Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' On Heaven's Door

So I decided to use Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, since it is both a good film and a foreign film. Also, some of you will notice that the title of the post isn't as "clever" as normal (though my previous title was pretty lame as well). The subtitle of the movie's title, "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" was dropped from the US release due to rights issues (I believe). The movie takes place between episodes 22 and 23 of the series, and offers the highest bounty the Bebop crew has ever chased down.

Like many TV-to-film adaptations, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is kind of like an episode of the series with higher stakes and a bigger budget. Fortunately, the events of the movie lend themselves well to the big screen. The fight and chase scenes are incredibly well-done, and the world of Bebop gets to be even more fleshed out, showing off the beauty of dilapidation. And of course, the soundtrack is incredible.

The story takes place in the days leading up to Halloween on Mars, which is home to some of the richest people in the solar system. As the capital city begins preparation for the Halloween celebration, a two-bit bounty Faye is chasing seems to be mixed up with someone extremely dangerous. The explosion of a tanker truck leads to the release of a deadly bioweapon that has the authorities perplexed, and an enormous bounty is placed on the head of the man responsible. As Spike, Jet, Faye and Ed hunt down the mysterious Vincent Volajou, they begin to uncover a strange cover-up involving the government, the military and a powerful corporation.

The movie shows off more of the upper class of the future than we've seen throughout most of the series. With the exception of the scenes located at Syndicate buildings and the opera house, most episodes took place in very poor areas, since most of humanity is living in substandard living conditions. There were still plenty of scenes of poverty (notably Ed's undercover trick-or-treat mission that brought her to the door of a transvestite prostitute), and the starkly different environments beautifully highlight the class divide.

Of the five foreign films I've covered, this one is, to me, the most "American", mainly because the English dub is as professionally done as the original Japanese track (I would wager that an English script was written alongside a Japanese one to avoid untranslatable idioms). The makers were aware that there was going to be a huge market in the United States as well as Japan, since the series had already been well-received on both sides of the Pacific.

This is certainly not a comprehensive list of foreign films worth seeing. But these are five films, each from different countries, that I believe are all worth seeing (though Cowboy Bebop doesn't have the important messages of the other films, most notably Persepolis).

Up next: Indiana Jones?...