Maybe He'll Come Back as Carlin the White

I try to keep things relatively clean here, but...

SHIT PISS FUCK CUNT COCKSUCKER MOTHERFUCKER TITS

George Carlin
1937-2008
R.I.P.

You Can't Fight in Here, This is the War Room

Today's random observation...

Is anyone else watching the Get Smart trailer reminded of the war room set in Dr. Strangelove? It's probably just me. What a waste of brain cells, bandwith, and time this blog is sometimes. Sorry gang.

GTAAM #2: Stan Winston Edition

A.I., The Wiz, The Relic, Predator 2, Congo, End of Days, Leviathan

What do these movies have in common? Answer: they're not good. Granted, Congo has Tim Curry and Bruce Campbell at their cheesy best, but other than that, they have at least one unifying, redeeming quality: Stan Winston worked on them. Winston died earlier this week at the age of 62, and I'm a little slow to blog about it, but this is sad news for a fanboy movie buff.

Winston was a special FX guru who was as versatile with make-up and goo as he was with metal and microchips. He was as much a designer as he was an engineer, and pretty darn close to being another Ray Harryhausen. Let's just run down a list of some of Stan's creations:

. The T-800
. Predator (granted, the mandibles were supposedly James Cameron's idea)
. The Alien Queen
. Edward Scissorhands
. Jurassic Park's dinosaurs
. Iron Man
And, as less iconic work, but personal favorites of mine, I'll add:

. The Thing (made the dog monster, rest of film was handled by Rob Bottin)
. Galaxy Quest (gave animatronic control to the actor's own face, rather than remote control)
But this blog is supposed to be an installment in the Great Things About Awful Movies series. So let's get back to the first list of duds. I won't go through one by one and discredit the movies I mentioned (or the many other crap-fests on which Winston worked in his long career). If you like Spielberg's Asimovian wank-fest or that Crichton-in-the-jungle mis-fire, good for you. I don't feel the need to pick a fight.

"Awful" may be a strong word for some of those flicks, but the point is that Winston's work on them stands out. It is the best of what special effects have the potential to be: technically proficient (often seamless), dramatically motivated, imaginatively fantastical, and yet grounded in a realm of believable physics. Winston's creations are often the reason for coming to the theater, and yet always subservient to a larger purpose. They are great form, to be sure, but they always serve a great function as well. And in the cases (like the duds above) in which there really is no greater narrative worth paying attention to (for my money), one can just sit back and watch the eerie beauty of his robots in A.I., cringe at the effectively frightening Relic, or even gasp in terror at the sheer horror that is Michael Jackson's presence in The Wiz.
Winston's monsters move unlike anything we've seen, yet they move in a way that seems utterly real. They look, at times, like the most preposterous concoctions of fantasy, and yet they look like things that could actually exist. And, working through the onslaught of digital FX in Hollywood, he most often favored puppets and models over computers. He believed movie magic could be made with one's hands. He made good movies better, and made awful movies at least a little fun. He made wonderful, wondrous things on film, and he will be missed. R.I.P. Stan Winston.
P.S. My friend SW asked that I mention Death Becomes Her, but I'm sorry dude, I don't think he worked on it.

In the Middle of an Oreo, It's the Most Delicious Thing I Know

... with props to Weird Al. The new Mars rover has uncovered a mysterious white substance in its tracks. Apparently, the NASA eggheads can't tell if it's salt or ice. Is that where their list of possibilities ends? How about Martian pigeon s%!#? Or maybe it's something more sinister...
Is anyone else reminded of The Stuff? This is the 1985 classic in which the discovery of a great-tasting white ooze leads to the marketing of a new food product that takes over the brains and melts the bodies of those who eat it. I'm just saying that the rover should be careful. And if NASA suddenly starts selling Martian Yoplait, stay away!

Too Close Encounters Make Me Want to Indy Phone Home

My long absence is herewith redeemed (I hope) by some long-winded geek talk. Usually, I try to avoid the most blogged-about topics. Why be just another straw in the cyber haystack? But I can't help myself. I gotta moan about Indy IV. Where to start? Ok, first of all... big spoiler alert. This is for people who saw it or don't mind having it ruined. Then again, one of my main beefs is that the movie has no surprises. A spoiler alert is almost a moot point, since the movie telegraphs from its first big scene -- hell, from its poster -- all of the inner-workings of its would-be mystery.

