 5/9/08: Closed because...
…we won’t see Speed Racer until a very late showing, and the only conservative angle to What Happens In Vegas is an appearance by Dennis Miller. We thought we’d fake our way through a lazy week by linking to an article from elsewhere, but it didn’t run as scheduled.
Instead, we recommend Kathy Shaidle’s review of 1966’s Blow-Up. Anybody reading this site should already be checking out her Five Feet of Fury blog. Shaidle’s own politics are often mixed with trashy pop-culture moments, and her thoughts on Blow-Up are a lot less shrill than whatever we planned to write someday. We would’ve included a SPOILER warning on the piece, though—and probably thought up some political context for Jane Birkin’s big scene.
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 5/7/08: Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971)
First off, yes, we know it’s really Godzilla vs. Hedorah—or Gojira tai Hedora, if you want to get technical. We saw this in the theaters as Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, though, and that’s how it remains implanted in our mind. Of course, it’s also implanted in our mind as the most ludicrous Godzilla film ever made—and, by then, we’d already seen Godzilla’s Revenge on television. That one’s really baffling.
For our purposes, Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster is also another entry that we meant to get around to in the aftermath of Earth Day. To their credit, the folks at Toho Films never meant to make an environmental epic. The story goes that the head of Toho was in the hospital while Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster was getting made. The guy was pretty unhappy to see what director Yoshimitsu Banno had done with the studio’s biggest name. At least Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster isn’t some kind of campy disaster. It’s more like a weird mix of serious subject matter and overblown lunacy.
Anyway, on to the plot: Dr. Yano and his family live somewhere on the Japanese coast. The doctor—who likes to bring his little boy Ken along on dangerous missions—sets out to investigate the origin of these weird giant tadpoles that are showing up in the ocean. He goes diving while Ken is left alone to play on jagged rocks along the shoreline. Ken and his dad both discover that there’s a creature flying around that’s made out of sludge. Don’t touch it, though. Ken gets a minor chemical burn on his hand, while his father is neatly scorched by radiation burns along one side of his face.
This creature—who appears in many variations—then becomes more aggressive, ultimately bogarting the smokestacks of the local factories. Ken decides to name the creature “Hedorah.” Some people say that’s Japanese for “pollution,” but it might just translate as “yucky crap.” Ken’s dad works to unravel the mystery of Hedorah so the government can kill it. Ken simply declares that Godzilla will come along to save the day, assuming that Japan’s favorite giant lizard isn’t too bummed out by all the pollution in his home country.
This is a good place to note that a lot of the film’s running time is dedicated to trash rotting in a bay. At one point, we see a crying baby sitting up to his neck in the muck. The movie doesn’t even bother suggesting that Hedorah has anything to do with the poor tyke. See, it turns out that Japan has a huge problem with pollution—as constantly noted by this hipster type named Yukio who’s always hanging around with Dr. Yano.
Our first thought was that Yukio is Ken’s older brother. Then it seems more like Yukio’s just a bad influence. He even brings Ken to some crazy nightclub where people drop acid, imagine all the other hippies with fish heads, and dance to an annoying theme song called “Save The Earth.” Yukio is so busy planning environmental protests that he doesn’t even notice when Dr. Yano decides that Hedorah isn’t a man-made crisis. Turns out that the pesky pollutant is just an alien type who hopped a ride on an asteroid.
Yukio can’t be bothered with those kinds of details. He’s got bigger ideas, like getting “every youngster in the country” and throwing “one blast of a party at Mount Fuji.” Yukio’s big plans work out like most environmental events. As one comrade notes, “I thought a million people were coming. There’s only a hundred.”
“So why complain about it?” proclaims Yukio. “There’s no place else to go, and pretty soon we’ll all be dead. So forget it! Let’s sing and dance while we can! Blow your mind!”
