69 years after Hondo Ishiro’s masterpiece Godzilla created the most iconic non-human monster in the history of world cinema, a period that has seen the release of 32 feature films starring the great lizard from Japan and a handful from Hollywood, as well a multiple television programs, it takes very little actual effort to have created “the most compelling human narrative of any Godzilla picture”. So I am not, perhaps, […]

Happy Monday! It’s good to be back after a little unplanned break.  Nothing gets the mind right like Tim cackle laughing at imagining Carrie and Rob’s first (and only) bath together.  On this episode, Tim brings two new films out of Japan, Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron. Carrie has a whole batch of movies to choose from, but decides to go with the Netfix Original, Leave […]

As the climax to Legendary Pictures’ “MonsterVerse” franchise, Godzilla vs Kong raises the question: was anybody in the entire world waiting for the climax to the MonsterVerse? How many people other than the rabid consumers of media news blogs, their brains addled by too much internet, know that the “MonsterVerse”, under that name, even exists? The 2014 Godzilla film pissed off as many people as liked it, if not more […]

As a followup to the Spoiler Alert episode discussing Kurosawa’s Kagemusha and Ran, Brennan is sitting down with Tim to discuss the Godzilla franchise, many of which were directed by Kurosawa’s compatriot Honda Ishiro! Join us as we discuss the various horrible forms that baby Godzilla has taken throughout the years, our top (and bottom) 3 Godzilla films, and even get a scoop on next week’s main feed episode!

In reviewing Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, I summed up my not-really-a-conclusion thus: “If the next two films are great, this will hopefully seem like an elegant piece of scene-setting. If they’re lousy, this will seem like a huge missed opportunity that wasted too much time getting to the good stuff”. As it turns out, I had that all wrong. Now that I’ve finally found an excuse to catch up […]

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a peculiar thing: it’s a sequel for people who didn’t like the original movie. Myself, I still think the 2014 Godzilla is a hell of a picture, capturing a sense of genuine non-humanity in its scale and scope: it’s a movie about things so big that there’s simply no way to fit them into a human-oriented world. Which I think is why it has […]

Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters might very well represent the largest shift in the Godzilla formula since 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, and not just because Planet of the Monsters is the first animated Godzilla feature (there have been multiple animated Godzilla TV series produced in both Japan and the United States).* Though it’s unlikely that the film could have afforded to explore this new world if it wasn’t animated, […]

Over the 62 years of its existence, Godzilla has been anything and everything: metaphor for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dangerous animal, force of nature, warrior for the environment, psychic hangover from of WWII, friend to all children, giant hermaphroditic iguana. There’s no such thing, really as a “normal” Godzilla or a normal Godzilla picture, and that’s just the way it should be. Even so, I was not prepared for whatever the […]

Of all possible outcomes for the new American-made Godzilla, one that I wasn’t prepared for at all was that, at the macro level, it would have exactly the same structural problems that the last Godzilla film, 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars did. To wit: in a movie just a smidigen north of two hours, the best stuff tends to bunch up in the back half, and the whole thing would be […]

There are films about which we say, “people have mixed reactions”, because there are things that are generally liked and things that are generally disliked, and it’s hard to feel much more than a profound ambivalence about it when taken as a whole. And then there are films about which we say, “people have mixed reactions”, because of the gaping gulf between the people who love it and the people […]

If there is one unanswerable criticism of Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., it’s that the film is entirely shallow. Not, après it’s immediate predecessor Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, that it ends up a trivial pile of nonsense and fluff whose attempt at any kind of humane drama goes massively awry; that it never makes even the pretense of trying to show any humane drama in the first place. Perhaps intellectual consistency demands that […]

I might scour my vocabulary for hours and still never come up with a better single adjective to describe Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla than “frivolous”. Which is on the one hand not a word that really suggests and kind of special sin or even a legitimate failing of any sort, but on the other is almost entirely devoid of any positive connotations in any context. At any rate, one would generally […]