Showing posts with label Godzilla. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Godzilla. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla


It's been months since I last wrote an entry to this blog meme.

I don't know if anybody noticed, but yesterday marked the sixtieth birthday of Godzilla AKA Gojira. The first Godzilla film premiered on third of November in 1954 in Japan, and I helped organize the showing of one of the later Godzilla films, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, at the Finnish Film Archive screening here in Turku, Finland. It was shown on 35 mm film, in a Cinemascope picture.

The film is a hoot. It's very, very hilarious. It's fast-paced, it never slows down, which is a normal handicap for bad and campy pictures: they are slow. There's always something going on in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla even though none of it makes sense. Cigar-smoking space invaders in silver suits? Check. A huge cyborg pretending to be Godzilla? Check. An ancient Japanese god living inside a cave? Check. A woman singing praise to the said god on a beach with a nice orchestrated background? Check. A mysterious Interpol agent masquerading as a freelance journalist in a long coat trying very hard not to look suspicious? Check. Mysterious gangsters turning into monkeys when they die or even get hit? Check. Name it, and you probably have it in the film.

Highly recommended, lots of laughs guaranteed. More Overlooked Films coming up at Todd Mason's blog here.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Godzilla (1998)

Roland Emmerich's reworking of the famous Japanese monster wasn't a critical success (I think it wasn't a success even commercially), but my kids just saw it and they liked it. I believe my son (who's soon to be 9 years old) loved it. He also loves the Jap movies of which he's seen five, including the original one. 

There are some moments I also happen to like ("love" might be too strong a word here): Godzilla's leap into Hudson River, the drive into Godzilla's mouth, when Godzilla fools the submarines, the sequence at Madison Square Garden with the Godzilla babies. I also like Jean Reno's hardboiled character. My son says: "The best moment is the ending." He always feels sympathy for the baddies in the film when they fall. 

More Overlooked Movies here