G-Watch: Monarch TV Series (2023-2024)

I did not expect my viewing of a show about Godzilla and Kurt and Wyatt Russell to turn into a hate-watch, but here we are.

My understanding is that there are enthusiastic viewers of this show, and, if I'm being honest, one of the things I've enjoyed about being a somewhat sideline Godzilla fan over the years is that the fanbase is pretty chipper about all forms and takes on Godzilla. There's no shock it would extend to this show. Maybe they're not as critical about film as they could be, but I was not going to be the guy to point out that maybe Destroy All Monsters is not going to double-bill with Citizen Kane.*

And it is a great time to have a general fondness for Godzilla. The movie in 2021 from Legendary was super fun, Minus One and Shin Godzilla are actual think-pieces, the shorts Toho put out are perfectly recreating what I like about pre-2000 Godzilla. I keep finding funny Japanese shorts aimed at kids with the monsters in-character and adorable and insane. And if I'm being candid, there's a hurricane of affordable (and less-affordable) Godzilla merch out there right now.

When Apple+ and Legendary announced Monarch, I was ambivalent. To me, the track record of the Monsterverse is not amazing, and I am decidedly less enthused about the existence of Monarch in those films than other fans. It's my opinion that the execution has, overall, been inconsistent and sloppy across the few movies they've put out. And, after several episodes, it seems the raison d'être for Monarch as a show was to paper over the bad continuity. Which, as every DC Comics fan should know, is actually just going to make things worse.

And, indeed, it did!

90's Watch: Quiz Show (1994)

Watched:  01/15/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Robert Redford

Selection:  Jamie

It's been 30 years since Quiz Show (1994) was released, and probably 29 since I've last seen it.  I'm now much older than Ralph Fiennes and Rob Morrow as our leads, and in the intervening years, the real Charles Von Doren, Richard Goodwin and Herb Stemple have passed (oddly with little in the way of news or media mention).

Sometimes watching younger film reviewers on YouTube or reading the film discussion of younger film enthusiasts, it's interesting to note the tilt to genre pictures of prior eras, and it's easy to forget that genre was largely in the margins thirty years ago.  At the time, something like Quiz Show was happily released by Disney when they had multiple outlets for producing movies for general and adult audiences - this one released through Hollywood Pictures (see also Touchstone and whatever their deal was with Miramax).  And we had name directors doing prestige pictures that were a thing to go see.

Goji Watch: Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Watched:  01/14/2024

Format:  MAX

Viewing:  Second

Director:  

Ishirô Honda and 

Jun Fukuda

Selection:  Me, sort of

This one is a lot of fun.

It takes place in the near-ish future, when (a) the world is mostly at peace and (b) all of the monsters have been caught and put on "Monster Island" where they live out their days, lightly fighting and unable to escape their idyllic ocean-view home.

The goal of the movie is to get as many monsters on screen as possible, and that they do.

l-r:  Gorosaurus, Mothra (larvae), Rodan, Kumonga (spider), Anguirus, Minilla, King Ghidorah, Godzilla, Varan?, Manda (snake), Baragon 

Aliens realize this makes Earth a great target, do some mind-control on the monsters and get them to rampage across Earth so they can have it.  

There's a story about the Earthers fighting the aliens, because humans have to do something in this movie.

The aliens are young ladies wearing silver, sparkly pajamas, which makes them seem like not-a-threat, but they are!

Eventually the monsters bust free and the aliens send in (who else?) King Ghidorah, who is a proper dick until the monsters dog pile him.

It is a mostly silly movie, and if there's subtext, I think I ignored it.  But it's lightyears more watchable than the following movie All Monsters Attack.

Dug was Here Selections: The Skydivers (1963), Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967), Pumaman (1980)

Watched between:  01/12 - 10/14/2024

Format:  MST3K on YouTube

Viewing:  First on All (I think)

Director:  No

Selection:  Consensus - us, MST3K live feed

My father-in-law had some outpatient surgery and, thus, Dug, my brother-in-law, was here for a couple of weeks.  He capped off his visit with a stay with us.  Dug is the foremost MST3K/ Rifftrax fan in my life - and while I've been a fan since I was 14, he's the guy who remembers stuff about episodes from the show that I haven't seen since high school.

