Last night, we had my parents over to exchange Giftmas presents, since D and I will be out of town on Christmas Day proper. Among the things I got from my parents was a DVD I'd been waiting for the release of, Godzilla: Final Wars.
With D at a hair appointment this afternoon, I got some quality "male time" in front of the big-screen, watching everyone's favorite nuclear-powered-dinosaur open a can of whoopass on everyone and everything he came across.
Final Wars was made as a "going away party" of sorts, with nearly every monster from the Godzilla flicks putting in an appearance, even if that appearance lasts like 30 seconds with Godzilla one-shotting them into a final, permanent death (for instance, he decapitates Gigan on the first try.. no matter how you spin that in a future movie, it's a hard death to come back from).
Final Wars, planned as the last Toho-made Godzilla movie "for the foreseeable future", sought to give the fans some form of closure to it all. Amusingly, the 1995 "Godzilla vs. Destoroyah" was viewed by Toho as "the end", with the rights then ending up in U.S. hands, with distasterous Roland Emmerich "Godzilla" (see a great review of that). With their beloved monster neutered and turned into a Jurassic Park escapee, Toho decided "that couldn't be the final send-off for the big guy" and went back to their script-writing.
Anyhow, to make a long blog entry short, this movie starts out a little slow, but winds up with some serious nuclear-powered whoopass which any fan of the Big G will be happy to curl up with on Christmas Morning.
My fave this year was "BBS: the Documentary" Yeah, I'm a geek. It's kinda slow in spots, but it puts that period into a cohesive perspective. Having lived it, in a minor way, I never really *saw* it and couln't have explained it. My favorite bit was Jack Rickard saying he can't really explain the distiction between BBS/Doors and the Internet via dialup. Yah, me either.
Hey, anyone know? Was it a double-pun to name one of the early searches "Archie"? I know about the comic book... but Archie Goodwin was the detective who went out and got stuff for Nero Wolfe in the Rex Stout mystery novels. Wolfe would say something like, "Go and bring Mrs. Kloos to me." He didn't do it himself because he had slothy habits and never left the house on business.