Monday, January 6, 2025

Monsterpiece Theater

Film: Godzilla Minus One (Gojira -1.0)
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

I’m not really a kaiju guy. I don’t actively hate them the way I hate televangelists or people who leave their shopping carts in the middle of a parking space, but I don’t generally go out of my way to watch giant monster movies. It’s not quite a “when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all” thing, but it’s in that ballpark. Godzilla Minus One (or Gojira -1.0 if you prefer) got a lot of acclaim, though, and also won the big lizard his first Oscar, so it was hard to resist.

My ambivalence to kaiju is almost certainly related in part to early Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, which were rife with Gamera movies. Sure, it’s fun to watch a giant turtle fly through space and attack another dude in a rubber suit, but there are a bunch of them right in a row, and it gets tedious. These movies also went through a strange evolution. Godzilla, Gamera, and the rest started as giant beasts created by radiation or pollution taking out their rage on the Japanese countryside. Over time, though, they became the heroes, fighting monsters worse than they were, causing destruction like superheroes. The buildings still got knocked down, but our hero kaiju were doing it to defend Japan rather than destroy it.

Sunday, January 5, 2025

What I've Caught Up With, December 2024 Part 2

I managed to do something unpleasant to my knee a few weeks back, which means I wasn’t able to do anything in the gym for a few weeks. I had to give up on Peaky Blinders as my workout show, so instead of finishing it at the end of the year as planned, I’m only about halfway through. I did watch a few shows, though, getting through both seasons of Altered Carbon, finishing Killing Eve, and watching Death and Other Details. This really wanted to be a variation of the Benoit Blanc movies and really wasn’t. I also watched Exploding Kittens on NetFlix. You can (and should) get through it in an afternoon. I’m in the middle of the sixth season of Parks and Rec, and have also started Doom Patrol, which is the right kind of weird.

Saturday, January 4, 2025

What I've Caught Up With, December 2024 Part 1

So I finished the year with 366 movies watched. Of those, about 285 or so were new to me, with the rest being rewatches. On the They Shoot Zombies list as it currently stands, there are 205 I haven’t written reviews for, and ten or so more than that that haven’t been posted and I have in reserve or for Halloween. The big list of movies that have been recommended to me dropped under 1000 briefly, but with 2024 to not catch up on, it’s ballooned back up. Feel free to recommend anything from 2024 that is worth watching.

Thursday, January 2, 2025

Sacre Blech!

Film: An American Werewolf in Paris
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

Sometimes, when someone drops a sequel years after the original movie, it turns out decently. Sometimes, you get An American Werewolf in Paris. This is a movie that very clearly wants to capitalize on the vastly superior first film that is more than a decade and a half older. Honestly, it feels like a cheat. If you’ve seen An American Werewolf in London, you’re likely to go into this with expectations. Those expectations are not going to be met. This is equally true if you thought it was instead a riff on An American in Paris.

In terms of the set-up, you don’t really need more than the title of the film and the knowledge of the London version. This time, there’s a trio of Americans, and this time, they’re not walking across the moors but instead find themselves in the City of Lights. Andy (Tom Everett Scott), Brad (Vince Vieluf), and Chris (Phil Buckman) are touring Europe and attempting extreme thrills. Andy, who we are going to be following here, is behind on points, but plans on upping his total by (sigh) bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower, because that’s something that you won’t get caught doing.

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

End of Year Fifteen

My goal every year is to watch 400 movies, and for the last few years I’ve been coming up short. I came up short again this year, but I’m a lot closer than I normally am. This year I hit 366 movies, which comes out to exactly one movie per day.

I finished the Oscar list from 2023 earlier this month, just in time for the next set of Oscars, which get announced in a couple of weeks.

Monday, December 30, 2024

New Wine, Old Bottle

Film: Nosferatu (2024)
Format: Market Square Theater (Theater 7).

Sometimes I wonder what story has been filmed the most. Certainly Dracula and variations of it are at or near the top. When the Robert Eggers version of Nosferatu was released, I knew it would be one of those rare occasions when I would make it out to the theater. That said, it’s the fifth Nosferatu-related film I’ve watched for this blog—the silent version, the 1970s remake, Shadow of the Vampire, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and now this one. It’s a bit much, and that’s not even including all of the Dracula variants.

Eggers’s film expands on the original Nosferatu by nearly a full hour of running time. The Murnau version clocks in at just over 80 minutes, and this one at about 135, with roughly seven of that taken up as credits. Most of that additional running time is used to show the influence of Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) on the area around him and going deeper into the individual aspects of the story. Where the original may have glossed over some things or run quickly through scenes, Eggers takes his time.