Then everyone starts dancing around bonfires while a band plays lame acid-rock. We’re talking about Japanese acid-rock, so maybe it’s played right to left. Speaking of acid, Hedorah happens to decide that Mount Fuji would be a fine place to show up and start flinging around his caustic mud. In typical fashion, Yukio’s put lil’ Ken in harm’s way by dragging him along to this all-night rave. Fortunately, Godzilla’s also there to put an end to Hedorah.
It’s nice to see Yukio’s followers get wiped out by a monster that their leader couldn’t bother researching. It’s even more fun to realize that Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster is also nuclear power vs. pollution. After all, Godzilla was created by courtesy of President Harry S. Truman. The lizard’s nuclear breath even saves the day when the Japanese military can’t get a decent power source to unleash their own secret weapon against Hedorah.
And so we’ve got a landscape littered with dead hippies (although Japan’s hippies look more like a Toho version of The Mod Squad) while clean nuclear power helps to save the world. That’s the happiest ending to a Godzilla film since the American-made King Kong won their big battle back in 1962.
Make it your own: Godzilla vs. Hedorah (okay, okay) was released on DVD in 2004 as part of Toho’s big 50th Anniversary celebration. It’s a fine print that can be had cheap—and it’s pretty much what we remember seeing in the theater way back when.
The only big difference is that the dubbing on the DVD doesn’t include the English lyrics to “Save The Earth.” You have to settle for hearing the original Japanese lyrics. That’s a shame. We have fond memories of walking around the mall after seeing Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and singing the theme with our childhood pal—well, better if we don't mention his name. He grew up to be a Hollywood producer. Nowadays, a guy could get blacklisted for not taking “Save The Earth” seriously.
The DVD also has very nice ad copy on the back of the box. We stole today’s headline from it, although we could’ve gone with “Mammoth of Muck.”
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 5/5/08: Closed—as Ordained by God!
Deadlines loom, and, as the Good Book says, “Thou shalt not harvest schlock whilst thou children starvest.” Except, of course, the Bible says no such thing. Good thing, too. Harvesting schlock is our only job skill. We just wanted to catch up with goofing on Nancy Pelosi and her own fondness for imaginary Bible verses.
Someone else should’ve mentioned this while we were on vacation, but now we have to note that Pelosi’s preening brings her reign in the House of Representatives even closer in comparison to 1962’s classic caveman saga Eegah—which also ends with a dopey and fictitious Bible verse. This got us to watch Eegah again, and it’s still a fun film with a title sequence that once scared the heck out of a certain 10-year-old conservative. Sadly, there’s no real political content. The only thing we could think of was that the prehistoric Eegah seems to have been kept alive through the ages by the sulfur in his California cave. That might explain why environmentalists smell that way.
Yeah, that’s the best gag we could manage. The director of Eegah made a Cold War classic, though, and we’ll review that soon enough—but probably not when postings resume on Wednesday, May 7th.
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 5/2/08: Iron Man (2008)
It’s interesting that Iron Man and The Hulk both have big-screen adventures coming out this summer. The two represent the greatest gulfs in the comic universe, with Iron Man—being military industrialist Tony Stark—often confronting The Hulk in pragmatic and logical ways. There are other writers who’d do a better job of discussing all that. The important thing is that now we have Iron Man, and it lives up to all those teaser trailers that were littering the internet.
It was nerve-wracking to see how good the film was looking. Iron Man seemed set to embrace Tony Stark as the anti-Commie hero of his early ’60s origins. The opening of the film—a long sequence before the title card—certainly sets up Stark as our kind of warlord. He’s palling around in Afghanistan with American soldiers who clearly admire the millionaire. That fun comes to an abrupt end, though. His convoy is attacked by terrorists who take Stark into custody.
That’s when we get the aforementioned title card, and a flashback that makes us like Stark even more. He’s in Vegas for some kind of honor, and banters with a typically vapid journalist who asks Stark how he enjoys being known as the “Merchant of Death.” He thinks that’s a pretty nifty nickname. Maybe it’s a little much when Stark is shown to keep a private plane full of stripping stewardesses, but that’s how he rolls to Afghanistan—where Stark demonstrates some new weaponry. His best lines there are also in the trailers:
“They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire. I prefer the weapon you only need to fire once.”