The film opens at a remote desert military base ("where the government keeps all its secrets"). One need not be a fanboy geektard to have heard of Area 51, and just in case you didn't get it, there's a giant "51" stenciled prominently on the wall. To the best of my recollection, even Independence Day doesn't name its desert alien research facility, but one gleans that it's Area 51 by implication. And when Independence Day has a movie beat on subtlety, that should give you a hint as to what's in store for you.

Some evil Ruskies steal a mysterious crate from the facility. Will we wait with baited breath until later in the film to discover its secret contents and guess at why the villains want it? No, they'll open it right away and most conspicuously reveal what is, quite obviously, the carcass of a little green man. Ok, we saw the poster on the way into the theater. We saw the elongated skull with giant eye sockets and a South American pyramid behind it. One of the first shots of the film is of a "this means something, this is important" mound of dirt à la Close Encounters. And now, five minutes into the film, we see an alien at Area 51. Ok, so I guess Indy's going to discover that aliens built the pyramids... but there must be a twist, right? It can't be that simple, can it? It's been forty years since Chariots of the Gods? was published. Again, one need not be a complete nerdling savant to have heard about the theory that the Mayan and Aztec gods were extra-terrestrials. This is stuff that has made its way into pop culture apocrypha. So Misters Lucas and Spielberg must have a twist for us somewhere, surely.

Alas, no. And this is my biggest problem. The film has nothing up its sleeve -- no mystery, no magic. It trudges along, Indy slowly coming to realizations about the forces at work behind the plexiglass -- pardon me... "crystal" -- skull. Near film's end, when our heroes find ancient murals depicting the "gods" ruling over the ancient El Dorado, they hold the skull aloft, all aghast at the "exact match" of its silhouette against the cranium of the figure on the wall. John Williams's music swells, as if to build this into a moment of tremendous revelation. But didn't we figure this out from the movie's poster? And didn't Cate Blanchett's swashbuckling Soviet confirm it all explicitly in some exposition she delivered earlier in a tent? That sense of revelation -- of discovery -- so important in the first three Indy films (and in Indy's chosen field of archaeology), is disappointingly absent here.

What is present are more references and homage à old Hollywood serials and genre pictures than one might have thought possible. Seems like they loved Elvis movies, swashbucklers, flying saucer films, and even Tarzan flicks (as is evident in one of the most arbitrary and odd action sequences I've ever seen). Lucas, Spielberg, and screenwriter David "Let Me Explain This All For You So That Performance, Camera, and Cutting Don't Have To" Koepp have jammed so much stuff into this Indy adventure that when the dust all settles, one realizes that very little has come of it all. It's a pastiche of disparate adventure serials with no connecting tissue... a colorful ramen soup with no noodles or broth (I'm hungry... you'll have to endure a food metaphor).

Our auteurs also seem happy to reference themselves as often as they do Errol Flynn and Johnny Weissmuller. I suppose a certain amount of that is unavoidable, and perhaps necessary, in a series as beloved as Indy, especially when he's been absent from theaters for 19 years. But at the end of the day, this stuff does nothing for me. In the first action scene, a crate gets busted open in Area 51, giving us a fleeting glimpse of the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The opening night crowd I saw it with errupted in cheers, as if to say collectively, "Yes! We saw that movie!" So what? How's this movie going? Photos, paintings, and even a bronze statue of characters-not-returning-for-this-movie populate the film, far more often, I'd venture, than is necessary. I love Karen Allen, and my experience is that her Marion Ravenwood is everyone's favorite Indy girl, but after the applause garnered by her entrance dies down, she's just here to drive the car around while father and son do all the work. Allen's presence in the film does little more than remind us that Indy movies used to rock.

