynical, more depressed, and more like a Jaws riff than a Godzilla movie.  Maybe because Shikishima is not a sympathetic protagonist?  Nothing about this worked for me.  

It has a ton of critical acclaim and won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects so clearly other people like it.  It's streaming on Netflix.

The Man with the Iron Fists 2 (2015)

  This has nowhere near the level of quality as the first one but that did not bother me in the slightest.  It is a big, dumb, poorly written martial arts extravaganza in the style of the Shaw Brothers and I enjoyed it.  

On a quest to find inner peace, Thaddeus (RZA), the man with the iron fists, stumbles into a small mining village run by an evil gang called Clan Beetle.  The mayor (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) is ineffectual and the local union leader (Dustin Nguyen) is trying to avoid a violent showdown so he doesn't have to confront his own past.  Oh, and the ghost of some evil dude looking for immortality is killing young women, but nobody super cares about that until it's too late.

Yes, this does feel like an extended episode of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.  This is a feature, not a bug, but your mileage may vary.  Some people's comfort media is romantic comedy, mine is martial arts.  Tropes abound, including classics like Lone Hero Reluctantly Takes Up Arms Again for Worthy Cause, Average Guy Hides Previous Occupation as Sociopathic Badass, Honor Challenges in the Octagon, Beautiful Highly Useless Girl with Astonishingly Stupid Name Gets Kidnapped/Held Hostage, and (a personal favorite) Ancient Monk Drops a Beatdown on Fools While Espousing Non-Violence.  That is my emotional support Wire Fu, please leave it alone.

Sadly, this did not get any kind of support or cult following so it's much harder to find.  You're going to have to dust off the VPN or shell out some money to rent it.  This was obviously a labor of love for RZA, and frankly, more millionaires should have silly creative outlets like this.