Gojira! (1954) and "Our American Cousin"

Gojira (akaゴジラ Ishirô Honda (1954) A kaiju film (怪獣kaijū). The most expensive film in the history of Japanese cinema to that time, Gojira is a cautionary tale on the horrors of atomic weaponry from the country upon which an atomic bomb had actually been used in acts of war. If any country has the right to protest the atomic age, it would be Japan. And the "Godzilla" series is the longest-running, most successful film series acting as a metaphor for a political-ecological statement ever created in the history of film.

But, it wasn't entirely their idea, though. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms preceded it by some 16 months, after a successful 1952 re-release of the original King Kong inspired its production. Production of Gojira, being already expensive—and with its production simultaneous with Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai threatening to bankrupt Toho Studios—it was decided to create the monster effects with an actor in a suit rather than doing very time-consuming (and expensive) stop motion animation as was done—by Ray Harryhausen—with the American film.

Two sea-vessels, a freighter and its rescue ship, are overtaken by sudden flashes and sunk catastrophically.* Survivors picked up by a fishing vessel tell of the ocean just blowing up and are on their way to nearby Odo Island, when they too are overcome. The islanders find survivors on a raft talking wildly about a monster in the seas. An elder talks of Godzilla, but he is dismissed as a superstitious old man with talk of sacrificing girls to the vengeful creature that destroyed their catches in the old times. That night, the island is beset by a terrible storm that destroys homes and livestock, and investigative hearing is held with eye-witness reports and a speculation by Dr. Kyohei Yamane (Takashi Shimura) that, with the reports of monsters, it might be some creature unknown to modern man. A investigative trip to Odo Island is sent out.

The movie's first glimpse of Godzilla: "Run away! Run away!"

What they find is mysterious tracks, very localized radiation signs...and one very pissed-off dinosaur-like creature. It's that last one that convinces folks that something is seriously wrong with the ecology (although I'm sure there would be some denying it despite the giant lizard in the room—and, in fact, one official gets all blustery saying that the news is so important it should be kept from the public). A Counter-Godzilla Headquarters (yes, that's what they call it) is established and a ten frigate fleet is sent out to Odo to set depth charges to kill the creature.

Watching from the sidelines is Yamane, who, despite the destruction on Odo Island, is a lone voice, seeing the virulent hysteria against the creature and advocating for study and containment rather than destruction. Partially, his reasoning is that Godzilla has absorbed so much nuclear radiation that even a nuke would be useless against him (well, maybe if they missed him by a mile, but a direct strike might just do the trick!) It seems there always has to be a lone scientist who takes a contrary position, and Yamane feels isolated, but, given the possibility of further, and even greater, carnage, he feels he can only offer a dissenting opinion.

It's soon determined that, to protect the citizenry of Tokyo, the military should construct a wall—that always works—of rapidly constructed electrical lines, backed by a phalanx of Japanese weaponry involving machine guns and tanks. Now, let's step back a moment and think about that.  If atomic weapons are considered to weak to handle Godzilla—not to mention the aversion the Japanese might have to using nuclear weapons (especially in a movie that has a back-message warning about nukes)—a stretch of high tension lines seems like an extraordinarily weak alternative, unless, of course, you've seen The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, where it worked fairly well.

But, despite aggressive military action and that "beautiful" electrical wall, which is as effective as putting up large swaths of tissue paper, Godzilla manages to break through—without losing any waddling speed—and does what Godzilla is supposed to do—attack Tokyo and achieve massive annihilation and ruination, massive if you ignore the extensive model-work that stands—and more often, collapses—for the city-scape, but in an H-O scale.

It is also at this point that Godzilla rolls out his hidden super-power—charging up his dorsal fins in a glowing display and then spews an "atomic breath" that burns, melts and explodes everything in its halitosic path, resulting in what is described universally as "a sea of fire" that keeps flames roaring on any visible horizon.