Ray Winstone, another actor I like a lot, also seems to be here as a mere phantom of the John Rhys-Davies buddy role. But Mac turns out to be nowhere near as endearing as Sallah, nor even remotely as important to the narrative. Seriously, what does this character offer to the film? Given a strangely poignant farewell at the end, this cypher of a character is supposedly a dear old friend and partner of Indy (we've been told so), but he doesn't have a likable moment in the film. If he and Indy did have good times together, then this film, again, only serves as evidence that I'd rather be watching the movie about those times.

Even the props fill me with this sentiment. The film's namesake is the most kitschy, unwieldy, plasticine movie tchotchke I've seen since Nicole Kidman's lips in The Golden Compass. It sits awkwardly in Harrison Ford's arms, looking most clumsy and un-enigmatic as he talks about how special it is. The crystal skull is completely devoid of the Ark's majesty (Raiders), the holy grail's gravity (Last Crusade), or even the Sankara stones' elegant simplicity (Temple of Doom). It's hokey. And it seems decidedly unexceptional, even by the film's own standards: Blanchett casually shows us her alien cadaver in her riverside tent, complete with extraneous crystal skull inside. I guess, through some convoluted logic, the hero skull is more important, but I couldn't help but wonder, "What's the big deal," when these skulls seem to be dropping out of the skies.

And these skulls, so over-explained to us (and therefore so devoid of mystery), do Indy a disservice. I like my Indy films pitting him against Judeo-Christian mythology and magic, or at least some Hindu cult voodoo. Indy is a rational academic who faces the greatest, most fantastical, supernatural incarnations of good and evil. Now, suddenly, he's in an atomic-age sci-fi story. Indy investigating aliens is as de-mystifying as saying that The Exorcist is about a girl with a weird psychosis, and as counter intuitive as would be Sigourney Weaver's Ripley fighting the Mummy. It's oil and water... unsettling and unsatisfying for a fan.

There is the pretense of some very grandiose forces at work here. Blanchett's fate mirrors the villains' demises at the end of both Raiders and Last Crusade. The agents of evil, in their tireless thirst for power, open a Pandora's box and are destroyed by a power greater than their own. But Blanchett's Irina Spalko isn't nearly so evil as the villains of Indy films past. We never see her murder innocents, enslave children, or even burn a book. The most sinister plan she has to offer is to "make you all think like us without you even noticing it." But if Americans are as boneheaded, jingoistic, and bomb-happy as they are made out to be early in the film (the film's brief attempt at some political commentary about the American psyche), then would that really be a bad thing? And frankly, I'm not so sure that what happens to Spalko is punishment. She dissolves and is pulled into another dimension, overpowered by the wealth of knowledge she is shown by looking into E.T.'s eyes. Isn't that what she wanted? She is given an ambiguous fate: disintegrated by physical, human standards, but given the ultimate "gift" of her alien superiors.

So the sweeping, bombastic climax of the film is hard for me to care much about, not least for the unabashedly digital overload in its execution. And this, perhaps, finally, is my last major beef with the film (nitpicky qualms could populate another blog this length). There's so much computer-generated scenery and action that it's hard to spot Indiana Jones in there. We expect this from Star Wars. But Indy is most fun when -- like the old serials it emulates -- it is cobbled together out of chickenwire, paper-mache, glue, models, and cobwebs, not rendered from wireframes, bits, pixels, ones, and zeros. The lush, hand-made matte paintings of old Hollywood have been replaced by flat digital plates, and computer composites have taken the place of photo-chemical prints on emulsion. All the original effects, even the optical ones, were physical; they were done by hand and relatively crude machine, just as Indy uses whips, revolvers, and fists rather than the rayguns and warp-drives of Han Solo.

Amendment 5/27: I thought of a much simpler way to illustrate the problem here, and perhaps the bigger picture as a whole: Indy and company running down a digital gauntlet of giant, computer-generated gears will never be as exciting and interesting -- let alone as iconic -- as Harrison Ford running from a very real, physical giant boulder, as he did in Raiders. That encapsulates why this movie fails for me. If you have no problem with that contrast, then good on ya... you might actually enjoy this.

