By Jim Lundstrom

The cover of a DVD called Big Man Japan caught my eye at the library, and that was all it took. It's Japanese and has giant monsters. What more do you need to know?

When I pulled the DVD out of my backpack to show someone, someone else offered, "That's a horrible movie!" He went on to explain that he gave up after watching 20 minutes of boring talk (in Japanese, with subtitles).

But knowing that we are all unique individuals with our own well-developed peccadilloes, I prefer to experience things for myself rather than accept someone else's judgment of the experience. In this case, one man's horrible movie is another's funniest movie of the year.

The "boring talk," it turns out, is spoken by writer/first time director/star Hitoshi Matsumoto in this hilarious mockumentary about a kaiju-battling super hero with poor ratings.

Must you have some familiarity with the Japanese giant monster/super hero genres to appreciate Big Man Japan? Not really, but surely most people have heard of Godzilla, just one of many giant monsters that have ravaged post-atomic Japan in movies and on television. Even the most cursory knowledge of Japanese giant monster movies should be enough to yield a high return of laughter.

Matsumoto is one half of a well-known Japanese comedy team that has been around since 1983, and Big Man Japan is an excellent example of comedy transcending culture. We do not have to be students of all things Japanese to laugh out loud at Big Man Japan.

The movie begins with a camera crew talking to and following a long-haired, public-conveyance-riding burnout named Daisoto, whose one overriding passion is for things that get big when they need to, like umbrellas and dehydrated seaweed.

Matsumoto's portrayal of the decidedly non-heroic, seemingly slow witted and pointedly boring Daisoto makes him the slacker everyman. Everyone everywhere knows a Daisoto.

Daisoto's cross to bear is that he comes from a long line of superheroes known as Big Man Japan. His grandfather, The Fourth, was widely recognized as the greatest of them all. But, Daisoto points out to the camera crew, there were not only more monsters back then, there were more super heroes who were friends and comrades in arms, and today it is only he, Big Japan Man VI, against the giant monsters that regularly invade Japan to destroy buildings and wreak havoc.

When Daisoto gets the call from the government that a monster has invaded, he travels to the nearest electrical station, where he is jump started into becoming Big Man Japan by attaching cables to his nipples. This transforms him from the milquetoast Daisoto into the husky, multi-storied, purple underwear-clad, Eraserhead-haired Big Man Japan.

BMJ's first monster encounter is with a tipsy-looking creature called The Strangling Monster (aka the Comb Over Monster). BMJ defeats The Strangling Monster, whose soul rises in a white beam of light, and Daisoto returns to his ordinary life. We see him shopping, having a beer, eating Super noodles at a noodle shop and singing at a karaoke bar. He lives a shabby life, while his well-heeled agent bitches at him about his poor ratings and suggests areas where he could place more ads among the tattoos on his billboard-sized body.

More surreal monsters come and are defeated in surreal settings and circumstances, and their souls are beamed up, until a giant red demon shows up, stomps BMG and causes him to run away, which results in much ribbing from a public already embarrassed by a super hero with enormous love handles.

The red demon gets his at the end, but not from BMG. He has help from an American ultra hero family that shows up to beat and humiliate the red demon before blowing him up with a rainbow-hued beam. It's the funniest thing since Gary Cooper discovered spaghetti in China as Marco Polo.

Make sure you let the movie roll through the credits for the ultra hero family's dinner table analysis of the fight with the red demon.

Why is this a movie that matters? We all need to laugh but the majority of modern American comedies are painfully unfunny. Go Big Man Japan!

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If you can find it, check out the Nazi-era 1943 film Titanic, which includes a fictional German hero and a propaganda message about the eternal profit motive that drives the British.

Plagued with production problems - including the jail cell "suicide" of the original director after he made disparaging remarks about the German army - the Nazi version of Titanic was virtually unseen anywhere until a 2005 Kino Video release on DVD with extras that include a White Star line promotional tour of the Titanic's sister ship, Olympic.

The Nazi version might have been scripted by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, whose guiding principle was "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

But it was Goebbels who banned the film from being shown in Germany upon its release in 1943. He thought a movie about a doomed ship filled with panic was too close to the bone. Titanic had its world premiere in occupied Paris, and then quietly slipped below the dark surface of public awareness.

I've never seen James Cameron's Titanic, but sources who have claim Cameron lifted some scenes and scenarios from the Nazi movie. Sorry, that's not enough of a titillation factor to make me see the Cameron flick.

I have seen the 1958 British version of the Titanic tragedy, A Night to Remember, as well as many other disaster movies, and the Nazi Titanic is a well-made disaster movie.

But it's the perspective this movie takes that makes it worth watching, which, basically, is this: If only good and true Germans had built and sailed the Titanic instead of cowardly and greedy Britishers, not only would she not have hit the iceberg, but all people would come, as Hitler once described the results of successful propaganda, "to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."