So, how doe you solve a problem like Godzilla? An "ecological-disaster-problem" like Godzilla? Well, unfortunately, it takes an equal ecological disaster to overcome him, and fortunately—or rather, unfortunately, if you make your home in Tokyo Bay—a scientist has come up with just such a violation of the natural order to do the trick. No, it's not Donald Trump's environmental policy. No, it's not a military drop of plastic six-pack rings (that would have already worked if it was). It is the invention of the sullen and reclusive Dr. Daisuke Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), disfigured WWII veteran and former flame of the daughter of Dr. Yamane. He has created something which he calls an Oxygen Destroyer—just add water and it will suck the oxygen out of the water liquefying flesh and leaving a nicely leeched skeleton in its place. A demonstration of it horrifies Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kôchi). Good enough for government work. The government hires Serizawa to deploy the thing in Tokyo Bay.

It works well enough that it delays sequels for a few years, but sequels there will be. What is striking about the original unadulterated and un-Burr'd Gojira is its overall tone of sadness. The monster is dispatched, but not without cost and those who are sacrificed in his passing are mourned, but given the attitude of Yamane, so is the monster, as it is very much communicated that the death of Godzilla is an opportunity lost to science. Perhaps that is why the creature was revived for an increasingly less serious and affectionate series of films, and his reputation as a cultural icon maintained over the decades. Yes, the thinking may be, he may be a monster, but (dammit), he's our monster.

And one may be dismissive of the somewhat crude effects, but it took quite a lot of work to pull off. And yes, Godzilla is ultimately a guy in a suit, but the cost-cutting move is used in as unjarring a way as possible—the monster is seen only at night and with an impressively respectful camera angle, intercut with a hand-puppet version for close-ups, and enhanced with animation and, yes, even some stop-motion work done sparingly for some shots of Godzilla's destructive tail.

For a monster movie, it is far less giddy and far more sober than any other film in the genre.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters (Ishirô Honda, Terry Morse, 1956) I had a cinema professor in University—he taught Cinema101—who outlined the difference between foreign cinema and American cinema: foreign cinema begins with setting, with long montages of fields, then workers walking to the fields, then montages of workers working the fields, then they look up, smiles begin to appear, then a tractor appears on the horizon, and the workers rejoice; in American cinema, you get a couple shots of fields, then, over the horizon, a plane appears, then it blows up.

Good joke, that. But, when you compare the two versions of Godzilla: the Japanese Gojira original and the "American" cut, Godzilla, King of the Monsters (released here two years later), you get a sense of what the guy was talking about.

Gojira begins with a calm setting disrupted by something mysterious happening, and a couple reels go by before we actually see the titular cause, where the American version begins 2/3 through that film's timeline, after the attack on Tokyo. As Tokyo burns, two men are found in a collapsed building—one of them is dead, but the other is alive, but quite wounded. 

That would be Steve Martin (Raymond Burr) of United World News (as he's only so happy to tell people throughout the film), who is taken to hospital where he is recognized by Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kôchi), who just happens to be an acquaintance, seeing as he's friends with Dr. Yamane, Dr. Serizawa, and everybody else in the film, with the only exception being that of Gojira or "Godzilla" as he is called in this film. When asked to describe it by his editor, Martin pauses and says "Well...it's big and terrible," which is both fact and opinion in four words. Not exactly Pulitzer material, but, then, Martin is a man of few words, especially in Japanese. Convenient for Occidental audiences who don't want to read subtitles...or subtleties.

"Whyyyy...isn't that Dr. Yamane over there?"

Steve is the American ambassador to all things Godzilla. He's there being questioned about seeing anything peculiar when he was flying over Tokyo Bay on his way to his stop-over in Japan...like seeing blinding flashes of light destroying two ships. He's there at every press conference and every secret briefing, and he's even there on Odo Island when they find the surviving sailor of the rescue boat, is there when Godzilla is part of a furious storm that destroys an Odo village, and he's there when G-zilla first pops his head over the hills to scare the party who've been moving to higher ground.