“Is it better to be feared or respected? I say—is it too much to ask for both?
No wonder those soldiers are so happy to be hanging out with Stark. The products of Stark Industries will be keeping them alive. The guy deserves all the stewardess/strippers he can get. But then we begin the superhero part of the movie, with Stark building his Iron Man armor while being held hostage by the dopey Islamic terrorists. This long sequence reminds us why Muslim nations haven’t contributed anything to modern technology outside of the suicide belt. (We stole that line, but that makes it no less true.)
From there, Iron Man is a celebration of killing terrorists and traitors. Some film critics might try to tell you different. After all, the last thing Stark sees before the terrorists capture him is that they’re using his company’s technology. It’s still a stretch to say that Iron Man is about the evil of American capitalism arming our enemies. Stark wants to get out of the munitions business after he escapes. That doesn’t mean he’s becoming the new George Soros.
As Stark declares, “I want to protect the people I put in harm’s way.” This involves Iron Man returning to Afghanistan and blowing up more terrorists. Really, the only disappointing thing about Iron Man is a scene where our hero calmly walks away from an exploding enemy tank. That’s a bad cliché—but at least the camera lingers on the marvelous mayhem.
To the great disappointment of many critics, the film’s main villain—and this is hardly a SPOILER—isn’t presented as a typical capitalist. Tony’s business partner is simply a traitor. He’s the guy who sold the weapons to the terrorists. There wasn’t anything business-as-usual about that transaction. In a similar spirit, Iron Man isn’t business-as-usual for Hollywood.
Make it your own: In theaters now—and you won’t even mind that blatant Burger King product placement. It’s kind of patriotic, and the toys in the Burger King Kid’s Meals are really cool. The last line in the film is pretty awful, though.
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 4/30/08: “Ruby’s Bird Bath” (c. 2006)
A few readers noticed that Dramarama’s ode to Earth Day marks the date as April 21st, even though we now celebrate the very important event on April 22nd. We don’t know why that changed. We just know that environmental activists don’t really worry about consistency.
On the other hand, things are very consistent with episodes of Max & Ruby. The show is based on a series of children’s books, which probably also repeat the same story about these lovable bunnies. Ruby is the sensible older sister. Max is the rebellious toddler. Ruby has a task she wants to complete. Max undermines things by insisting on some strange detour, while intoning a different mantra each time.
“Ruby’s Bird Bath” is inherently typical, as Ruby sets out to earn an Environmental Badge as part of her Bunny Scout activities. “My bird bath will be all natural,” she proclaims. “Bath toy,” Max responds, placing one of his favorites into Ruby’s artificial pond.
Ruby informs Max that there’s no place for man-made devices in the utopia she’s creating. She removes the toy, but no birds arrive. Ruby figures out what’s wrong. “You can’t have an environmentally-correct bird bath,” she explains, “without water lilies.”
Ruby adds some, but then finds that Max has contributed a toy submarine. She removes the offensive element and scolds Max. “Bath toy,” he rebuts. Ruby still doesn’t get any birds to visit. “If I was a bird,” she declares, “I couldn’t wait to take a bath in my bird bath!” All good environmentalists have that sense of empathy.
Ruby decides to add some bulrushes. Or cattails, if you prefer, but it’s kind of neat to see a cartoon bunny talking about “bulrushes.” She sets them up, but that pesky Max (with a cry of “Bath toy!”) strikes while Ruby is distracted. He sends in a toy battleship—or maybe it’s an oil tanker—that promptly knocks over the plants.
