Godzilla at Fifty: PopMatters Blows Out the Candles

Phil Nugent — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

PopMatters celebrates Godzilla's fiftieth birthday with a jam-packed "special section" on the radioactive thunder lizard's oevure and cultural legacy. Thomas Molesky and Brian Ruh fill in the historical context; Steven Luc examines Godzilla's ability to be all things to all people; Mark Pyzyk ponders the levels of "self-loathing" that drive audiences to cheer the big fella on as he confounds our military and flattens our cities; Tobias Peterson and Will Harris wonder how he got so cute; Bill Gibron addresses the criticisms leveled by Mystery Science Theater 3000 that "the surly superstar from the land of the rising sun really coasted through a great many of his later films."

In the opening essay, Mike Ward tracks what a long, strange trip it's been through the chronology of Japanese Godzilla films, from the atomic-devastation metaphors of the original Gojira, as hia mama named him, to the self-conscious mythology addressed three decades later in Godzilla 1985, in which Godzilla is compared, by a scientist, to "a living nuclear weapon" and described by reporter "Steve Martin" (Raymond Burr) as nature's way of reminding us "how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla." Writes Ward: "Maybe in Godzilla's case, overtly stating the theme is the same as contradicting it. If, in his unknowability, Godzilla stands in for the inexpressible horror of the atomic bomb, then expressing this metaphor outright — he's a 'living nuclear weapon' — robs it of its force. This is why mysterious quantities like the Oxygen Destroyer are no longer needed to defeat him. A volcano is now Godzilla's equal; which puts him into a known category, along with tornadoes and earthquakes. Godzilla is just another disaster." With so much to chew on, PopMatters could have been allowed to simply ignore perhaps the biggest disaster ever to tarnish Gojira's name, but instead, Ward addresses it head on, directly and succinctly: "Toho Productions' Godzilla could whip Roland Emmerich's Godzilla back to the Jazz Age."

Something Weird Video: "The End of an Era"

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Mike Vraney started Something Weird Video back in the late 1980s as a tiny videocassette concern devoted to keeping such grindhouse artifacts as Herschell Gordon Lewis's gore movies and "Chesty Morgan" vehicles alive for movie freaks, pop culture addicts, and other perverts. When DVD marginalized even the mainstream VHS market, Vraney had the choice of going to the trouble of transferring his then-vast back catalog to the new format or getting a new hobby. To his credit, Something Weird jumped in with both feet, embracing the digital age by making a redoubled effort to find the best available source materials and then jam-packing their home-video versions of such obscurities as The Girl from Rio with interviews, archival materials and other special features, as well as unearthing such neglected finds as Brian De Palma's first no-budget feature, Murder a la Mod, which was assumed to have been lost even by the director himself. If all this effort means that Something Weird became, in the words of Pop Matters blogger Bill Gibron, "the Criterion of Crap," well, just because the compliment may be a little back-handed doesn't mean it's not a compliment. If these films are going to be preserved and made available, here's to SWV for doing it with a level of inventiveness, passion and panache that the majors would do well to emulate. Unfortunately, Something Weird has now ended its association with the DVD distributor Image Entertainment. It's the latest setback for a company that had other problems, such as seeing the licensers of some of its prize titles capitalizing on the attention that SWV had won for them by lighting out for greener pastures, and if the company isn't dead yet, Gibron thinks it's "the end of an era." His full, heartfelt tribute to SWV's achievement can be read here. — Phil Nugent

The Screengrab : bill gibron

Godzilla at Fifty: PopMatters Blows Out the Candles

Something Weird Video: "The End of an Era"