That movie magic, sadly, may be gone forever, and that's no more apparent than it is when watching Indy 19 years after we last saw him. A lot has changed in that time, and of course, times change and technology develops. But then, is it too much to ask for some ingenuity in storytelling? Alas, Crystal Skull's biggest tricks aren't tricks at all. Even the first utterly mediocre Alien vs. Predator managed to come up with a pretty creative twist on the Von Daniken theory of pyramids-by-aliens. The best Lucas and Company have to offer us here is "No, they weren't from outer space, they were from another dimension." Really, does anyone care by that point? Oh, well then maybe we can take a moral from this? How about it, Indy? Yes, Indy tells us (and I paraphrase from memory), "The Mayan word for 'gold' also translates to 'treasure.' It wasn't gold they were after, it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure." Koepp is the king of that insulting "1+1=2, therefore 2=1+1" dialogue. It's crap like that which incensed this blogger to write one of his longest entries yet. And for that, I apologize. Those of you who have made it this far, I salute you, just as I salute those of you still planning on venturing into the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Godspeed.

Pauline Kael Resurrected as a Canine

I guess the dog saw Episodes I-III.

This is My Blog and it Freaks Me Out

And, since it is my blog, I am allowed to self-promote. I haven't done it here yet. Please check out the link below for my new project with John La Zar, famously of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (above).

The Strange Case of Dr. & Mrs. Jacobs

Condor, You Shall Fly Again!

So now you can have your ashes launched to the moon. I don't feel the need to say much about this, but am instead using it as an excuse to plug one of my favortie (and one of the least talked-about) films of all time: Tony Richardson's The Loved One.
This is the picture Richardson decided to make after winning two of Tom Jones's four Oscars (Best Picture and Director both went to him). Haven't seen Jones? Go see it. The chicken scene is still as sexy and funny as ever. So Richardson comes off of a huge double whammy and has something close to carte blanche. He decides to adapt Evelyn Waugh's black comedy about the undertaking business in Hollywood. He does this with the help of screenwriter Terry Southern (who had just co-written Dr. Strangelove), and a cast that includes Robert Morse, Jonathan Winters (my favorite madman and Robin Williams's mentor), Milton Berle, James Coburn, Sir John Gielgud, Roddy McDowall, Rod Steiger, a young Paul Williams, and yes, Liberace. Some phrases I'll throw out to entice you: "Mama's little Joy-Boy want lobster," "last one in the box is a bad boy," "they told me you were hung with red protruding eyeballs and black protruding tongue." And Mr. Joyboy's mother... omg... one of the most amazing screen concoctions ever.
As if you need to know any more than that, the film bombed because it was a bit too grotesquely grim (even by today's standards, it makes Six Feet Under look like the bastion of good taste). It's hysterical, sad, twisted, and gorgeous (Haskell Wexler shot some amazing black and white). As much a meditation on the death of the golden age of Hollywood as it is about the commodification of mortality (and immortality), I think it still holds up, despite some moments that seem forever trapped in the 60's. Go see it, and you'll get the connection to the moon ashes article.

A Paradox

In honor of Leap Day/Year, enjoy this most ingenious paradox. I grew up on Gilbert & Sullivan, and will fight anyone who calls me gay because of it. However, I do find Kevin Kline curiously attractive in the clip below, and will therefore defer to others' judgement as to my sexuality.

Come on, admit it, you're all taken by his chest hair too...

and his one-legged yoga squat...

and his 70's pornstar 'stache...

and his unnecessarily puffy sleeves.

"America Can, Should, Must, and Will Blow Up the Moon"

SPACE.com via Yahoo! News reports that NASA is planning on "priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon's South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice." Is anyone else reminded of the Mr. Show sketch in which NASA plans, for no apparant reason, to blow up the moon?

It may be my favorite Bob & Dave sketch, and -- if I may deign to analyze -- is about American machismo. In a broader sense, it could be an observation that the nature of science and technology -- the blind, ceaseless tendency to push further and always do whatever is "next" -- is inherently foolish. But -- perhaps just because I disagree with that sentiment -- I think the central notion of the joke is that America will flex its muscle just 'cause. Along the way, the sketch throws some nice jabs at knee-jerk activism ("We're Earthlings, let's blow up Earth things!") and jingoistic country-western music (see below).

