They Live is one of those unfortunately good movies that cannot be adequately analyzed without betraying the very elements designed to entrance first time viewers and inspire the unfettered love that those of us who’ve seen the movie far too many times still hold. As such, standard Spoiler Warnings apply. All bastards unfortunate enough to have never experience a context-free viewing of this picture are hereby placed On Notice. You’ve been warned. They Live, We Sleep.
The movie also served as my introduction to the oeuvre of one John Carpenter, last seen around these parts when…my god, has it been as long as all that? (Note from behind the fourth wall: I’d meant to examine his sophomore effort, Assault on Precinct 13, neigh on a year ago. Anyone reading this site can properly tell where that little effort went.) Made twelve years after a little bit of paranoid schizophrenia called Assault on Precinct 13 and two years after the apocalyptic, artist vs. studio row over Big Trouble in Little China, They Live presents a portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man, no longer trusting the authoritarian forces that served as Assault‘s protagonists. Here we find Big JC making no bones about his distasteful distrust, not only of the entertainment industry, but the whole of capitalist society. No surprise, really. A decade living and working inside the studio system could do that to anyone…but just imagine doing it in (buh-dun-*cymbal crash*) the ’80s. {More}
Where others formed their love of movies in the dank bowls of old theaters with important sounding names, I, your humble narrator, was a mite deprived in this regard. My obsession with this movie formed at an early age in the dank bowls of a crackerjack video rental store in a small Missouri town with a decided lack of apostrophes in its name, typical of the local dialect.
What a place it was to my five-year-old self. For him (me) a trip to Movies N More was a consistent birthday gift, a Christmas morning and a church visit all rolled into one. The stacks towered over my vertically-challenged self, but I could always ask my parents, or the nice man behind the counter, to stretch out and nab that copy of the Transformers movie for me. {More}
By the time I’d made it all the way to tonight’s piece I was going on 14 and even then Younger Me could sense the hurk and jerk of a movie series tottering on its last legs, begging for a fresh idea to blow through its sagging sails. At the time, Young Me found it odd that this series of films, centered as they are around a homicidal pseudo-zombie, could be so lacking in life.
Older and (I like to think) Wiser Me is nonplussed at this. He (I) no longer finds anything odd in the progressive degeneration of the American horror film – or film in general, for that matter. Older Me (I) possesses enough insight to see these films clearly, both as perpetrators and victims of their own perpetuation. Their downfall and degrading “quality” were as inevitable as a teenage death inside the Crystal Lake Woods, the result of a mass market system geared, not to telling stories, but to making the good people at Gulf Western (who at the time owned Paramount Pictures, and thus Jason Voorhees) richer than they already were. And they’ve no one to blame but themselves. {More}
Yeah, guy wearing a flag into battle. That's not an easy target.
Best to begin this with what Ultimate Avengers is not. It’s not the movie I’d hoped it would be. What is these days, right? It’s not a shot-by-shot recreation of the similarly named, and much more thematically complicated Mark Millar/Bryan Hitch comic book miniseries upon which it is based. It’s not necessarily a major milestone in American animation. (No Fritz the Cat’s here, folks, keep walking.) It is not Marvel’s answer to Paul Dini’s spectacular Justice League series, which did more with more characters, smaller budgets, and the Ever Present Eye of Cartoon Network’s Standards and Practices.
Ultimate Avengers is not a great movie at all…and it shakes and shutters on the cusp of being good. By any objective or technical measure it’s not really that, either. The reasons why become quickly apparent. But first: plot synopsis.
Ultimate Avengers opens (like so much else in the Marvel Universe) during the winningest days of World War II. Hitler is dead, his armies in retreat, Germany safely carpet-bombed back to the Middle Ages. “But what,” asks the radio announcer, “are these rumors of a secret Nazi super weapon aimed at Washington? Categorically false, says the War [nee, Defense] Department. And we believe them!” {More}
I’ve never been happy with the Man of Steel’s celluloid incarnations for the same reason cited by all the comics industry pros: the damn Boy Scout is a real chore to write, and a stone cold bitch to write well. Years of previous (mis)conceptions about just who and what he is don’t help. Neither does the fact that his world (by which I mean the 1930s) has moved on.
