Mike & Molly

An Oz esposide with Luke Perry.

People eating 😂😂😂

Amanda Knox documentary on Netflix. I read her book awhile back. It was riveting.

Facts Of Life

I'm watching another esposide of Oz that has Luke Perry in it. He looks hot.

I just finished watching the latest episodes of The Good Place and Pitch.

Oz - Season #5

The Middle

Seinfeld

Anime:
Astro Boy (1963)
Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 (1998)
Desert Punk (2004)

PX 11 News

Seinfeld- Season #8

Harry Potter the first movie. I'd never seen the movies before.

Yesterday, I drove into the city to an "artsy" cinema to see a limited screening of Shin Godzilla ("shin"="new"), which came out in theaters in Japan in July 2016; this version was subtitled.

This is the first new Toho Godzilla film in a decade, and it was really different. It's a reboot, but really takes a totally different approach to a Godzilla film than any of the past Japanese (or American, for that matter) G-films. I had to agree with my friend Brian's assessment that "It will probably never be one of my favorite Godzilla movies", but it's interesting, at least, in a number of different ways... and I'd say the differences are so multilayered that I'm not sure I can come to any definite conclusions about how I felt about it without seeing it a couple more times, at least.

There's a lot going on in the plot here, and I did get the feeling that some of the nuances and implied things were totally lost on me upon first viewing. Getting to the theater too late to find choice seating didn't help -- I was stuck in the second row, way too close to the screen, considering the subtitles (they appear at both the top and the bottom of the screen), plus the fact that the first half of the movie consists almost entirely of (possibly hundreds of) short shots (under 5 or 10 seconds, with more than half of them only 2 or 3 seconds long) in medium or extreme close-up, constantly cutting back and forth between them. Never can I recall seeing a film in which I was so acutely aware of every single wrinkle, blemish, and pore of every actor's face! So to begin with, the cinematography employed here is radically different, and so is the casting. Most of the actors here aren't your obvious 'types', with no real 'screen-idol' casting, and only a couple of the characters (more by contrast than anything else) emerging as above-average-looking humans. Only the female lead role seems to stray into 'less than plausible' characterization. Aside from that, this film is character-heavy (both in numbers and in emphasis) for a Godzilla film, and dense with dialogue exchanges of a plot-crucial nature. Most of the actors here turned in a fairly credible performance.

Unlike any other G-film, this one focuses on the government's reaction to the sudden appearance (and unprecedented revelation of the very existence) of Godzilla -- the mechanics and politics of the National Emergency Response protocols. That quickly escalates to a global reaction (in political terms) to the Japanese government's response to the crisis, when the governments of other countries assess the rapidly-escalating threat potential of Godzilla as a danger to the rest of the world. Most Godzilla films will focus on an older scientist, plus maybe a younger scientist and a girl (or sometimes with those two gender-reversed), plus the military commander and/or a soldier or pilot, all feet-on-the-ground characters caught up in dealing directly with countering the threat of Godzilla, hands-on, while the actual decision-makers responsible for deploying these people are merely referred to in an offhand line of dialogue or given a token cameo scene or two -- but here, the entire film revolves around the process of determining the "hows" and "whys", and the "what" of the appropriate response (which is nowhere near as clear-cut as you might think) by the politicians of Japan -- the committee meetings, the conflict between various factions of thought within the government, the international reaction, and the Japanese politicians' counter-reactions. That's what amounts to a speculative-fiction extrapolation in government-level Crisis Management scenarios. It's definitely the most 'real world' approach ever taken by a giant monster film, that's for sure. There are no giant robots or sci-fi military vehicles in the story here, and no clear heroic or villainous characters either -- just people, attempting to do what they think is the right thing. The threat of Godzilla itself is the one science-fantasy element that the film allows itself, and then tries to put that threat into the context of a very present-day world reaction. Even the economic impact of the cost of the devastation on the country of Japan is speculated upon in some detail. In the end, the film turns into a race against time, with no margin for error in determining the correct response to "the Godzilla problem", as the Japanese government tries to beat the doomsday deadline of a scheduled U.S. nuclear missile strike (with the support of the United Nations!) aimed at Tokyo. Yet the film doesn't view the American response xenophobically, either, as one of the main Japanese politicos ruefully admits, "They'd do the same if it were New York City."