Godzilla Continuity: Parachronic Homogeny part 1: GODZILLA

We start at the most obvious place: the king himself. While the Tohoverse outside of Godzilla is just as expansive and awesome as the purely Godzilla part, there's no denying that all threads lead back to Godzilla in this world. He is, very much, the center of the Tohoverse, even when he's not directly present in a given story. This is, of course, based on the fact that he's solely responsible for the whole thing ever having happened in the first place, and he's also garnered the most consistent attention over the 60 year history of Toho's science fiction and fantasy (and some horror) films.

DISCLAIMER: If you don't know what a "parachronic homogeny" is, or want to know how it is that I'm still alive after "Godzilla 2014," as it's called, I guess, be sure to read my intro to this new sub-series here.

Godzilla Continuity: Parachronic Homogeny part 0: Introduction

So, first of all, yes I'm still here. After the movie I went out drinking with my mom and decisions simply didn't get made. And my mommy telling me it's going to be alright still does manage to work even when you're my age. Logically, I know this isn't true, but I guess you just get it so hardwired in your head as a child that it's hard to shake even when you're an adult who's well aware of how horrible the world is.

The movie? Well, it's not good. It's really, really shitty. I can safely say without any sort of hesitation that it is far worse that both All Monsters Attack and Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla. As, of course, a Godzilla movie. I mentioned this when I was going through the cartoon during the countdown, but it doesn't matter how weird and awful or wrong something is, it can't destroy Godzilla if it was never meant to BE Godzilla in the first place. The Hannah-Barbera cartoon can get away with eye lazors because it's a fun show and no one gives a shit if it's exactly like the movies or not. In this same way, "Godzilla 2014" or whatever the fuck I'm supposed to call it (I'm still partial to GINO 2 myself) isn't horrible. If this isn't the end and Toho finally fucking brings Tezuka, Oshima, and Asada back for Godzilla X Biollante like I've been waiting for since 2004, then we can all look back at this strange, Hollywood thing as just a sidebar in Godzilla history. And as a sidebar, I don't hate it. I don't like it, it isn't very good and it's really confusing and pretty stupid and obnoxious, but I could easily watch it again and enjoy it for what it is: a stupid Hollywood movie that has a bastardized version of Godzilla in it which is at the very least an attempt at making it seem like Godzilla.

The problem, of course, is that Hollywood doesn't want to be a sidebar, they play to win, and they always win. So the natural assumption is that this really is the end and there will never be another Godzilla movie. I've had to spell this out so many times now, about why it ultimately doesn't even matter what the movie itself is like, so let's get it out of the way for the last time: "Godzilla 2014" will not ruin Godzilla if it remains as a cute little sidebar to the real Godzilla series, it's a dumb but not horrible movie, like ALIENS, but the problem is that if this becomes what Godzilla is, then yes it has absolutely ruined Godzilla forever. Or at least until it stops becoming marketable.

For those interested, my full review of the film can be found on my new parody blog here. I'm playing an exaggerated character, yes, but my real feelings aren't much better. That blog is going to be a focus from here on out since the whole reason I'm still here in the first place is because I'm going to try and use blogging to get some kind of income, since I apparently and completely un-employable, so this is really kind of my last chance to try and get some sort of a life together for myself. I'm not optimistic about it, especially since everyone uses adblock (including me), but I might as well try, I guess.

SO ANWYAS, WHAT'S A PARAPLEGIC HOMOSEX? Read on to find out:

Godzilla Countdown: Day 7

Tomorrow is the big day, or... today when this gets posted, I guess.

Having fun going through the millennium series again, this was a really exciting time for me. I'm sure I'll get to it all in a bit, though. Gonna try and do Always 2 but who knows if that's gonna work. Don't expect it, but we'll see.

EDIT: This is going up a day late, but I ran out of time to finish this yesterday before I had to leave for the thing. Movie was a little less than "just okay," but I'll get to that later.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 6

Second to last day and I'm just tired. Pity that I had to get to this point during the 90's movies, but there you go. I'm gonna just power through these last two days and try to make succinct entries, more than I had, but I don't know.

I spoke to someone who saw gino 2 yesterday, some sort of thing because he works at a theatre I guess. Says it ignores the first movie altogether, some other stuff. Its not looking real good. I don't think this is going to end well.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 5

Five days in and I've successfully transitioned from giving up on everything to distracting myself with something else. As it usually goes, I'll make spreadsheets or read stuff on Something Awful or watch a let's play or something else that, for normal people, would an entertaining break from responsibility. When you don't have anything else, it isn't really "entertaining," it's more like finding something to stare at that's more interesting than a wall. This is the sort of thing kids who don't know any better dream of, just watching cartoons all day, a perceived paradise. The thing that those kids, including myself at that age, didn't understand is that doing something on your time off is inherently different from doing the same thing constantly forever. It doesn't matter what it is, it really doesn't, you can't just stare at the same thing without a break and stay sane for very long. For people with lives, even monotonous cubicle jobs are broken up with even the most menial of indulgences. A few friends and a day off every once in a while can keep people from going postal due to the soul-crushing tedium of a desk job.

