Lithesome Protagonists and Goggling Extras

Hello, everyone! Sorry for not having updated in a rather long time, but I haven't been able to either think of or work up the gumption for a suitable post. I suppose I'll just make this one broad of topic and treat on some of the various happenings of mea vita. :-)

I've found miles of walking trails that can be walked to from my house. My longest hike so far has been about 3 hours and I haven't exhausted any trail system yet. Despite the signs warning of cougars and rattlesnakes, I have so far only seen a bucketload of rabbits, a few squirrels, a bunch of raptors that might be golden eagles (though I wouldn't know the first thing about bird identification of that precision) and a positive ubiquity of fuzzy caterpillars. I'd like to think the cougars wouldn't dare mess with me, but I suspect they're just aloof and shy by nature like any predatory animal. ;-) My three hour hike, by the way, thanked me for my pains with a ripping good case of sunburn that makes me look a bit like a roasted beet.

I watched the movie Godzilla yesterday: the 1998 Roland Emmerich remake. I shall be sure to review it on Tolle, as soon as revitalize the bally thing (sorry David!), but I'll make some comments on it here as well, just for fun. :D

Godzilla him- (or is it her?) self looks like a dork. If you've ever imagined a 500 ft. iguana with skinny legs and Stegosaurus plates, a sort of upside-down rectangular snout, and the intermittent-only-when-it's-convenient-for-Roland-Emmerich ability to breath fire, then you may have imagined something extremely similar to the nuclear lizard. The plot is so basic I may be able to sum it up in one sentence. Let's see: French nuclear tests in the French Polynesian Islands mutate a hitherto undiscovered dinosaur into a vast and virtually impregnable monster which swims around destroying fishing boats in search of its coveted food, and eventually ends up in New York, where it whallops the crap out of the Big Apple, performs a broad series of improbable actions which touch the lives of flat and silly characters, and lays about a billion young in Madison Square Garden.

Matthew Broderick takes about fifteen steps down from his hilarious role as Ferris Bueler to portray Niko Satopolos, or something like that, a former anti-nuclear activist now trying to effect "real change" by working on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission studying the effect of radiation on existing species. Somehow the filmmakers have managed to invent a job position perfectly suited to studying mutant monsters. Yeah.... Anyway, this cove exists primarily to chew up and spit out improbable pronouncements like "we're looking an incipient creature. The dawn of a new species. The first of its kind." Woo-hoo. His egregious ex-girlfriend, who becomes his current-girlfriend by the end of the film, is blond and shows it. After stupidly, predictably stealing a VHS tape from the military labelled TOP SECRET in order to get a one-up on her snotty boss and prove she can be a real reporter, she makes Broderick mad because her actions have ended up in getting him kicked off the team, because everyone thinks he leaked the information. Duh! She then performs one of the most fake sobbing sessions I've ever seen, one that might make Mel Gibson into the greatest tragedian of all time.

Roger Ebert quite sensibly pointed out some, er, aberrations between the laws of physics and the actual behavior of Godzilla. I'd like to point some out too, which may overlap with his list.

1. How does it remain underwater for hours without gills?
   
2. How do suspension cables on a bridge trap it in place when it can literally blast Godzilla-sized holes in steel skyscrapers and crush tanks like paper cups?
   
3. It can breathe fire in such a way as to blow up three or four cars at a time. The creature is also smart enough to evade and then lay a trap for a flight of three attack helicopters and lead a torpedo back toward the submarine that fired it. Nevertheless, when it has a carload of main characters trapped in a tunnel, it never even occurs to it to simply roast and incinerate the whole shebang and leave all four main characters as barbecued ash. It also never occurs to it to use this fire-breathing capacity against the military, even though this would probably be four times more effective than just stomping.
   
4. In one of the most improbable actions scenes in the film, why does it hold a flippin' taxi in its mouth for five minutes and give Broderick enough time to electrocute its mouth? It would be as easy as pie for a creature of that size to just EAT the taxi. Presumably a nuclear digestive system could take care of the metal parts--or maybe that's how it would die. I don't know, just don't hold it there like a dork because it has main characters inside!

Finally we must turn to the question of the Iuvenes Godzillae, the terrifying and monstrous Godzilla Juvenile Brigade! Now, Godzilla is big, but unless it had a womb the size of Central Park, I don't see how it could have laid several hundred 8-foot tall eggs in small clusters all around the bottom level of Madison Square Garden. Be that as it may, the movie tells us it did. Now, I fully realize that many animal babies are born far less dependent than any human baby, but nevertheless, gimme a break. The Godzilla-lets are 9 feet tall, agile, intelligent, buffed, and fully ready and capable to ingest a human at one minute old. It was hilariously obvious that this scene was copied by rote from the Velociraptor set-pieces in the two Jurassic Park films made prior to Godzilla. We have a Iuvenus Godzillus tap a door with its forehead in exploratory fashion, which swings out a bit and then swings back to bump it in the forehead; now convinced of the door's facility at swinging open, the beast gives it a hearty shove and stalks into the room. I happen to have seen the first Jurassic Park film a number of times, and I can assure you that when Timmy and Lex run into the kitchen toward the end of the film, one of the velociraptors does the exact same thing. There's even a scene of one plastering its face against a small glass window in a door, going eye-to-eye with a main character, which unsurprisingly also happens in Jurassic Park a couple minutes after the above-mentioned scene. Broderick manages to trip up about a half dozen of these creatures with basketballs and Jawbreaker candies, which is kind of funny in its own right.

But here's the deal. Something that permeated the whole film. When a monster wants to eat an extra, its physical prowess is in top form. Its bites have consistent and lethal accuracy. Its leaps are fantastically high, its intelligence works in some kind of predatorial hyper-mode that cancels out every attempt of human ingenuity to avoid being eaten. Come to think of it, though, it just as often poses for the camera in front of the extra while that extra goggles at it in impotent horror, and THEN it goes in for the kill. But when a monster wants to eat a protagonist, it is suddenly all bark and no bite. Its appearance of savagery and hunting capability trebles, but its actual success rate falls to about .0001%. As mentioned above, Godzilla takes about three minutes trying to decide whether to crunch a cab full of main characters when it had no compunction about chomping down on a HELICOPTER hard enough to make it explode earlier in the film. As for the juveniles, if they want to kill an expendable French dude (the French secret service is involved in this film, don't ask), they just bust through a door, slam into him, and start feasting. If they want to kill Matthew Broderick, he just can just go "whoah!" and kind of suck in his stomach, and their jaws will clamp shut on the empty air where his acrobatic navel was a millisecond before. These characters literally dart through crowds of these monsters, supposedly crowding them together in such confusion that they can't really be bitten. But even if these 'little' guys weren't pack-hunters by nature it doesn't take that much effort to just rip somebody's arm off when you're nine feet of sauropod ferocity.

Well. I had fun with that. There are other things I could mention about the film, but I'll leave it be for now. :P

I have some cool things coming up. In just a couple weeks I'll be off to Texas to visit Robert in his natural habitat. :-P A few days after that, David will be coming down here to visit. About a month after that, I'll probably be visiting the Deckers. Roughly two weeks after that, I'll be taking a summer class at Hillsdale. A month after that, I'll be in Italy. A month after that, I'll be back at Hillsdale for freshman year. Yipes! :D

Cheerio, peeps!

~Connor