Ruby again tries to reason with Max: “There’s no place for bath toys in an environmentally-correct bird bath!” It’s too bad that Max doesn’t have a better vocabulary. Then he could explain that he wants no part of Ruby’s environmentally-correct world if Max can’t enjoy his bath toys there. Instead, he says, “Bath toy!”
Ruby returns to pondering the ungrateful nature of Nature: “Why haven’t any birds come yet? My bird bath is environmentally perfect!” The pressure’s on, because her Bunny Scout leader will be visiting at any minute. Fortunately, a flock of birds suddenly arrives. This is because Max has struck again, and put a rubber duck into the bird bath.
The birds are really interested in Max’s rubber duck—which is most likely loaded with phthalates. Those are the wonderful chemicals that make plastics so flexible, and which environmental activists are currently trying to ban. Never mind that our parents and grandparents were teething on phthalates with no consequences. The environmental activists have found a new scare tactic. As the activists would explain, “There’s no place for phthalates in an environmentally-correct bird bath!”
Max & Ruby may be just a cartoon, but you can say the same for the environmental movement. Max & Ruby is certainly more realistic—especially if we consider Max to be the descendants of the bunnies who built the Alaskan pipelines that were supposed to kill off all the local caribou and moose. The caribou went on to use the pipelines as a mating device. Max’s rubber duck will probably lead to some hot animal mating, too.
The Bunny Scout leader doesn’t notice Max’s rubber duck. She’s too busy being impressed by all the real birds. The lady can’t figure out Ruby’s secret: “However did you manage to attract so many birds? Was it the rocks? Was it the water lilies? I know—it was the bulrushes!”
Like any good environmentalist, Ruby commences with some spin. “It was all that,” she replies, “and a little something extra.” That’s smart, Ruby. Keep the facts vague. Anything else might interfere with your funding.
Make it your own: There’s some weirdness with Max & Ruby. “Ruby’s Bird Bath” was originally on the Max & Ruby: Max and the Easter Bunny DVD collection, but that went quickly out of print. Meanwhile, hardcore Max & Ruby fans are bitter about the show’s changed direction since debuting in 2002. This episode is supposedly one of the lesser ones. We don’t really have a position on that controversy. If you’re curious about Max & Ruby, though, it’s shown every day on the Noggin network—with “Ruby’s Bird Bath” currently being aired about once a week.
And speaking of rubber ducks and mating…
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 We’re off on another vacation. The new entry below will have to suffice until Wednesday, April 30th—when we’ll probably return with postings that would’ve made for a theme week of Earth Day tributes if we hadn’t gone off on vacation.
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 4/21/08: Dramarama: “What Are We Gonna Do?” (1991)
Dramarama was one of the best bands of the ’80s and ’90s, and were timeless in their dedication to catchy and sensitive glam-rock. That’s why it was fairly alarming when 1991’s Vinyl included an ode to Earth Day. As it turns out, the band also found the topic to be distressful. The details are discussed in Jerry McCulley’s fine liner notes for The Best of Dramarama:
…“What Are We Gonna Do?” parodied late–period Beatles pop to cynically skewer the bumper-sticker mentality of all-too-many armchair environmentalists. “I still don’t think people get it,” notes [frontman] John Easdale. “Environmental people listen to it and think, “Wow, this guy is really ‘Green’!” It disturbs me to think that there really are people who believe that they’re ‘spokesperson for a generation.’”
Easdale recalls the song’s genesis: “We played at the festival celebrating the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. Forget about the last 19 that nobody celebrated; ‘It’s the 20th anniversary, let’s have a party!’ And they did, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Linda Gray from Dallas is in our trailer smoking cigarettes and drinking beers, and there’s a quarter of a fucking million people in front of us! When everyone left, we looked at all the garbage left behind and wondered just what we were celebrating.”
“What Are We Gonna Do?” captures Dramarama’s exasperation. The lyrics begin with the band “trying hard to think of something meaningful and worthy, kind of earthy.” By the end of the song, Easdale is passing along a message from “a tiny little man” that the world will end by 2041. The song closes with the classic hand-wringing Leftist angst of a repeated refrain: “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?”