I won't be writing these movies up, but I can say I finally ticked Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967) off my list, which had been there since discovering Joi Lansing about 20 years ago via The Adventures of Superman.  But I also knew, for 20 years, this was going to be a rough ride.  The movie is a weird, all-star bash, including Lon Chaney, Basil Rathbone, John Carradine and a bunch of Nashville musicians, for whom it was intended to be a showcase.

you get two big guesses as to why Joi Lansing was included

There's also some yellow-peril as there's a spy story going on, also a gorilla and ghosts.  

this movie has everything

The Skydivers (1963) is a movie made by sky divers about sky divers, and it's like they knew one day MST3K would exist, and would need content.

The Pumaman (1980) is an Italian produced, British-shot movie about a superhero with alien-gifted powers of a puma.  Like flying, and walking through walls.  It makes no sense, and has Donald Pleasance as the villain, wearing a sort of leatherette jumpsuit.  Cannot recommend enough.

Anyway, a good time was had by all.  

  

Mystery Watch: Maggie Moore[s] (2023)

Watched:  01/12/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  John Slattery

Selection:  Consensus selection - me, Jamie, Dug

I was curious about Maggie Moore[s] (2003) when I saw the trailer in mid 2023.  Sure, it looked like it had a decent comedy set-up and I like a good crime movie, but it also had John Hamm, Nick Mohammed and Tina Fey.   And I figured they wouldn't jump at a bad script and they're three folks I like in general.  Throw in John Slattery giving it a go behind the camera and I put it on the list of things to see.

Unavoidably, one has to ponder how this movie really wants to be Fargo.  Which would be less of a deal - Fargo was 25+ years ago - if we weren't on Season 5 of Noah Hawley's Fargo show on FX.   We have inept criminals who got into crimes because of their incompetence in life, and a stone-cold killer amongst them.  There's a morally centered cop with a less competent colleague, and the promise this is based on real-life events.

But, yeah, beyond that, it does deliver on the promise of the casting and folks generally being a good group with whom to spend time. 

Indy Watch: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Watched:  01/102/2024

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  James Mangold

Selection:  Jamie

I was aware that the critical consensus and box office on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) was not good.  Neither of those things are much a deterrent for me for watching or enjoying a movie (see the many Godzilla posts on this site), but it did catch me by surprise when it happened.  After the fan-lambasting and luke-warm critical reception of the last time Ford revisited the character in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, I figured if Disney was going to go back to the well and offer another movie (after that one at least had the decency to give us a particularly happy ending for Indy), they'd be working to make sure that this one was well worth the return for cast and fans alike.

At the top, this wasn't what I would have hoped for in a big-screen return of Indy.  If you liked it, and many people did, just a heads up.  But, as always, I am not here to tell you what to like or not to like, just how I took in the movie.

The thing I was not expecting out of an Indiana Jones film was to feel bored.  And at well over two hours...  that's a lot of looking at my watch.

There was a big opportunity here for Disney, owners of the Lucasfilm output, as Crystal Skull was widely disliked and a new finale to the series could revive the franchise somehow, maybe get some life/ money out of the franchise yet.  But, the window is closing on the value of that license with Ford now a guy in his 80's and the horrific realization that - just like Star Wars - there was going to be a response somewhere between "meh" and "you ruined my childhood" with a recast of the role.  

All they could really do was hope to test the waters on a new action hero to carry the torch, and the obvious choice was (checks notes) Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge.  And maybe they could keep Ford around for another picture or two to cement the hand-off.   

I don't know if that was the plan, but, man, the movie really leaned into wanting you to find Waller-Bridge's character an equal (or better!) to Indiana Jones.   The ten year plan can't be "count on a guy in his 80's to still jump around in 2032".

But that's speculation.  Looking at Dial of Destiny, the movie didn't work for me in a few fundamental ways:

G Watch: Godzilla 2000 - Millennium (1999) - but, really, a quick history of how I decided to like Godzilla again

Watched:  01/08/2024

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  4th?  5th?

Director:  Takao Okawara

Selection:  All me, baby

I had to check, but somehow I've not written this one up, but I know I watched it during that circa 2020-era where I was dealing with the COVID lockdown by just watching an endless stream of Godzilla films.  

So, this movie is the key to my Godzillaissance.   

As a kid, I was a Godzilla fan via a few channels.  There was an American produced Godzilla cartoon that ran for a year or three.  I have some flickers of memories of watching Godzilla movies on TV with Steanso during long summer days.  We also had two key Godzilla toys.  My toy was the Shogun Warriors Godzilla, which I absolutely adored.  Steanso, however, had this amazing playset with Godzilla, a non-canon monster, a city backdrop and army vehicles, which I remember us setting up and having a good 'ol time playing with.  