But, as the geezer in the sketch -- and my friend E -- says, "Now, it's science fact!" So what are we to think? Have NASA lost their marbles? I doubt it. If anything, Bob & Dave's spot-on satire speaks to the disposition of the media coverage (or at least to this particular article). Apart from "double whammy," it's chock-full of language like "takes aim," "sledgehammer," "brute force," and my favorite, "Earth-on-moon violence." I guess that's ok with me as long as the moon is a consenting adult. And what happens on the dark side stays on the dark side.

So I'll take NASA's word that this is an "economical" plan. In the meantime, I'll just be amused by the coverage, which is very Mr. Show in nature. But I bet someone will complain soon, if they haven't already. Will some Green Party committee of the Planetary Society form to declare this a corruption of the moon's ecology? Or how about this: remember a few years back when some company sold off the real estate of the moon to anyone who wanted to buy? You could buy an acre, or the whole Sea of Tranquility if you could afford it. As I recall, no one could stop them because, well, let's face it: who has jurisdiction over the moon? Even if there were little green men on it, they'd probably have as much luck disputing these real estate purchases as the Iroquois had getting rid of their white devils. So you just watch as the Deutsch Bank Credit Union comes forward and says, "Nein! Das ist our slab of die moon!" Or better yet: Joe Bob McScratchyballs in backwoods Bumblecrack sues NASA $3 billion for destroying his descendants' place in the sun.

I digress. The point is, ready-or-not... moon, here we come. I leave you all with "C.S. Lewis, Jr."'s country hit from the Bob & Dave sketch:

Look out, moon,
America's gonna getcha.
Gonna go ka-boom,
Was nice to have metcha,
'Cause you don't mess around
With God's America!

I Think We're Gonna Need a Bigger "In Memorium" Montage

WTF? Unless I blinked longer than I thought, Roy Scheider was conspicuously absent from this year's "Bye Bye My Life Goodbye" section of the Oscars. Boo-urns.

Roy, I haven't forgotten Jaws, All That Jazz, and Sea Quest. Here's lookin' at you, kid.

AMENDMENT 2/25 6:06 PM:
It seems (reading the fine print) that the montage was only through Jan 31, 2008. So Scheider will be on next year. Brad Renfro, on the other hand, got shafted, as MQA points out in the comments.

The Last Crusade of the Raiders of the Temple of Little Green Men

The Indy 4 trailer is finally online, and nothing has me more excited -- other than the return of Karen Allen -- than the above still. Let the speculation begin.

Forget Bucky, You Can Still Write-In Steve Rogers

This image is as political as this blog will get during the Presidential race (which, incidentally, should give you some idea of my opinion of the across-the-board mediocrity I see in the primaries).

When Do Sirrus and Achenar Get Flashbacks?

I refuse to blog extensively about Lost. I do not want to be one of the hordes of theorists and speculators who devote countless hours to this, only to proven completely -- if not moderately -- wrong with each passing episode. All I will say, after watching the "ooh... ahh..." Oceanic Air viral commercial, is this: I'm just waiting for them to tell me that the name of this goddamn island is Myst.

GTAAM #1: Langella's Skeletor

Just because I feel like it, I'm creating a new feature here at the oft-not-read Bite Me Fanblog. So, with little pomp and unimpressive circumstance, I offer the first installment of:

Great Things About Awful Movies

Today, we look at Frank Langella's performance as Skeletor in the 1987 Golan/Globus production of Masters of the Universe. As I was a 7-year-old kid, this was to have been the biggest moment of my life since He-Man: Live at Radio City Music Hall. That was, of course, until I saw the damn thing in theaters. I remember it well (sadly); and yes, I own the DVD, thinking, naively, that perhaps repeated viewings every year or two will alter the film itself.

Alas, no such revision occurs. Dolph Lundgren never gets interesting. Billy Barty's ill-conceived role as Gwildor never eclipses the disappointment of not seeing Orko (if ever there was a part for a little person from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon, that was it). Courteney Cox never gets less annoying (her fault? or the fact that the whole "trip to earth" is such a bad idea?). There is one saving grace, however...