The man is everywhere, pipe at the ready to ponder the significance of each new wonder, knitting his brows and shadowing his forehead the way he would whenever Paul Drake handed him a note that didn't add up in the sequence of events of a murder trial—Burr would become TV's Perry Mason the next year. And conveniently, as he's standing just out of camera-range of the proceedings, he'll turn to his Japanese liaison and say "I'm afraid...myyy Japan-ese is a little rusty..." so we can be clued in to what's going on. he's there speaking into a tape-recorder when Godzilla is breaking through Tokyo's defenses, and he's well enough to be discharged from the hospital to watch Serizawa and Emiko's fiancee dive with the Oxygen Destroyer to take out Godzilla. The man does get around.

Other than the utter improbability that one can can be everywhere in the first movie short of being on the camera crew, Burr's Martin makes for a convenient host, if mostly just a glorified by-stander, and Morse does a "fairly" credible job of marrying footage of Martin with shots of the principals so that it looks like he's having conversations, albeit in dubbed English, with the other performers. The two places where it strains credulity is a phone conversation to have tea with Serizawa, where the stand-in manages to hide his face with his arm except for the signature eye-patch he sports, and a hallway encounter with Yamane, where the stand-in does not resemble Takashi Shimura, with the exception of white hair.

"I can hardly believe what has just happened. Now, it seems, Tokyo has no defense." 

Still, it's a game effort to translate—quite literally—the Japanese film for American audiences so they don't have to read, and throwing in enough sophistication in story-telling technique that flash-back and narration can be used to cover a whole lot of back-story holes, while still presenting the film as more of a thrill ride for American sensibilities than a slowly unfolding mystery...with a big, stomping lizard as the culprit.

Burr would return as Martin for the American version of Godzilla 1985.
"Whaaat? Again?!"

* This would have struck a nerve with Japanese audiences at the time—as a Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, was caught in the blast area of the Castle Bravo nuclear test in March, 1954, killing at least one of the fishermen once the ship got back to port.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953)  Ray Bradbury is associated—and credited in the film—but he didn't really write it, so much as inspire it—his short story "The Fog Horn" had just been published, and the producers had wanted him to do the screenplay, and a deal was struck, where the story's screen-rights were bought, and Bradbury feted in the posters.

Other than that, the story's an original—and it was truly original back in 1952, when it was produced—about atomic testing unthawing a prehistoric creature from the ice, which swims down the coast of North America, and decides to chew on The Big Apple—"Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to be squished there." Yeah, yeah, there have been dozens of variations on the theme from dozens of countries of origin, but this one was the first, and hewed very close to the "Atomic dangers" theme that the movie used as a metaphor for the unnatural terror of The Bomb.

Atomic testing above the Arctic Circle, leads one of the scientists, Professor Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian), a "nuclear physicist from New York"* to literally stumble upon a prehistoric lizard (designed, sculpted and animated by the brilliant Ray Harryhausen). When he's found, babbling about "b-b-b-big lizard!" he's laughed off by the Army (represented by Kenneth Tobey, who would take on The Thing years later) and the scientific community, including Dr. Thurgood Ellston (a bubbly Cecil Kellaway, quite different from his malevolent warlock in I Married a Witch). Only after a witness to a boat attack further down the North Atlantic Coast, corroborates the phylum of the critter do the pipe-smokers take an interest. Vindicated, Nesbitt takes an interest in Ellston's lovely assistant (Paula Raymond), who sports wide lapels and even broader gestures—"Très  dramatique!" Nesbitt must think. 

Ellston concludes that the Beast must be making its way down the coast, given the flotsam and jetsam (and a distinct lack of witnesses) heading for the States.  Anticipating the Beast's arrival, he volunteers to take a diving bell to make observations, but, just before he can make measurements of the Creature's incisors, he becomes a victim of them.

Nuts.  We need another expert.