But this was also the era of Star Wars, Tron and other fun, shiny stuff, and so Godzilla fell by the wayside.

Also, Godzilla was weirdly hard to come by.  Unless you were home to catch a movie on UHF, badly dubbed movies weren't something most channels wanted to run.  And you weren't going to get much in the theater.  

In fact, when Godzilla Returns/ Godzilla 1985 was released, I *wanted* to see it, but it came and went so fast, it wasn't until my 11th birthday party that I used my "I can rent whatever I want" pass to rent the movie.  What I don't remember is Godzilla films from Toho on the shelf.  I just have zero memory of Blockbuster carrying the movies, or the Mom & Pop places before Blockbuster.  That may have been an artifact of sorting out US distribution or me being distracted by trying to unlock the mystery of what was happening in those Sybil Danning movies on the shelf.  But given that I would rent stuff like Robot Jox without blinking, given the option, it seems like I would have picked up a Godzilla movie or two.

Happy Birthday, David Bowie

Here's to the great David Bowie on his birthday.  

The picture above is from about 2004, which is around when Jamie and I saw him in concert for the second time.  

What struck me about that show was how different it was from when I'd seen him on the Outside tour, where he was doing a thing tied to the music, and was being a very serious rock god.  In 2004, he was playing new stuff and playing the hits and having fun bantering.  Which, in it's own way, was kind of weird as it so defied my expectations.  But, man, it was a fun show.  

Here's to the The Thin White Duke.  The world literally hasn't been the same since we lost him.

Noir Watch: Pickup (1951)

Watched:  01/07/2024

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Hugo Haas

Selection:  Me by way of Noir Alley

As happens a lot at the start of the year, I was fired up to break the Christmas movie cycle and watch some non-Christmas-type stuff.  I've also been missing noir films, from the original period as well as everything up to today, and wanted to get back on that train.  Luckily, Noir Alley was on TCM Saturday and Sunday, so I set the DVR to record a movie I'd not yet seen.  

It's easy to say Pickup (1951) is a riff on The Postman Always Rings Twice.  And there's definitely some truth to that, but so are a number of movies from the era.  What I found interesting was that there's enough different here that it pivots the whole concept.  While we still have the remote home/ workplace, the older husband, the sexy wife and the yearning employee, this is less the story of the troubled, star-crossed lovers in over their heads, and more the story of "Hunky", the older husband.  And, it's worth saying at the outset, Beverly Michaels' Betty is not the sympathetic figure Lana Turner cut as Cora.  

Mystery Watch: A Haunting In Venice (2023)

Watched:  01/06/2024

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Kenneth Branagh

Selection:  Me

At first, a third Poirot movie directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh was something I looked at with perhaps a bit of a jaundiced eye.  I'd enjoyed Murder on the Orient Express well enough, but Death on the Nile felt a bit self-indulgent and just didn't manage to ever keep me terribly engaged.  But, this installment had at two members of the cast who were a sell (Michelle Yeoh and Tina Fey) and that was enough to get me to not dismiss the movie.

A Haunting in Venice (2023) received stunningly little promotion (Jamie reminds me that this was released during the strike, but even for that, seemed it barely got a whisper) and was dropped in the busy horror Halloween season, where I think it was immediately lost in the shuffle.  While I understand the thinking - the movie takes place on Halloween night and is about a seance and ghosts - the trailers didn't really make *anything* particularly clear or compelling.  And Poirot, a character folks know from PBS spots, is not famous as a ghost chaser or breaker.  So one could assume before even starting the movie that this detective, who is the consummate deductive genius, would be disproving ghosts and ghouls, and it all felt a bit ill-conceived as a Halloween flick.*

The title itself seems an attempt to tie the movie into the "A Haunting" series of films and trick the youths into watching it, and while there are worse fates, it's kind of odd.  But it also loses the tie to the actual novel, moves it to Venice from England, and can make you wonder what tax incentives Italy was offering for filming there?  Or if this was a "postcard picture" for all involved.  And, btw, from a quick glance, this story is about 65% new, using only the raw materials of the novel, Hallowe'en Party.

But, I'd heard from Simon that the movie was pretty solid, and then two more folks (hi Mike and Laura) watched it within a day of each other and said that, yes, it was worth a watch.  And, with the promise of Michelle Yeoh, we found it on Hulu.