First there’s the Conflict Problem, both Internal and External. Superman’s external conflicts are often hilariously one-sided, while his internal ones have none of Batman’s brooding insanity, none of Peter Parker’s conflicting loyalties…he can’t even match Tony Stark’s problem with intimacy, since it’s not like Supes doesn’t have plenty of opportunities to get some. He appears, or is often written to appear, as a whole and hearty individual in-and-of himself, apart and above the other tortured souls populating his multiverse. And that seems to be okay for everyone involved with creating his adventures, including Bryan Singer. {More}
I may have reduced myself to a monthly reviewing schedule, I may have gone through the interminable burnout of academic paper writing, and I may have surrendered for a while there to myopic self-defeatism (“Oh, god, what can I possibly do? What’s the bloody point to it all if nobody cares anyway?”) but, by the lightning, I’m still here. And I still believe in the Cause. You need people like me. You need me to play the fuckin’ bad guy. Well say, “Hello” to the bad guy because, as I mentioned, I am still here.
Billing itself as, “A romantic comedy. With zombies,” Shaun of the Dead presents a fascinating case study in modern horror. Not that it’s any particularly hot shit…but what is these days, eh? It certainly is not an original masterpiece of independent film making…except for those times when it is. It is miles above the Dick and Fart Extravaganza that passes for mainstream comedy in these dark days. But perhaps I am a little biased in this. The most prevalent form of humor in the film is nerd humor, aimed specifically at me, and that goes a long damn way toward buttering me up. {More}
Forget for a moment that the original Kong was a blatantly racist polemic masquerading as a pulp fantasy-adventure yarn. Forget that no one is willing to even countenance this contention, much less discuss it in a calm, rational manner (perhaps during a double feature: Kong and 1915’s Birth of a Nation). Forget that no one, anywhere, appears willing to question this movie’s informed superiority. Why criticize when you can parrot over seventy years of generalized praise? Hell, its a classic, right? Must be: it came out before 1970.
“The classic film will always be the classic film,” said director Peter Jackson in a recent magazine interview (citation lost thanks to sleep deprivation). He might’ve added, “After all, it’s a classic!” just to drive the stake right through the heart of his point. The slavish worship Kong inspires in its fans honestly sickens me sometimes. (I’m sure this is how Star Wars and Trek partisans feel about each other.) Because what is Kong, really? Its story, constructed of reliable pulp staples, is hardly revolutionary. Hell, it’s the kind of tale chain smoking writers of the age turned out in their sleep…or their alcohol induced comas. The down-on-her-luck damsel gets a one-in-a-life-time chance to go to an uncharted island and become a monkey’s plaything…or a dinosaur’s bite-sized snack. The damsel, once distressed, needs the quick thinking of a square jawed man to save her bloomer-wearing ass. He does, the movie ends. {More}
Gamera vs. Barugon is the high point of the original Gamera franchise. After the (relative) success of Daikaiju Gamera, the far-sighted and responsible men of Daiei Studios could have carried on, as their fellows at Toho have for years, mining the tried and true formulas of the giant monster genre to wildly varied, but none-the-less consistent, success.
But the times were, sadly, a’ changing. Those who pine that American cinema is slave to every idiotic trend that comes down the pike obviously haven’t watched enough Japanese monster movies. They provide quite the handy cultural history of Japan, and can be enjoyable on that level even if one has no interest in giant monsters (narrow minded philistine that you are). {More}
The Yes Men, a not-so-gruesome twosome of Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, began their adventures in “identity correction” with a wit, a prayer, and a web site, gwbush.com. Back in 1999, Bonanno and Bichlbaum turned their little domain into the preeminent piece of web-based anti-Bush satire. The Bush campaign, like any good political hit squad, responded with Cease and Desist orders and pitched a bitched about gwbush.com to the Federal Election’s Commission. This generated a minor media kerfuffle for the Governor and a bit of free publicity for Our Heroes.
