Welp. Two films that have already been eliminated once. So I guess my verdict is basically a death sentence for one of these. Also the last matchup of the round. What pressure.
The Eel The poster for
The Eel on IMDB calls it an erotic spellbinder, which I found a little odd when I did some digging around on this movie after watching it. A man gets a letter says his wife is cheating on him, he verifies this to be true and kills her in a crime of passion. That is the first five minutes. I picked a different poster that seemed more appropriate.
Koji Yakusho plays Takuro Yamashita, fresh out of jail eight years after committing the murder. He ends up in a small village while paroled, and due to his experience cutting hair in prison, he opens up a barber shop in a run down building.
The viewer kind of keeps expecting his past to sneak up on him and haunt him big time, and while alluded to by characters, it never really does. Oddly enough, Yamashita ends up saving the life of a girl named Keiko, and we probably spend more of the second half of the movie watching
her past unfold.
You really get a sense of the community in this movie, which is what I liked more than the more dramatic arcs of the story. Personally, I had a lot of fun watching Yamashita adjust to life and make friends in this small village. You really get to know who the people in the town are, and only a few of them are wacky personalities, as is often the case in these type of things to make the small roles memorable.
I enjoyed this movie well enough, although I didn't particularly find it erotic or spellbinding. Following the initial murder, I'd probably describe it by just calling it nice.
vs
Moonlight Boy Usually I like to read this and that on a film in a bracket matchup after watching it and before doing the write up, but I really couldn't find a whole lot on
Moonlight Boy. In fact, I am the only person that has checked it on Icheckmovies and it only has 16 votes on IMDB.
Too bad it is so under seen because I liked it all right.
Basically the story is about a spirit taking the form of a boy (the pleasant looking fellow in the poster) who keeps coming around a family with a grandmother, mother, and daughter.
The first half of the movie is slow paced but really sets the mood well. It floats around between the spirit and the daughter with a nice hypnotic quality. Aesthetically wonderful, and some of the scenes are really well crafted. I was reminded of the Sixth Sense actually, particularly when the spirit was in the room with people that can't see him. It also gets into some other weird stuff, including some animated characters that appear in the story occasionally.
As the mystery unfolds, unfortunately it takes with it a lot of the mood and mystique that I was enjoying in the first half. We see how the spirit is connected to the family through some flashbacks and it makes for a pretty powerful ending, but ultimately I was a little bit disappointed with some of the turns the film takes.
The Verdict
I thought both of these movies were pretty good, but I liked
The Eel a lot better. That will be the one that moves on.