Godzilla Final Wars: First Thoughts

Even the digital magic of DVD hasn't much changed the fuzzy nature of advance bootleg screeners -- instead of peering through fuzzy VHS degradation, I was trying to penetrate blocky MPEG compression. The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?

Godzilla: Final Wars, the "last" in the fifty-year series of Godzilla movies (how many times has Godzilla "retired" now?) is directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, auteur of high-octane wire-fu films like Versus, Azumi, and Alive. Final Wars is exactly how you'd expect a Godzilla film directed by Kitamura to be: gritty, clad in black latex, and filled with monochrome cinematography. The plot isn't difficult to decipher, even without a translation from the Japanese, though it does help that one prominent character speaks exclusively in English. Aliens invade Earth and, as promised by the producers, use (almost) the entire menagerie of past villains from Toho's monster library to trash its cities.

The monster scenes are well done, though I was a bit surprised to see that Godzilla has picked up some kung fu over the last five decades. There are perhaps a few too many scenes in which the outcome of the plot is dependent more upon the actions of the puny humans as opposed to the actions of the giant monsters. However, since people are cheaper to film than lumbering beasts and they can recite expository lines of dialogue as well, it is not all that surprising.

I don't want to say too much more for fear of spoiling the Stomp Tokyo review of the film (we'll likely end up cannibalizing some of this material for the review, I don't doubt), but I'm kind of glad they're wrapping things up now. The Godzilla franchise has, for the last few years, been ruled by a "hit director of the week" syndrome in which prominent young Japanese directors are given their shot at the Godzilla franchise regardless of their actual vision of the character. (Yes, I'm aware that there's some irony in talking about the "character" of a giant fire-breathing dinosaur, but I maintain that there are right ways and wrong ways to "do" Godzilla.) Perhaps a hiatus will allow Toho to back off for a bit and find a new generation of producers and directors to revive the giant monster franchise without slavishly conforming to whatever style is currently hot in Hollywood and Japanese action cinema.

The (Not-So) Fantastic Four

In anticipation of the "real" movie coming out later this summer, Stomp Tokyo presents a review of the 1994 Roger Corman-produced low-budget version of The Fantastic Four. If you can't remember this one ever coming to a theater near you, there's a reason.

Wire in the Blood

BBC America began airing episodes (actually, 2-hour TV movies) of the mystery series Wire in the Blood this month. I caught the first one and I found myself thinking "Wow, they created a British version of Medium, and they made it a whole lot better than the Americans did."

The series stars Robson Green as Tony Hill, a soft-spoken but brilliant forensic psychologist who helps the London police catch murderers. I've only seen one installment ("Legacy"), but from what I can tell they refrain from stating explicitly that Hill has extrasensory perception. The hints are subtle, and depending on how you interpret them, Hill is either a little bit psychic or an adept student of human nature with amazing powers of intuition. It's unimportant which, really, and it's more fun to be kept guessing -- if NBC's Medium (starring a strangely muted version of Patricia Arquette) is to be believed, certainty of one's psychic gifts merely leads to sleepless nights, familial angst, and low-level alcoholism.

I'm going to keep watching both series for now, but since I got more enjoyment out of two hours of Wire in the Blood than I did a half-season of Medium, it's not difficult to say which will win out if I ever have to choose between them.

You knew it had to happen

Get your very own Pope Collector's Coin, from the National Collector's Mint. Do they have to get permission for likeness rights to do stuff like this?

Lost

The supervising producer of the ABC show Lost revealed recently that the series' first season finale will clock in at three hours.

In related news, Entertainment Weekly's edition this week features Lost on the cover. The issue number is 815, which "coincidentally" is the same as the flight number that crashed on the show. (Kudos to my wife Christina for predicting it.)

Slacker

Upon moving to Austin, Texas, I dutifully put the movie Slacker in my Netflix queue. After all, a cult movie aficionado can hardly move to a new town with a renowned cult movie all its own without having seen that picture, right? Especially if that picture received a presitigious Criterion two-disc release. With a screening of the DVD under my belt, I would be prepared for that inevitable moment when someone in Austin, upon learning of my interest in cinema, would ask:

"You like movies? Have you seen Slacker? It was filmed here in Austin, you know."

The disc arrived in Austin shortly after I did, and then it sat atop my TV for three months. (My turnover rate for Netflix discs has always been woefully low, but I still feel certain that my occasional spurts of rental activity have justfied the monthly fees as compared to a local rental store and the late fees I cannot escape.) The activities of moving, telecommuting to do business with my old job, and looking for a new job, not to mention the business of Stomp Tokyo, kept me from putting the disc in the player.

But finally enough was enough and, after a day of piling through receipts and electronic bank records to complete our 2004 income taxes (what do you mean, "we owe the government money?"), Christina and I decided to treat ourselves to one Austin institution (Saccone's pizza) while watching another. Thus our journey with Richard Linklater (the man who, over a decade later, would direct the highly entertaining School of Rock) and the slackers of early '90s Austin began.

Ninety-eight minutes and a sausage-and-onion thin-crust pizza later, I was left trying to come up with a polite answer to that question above that wouldn't offend anyone.

Slacker, for reasons that pass my current understanding, was critically hailed as a masterpiece of (depending on which critic you read) surrealism, satire, and cinema verité. Most of the reviewers simply seem relieved to be watching something that doesn't adhere to rigid Hollywood formula. I can appreciate that, but as someone who watches the film from the perspective of fourteen years of "independent" filmmaking later, it comes across as less innovative and more annoying.