One publicity consumer, the proprietor of gatt.org, wondered if Bonanno and Bichlbaum might throw the same kind of satirical mud on at the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, institutional precursor to the World Trade Organization. What better way to piss in the WTO’s eye (if, like our two heroes, you couldn’t make it to 1999’s Battle of Seattle) than a satirical website poking fun at everything these real-life Evil Capitalists propagate? It probably would’ve stopped right there…if not for those blessedly idiotic people who don’t bother to read the websites they Google. Occasionally, one of those useful idiots would stumble upon gatt.org and send in an esoteric question on tariffs…or trade…or an invitation to speak on the WTO’s behalf. {More}
Godzilla X Mechagodzilla, following the current vogue, takes place in yet another freakish alternate reality, as distant from all previous Godzilla films as they are to us. In this wacky parallel dimension, Godzilla first appeared in 1954, “raided” Tokyo, and fell to Dr. Serazawa’s Oxygen Destroyer the very next day. The year 1999 marks his second appearance in this history, and the film’s opening sequence.
Akane Yashiro (Yumiko Shaku) is just another groundpounder in the JDSF. Oh sure, she fights monsters with a laser tank for a living, but what’s that to an intelligent, independent, young Japanese woman on the make? Besides, she’s a member of the Anti-Megalosaurus Force, an elite unit created specifically to counter the continuing threat Giant Monster pose to Japan. As such, the AMF rushes to counter Godzilla’s latest insurgency. Three guesses who the winner is. In the confusion of battle, Akane accidentally gets herself and a truck load of her superiors into a road accident. Akane survives. Her colleagues go over a cliff and under Godzilla’s foot. Akane even gets to watch because God himself knows we can’t have a strong female protagonist in a Japanese film who isn’t suffering from some kind of trauma or another (unless she’s looking for a Just the Right Man to turn her into a giggling, pre-adolescent puddle, torn screaming from the depraved psyche of a deranged, Asian-obsessed pedophile…the type of guy who keeps Oriental Women magazine in business).
As the political establishment wets itself over Godzilla’s re-appearance, Akane is re-assigned in the wake of her little…incident. We leave her in the Data Room (the JDSF equivalent of Agent Mulder’s basement office) and quickly switch to our other (male) protagonists: Tokumitsu Yuhara (Shin Takuma), who will be our Scientist for the remainder of the film, by virtue of the fact he’s designated one of “Japan’s greatest scientific minds.” So says Science Minister Hayato Igarashi (Akira Nakao). And he should know because our Science Minister has an absolutely brilliant idea: use the assembled brain power of Japan to build a “bio-robot” in the image of Godzilla…using the bones of the first Godzilla (picked clean by the Oxygen Destroyer) as a base…and a support structure. “It’ll be a powerful weapon against Godzilla,” he says. Like a politician’s never uttered those words before…
If history teaches us anything, it should teach us this: Given half the chance, leaders will always use National Crises as an excuse for massive build-ups of arms. Japan’s leaders are no different. Once again, violent solutions are the only solutions considered. After all, this is a movie, film is a visual medium, and you try to think of something as visually striking as the sight of a giant robot fighting a giant monster in the heart of a major metropolis. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have to think on that a bit. So don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for a Mechagodzilla. He (or it) is one of my favorite re-occurring Godzilla antagonists. But I have some problems with his (or its) choice of films.
For one thing, they’re exceedingly narrow-minded…almost myopic. Certainly their sense of scope is small…ironically so, considering the film nominally centers around a three hundred foot lizard. I mean, let’s pretend for a moment. You’re the President of China. You turn on CNN one day and find out Japan is building a giant frickin’ robot right next door. To “defend” themselves, they say. Yeah, right. What exactly do you do? That could be a movie in itself…and it’ll have to be, because this movie sure as hell isn’t going to address the question (or even mention it). How do you think Kim Jong Il would take the news of a Mechagodzilla next door? Or our own Glorious Leader, over here in the United States?
