The holiday brought me the Criterion collection of the Showa era Godzilla films.
I dove right in to Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla which I remembered as a favorite local video store rental from when I was a kid. It’s still fun.
In particular Nanbara the interpol agent had always stuck with me as a character image. Doing some digging it clicked and made sense once I found out he apparently was analogous to Christopher Lee in playing Dracula in Japan:
I had my yearly dose of Die Hard on Christmas Eve. Still the best Christmas movie out there.
Also, finished the last season of The Crown. Impressive cast on this season, definitely Dominic West and Elizabeth Debicki as Charles and Diana, but also Imelda Staunton and Jonathan Pryce as Queen and Prince Phillip.
Yesterday I had a day at home after a weekend full of games and socializing, so I spent it watching three back to back episodes of Critical Role (around the beginning of the Croma Conclave crisis)
Tonight I continued with the criterion Showa collection back to 1954’s Godzilla.
I feel bad gushing any text about this movie but maybe I’ll say something somebody will like. It’s pretty roundly accepted this is a great movie and I really like it. This is the second time I’ve sat down and watched the whole original thing and it’s still strong this second time some years later. I saw the Raymond Burr version once during high school and it didn’t hit.
Three things hit me worth typing here I think from that viewing.
First, the scene in Serizawa’s lab with Eiko and Serizawa from where they go downstairs to when she puts on her apron in the background at home is just an amazing cosmic horror style scene whether in this movie or out.
Second, that led me to realize I really like the parts of these movies that are stories about people in a world with Godzilla as opposed to parts about Godzilla. Even when it’s bonkers. Like the folks on the train chatting about Godzilla is great. The parts with cosmic horror mad scientist or interpol alien hunter are fun too and it may be the 10 year old comic fan in me but those bonkers stories are kind of more fun with Godzilla in the background than just on their own.
Third, I caught myself at times watching this as a propaganda film from a world with Godzilla in it. Like an in-universe artifact from there. I think it’s all that time watching Victory at Sea with my dad maybe and the depth charge stock footage used here. This was particularly strong in the scenes with the jet fighters being cheered on by the crowd of survivors at the docks.
Again, I feel like I’m preaching to the choir talking about this movie here but if you haven’t seen it I think it’s worth a watch for sure.
I have no recollection of which of the Godzilla films this was, as it was something I saw randomly on TV one night years ago; but my one permanent Godzilla recollection is bemusement at how dramatically the scale of Godzilla would change from scene to scene for no apparent reason. He might be crushing houses under foot in one scene, yet later be seen stomping around amongst houses, at only 2-3 times their height. There was seemingly no attempt at consistency at all between the different models.
I can appreciate that. I suspect it’s partly because we can buy into human characters more easily than we can buy into Godzilla – so when we see those human characters buying into Godzilla, then it makes it easier for us to do the same.
I noticed similar things with Doctor Who - quite a few stories open with people doing normal people things, but in space or wherever, before the monster shows up, and I love that stuff.
I noticed with watching Glass Onion and recently Enola Holmes (and Knives Out was the last movie I saw at the movies before the pandemic) that I seem to enjoy these modern detective stories quite a bit. Are there more of those? Any recommendations? (As in games I seem to enjoy the puzzly aspects, I am apparently a puzzle person through and through… )
I’ve not seen a lot of them in film, though I have many, many recommendations of various sorts of mystery novel. 
I still have a few episodes of the Crown. Apparently another season of Bad Batch is coming “soonish” and I for one can’t wait to see more of Ahsoka (we just finished the second half of Tales of the Jedi last night). Apparently, Dr Who is coming to Disney as well… and I am considering a rewatch of Clone Wars or The Good Place. But sometimes I like to sprinkle a good movie or two between the shows… just because the ark ends up shorter and I don’t have to carry the tension across multiple episodes
My favourite of that kind is Luther, although finding episodes of it other than in the BBC iPlayer could be tricky. And I guess you have seen True Detective and The Wire in series format.
With regards to movies… most are really old, and I guess the new takes on Poirot’s Orient Express and Death on the Nile could be worth a watch if you have not seen previous versions already…?
We’ve seen Luther and liked it quite a bit. I think it was on Prime for a while? Not sure. Nope I have not seen True Detective. I have heard about it. I think it seemed a bit too gritty and dark for me when I read about it. I’ll have to check it out anyway. I might have a wrong impression. I have not seen The Wire. I have only just figured out that this might be the kind of stuff I enjoy right now.
We also watched Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery on Christmas Eve and enjoyed it as much as the first movie.
Bullet Train is also on our list!
If you’ve never seen the TV show Jonathan Creek then give it a try. It’s a light-hearted mystery/crime series where the titular character invents magic tricks for a living, but winds up using his skills with illusions to investigate “impossible” crimes on the side. The episodes invariably focus on the puzzle of how the thing was accomplished, first and foremost.