Langella's Skeletor -- while a far cry from the blue, muscly, nasal-toned baddie in the show -- is a joy to watch. Once a fan gets over the film's almost total lack of resemblance to the cartoon, Langella stands out as exceptional. He makes something out of nothing. The most pat, cliché lines come across as genuinely sinister and dangerous, rather than as the sort of one-dimensional villainy that the square-jawed hero will have no trouble flicking into defeat. Langella (who said he took the role only because of his children's wishes) knows that the only way to sell such absurdity is to play it absurdly (not insincerely, per se, but with just enough oomph to create a heightened reality).

It's a very broad performance. Langella's technique is utterly theatrical. He belts nearly every line. He treats the camera frame as a proscenium, using every angle and gesture to change perspective to his advantage (watch how he uses the edges of his hood). I'm giving performer, rather than camera, the credit here. A good actor knows what he/she is doing... knows how to manipulate image just as much as filmmaker. Actors can be filmmakers in their own right. Look at Dietrich, who was said to have known as much about cinematography as Von Sternberg did, and even had mirrors set up so she could watch her own lighting during takes. Stanley Kramer said that even though he saw Milton Berle leave frame in every frantic group shot on the set of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the dailies always came back with Berle running back on camera, squeezing in an extra moment of scene-stealing slapstick at every turn. Langella may or may not have had an inkling of the bigger picture's quality here, but he certainly is in control of his own, very nuanced performance.

And creating nuance with strokes that big is hard. He's the Van Gogh of 1980's bad guys (does that make Predator the Bosch?). The performance puts me in mind of Olivier's Richard III. Indeed, Skeletor's own dialogue paraphrases a line from the Bard: "I am not in a giving vein this day." Why do I have a feeling this was Langella's idea? Frank writhes upon, hops about, and fondles his throne with Olivier's almost comedic gusto. He manipulates the rhythm and meter of his dialogue erratically, and to great effect (Langella finds iambs and caesura in some of the least poetic dialogue imaginable). He is a time bomb. His outbursts come without warning, but always seem dramatically "earned." He speaks every thought as a decree, and everything he says sounds like it's the most important thing he's ever said. It is a commanding, maniacal, unpredictable screen presence.
Most impressive of all, perhaps, is what Langella can do from behind that rubbery, unforgiving makeup. It's a nearly-unmoving shell, a mask rather than a face. But what Langella does with eyes, voice, angle, and gesture overcomes the shortcomings of his ridiculous latex-and-facepaint husk. It's as sinister as anything David Prowse and James Earl Jones created as Darth Vader (granted, Langella has his eyes to use). On that note, it's amazing that Langella creates something unique, given how uncannily Vaderesque the design of his costume is (and the helmets of Skeletor's guards are downright visual plagiarism).
Indeed, Masters steals unrelentingly from Star Wars. The design of the Death Star and Williams' score are all over this turkey, and it may be this thievery that is accidentally responsible for one of the only things the film gets right from the show. This world exhibits a beautiful mix of technology and magic. He-Man has always seemed a bit Conan-like to me, but as much as these muscle men trust in steel and voodoo, they ride jet gliders and fire lasers. That's as true in the film as it is in the show. It's a difficult balance to achieve, and no one does it better than Langella. Skeletor may use guns and microchips to help him seize power, but it's the magic that really makes him powerful. He's a wizard who can use a computer. Come to think of it, Star Wars walks a similar line with the force. But Langella doesn't mystify Skeletor's mysticism. He wears it on his sleeve, whereas Vader and the Jedi keep it in their elite club.

Vader it's not. Nor is it the cartoon's Skeletor (amazingly voiced by Alan Oppenheimer, by the way). Langella's Skeletor is something that stands alone, frightening in its own right, in the midst of what is otherwise a cinematic catastrophe. Props to Frank. This performance lingers in my mind with the best of them, and I nominate it for one of the great overlooked villains in movie history. God only knows what we'll see if the new rumored live-action He-Man is a go.

The World's Biggest Metaphor (and the One That Failed)

Ok, I can't resist. I have to talk about Cloverfield. I will resist a detailed diatribe about the film's inner workings and many flaws (as I see them, anyway), but I want to talk about broad, poetic strokes.