The movie tells no particular story, drifting instead between several dozen of the most boring and uncomfortable conversations imaginable. There are two different aggressive conspiracy theorists (one JFK, one fake-space-program) who attach themselves to their victims with a frightening tenacity, a burglar who finds himself ensnared in a conversation about history and politics when his victim arrives home early, and a host of pseudo-intellectual twenty-somethings who occupy themselves with half-baked analyses of the cartoons of their childhood. In short, it's like the dark corners of a metropolitan public library combined with the more drunken moments of a lazy college honor student. If you've never experienced these things in life, you might find Slacker entertaining for about a third of its running time. If you have had the misfortune to encounter these people in person (or worse, you recognize some part of yourself in the characters), then you'll realize almost immediately that you've spent enough time trying to extricate yourself from actual social situations like these, and you'll wonder why anyone would want to watch it on film.

None of these vignettes are filmed or acted with particular aplomb – they just sort of are, and oftentimes they're much less convincing than would be their real-life counterparts. There's an uncomfortable situation, and then there's the filmic recreation of an uncomfortable situation that manages to throw in some additional tedium. About an hour into the picture, Slacker assumes the perspective of a character in a bar with a toy Pixelvision camera. This prompted my wife to observe that "up to this point it's just been boring. Now it's boring with bad video."

Apart from the title, there is some indication that Linklater is aware of the the film's deadly realism. A self-professed "anti-artist" (Austin musician "Wammo") confesses that he does little besides work in a bar, eat, sleep and watch movies. Few of the self-important posers are portrayed as being much more than that. The question is: why immortalize these people, these conversations? Is it much more than a fledgling filmmaker learning his craft and gathering material for the soon-to-follow (and genuinely funny) Dazed and Confused?

Whatever the answer, I'm glad that Linklater moved on to better material and made better pictures. If the idolization of an imperfect work (a two-disc Criterion release? really?) is the price we pay for the rest of Linklater's catalog, then I suppose I'm okay with that.

Just don't expect me to give you the "Slacker tour" of Austin when you come to visit.

Doctor Who returns

Christina and I sat down on a couple of nights this last week to watch the first two episodes of the resurrected Doctor Who. It was Christina's first real experience with the series, but I am not a Doctor Who virgin at all. (In fact, it is my sad duty to inform you that at the age of 12 I wore a six-foot long scarf and trench coat to school most days.) Happily, reports from both sides of the fence are positive. I was pleased that this modernization of the series preserves the spirit of the original, and she was happy to see that the show is easily accessible to first-timers and apparently free of the bargain basement special effects for which it is famous. (We'll see what happens beyond the first couple of episodes when the budgets start to shrink.)

Chris Eccleston is appropriately gleeful and arrogant as The Doctor. As companions go, Billie Piper's Rose is perhaps the easiest for audiences to identify with since Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) stepped into the TARDIS thirty years ago. (The Doctor always did have a thing for pretty young women.) Most gratifying, however, is that the cerebral nature of the series hasn't been gutted in favor of flashy laser beams and aliens. The writing is as rich with ideas as it ever was, and a darn sight cleverer than many of the previous episodes I can recall. This new generation of producers and writers aren't afraid to put their own stamp on the legend -- the use of a Britney Spears tune (to hilarious effect) is just one of the examples of the many original strokes by a creative team that obviously loves the series and is thrilled to have a chance to take it for a spin. It's hard to believe that a series with this much nostalgia appeal returned to the air with the production values and imagination evinced in the first two episodes won't be a hit.

The day after we watched the pilot episode, however, we were greeted with the bad news that Eccleston won't be returning for a second season as the title character. (Eccleston refuted most of the comments made by the BBC in the statement, and the BBC apologized.) For most series that almost certainly would spell the end, but Doctor Who has a built-in escape plan: a main character who can "regenerate" his appearance, allowing a multitude of actors to play the role. (Eccleston is the ninth to play The Doctor on TV.) With the energy currently behind it, the series will very likely survive for a few years to come. It would have been nice, however, to see a few seasons more of Eccleston's quixotic and earthy take on the character.

Sin City

Allow me to cast a "nay" vote on Sin City. I wasn't transported, I wasn't entertained, and I wasn't convinced. I actually considered walking out, but we were watching it at the Alamo Drafthouse and you can't really walk out before they bring your check.

By the way, allow me to plug the Alamo here: they had the musician who plays "Zorro Girl" (Dallas?) giving a freebie performance at the opening. A nice touch, though her music kept drifting in the door during the picture's first hour.

I was pretty upbeat going into this picture; Peter Jackson's turn at LOTR had me convinced that material that defies conversion into film really just needs the right director to handle it. If that's the case and Sin City could be turned into a convincing film, then Miller, Tarantino, and Rodriguez just weren't the guys to do it. And if not them, then who?

Maybe it was a case of my imagination being too good. Maybe there aren't any actors who could have delivered those lines like they sound in my head. Or maybe we've just passed the point where modern actors can say those lines without them sounding like lines. At any rate, it's not that the film didn't look great and didn't have a lot of style, but without the few surprises offered by Miller's hard-boiled stories (having read the comics, I knew what was coming), there just wasn't anything to hold my interest. This picture literally didn't show me anything I hadn't seen before, and done better -- either fifty years ago in the original noir pictures, or in the pages of Miller's original novels.

Let me also quickly mention that those with weak stomachs should probably apply elsewhere for entertainment; few of Miller's trademark graphic depictions of mortal wounds are excised. As amusing as it is to see Benicio Del Toro with something sticking out of his head, the rest of it may well make you lose your lunch.