I got Chinese food last week because I enjoy leftovers and fortune cookies. At least, I used to enjoy fortune cookies. I'm beginning to think fortune cookies don't like me very much, though.
Let's break this down. #1 isn't so bad, in my opinion, though Girlfriend thought it was the sort of fortune Genghis Khan might get.
#2 is more open to interpretation. Was that cookie trying to tell me I ought to be a test subject? That I was congenitally abnormal? And "could prosper"? Where's the world-bestriding confidence of fortune #1? Fortune cookies aren't a sound basis for major life decisions to begin with, but if the cookie itself is unsure of its prediction then the whole exercise's narrow foundation crumbles.
#3 doesn't make very much sense. I suspect it is a lyric from an upcoming song by one of those arch pop rock groups like the Arctic Monkeys or the Killers.
#4 is practically fighting words. Excuse me, cookie! Would you say that to someone at a party? To a friend, even? Where do you get off? Your overt contempt for my achievements (those yet unachieved and, by inference, those already behind me) is completely uncalled for. I worked for what I have, I'll have you know. But you know what, cookie? I crumbled you into pieces and ate you.
Sometimes I run into some fridge logic in my own life. For instance, I have the strong impression of having watched the following trailer in a theater, but for that to have happened it would have had to have been shown before The Lego Movie, which would have been an interesting choice, to say the least.
Anyway, the news that another Godzilla movie was coming down the pipe lit a fire under the vague desire I've had for a while to watch the original Godzilla/Gojira from 1954. Partly because the Godzilla franchise became so goofy over time, it was intriguing to me that the original movie was so deadly serious, and so relevant in the bizarre way that we've been getting more and more used to things being relevant.
I've spent plenty of time since college noticing how America's cultural anxieties play out in our media. In the aughts we watched Spider-Man, Batman, and the crew of the Battlestar Galactica deal with the ramifications of the War on Terror. Then, of course, there are the hordes of zombies manifesting our fears of societal collapse.
It's 2014. Are we ready to be afraid of Godzilla again? If this new movie catches on, I think we might be. People are getting tired of zombies (the degree to which I continue to be impressed with The Walking Dead notwithstanding), but our anxiety seems prepared to outlast the trend. Zombies and kaiju both play on the same fears that our civilization is inadequate to deal with a serious challenge... flimsy, even. Are those state-of-the-art tanks defending us, or plastic toys? Are our walls made of brick or cardboard? Push them and find out.
In 1954, 60 years ago and 9 years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was a dark movie about a radioactive monster destroying Tokyo. Some reviewers thought it was too soon (especially because, earlier that year, a Japanese fishing boat had been caught in the fallout from a botched American H-bomb test).
If Godzilla were just about anger at America, I doubt it would have caught on here. And if it were just about nuclear weapons, I doubt it would have the same staying power. But Godzilla was, more generally, a disaster movie, and Japan's is a culture well acquainted with disaster: earthquakes, famines, fires, centuries of civil war... typhoon and tsunami are Japanese loan-words.
The civilians in this first Godzilla are already a bit jaded.
I came to Godzilla curious and finished it impressed. Not all of it ages well, of course, but most of it made good on its mighty ambitions. (It won the Japan Movie Association award for Best Special Effects, and lost Best Picture to Seven Samurai, possibly just my favorite movie ever.) It's at its best with the monster shrouded in smoke and darkness, which doesn't feel like cheating so much as a good use of the medium.
I take it as a good sign that the new movie's trailer, at least, is choosing to imitate that.
Of course this new movie could still turn out as poorly as the one in 1998 did. I think it's about time for it to be done right, though. Who knows? Maybe we can be as sick of city-flattening monsters in 2020 as we were of vampires in 2010.
Just sharing a comic today, which certainly hit on how I feel reading The Lord of the Rings or Watership Down, or other masterpieces by Englishmen who must have spent all their childhoods frolicking in a clearly-labeled countryside. I try not to skim passages that read to me like:
The sweet odour of the smendley mixed with that of new-mown grass, for it was Spring; the curmudgeons bloomed merrily in the hoary elbows of the Mother-Doing-Laundry, and the swips sang amongst the buds upon the branches.
I find myself in a similar position reading The Stand, Stephen King's American epic, except in this case it's cars rather than nature whose names are a dizzying blur. I could care less about cars, but not much less, and I could much more easily care more if I cared to, which I do not.
Not that I begrudge King his interest, any more than I begrudge Tolkien his Shire-y upbringing. It's just interesting to notice the things that a narrator knows by name. Of course a good narrator knows enough to explain what he's on about to ignorami like myself when it's important.* The rest of the time, we can look it up if we need to know.
* We as writers might remember to use the common name of anything that ends up in the foreground of a story. Don't think of it as lowering yourself to the level of your stupidest readers; think of it as expressing the hope that your work will still be read when our household names are but a distant memory.
I didn't watch the Oscars last night because, well, network television. Judging by my Netflix connection (why, yes, I'm still with Verizon right now) I wasn't the only person who decided to give the 86th Academy Awards a pass. These award shows are more or less like baseball anyway, in that although they take three hours to play out you can take in the essential action in five minutes, over the internet, afterwards. Although I might have enjoyed seeing John Travolta introduce Idel Dazeem live, if only to give my eyebrows a workout.
Girlfriend and I have a policy of not watching The Walking Dead immediately before bed because she has zombie dreams and if she hears me getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night she is liable to murder me with the heaviest thing she can find. As it happens this year we've mostly developed a policy of watching each Sunday's episode of TWD during the snow day the following Monday.
We ended up watching Moon, which means we watched Sam Rockwell Sam Rockwell Sam Rockwell for two hours. It was very good and very sad, and I had thought we had escaped watching an untrustworthy Kevin Spacey by ruling out House of Cards for the night but no.
There are two kinds of pain, Sam...
I don't want to give the impression that I'm spending all my time watching television instead of reading. I'm just still reading The Stand.
While I wasn't actually watching Netflix, I did spend some time on their site, rating movies. Because it's fun. Because it helps them help me. Because it's addictively distracting. Because it gave me ideas for what to watch (when it randomly threw out Moon, that's when I decided to watch it, though I watched it on Amazon). Because it's... interesting to see how it categorizes movies.
After you rate a movie, Netflix asks you how often you watch movies like the ones you just rated. As I went on, I got the distinct impression that Netflix was messing with me.
How often do you watch movies about marriage like American Beauty?
How often do you watch dysfunctional family movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind?
How often do you watch tortured genius movies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?
How often do you watch father-daughter movies like The Incredible Hulk?
How often do you watch movies about cool mustaches like O Brother, Where Art Thou?
How often do you watch holidays like Independence Day?