But, before they can find one diving-bell-size (and with the proper insurance), the big hurking lizard takes matters into his own claws, lurches out of the Hudson, up on the dock, scattering the local Union,** and taking a tour of Wall Street, squishing the more gutsy members of the NYPD (or the dumb ones not out collecting their protection money) and any stray investment bankers (Oh, where was a Rhedosaurus during the Bush Administration? It would have made Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps SO much more entertaining). The Army manages to give the beast a bazooka tracheotomy, but (damn it!) turns out the thing bleeds toxic blood and all the front-line combatants start dropping in their tracks.

Okay. Plan "B."

"uhhhhh....Plan B?"

Good thing we have a French physicist in the cast, who decides that if he can get an Army sharp-shooter ("I've got a plan!  Let the Americans do it!") with a grenade launcher and toss some fissionable material into the grenade, they can fire it into the open neck-wound and microwave the thing from the inside  (Sounds safe to me!). And just because its blundered into Coney Island and is trapped inside the giant flammable roller-coaster near high-intensity electrical lines, it seems like the perfect time to take one of the cars to the highest part of the coaster.

It's like anything; it's never easy.

Man, it's silly. But it isn't pretentious—all the atomic speechifying is done at the beginning, saving the ending for roaring, roller-coasters and roasting rhedosaurs.  "The End" comes up so fast you don't have time to wonder if there's a garbage-strike on so they can pick the thing up on Tuesday. And Harryhausen's stop-motion work is still amazing even in this age of CGI manipulation—it still amazes that he's got the dinosaur surrounded by roller-coaster at the same time he's combined it with live action footage—where does "it" stop and the film begin? I know I'm "old school," but, man, I buy this  Harryhausen labor of love (done one frame at a time) over the most complexly rendered computer kerfluffle. I'll take 20,000 Fathoms over 20,000 pixels any day.

Lighthouse Envy—The image inspired by Ray Bradbury's story

*Although judging from his accent, apparently New York has a "French Quarter."

** The incident isn't referenced in On the Waterfront.

ParaNorman

Written at the time of film's release...

Re-Animators
or
"I See Dead Puppets"

The town of Blithe Hollow depends on the supernatural for its tourist trade. But, what the city fathers probably don't understand is that if you live by the sword...well, let's just say you'd better have a good cleaning crew.

One of the town's citizens is young Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smith-McPhee) and he has a problem—he sees dead people, all of them. He's ostracized from friends, family and reality...from life, really...as most of his acquaintances are non-corporeal and that leads to bullying, loneliness and a general lack of enthusiasm. He'd be better off dead—as the only people he can relate to already are.

Then, there's his creepy Uncle (a wonderfully comic vocal performance by John Goodman) who tasks him with a special duty—saving Blithe Hollow from destruction by the wrath of the very witch of the town's fame, killed by the city elders centuries before.  To do so, he must go on a hero's journey with unlikely allies, many roadblocks both physical and emotional, while evading zombies, the undead, jocks, bullies and narcissistic big sisters to confront the evil witch.

ParaNorman is hilarious, quirky certainly, but also has a lot of depth and breadth to it.  It would be an easy—too easy—temptation to call it a Tim Burton knock-off (stop-motion animation, horrorific subject matter...it must be a Tim Burton knock-off), but it's actually far more concerned with story over effect than Burton, whose work can become tangentially derailed for a sequence or bit that the director finds funny, even if its a mismatch for the rest of the film and its non-sensibilities. ParaNorman stays on track, managing to brings its humor out of character, rather than despite it, and with a sense of comic timing that's by turns subtle, surprising and goofy. Yes, there are scary bits—it's rated PG, so maybe the littlest of kids shouldn't go—but its horrors are not there to shock, but to thrill. 

And when the film does build up a full head of horror steam at the end, it provides some of the most awesome sights and effects that have been seen in animation in quite some time. A hybrid of the Burton and Aardmann animation studios—directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell worked for both groups, respectively, and you can see aspects of their animation styles meshing, hallmarking the best of both stop-motion worlds—Burton's "antic-ness" and Aardmann's appreciation (and mining the comedic possibilities) of stillness.  Combine that with the story of an outsider who manages to collect a posse of co-adventurers who handle the auxiliary parts of the hero's main mission, and you have a well-rounded story that manages to surpass the limitations of the parts (making it, amusingly, a bit of a zombie-movie itself).  

