DEATH NOTE (2006)

Light Yagami is a college student who naively believes that if he pursues a career in Law that he will be able to make a difference. One night he witnesses something that shatters his beliefs.  A few moments later he finds the Death Note. It's a notebook that belongs to a God of Death (think Grim Reaper) named Ryuk and there's a bunch of rules to it, but simply put: you write a person's name in the book and they die.  Also, Ryuk hangs out with Light now, but nobody else can see him.

That's a huge oversimplification of the story (I completely left out the exciting cat and mouse stuff with the brilliant crime fighter, L), but I don't want to give too much away, because one the most satisfying parts of watching DEATH NOTE for the first time is discovering all the new rules and crazy twists and turns as it happens. Yeah, some of it's silly, but DEATH NOTE is still a wicked story.  Silly and wicked.  That's my kind of movie!  I love it.  Highly recommended.

Part 2 - Death Note: The Last Name (2006)
Part 3 - Death Note: L Change the World (2008)

DETROIT METAL CITY (2008)

[Update 02/21/2021: need to redo this entire review and fix the screenshots.]

I rented this solely because the cover looked cool and I like metal. I kinda figured it was going to be lame, but I ended up really enjoying myself. The "metal" I wouldn't consider true metal, but that's my only complaint. That and the fact that Rosa Kato didn't have a 666-second nude scene, but oh well.

The story is pretty funny: a dorky country boy moves to Tokyo and has dreams of singing really goofy love songs, but he accidentally ends up as the lead singer/ guitarist for a Satanic glam metal band called Detroit Metal City. He does it just to pay the bills, but then his worst nightmare comes true: they become famous! To make matters even worse, the girl that he's in love with hates DMC, so naturally this leads to all kinds of mistaken identity hijinks that were pretty goddamn funny. Including one where he has a concert right next door to where he's suppose to meet her for a date, so he ends up running back and forth between the two! There's also a surprisingly sweet moment concerning his mother that I thought really pushed the movie past being funny to actually having a soul and a good message.

The best part of the movie was Ken'ichi Matsuyama's performance. He had me giggling the entire movie. His nerd guy character was so fucking stupid and over the top that I couldn't stop laughing. But then his glam metal guy was completely different to the point that I kept forgetting that it was the nerd guy in makeup. Outstanding performance. I think that if anybody else had been in the role the entire movie would have just ended up stupid.