I didn’t know this anime, but I’ve just Wikipedia’ed it and it’s apparently from Madhouse. That means the animation quality is probably very high!
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It is. The artistry is amazing!
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I finished this and wow, what a beautiful and heartwarming show. I left a review here. 強いて言えば my favorite parts were actually the cooking (and how much Kiyo loves cooking for others), the intimacy of Kiyo & Sumire’s relationship (the supporting cast comments on this multiple times), and the inter-generational cast & family-like setting. That doesn’t remotely do it justice though. As Kiyo & Sumire go, there’s a scene where the characters say: ほんま 姉妹みたいやなあ。あれは姉妹以上どすお母さん。and there’s other moments that possibly imply certain characters have some attraction to women (apparently this is moreso in the manga). I don’t think I’ll tag it as yuri, but if the story did eventually turn out that way, it would feel very fitting. Anyway, there’s more to the story than that, it just caught me by surprise. As language goes, I found most of it very comprehensible, some I’ve picked up enough Osaka-ben/general Kansai-ben at this point… there were occasional scenes I didn’t quite get - sometimes the vocab, and sometimes just the scene itself… but I’d say like 95% I got. I imagine it would be challenging for someone with no Kansai-ben knowledge.
Btw this is the first live action JP anything I’ve finished - so that’s very high praise from me
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Time for a Godzilla update! The last movie I posted about was Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, it seems 
Well, I’ve watched a few more since then.
Invasion of Astro Monster (1965)
Well, the Godzilla movies have highs (tiny ladies)… and they have lows. This was one of the lows. Lots of reused footage, a random American actor for some reason, and… so boring… It’s been a while since I watched it and I don’t remember a single thing about the plot except space ships and I think Ghidorah was there again.
Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
The first movie in the franchise directed by Jun Fukuda, who would go on to direct quite a few more! I thought in this movie that he brought a lot of freshness to the series, changing around the story structure, roles of the protagonists, and the monster introductions. It was a very needed break from all the other movies that were like ‘handsome reporter man and plucky photographer lady.’ Also I liked Ebirah 
Son of Godzilla (1967)
Jun Fukuda, you did so well with Ebirah, why would you betray me so??? I hate Minilla with a raging passion. He is so ugly. Get him off my screen!
Destroy All Monsters (1968)
In this movie we return to mainland kaiju action instead of being set on an island in Guam or whatever. I don’t remember this one that much but I think I had fun
All Monsters Attack (1969)
Before I watched this movie, I had clicked on the Wikipedia and seen that it was regarded as the worst movie in the franchise. ‘Aww, it can’t be that bad,’ I thought. Well… it was that bad. It’s supposed to be a children’s adventure movie, which would be fine if done well, but it was not done well. A kid somehow dreams his way onto Kaiju Island where he gets advice on how to deal with bullies from Minilla. The movie tries to say something or other about latchkey kids but ends up fumbling the message repeatedly. (Should adults step in like how Godzilla steps in when Minilla is bullied, or should kids fight back against their kidnappers, proving that it’s ok if Mom doesn’t come home on time? This movie just doesn’t know)
Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971)
Ok, this movie was a huge surprise. It’s incredibly stylistically distinct, and it’s weird! It was so weird that the producer hated it, and never let the director make another Godzilla movie again. But I was into it. We bring back the message-based Godzilla movies by having Hedorah be a monster born from pollution. There’s so much going on in this movie, including some gruesome onscreen deaths that I was not expecting! I also really enjoyed seeing the eras turn here- it’s 1971 so you can still see the 60s style in the hair/makeup but it’s starting to shift, eyeshadow is becoming more blue and frosty… This movie is apparently a cult classic of the Godzilla franchise and I can see why.
Godzilla vs Gigan (1972)
More of a return to form after the weirdness of Hedorah, but starting to see the shift to more modern monster/action movie style, with fights being set at night and moodily lit with smoke and explosions and more interesting angles rather than just a wide shot of a fight taking place in the middle of some field at noon or whatever.