What's nice is there's enough time in the plot (involving more than just the cemetery variety) to appreciate the artistry behind it—the way the town is laid out with abandoned squalor in the detail, the people with perpetually bemused expressions, and are, like us, anything but symmetrical, the way an ear glows with the back-lighting of sunshine, and in the ending that manages to combine moments of dark beauty and true psychotic scariness. Lots to appreciate. Lots to like. It's a fine film that makes the most of its slim ambitions, and rises above them.

Paranormal Activites

Written at the time of each film's release...

"Mic' and Kate + Legion"

Micah and Katie (Micah Sloat, Katie Featherston) are two young people in love. She wants to be a teacher, and he's a day-trader, they're "engaged to be engaged" and so they move in together. When we meet them, Micah has become engrossed with video cameras, and is documenting their lives. It's not some weird viral community experiment. Well, actually it is. Micah and Katie have another tenant. And it's keeping them awake nights.

Weird noises.

The faucets turn on (when they don't remember turning them on).

Whispers. Bumps in the night.

So, Micah has invested in video cameras to document it. We see them experiment with them, play with them—the footage is as vérité as it gets, and were it not for the fact that the two yuppies are slightly annoying in their own ways, it would be fascinating.

But the movie starts to cook in odd ways when the camera is locked down for the night and focused on the couple's bedroom. With rudimentary titles documenting the day and the particular night after filming, you tend to focus on the timer, which is used to fast-forward through the night and then stops at the time when an "event" happens. To describe what happens will spoil the thrills that Paranormal Activity provides.*

And it does provide them.** 

There's nothing new here. Director Oren Peli who conceived, financed, cast and shot the film in seven days (for a paltry $15,000.00—it made double that on its opening night...in one theater) in his home (which he got to re-decorate as a tax write-off) follows some tried and true audience manipulation that was prevalent far before similar films, like The Blair Witch Project (and, from the previews, the upcoming The Fourth Kind). Pace the thrills, and spend the rest of the time talking about them and amping up the anticipation. Wince and repeat. Accelerate. Though the film has gotten some professional once-overs that led to tightening and a new ending,*** it is essentially the same film that Peli made in 2007—strong enough to be released in its original rough-hewn condition (narrowly avoiding a more glossy remake).

The interesting thing about Paranormal Activity (other than it being so damned effective) is the way it has been released.

Check that.

It wasn't released. It escaped.

After making some limited rounds on the film festival circuit, and being passed around by Hollywood mucky-mucks—who wanted to re-film it (after all, they're in the business of generating funds for projects)—it was released in a very limited capacity, with internet options set up to generate word-of-mouth response and demand for it. For instance, when it opened in Seattle on Friday, October 10th it was playing at 2 theaters. When I saw it on October 16th, it was at ten. It appears to be alive...and it's growing.

As with any "good" horror movie, Paranormal Activity is about something else than generating goose-bumps. There has to be an underlying shared experience in our collective spines—a "polter-zeitgeist," if you will—that allows them to shiver, and where "P.A." digs in and eviscerates is in the relationship between men and women. Things start with the sorts of things that can happen when two people move in and don't know each other's habits—things get moved, or forgetfulness sets in, the usual annoyances that go with merging life-styles. And Micah and Katie react differently to the crisis: she wants to call in "experts;"**** he is skeptical and sees the poltergeistian activity as an invasion, an affront to his ego and man-hood. That he doesn't listen very well, or follow orders and only makes things worse runs with his reputation as a day-trader, a "Master of his Own Universe."

But it's not this Universe we're talking about, now. Is it?

Soon, the couple starts to bicker, and as they begin to lose more sleep, splinter apart psychologically. Their relationship is being attacked from within and, more to the point, without.

In the war between men and women, the Devil knows who'll win.

* The film so freaked out Steven Spielberg that he brought his screener DVD back in a plastic garbage bag, rather than touch it.