If you're making a kaiju eiga (Japanese-style giant monster flick), then why don't you embrace the form fully? Cloverfield, I know it's on your mind, what with the Japan references and the "Godzilla March" Variations during the end credits. So why hast thou forsaken the simple, elegant, poetic qualities of everyone's favorite atomic lizard?

Godzilla (especially in the original, 1954 Japanese cut) is such a sound horror film metaphor:

Godzilla = Atrocity of Atomic Warfare (Hiroshima)

The G-Man embraces his "high-brow" significance, but does not get bogged-down by pretension, delivering, always, what the audience came for: Godzilla smash Tokyo and absurd monster fighting. But along the way, the metaphor can reinvent itself to talk about many issues. Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster dealt with environmental issues in the 70's. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla may very well be about our (Japan's) over-dependence on technology. Godzilla 1984 is about nuclear disarmament and Cold War tensions (instead of the "elephant in the room" we have the "big lizard in the harbor").

But in all his incarnations (1998 American remake aside), Big G never takes himself too seriously. The Toho G movies are chock-full of comedic moments (and attempts there-at). He never forgets that he is a big radioactive iguana, as if to say, "Ok, now that we have that symbolism out of the way, we can get to the blowing $#%& up." I mean, can you really talk seriously about a giant monster without a grain of ironic salt? Apparently, Cloverfield (if we're calling the monster that) thinks you can.

So, ok, I was a liberal arts student, I can bs this. Cloverfield... go:

New York... attacks... destruction... panic... martial law... trust/mistrust of government... conspiracy theory... mis- and disinformation... threat levels... forced evacuation... surveillance... reality TV... digital cameras... loss of privacy... erosion of liberty (ooh, look, they decapitated Liberty)... war... "mission accomplished"... no winners... no answers... fear... paranoia... detachment... moral ambiguity

Fine. Great. All things worth talking about. Godzilla is to Hiroshima as Cloverfield is to 9/11. I'll go there. But Cloverfield's conspicuous decision to give us no answers (no origin of the monster, an elliptical ending, etc) is a cop-out. And don't tell me that's the point. Don't tell me, "We don't get any answers, just like the world we live in." Crap. Bull. Not explaining how any of these ideas come together isn't a meditation on the ambiguous signs of the times... it's just not having anything to say about them. It's pretentious, self-congratulatory cleverness without any follow-through or substance. This is most evident in the film's title -- an arbitrary code word, signifying nothing, supposedly lifted from the street name of J.J. Abrams' production company.

Ultimately, it's a rejection of the beauty (such as there is) of both Godzilla's purity and his purism. Cloverfield says, "Godzilla, you don't have the balls to take your poetry seriously. You hammer your metaphor over the heads of your audience, and leave nothing to subtlety and somber contemplation." But in taking this position, Cloverfield forgets that a giant slimy monster -- especially one with airs of symbolism -- is inherently ludicrous. Nothing could be less subtle than a titanic lizard or fish beast devastating a cityscape, and I like my giant monster movies that way. Cloverfield rejects that simple, elegant form -- but more's the point -- takes itself so seriously as to tell us that we can't have fun this time (Godzilla, save us!). Godzilla entertains, Cloverfield alienates.

I suspect that I would have liked it much more if I'd actually dug the monster, but it bored the gamma-irradiated snot out of me. Let me just say this: Godzilla would mop the floor (or Central Park) with that oversized guppy.

You Know, For Kids

Richard Knerr, repackager of the Hula Hoop and importer of the Frisbee, is dead. The story is here. May he rest.

Ender's Crayons

This thing is creepy/scary/beautiful. Crayon Physics is a computer game in which you draw free-form objects that immediately are absorbed into a physics engine and react in front of you. Played on the tablet (as it is in the clip below), it reminds me a lot of Ender's video game tablet in Ender's Game. Apparently, Windows users can download a playable version here.

And I'll Say it Again

I stand by my first blog ever.

Saturn's Soundtrack

This is old news, but news to me. Saturn emanates radio waves, and NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission has recorded them. The video signature is above. Check out the story, and be sure to listen to the sound. It's gorgeous. And it sounds eerily like Louis and Bebe Barron's amazing and pioneering score to Forbidden Planet.