Of course, it’s a lot more fun to hear the tune. We could’ve sworn there was a video made for “What Are We Gonna Do?” Instead, all we can find is a recent Earth Day video that earnestly uses the Dramarama song as its soundtrack. So, there’s the joke made real.
Make it your own: Everything by Dramarama is worth owning—although the recent reunion album should be the last of your priorities. John Easdale also made a great solo album, and contractual reasons had the band releasing one album as The Bent Backed Tulips. As noted, “What Are We Gonna Do?” is on The Best of Dramarama. You can also get the brilliant Vinyl for really cheap. You can pretty much get all of Dramarama for really cheap.
Here’s the band’s MySpace page. John Easdale would later protest Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial campaign with a cover of Dead Kennedy’s “California Uber Alles.” We discussed that with Easdale, though, and he sounded perfectly reasonable about his concerns. There’s really no reason for anybody not being a Dramarama fan. Just ask Ellen DeGeneres.
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 4/18/08: Closed, Pretty Much
We're trying to prepare everyone for our upcoming vacation—which also means we have to prepare, so we're too busy beating early deadlines to post today. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is in theaters, though, and you might be wondering if it's yet another in a series of grown-up, vaguely moralistic comedies from Judd Apatow. That's the writer/producer/director who was also behind Knocked Up, Superbad, and our beloved Walk Hard. Forgetting Sarah Marshall has a pleasant angle with its tale of a nice American guy whose TV-star girlfriend dumps him for a vapid rock star prone to slogans such as "Sodomize Intolerance." Actually, as you can see in the above graphic, that case is better made by the international advertising campaign. The American ads have been kind of irritating.
And while Forgetting Sarah Marshall goes on for a little too long, it ends with a spectacle that you won't see in any other theater at the multiplex this weekend. Also, the film stars and is written by one of the cast members from How I Met Your Mother, so that's an encouraging sign.
Postings will likely resume on Monday, but, seriously, there's a vacation coming up real soon.
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 The best part about Barack Obama’s recent snobbery has been the Leftist acclaim. You might have missed it, but there are plenty of websites where commenters are thrilled to have a Presidential candidate finally tell the hard truth about all those embittered gun-owning religious folk.
It’s certainly no surprise that a lot of those commenters are at film sites of a Leftist bent. Those same film sites will probably be raving about Baby Mama, which is an upcoming comedy from Tina Fey—whose 30 Rock sitcom is one of NBC’s more reliable bastions of irrational fear of conservatives. That same attitude is nicely summed up in the main promotional image for Baby Mama, which showed up in our mailbox on a screening invitation that we’ll have to decline. (We’ll be out of town on vacation next week; sorry to just blurt out the bad news like that.)
Baby Mama is about a successful executive (Tina Fey) who’s about to receive a child from a surrogate mother who’s simply the wrong type of person. You probably can't read the print on the graphic above, but here’s what it says: “Would you put your eggs…in this basket?”
The “basket” refers to Amy Poehler as the trashy mother—except Poehler is looking cute and perky with her high cheekbones and blonde hair and blue eyes. What’s supposed to be so trashy about her, anyway?
You’re not looking closely enough. Poehler’s character is clearly sipping a drink out of some kind of supersized cup from a fast-food restaurant. It’s probably a carbonated drink. That’s disgusting. The only good news is that maybe there’ll be a touching moment in Baby Mama where we actually learn that we shouldn’t be judgmental about anybody, and that we can all gain from each other’s experience and insights. The critics will love that—unless Poehler’s character is a Republican.