For more lighthearted mystery fun, I would recommend Psych, though it is much further on the silly scale compared to…well, just about anything.
If we’re into “silly but watchable episode of the week”, I’ll always recommend Leverage 
While I’m home for the holidays, my mom and I have been rewatching the late 1950s Guy Williams Zorro series. My 10-year-old niece has started watching along and really getting into the swashbuckling adventures. She occasionally needs help to follow the most complicated plots and we have had a couple discussions in response to things that are not the norm today (such as an episode yesterday that prompted her to ask what were gypsies and why were the other people talking about them so badly). That problem aside, it is quite the testimony that the old black and white show is one of the few things that has got her to put aside her iPad without prompting.
I kept going tonight with Godzilla Raids Again and I was pleasantly surprised. I’d never seen this before and I’d kind of understood it to be a rushed follow up.
There’s a fair bit of pretending to run a fishing company and then a prison break that work for me in the “normal for a movie stuff in a world with Godzilla” way. There are contrivances galore. There are a lot of models with unconvincing mass. But it’s a strong offering and I think worth a watch as a follow up to the original movie.
There are a lot of sections that are very quiet in terms of musical score and that worked for me. Effects wise, the scale model work on the buildings was impressive and I liked that the big monster fight was more framed as the destruction happening around the big monster fight. There were some technical filming issues that affected the speed of the motion and budget meant they just kind of left it as it was and moved on. That sped up monster motion does lend a dreamlike character to what’s happening when I’m feeling most charitable but when I’m not feeling charitable it looks cheap and undermines any sense of gravitas a gargantuan carnivorous ankylosaurus with brains in its chest might have.
Turns out 1955 was a while back folks. I think I was also really in the mood for black and white film and that helped me loosen up and enjoy this one.
I had my family over, and we watched Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which was a flop in its time, but which is nowadays seen as the final hurrah in Preston Sturges’ fairly extraordinary series of screwball classics. I’d been wanting to do this for about a decade but, as my sister is rarely in the country, opportunities have been few and far between.
It’s a black comedy which runs the gamut from actual slapstick to sharp-witted dialogue to some genuinely ugly moments; so tonally, the film is all over the place (which may or may not explain its failure in its day), but that’s also partly why I felt it had something for everyone. It’s uneven, but also wildly inventive. Classical music plays a huge part in the film (the lead character is a conductor), and I was confident that my parents would greatly appreciate this aspect, and that my Dad would quite likely be familiar with some of the pieces featured. (Sturges supposedly came up with the initial idea while working on a different script, after realising in the process of writing one scene that the music he was hearing on the radio in the background had caused him to significantly alter what he’d had in his head to start with, subconsciously influencing his thought processes.) My brother and sister share my sense of humour, so I knew the comedy would hit for them. And my sister once played in an orchestra, so she had that middle ground.
I do think it’s a film which would have benefited from some more judicious editing of a few scenes – but then I think I’ve thought that about pretty much every Preston Sturges film I’ve seen, and I love them regardless. Highly recommended despite its flaws.
(I’ve also now found that there’s also a 1984 remake with Dudley Moore and Nastassja Kinski which looks pretty awful. One of the posters for that seems familiar though, so I’m wondering whether I’d seen it advertised at the time. I cannot imagine Moore in this role at all, but apparently it was intended for Peter Sellers who I can imagine playing it. Mind you, based on the dire trailer I just watched, no particular attempt was made to play the original character. Sadly I also have to recommend avoiding the trailer for the original film, as I think it shows several things that it shouldn’t.)
Talking of older movies, this year I watched two on youtube and absolutely loved them:
The Dark Corner 1946 (with Lucille Ball in a crime noir!)
and
the amazing 1936 My Man Godfrey with Carole Lombard. This must have been one of the first screwball comedies, and was nominated for 6 Oscars despite being a pure comedy. Genuinely one of the best movies I saw in 2022.
I second the My Man Godfrey recommendation – it’s a classic for sure!
Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night from the previous year, actually swept all of the major Oscars. It’s one of my favourite films, and is near enough to screwball/farce to count it in that genre. If you haven’t seen that one, I recommend adding it to your list.
I’m not familiar with The Dark Corner but I’ll happily take your recommendation on that. I love a good noir, and Lucille Ball is great. I last saw her in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) which was what happened when Dorothy Arzner, one of the only women directing films in the Hollywood studio system of the time, got the opportunity to take over and rework a musical about showgirls, producing “a landmark in the history of feminist cinema” (quoting a 2020 review by Pamela Hutchinson). It was a film society screening, so I saw it on the big screen – lovely. (In fact, I got to see My Man Godfrey in the same manner a few years earlier – if anyone reading has a local film society, I’d urge you to check it out… I get to see so many great films on the big screen that way, as they were meant to be seen, and I absolutely love it.)
Finally watched Hawkeye, couldn’t remember where I was up to, so restarted and binge-watched the whole thing (only six episodes). And it was pretty good fun.