Godzilla
vs. retirement
The
Dai Pool at Toho Studios has been demolished and an era has ended. You probably
don’t recall this huge, shallow pool, but its pop culture rating is somewhere
between 50 and 400 meters high because this was the frothing sea that birthed
Godzilla, that ill-used avatar of nuclear apocalypse. The terrible
“Whale-Gorilla” captured the popular imagination at a time when life had proven
appallingly fragile on a massive scale.
In
2004, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Godzilla film, Toho Studios
released Godzilla: Final Wars and
announced that it would be the last movie to feature the great and powerful
creature. Even on the off chance that the monster would return at some future
date, a man in a rubber suit would no longer portray the beast. Whether
cinematic luddite or CGI geek, we should all mourn the day that an actor can’t
make a decent day’s wages by sweating profusely and stomping his way to heaven.
Godzilla
(real name: Gojira) began busting blocks and taking names in 1954, when Steven
Spielberg was less than knee-high to Mothra. American distributors fretted that
domestic audiences would not appreciate such a film without sympathetic
American characters, so Raymond Burr was hired for a day’s work and the character
of American reporter, Steve Martin, was added to the US version, turning a
tragic horror story into a disturbed and fractured tale.
After
showings at a smattering of West Coast monster movie festivals and little else
in North America, the DVD for Godzilla:
Final Wars is due for American release by the end of July. Many, many
sequels were produced during the preceding 50 years. As Marcel Proust once
said, “Everyone needs to eat madeleines and
watch Godzilla at least once in their
life.”
The original Godzilla from 1954 is worth seeking out. Under no circumstances
should the American-made Godzilla of
1998 be considered a reasonable substitute. Almost 30 sequels are available to
the undiscerning viewer. Godzilla vs.
Space Godzilla is representative. On the other hand, Godzilla vs. Bambi ends predictably, but has high
entertainment value.
—
Craig Brownlie
Ding-Dong, heaven calling
“Hello, my name is Angelina and I’m telling all
your neighbors about the New Millennium.” She was young and unlike any
door-to-door evangelist I’d ever seen: black leather jacket, sunglasses, thick
black hair unbound, tight checkered skirt.
What kind of little angel is this, I wondered.
She was sexy. But in a dulled, dim sort of way. Not like live bait dangling,
bright and glittering. She was definitely not hot-wired into God’s dynamo. “Do
you know how you’ll spend the next millennium?” she asked, in a far-off voice.
They usually come in pairs, trudging up my
street together, somnambulistic, slack-faced, dulled by the endless repetition
of come-on lines and the emotional hardening of all those doors slammed in
their faces.
Angelina gave me a single-sheet bi-fold tract,
like a flimsy Sunday school flyer. Bad colors and cheap printing. Thin
apocalyptic images on one side. Soldiers, red dragons, fighter planes. And
those weirdly tepid New Millennium pictures on the other. A kid with a lion, a
basket full of fruit, beautifully bland landscape. If that’s paradise, I
thought, I’ll stick with my suburban bunker visited once a year by sexy
evangelist girls. “What does the future hold for you?” her tract asked.
She gave me a wan smile, bored as a Wal-Mart
checker, and bid me to “have a nice day.”
Was she a renegade evangelist? An endtime angel
doing a little last-minute soul-trawling? Did she represent some new wrinkle in
the door-to-door salvation biz? No, I decided. She’s an anomaly. Doing her
duty, her own way. But if the elders knew what kind of ripples were spreading
out behind her, they’d yank her off the street in a minute.
— Th. Metzger
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2005.