I mention this only because Godzilla X Mecha-Godzilla takes care to add a political element to it’s story, apart from (but interacting with…occasionally and only tangentially) all the sordid, giant-monster-soap-opera turmoil our two protagonists go through. Yet the political peanut gallery never admits anyone outside the Japanese government to their (exceptionally polite, even by parliamentary standards) shouting matches. Budget consciousness and time play a majority part in this, I know…but there’s no denying the nationalistic nearsightedness. In fact, now that I think about it, nearly every giant monster picture suffers from some form of this malady. As if the appearance of a 300-foot, fire breathing, nuclear powered dinosaur didn’t have world wide implications. Past Toho pictures at least paid lip-service to this by casting a Token Anglo or three, almost all of whom generated unintended comedy gold thanks to their unprofessional acting and dead (not “deadpan,” just “dead”) line-reading abilities.
But anyway…three years pass and the “new” Mechagodzilla (named Kiryu…for no other apparent reason than to distinguish him from his predecessors) stands ready. Following bad movie law, Akane is inexplicably drafted to join the team set to pilot Kiryu. Why else would we have invested so much time (a full five minutes at this, the twenty minute mark) in her story? Even the casual movie goer knows Akane is destined to pilot Kiryu, in the same way domestic pets know when an earthquake is about to strike. The same way I (the jaded, cynical movie reviewing snit that I am) know her relationship with Yahara (and Yahara’s perky daughter, Sara, who will be our Kenny for the remainder of the picture) will teach her some lesson or another….probably have something to do with being isolated and letting the past haunt you or some damn thing.
Sure enough, Akane and Yahara cross paths before the first major action set piece. Seems one of Akane’s team mates–a little weasel name Hayama–just happened to have a brother in that truck that wound up under Godzilla’s foot. He interrupts Yahara’s comically inept attempt to pick Akane up by playing Iceman to Akane’s Maverick. She, being all stoic and bad-ass, sets him right…and then winds up in a heart-to-heart with Yahara and Sara about…how isolated she is…zzzzzz…
Thus the fundamental flaw of modern Godzilla movies is once again slapped, broadside, across my face. No matter how remarkable (or unremarkable) their special effects, or how broad their story-scope, they remain depressingly predictable. They move from A to B to C with all the energy of a single thirty-something’s morning routine. I’m moved to feel almost cheated by this kind of rampant story-telling laziness. And once again pitch a bitch about those damned studio suits with their insistence on churning these films out, every year, as if they’re stamping parts for a Toyota factory. Even the smallest moral, ethical, social, or political implications of building a giant robot from the bones of a nuclear monster (like, say, the potential collateral damage) are left unconsidered, which is sadly ironic in the face of what develops…
Because the God of the Godzilla-verse has a wonderful sense of timing, Godzilla interrupts Kiryu’s first manned flight-test. The Big G comes ashore, trounces an unfortunate water park, roars at the descending Mechagodzilla…and then leaves his mechanical doppleganger to go mad, Evangellion-style, and ravage the cityscape. I guess the G-man’s roar meant, “Sorry, bud. Didn’t know this bit was already taken. Tell you what: go on ahead with…whatever you were doing…I’ll try the next town down the coast. Sure they’ve got some scenic landmark or another I can smash.”
At last, I think. Something new…or, at the very least, different. Tales of man constructing his own demise in moments of psychotic hubris were ancient when Mary Shelley was still a virgin. But what do you do when your Frankenstein is three hundred feet tall and armed with all manner of missiles, laser beams, and a freeze ray (or “Absolute-Zero Gun”) so large it would send Captain Cold into orgasmic paroxysms?
The humans of this particular story decide to do nothing, evacuating the populous in Kiryu’s path (typhoon style) and wait until the robot literally runs out of juice…what the hell, everybody knows the construction industry is to Japan what Big Oil is to the United States, right? What’s a few independent contracts to pass around between friends…
Pop quiz: Will our director Masaaki Tezuka (director of 2000’s Godzilla vs. Megaguirus)and screenwriter Wataru Mimura (writer of the above, along with Godzilla: 2000, Yamato Takeru and 1993’s Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla) exploit the dramatic potential implicit in the above “What do you do when your Frankenstein…” query? Or will they instead chose a quick fix solution that destroys all the tension and build-up they’ve established up to this point, in favor of staging an epic, climactic daikaiju big battle in Tokyo…at night?