21/33 Japanese Godzilla movies remaining… 
And, of course, I’ll watch the American ones too now that I’m at it.
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I am continuing to watch Japanese TV series, without subtitles.
It is certainly a challenge, as I typically understand somewhere between 10% and 50% of what I’m hearing, but mostly on the low side. I watch with my iPhone dictionary in hand (shirabe jisho) so that when I hear a word clearly that I don’t know, especially one that is repeated multiple times (which is fairly often in the types of shows that I’m watching), I can pause the video, back up 10 seconds by clicking an on-screen button, listen to it again (as many times as I want), and then look it up.
I’m not (yet) writing anything down, and so I’m not sure of how much is sticking - but at least with shirabe jisho I can see a list of words that I’ve looked up recently and quickly get the definition and kanji again, so maybe over time it will sink in.
One series that I just completed was an educational anime aimed at kids - they introduce a lot of concepts and vocabulary related to vaguely scientific topics (I think that I have learned ‘dinosaur’ from the repetition, at least: 恐竜 kyouryuu - basically a ‘scary dragon’)
That show is called “Surviving Science!” - I 'd guess that it’s aimed at middle-school or junior high school students. The characters in the show are (rather annoying) kids, and so sometimes the VA voices are a bit too cutesy and kid-like for my taste, but I dealt with it - I may even replay the series at some point, and go over the dialog more intensively.
The one that I’m currently watching is a (yet another) police/crime live-action drama, with this one focused on an independent forensic science researcher/detective who is called in to handle the most difficult unsolved cases - through science (!) - and his shtick is that when he eventually figures out a key piece of the forensic puzzle, his catchphrase is 見つけた (mitsuketa - ‘I found it!’) - the MC has a personality roughly on a par with a sheet of wet cardboard - but there are other characters to act as his foils, including a young, female research assistant, and various police investigators (including one who I think may be his ex-wife) and lawyers and criminals and victims, the whole schmear. It’s pretty formulaic, but that means that a lot of the vocabulary is repeated which makes it more accessible to me.
Last Resort Investigator
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The Australian Japanese Film Festival Programme is out now! https://japanesefilmfestival.net/ Recommend buying your tickets soon as some sessions have already sold out. The Japanese classics Program is free: check out the Sydney showings: Japanese Film Festival 2025 | Art Gallery of NSW
(I wish I lived in a major centre but I’ll try and get a weekend in)
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That’s an impressive programme, especially the classics in that Special Series 
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s recent films are not among his best, but nice to see he gets a “spotlight” 
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Every year I drool over the Classics screenings but they are weekly (or at the most twice a week) and I can’t (unfortunately) spend more than a few days at the festival (work etc)…..
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Bit sad that this thread seems to have fallen off a bit, I liked to read through it to find new possible movies to watch (or try watching).
So I’m posting here that in my attempt to clear my Japanese movies/series “Watch later” list, I finally watched “ヤクザと家族” (A Family) on Netflix.
Summary
I quite liked it! It’s a classic yakuza movie in the first half, but there’s some interesting exploration of how life is like for someone trying to go back to a normal life after getting “out” of the yakuza and how the many, many laws that got passed to crack down on organized crime make it extremely difficult.
Now, as for language learning, I had to watch it with English subtitles because half the characters would have been completely unintelligible otherwise lol
Otherwise there’s actually plenty of nice, slow and easy dialogue to follow in the more “calmer” scenes, but as soon as the yakuza guys started to bring out that classic tough guy way of talking that makes them all sound like a revving motorcycle I gave up trying to even pick out singular words except for the usual この野郎 and the like.
Still, nice watch. It’s the kind of movie that makes you go “man…” at the end.
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I watched 100 em (100 Meters) on Netflix.
It’s a fun sports anime with 英語の字幕
えいごのじまく
English subtitles
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