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 4/16/08: Suddenly (1954)
It sure is difficult typing away while wearing a barrel held up by suspender straps—but that’s nothing compared to how other citizens were held up yesterday. Fortunately, we can mark another Tax Day with a film usually found in the $1 bins. There’s a long story to Suddenly’s public domain status, starting with a rumor about star Frank Sinatra pulling the film from circulation after JFK’s murder. The most popular rumor—perhaps cultivated by Sinatra himself—says that the star was upset to learn that Lee Harvey Oswald had once watched this tale of Presidential assassination.
In truth, television stations just politely lost interest in showing Suddenly after November of 1963. The movie’s lapse into the public domain then allowed Suddenly to be rediscovered when lowlife companies were looking to put out video product in the ’80s. It was certainly one of the better films to be found cheap.
Suddenly has added value as a correction to a creepy myth about film noir. We hate hearing idiots pontificating about the genre as a shadowy world full of moral ambiguity and antiheroes. Film noir is really about good and evil, and the simple truth that each walks different paths. Suddenly is film noir in negative, too, set on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The action takes place in the modest setting of Suddenly, and it’s our kind of town. The local deputy asks if the commotion that day is due to a “uranium strike.” A little boy is playing with a realistic cap gun, and Sheriff Shaw (Sterling Hayden) is asking the kid’s mom (and local widow) Ellen Benson if she wants to join him for church on Sunday.
The sheriff is busy this Saturday, since all the commotion is about a quick visit that the President of the United States is making to Suddenly. Our leader is going to arrive at the town’s train station at 5 pm. Ellen’s house has a perfect view of the train station. This brings in Sinatra as John Baron, posing with his cohorts as FBI agents while securing the house to take down the President.
Baron and his gang set up a rifle while Ellen, her son, and her elderly father (a former Treasury agent) are held hostage. Later on, the hostages will include Sheriff Shaw and a TV repairman. It’s a leisurely count to 5 pm, filled with lots of rampant patriotism. That’s established early on, as the Sheriff asks a Secret Service agent about their tip on the planned assassination. Shaw’s not sure why they trust the word of a dying stoolie. “The stoolie,” explains the agent, “seemed very proud of being an American.”
Things only get more patriotic once Baron reveals his motives. “You stink!” proclaims the 8-year-old. Baron responds by bragging about the Silver Star he earned killing Germans back in the war. It’s like the kid’s questioning his patriotism.
Grandpa’s still outraged: “But you’re an America citizen!” That even gets one of Baron’s partners to have some doubts. “Maybe the old man’s right,” he says. “It’s a terrible thing.”
“Yeah,” muses a smiling Baron. “I never killed a President before.”
That’s pretty much all that Suddenly entails. The good Americans are outraged, while Baron alternates between ranting about his military service and whining about his bad childhood. Phil Donahue and Michael Moore would have a knife fight over who got to make a documentary about Baron. The rhetoric gets more inspired as Baron gets more unhinged. “They’re stinking traitors,” declares the kid. “They’re Benedict Arnolds.”
“He’s your President, too,” adds the TV repairman, before accusing Baron and his men of being Commies and enemy agents.
“Don’t give me that politics jazz,” responds Baron. “It’s not my racket.” Suddenly doesn’t take that same attitude. The kid will eventually upgrade his toy gun to a working model, while the TV repairman—dismissed as a yokel—will work with Grandpa to be surprisingly resourceful. Ellen is too womanly to fire a gun at first, but she’ll become liberated in all the right ways.
And, of course, the train heads relentlessly towards Suddenly and Sinatra—who’d just won the Oscar that marked his comeback, so it’s interesting that this was the first role he filmed afterwards. Some critics say that it was Sinatra’s way of assuring Hollywood that he was a good American with appeal to the heartland. They ignore that Sinatra spends the film threatening to kill a little kid. Baron’s simply a great role to play, including a nice scene where the killer lists and dismisses the Presidential assassins of the past. The real Commie enemy agent was yet to come.
Make it your own: Word got out about Suddenly being a fine film, and the DVD age has seen some pricier repackaging. Alpha Video has a pretty good print on the higher end—with lots of new and used copies still available for a dollar.
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