** I used to work at a place that was haunted (no, really). Keys would drop to the floor of their own volition. Wallets would have their contents scattered across the floor. Footsteps would be heard coming up the stairs and no one would be there when you went out to greet them. Doors shut (with no one present to shut them). There'd be gusts of wind in completely sealed off spaces (cold wind, mind you). "Things" would appear to people. There's a lot of that in Paranormal Activity. It felt vaguely familiar. The first night after seeing it I couldn't sleep, and I tend to be more alert when there are rumbling fly-overs from McChord AFB.

*** One of the concerns of the Hollywood "suits" was the number of walk-out's the movie generates (and there were a few at the screening I attended). But, they're not because people don't like the movie; they're leaving because the film scares the bee-jezes out of them.

**** One of the straight-faced humor moments is when the "Psychic" tells the couple that he probably can't help them—that they'll have to contact a demonologist. Just like doctors: "You'll have to see a specialist."

"Paramount Pictures would like to thank the family of the deceased..."

I'm surprised that Matt Reeves wasn't pegged to direct Paranormal Activity 2, considering he pulled the same cinéma vérité trick with his Cloverfield as Oren Peli did with the first PA.  Reeves might have actually done something different, as opposed to this corporate product generated to merely try and tap the success of the first. Right off the bat, the vibe for this one is different, with the Paramount honchos putting the corporate brand in the very first crawl (which is partially used for the title of this piece)—a subterfuge, anyway, as it is "only a movie" and Paramount Pictures isn't thanking anybody, they're just trying to take your money, while fulfilling their initial wish to re-make the first movie (which was made independently for $11,000) under their corporate umbrella, thus inflating the cost to $2,750,000, while, cluelessly, also hoping to duplicate the original's success. Guess what, Paramount? The Paranormal Activity's financial success depended on the negative cost being so damned low. That won't happen when you're paying gaffers, best boys, painters, assistant directors and assistants to the executive producer (all missing from the original) a sizable wage.*****

They also can't duplicate the original's artistic success, either, such as it was.  The first film took a nugget of a good idea and ran with it, employing some audience knowledge of video conceits and, like any good horror-meister, letting the audience do their dirty work, trusting that what the sweating masses in the dark will come up with will be far more horrible than what actually occurs. A couple of shock-cuts, and you leave them quivering in fear.

But Paranomal Activity 2 really doesn't do anything else than go through the same motions. Oh, there is more coverage, thanks to an in-home security system that is installed after the initial "things that go crash on vacation" incident. There is no 80 herz hum that accompanies every incident, just some indeterminate sound effects (which are re-capped—and exposed as rather cheap—in the end-credits...End Credits? That kinda destroys the illusion, too). And this one is exposed to be more or less a prequel to the original...except that the actors shared by both look quite a bit older this time when the time-frame should be the same. 

It's just one of those moments of bone-headedness on the producers'/director's parts that show all they're interested in is going through the motions and collecting the cash, even if their efforts undercut the basic spookiness of the movie. It's Corporate movie-making at its dumbest, laziest and most crass. For example, you can't have a corporate movie release without some product placement (like that recognizable bottle of Sunny Delight in the kitchen, or the dramatically worthless talk about Burger King), which goes somewhat against the grain of a "captured" video source—and gaffe-spotters will have a field-day with this one—at one point, dad cracks a sexual joke by saying "Release the Krakken!" (the line from Clash of the Titans).  That would be funny, if it wasn't a glaring mistake. That line of Liam Neeson's from the 2010 movie only became a catch-phrase this year...and the movie is supposed to be taking place...in 2006.  Oopsy!

There was no reason, other than plunder, for this movie to be made, and while one can say that the performances are decent, and it delivers enough jolts that you forget that dogs and children are the potential victims here, this is one best not attended. Bad movies and bad movie franchises should be given the same advice as demon-poltergeists: "Just ignore it and maybe it will go away..."

***** One of those Executive Producers is Akiva Goldsman, whose name seems to appear on any movie that sucks.