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News Briefs 22-05-2014

…All I’m sayin’ is, Pacific Rim was waaaay better, k?

Thanks to the cold-blooded Oni.

Quote of the Day:

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”

~R. Buckminster Fuller

  1. Pacific Rim was better
    if only because it didn’t take them the whole movie to get the the good part. God I hope that doesn’t mean they are contemplating a sequel [for the latest Godzilla].

    Danish cartoon: I kind of liked it, it’s like a Danish version of Black Dynamite. Yeah it’s over the top, but I was LMAO as he hurled people through the windows XD

    1. Show me the monster!
      True dat. Too much effing wasted time setting the stage in order to make big-ass radioactive monsters ‘believable’. I mean c’mon!

      With Pacific Rim, from the beginning the set is staged: “Hey, you’re about to watch a film about giant robots battling giant aliens; you in? If you’re, prepare for one hell of a ride!”

      IMO it’s one of the side effects of what I like to call ‘the Nolan effect.’

  2. museums
    soooooooo much of this is already on my bucket list. i’ve been meaning to go to the crypto museum for some time. I would really enjoy being amongst all those poison and quack medicine bottles of the pharmacy museum, since I collect old poisons and medicine bottles.

    …banana museum…because California, because…

    1. Re: Fluoride IQ
      As if IQ was the main issue with fluoride. Aside from the likelihood that an IQ test trial would be subject to lots of fiddling, what inquiring minds want to know is the effect of fluoride consumption on the organs and nervous system. Oh wait, we already know that – it has bad effects.

  3. Did we watch the same movie?
    Pacific Rim was a fun ride the first time, but now I consider it barely watchable due to its ridiculous concepts, characters, and dialogue. Believability does in fact go a long way, even in the kaiju genre.

    Godzilla did everything right from a technical perspective. You see the monsters as human beings would see them. A lot of human beings die. There was suspense, and best of all: no voiceover narration.

    These recent Hollywood kaiju movies represent two distinct styles within the genre. Pacific Rim seems more influenced by the “tokusatsu” Rock-Em Sock-Em style we became familiar with through Ultra Man, and later, the Power Rangers. The Gareth Edwards Godzilla‘s biggest influence was the original 1954 Godzilla film, which, as has been said many times, was an allegory for nuclear war and more generally humanity’s precarious position on the planet despite technological achievements, and was itself heavily influenced by The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and other Western “cautionary” monster movies.

    From a 2004 review of the 1954 version:

    A lot of people are likely to be surprised by what they see. The 1954 Japanese cut is shot like a classic film noir, and the buildup to Tokyo’s inevitable thrashing is quite slow by today’s standards. The echoes of World War II are very strong, and the devastation wrought by Godzilla (played by Haruo Nakajima) is not sugar-coated; it eerily mirrors that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the deaths and injuries are dwelt upon. The monster himself is not fully revealed for quite a while, and even when he finally shows up, he’s a malevolent black predator with glistening skin, who stays mostly in the shadows, many times more fearsome than the green-skinned cookie monster who showed up in the various sequels to layeth the smacketh down on the candyasses of numerous alien invaders in ugly leotards.

    I prefer the more serious approach to kaiju movies. The genre was born from human anxieties, and in my opinion the super-cheesy Pacific Rim kind of misses the point.

    1. Revealing the monster
      While I do agree that the latest Godzilla stays true to the moral drive of the series —a reflection upon Man’s relationship with Nature; are we its master or slave?— I honestly feel the movie overdid it in terms of ‘selling’ the audience the believability of the situation.

      I remember how 20 years ago the Jurassic Park trailers in which Spielberg kept teasing us by just showing us mere glances of the dinosaurs, were masterfully done. Everybody went to the theater to sate their curiosity.

      BUT, unlike Godzilla, Spielberg revealed the dinosaurs in all their glory by the end of the 1st act. If we were to clock the actual screen time of Godzilla, I’m pretty sure you’ll see he appeared in maybe less than 15 minutes of the entire movie.

      1. Err no.
        [quote=red pill junkie]BUT, unlike Godzilla, Spielberg revealed the dinosaurs in all their glory by the end of the 1st act. If we were to clock the actual screen time of Godzilla, I’m pretty sure you’ll see he appeared in maybe less than 15 minutes of the entire movie.[/quote]

        Godzilla appears at the 45 minute mark of a two hour movie.

        That is exactly the end of the first act, thus Godzilla appears exactly where you’re complaining that he didn’t appear.

        Godzilla also has approximately 32 minutes of screen time, which considering the main character has 22 minutes, is pretty good.

          1. Standpoint of an adult
            That’s tough to gauge. Obviously I’m an adult –at least biologically– but there are movies which break your barriers and literally transport you back in time while you’re watching.

            The Avengers movie had that effect on me, and last Saturday the same thing happened with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which I highly recommend 🙂

          2. I wasn’t discriminating
            I wasn’t discriminating against juvenile fare. I have my own private fondnesses for kitschy and slightly silly things which are as much a necessary part of living as anything else, but the only sci-fi I was able ever to read was Stanislaw Lem whom I greatly admired. I envy your ability to let go and go back. My son says I am too uptight in that respect.

        1. Screen time
          Are you counting also all the scenes in which you only see his serrated back, or his foot? Because I was talking about seeing Godzilla full front 😉

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