What are the chances of that happening, right? It’s only the common denominator of the whole fucking franchise. And nobody knows common denominators like Tezuka and Mimura. These two dingbats may be near blind to the possibility of a giant monster tale (must’ve boycotted Gamera out of patron loyalty), but by God they know how to hit all the high notes and stick to the All-Mighty Release Schedule. Godzilla, and we, his fans, are that much worse off for it, since no one at Toho seems to have courage enough to dream up an original or creative thought.
And that’s the way it is. Human acting is serviceable all around…but in the final summation, I really could care less. I know the Love of a Good Man is going to draw Akane out of her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-induced shell and coax her toward heteronormativity the same way I know Godzilla’s going to sink back into the sea just before the credits roll…and, like any good comic book villain, they’ll be no body to discover, no postmortem to write up, and plenty of room left for the inevitable sequel…a direct one this time. Starring Mothra. God help us all.
I’ll get to that eventually, but in the meantime I wonder if Toho’s setting up some sort of Crisis on Infinite Earth‘s senario with all these wacky, parallel dimensions appearing and disappearing at will? Will the battle-hardened, Kenny-laden heroes of the Godzilla Multiverse be joining forces against some giant, rubber suited version of the Anti-Monitor at some time in the Not Too Distant Future? Have I finally succumb to sleep deprivation? Or am I merely deprived of honest-to-God good Godzilla films?
They Live is one of those unfortunately good movies that cannot be adequately analyzed without betraying the very elements designed to entrance first time viewers and inspire the unfettered love that those of us who’ve seen the movie far too many times still hold. As such, standard Spoiler Warnings apply. All bastards unfortunate enough to have never experience a context-free viewing of this picture are hereby placed On Notice. You’ve been warned. They Live, We Sleep.
Where others formed their love of movies in the dank bowls of old theaters with important sounding names, I, your humble narrator, was a mite deprived in this regard. My obsession with this movie formed at an early age in the dank bowls of a crackerjack video rental store in a small Missouri town with a decided lack of apostrophes in its name, typical of the local dialect.
By the time I’d made it all the way to tonight’s piece I was going on 14 and even then Younger Me could sense the hurk and jerk of a movie series tottering on its last legs, begging for a fresh idea to blow through its sagging sails. At the time, Young Me found it odd that this series of films, centered as they are around a homicidal pseudo-zombie, could be so lacking in life.
I’ve never been happy with the Man of Steel’s celluloid incarnations for the same reason cited by all the comics industry pros: the damn Boy Scout is a real chore to write, and a stone cold bitch to write well. Years of previous (mis)conceptions about just who and what he is don’t help. Neither does the fact that his world (by which I mean the 1930s) has moved on.
I may have reduced myself to a monthly reviewing schedule, I may have gone through the interminable burnout of academic paper writing, and I may have surrendered for a while there to myopic self-defeatism (“Oh, god, what can I possibly do? What’s the bloody point to it all if nobody cares anyway?”) but, by the lightning, I’m still here. And I still believe in the Cause. You need people like me. You need me to play the fuckin’ bad guy. Well say, “Hello” to the bad guy because, as I mentioned, I am still here.
I have issues with 
Gamera vs. Barugon is the high point of the original Gamera franchise. After the (relative) success of 
The Yes Men, a not-so-gruesome twosome of Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, began their adventures in “identity correction” with a wit, a prayer, and a web site, gwbush.com. Back in 1999, Bonanno and Bichlbaum turned their little domain into the preeminent piece of web-based anti-Bush satire. The Bush campaign, like any good political hit squad, responded with Cease and Desist orders and pitched a bitched about gwbush.com to the Federal Election’s Commission. This generated a minor media kerfuffle for the Governor and a bit of free publicity for Our Heroes.
Let’s dispense with the introductions, shall we?
I’ll get to that eventually, but in the meantime I wonder if Toho’s setting up some sort of Crisis on Infinite Earth‘s senario with all these wacky, parallel dimensions appearing and disappearing at will? Will the battle-hardened, Kenny-laden heroes of the Godzilla Multiverse be joining forces against some giant, rubber suited version of the Anti-Monitor at some time in the Not Too Distant Future? Have I finally succumb to sleep deprivation? Or am I merely deprived of honest-to-God good Godzilla films?