I can't just sit here. I can't live like this. I need... something. To do something, to write something, to go somewhere, to meet new people and have new experiences. You CAN'T just sit around all day like this, it's not natural. Watching funny internet videos should be a fun experience, but now my eyes just glaze over at it. The lack of any sort of... life in me has made things that should be fun feel like a desk job. Except non of this requires any effort on my part. Simply being alive has become a never ending chore me. I still have the means to do so, but taking the minimum effort to remember to eat is a thing I actively have to do, and it isn't something I relish. At least if I was starving in a ditch somewhere I could die like I'm supposed to instead of... whatever the fuck this is.

The things I get lost in are recursive, there's nothing new here. Hauntology only really fed what was already there, I've always been "haunted by the ghosts of the past" as it were. I think it really goes back to high school, when I realized that the whole "finding myself" thing was a complete waste of what could have been the best years of my life, but I squandered it trying to be someone else like some kind of god damned moron. Alcohol didn't help either, there was a period from 2007~2008 when I pined for "the good old days," which sometimes would be as long ago as *gasp* a week! I called this "perpetual regret," the idea that you always remember the past with rose-colored glasses and regret that you didn't appreciate your experiences enough, and that attitude created a perpetual feedback loop where because you were always thinking of the past, you could never appreciate what you did have.

So here I am reliving every Godzilla movie in a row plus the cartoon and some other things, distracting myself from the fact that I'm never going to get any less ugly or any more employable by desperately clinging to the one thing I'm still passionate enough about that Hollywood destroying it matters. Today I'm going to watch Godzilla vs. Biollante, my favroite thing in the world, probably for the last time.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 4

I'm settling into this post the day after thing. And that's great, because after feeling not just a tad under pressure by my own ambitions to finish this sort of... I guess you'd call it a journal of sorts, but after getting through what I intended the past two days, today the schedule is pretty lax.

Well, sort of. I only plan on just doing the two Showa Mechagodzilla films today, but in addition as first season of the cartoon. Also, I have a really shitty copy, but a copy nonetheless, of Luigi Cozzi's 1977 colorized version of the original film, which I will be watching today for the first time. I'm already at the climax of GvsMG, so before midnight I'll be starting the cartoon, which I happen to enjoy quite a bit.

Tomorrow I'll do the other half of the cartoon, and move on to the 80's, ending, of course, with Godzilla vs. Biollante, mankind's greatest achievement. That's going to be a pretty big deal. But for today I've been sort of easing out a bit. After all, when we're done with Biollante will have to go through the entire rest of the Heisei and Millennium series in two days.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 3

I left so much of the last post undone before I went to sleep that I'm only getting started on this at 17. I just finished watching Destroy All Monsters a second ago, so I'm planning on trying to keep at a pace of writing the impressions from one movie while I'm watching the other. This should also help me curb my obsessive compulsive screenshot taking, as I generated over 800 from yesterday, so I gotta calm down in that regard. These movies are just too gorgeous, it's not my fault. :c

Feeling a little pressure, and not, uh, well. I can't really describe it. But I'm not real happy about the way this is going. My sister's family called today, since it's mother's day apparently. I have nothing at all to say to them, and my nephew just... what, he's winning at dominos? And then what? I tell him "that's cool" but he just goes quiet. I start asking my mom about if she's going to be off on the 16th and I forget I'm even on the phone until I hear my sister in the background talking about something or another. I'm so far past caring.

I was working on the post for yesterday so much that I ended up only paying attention to DAM just enough as necessary. My eyes are kind of starting to glaze over at this point, because as I type this I'm watching All Monsters Attack or "Godzilla's Revenge" as we used to call it back in the day, and holy shit this movie is annoying. Well let's move on.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 2

Today I'm just going to breeze through as many 60's movies as I can. Hopefully all of them, but that depends on how much commentary I end up giving each. If I don't get to All Monsters Attack today I'm going to consider cutting the cartoon. But we'll see. Actually, I'm going to try today to just watch the films all at once and type up the relevant blog entries later. That should work out fine.

I'm feeling okay today. Doing a lot of watching, thinking about, and writing about Godzilla puts me in a pretty good place. I'm gonna try and calm down and enjoy this day as much as I can. Sure, I don't have a future anymore, but I have a present, and right now that's really all I want.

22 now where I am and I've watched the "Honda era" or "Golden era" films, being from King Kong to Monster Zero. There is still coffee in the pot from this morning, something like 10 hours ago. So I'm definitely going to get through the south seas eras too, but first let's look at those aforementioned golden era Godzilla films.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 1

A week from now, Hollywood is going to kill the king of the monsters. And this time he's not coming back. With gino 2 or "Godzilla" which is literally the laziest possible title (I suppose theoretically they could have just called it "Movie") for a movie ostensibly about or related to Godzilla in some way, being a AAA tentpole blockbuster style flick that caters specifically to the "nerd culture" "true gamer" and whatever the fuck else you want to call them synthetic demographic, which is just marketing speak for "18-24 year old men but under a label we invented to make them easier to control." While it may barely be possible that the movie itself ends up being no more offensive than the Hannah-Barbera cartoon or Peter Jackson's King Kong, this commandeering of what Godzilla is and the creation of an entirely new demographic that has absolutely no interest in anything that has to do with the real Godzilla is going to spell disaster regardless.

The problem is that money speaks, and Hollywood wants a product, not a character. By buying editorial space in sites like io9 or Kotaku or IGN they guarantee that mouth-breathing idiots with disposable incomes that need to be told what to consume will turn whatever they shit out into a franchise. This is business as a dictator, holding a vertical monopoly over both their engineered audience and media, as opposed to the middle man that is supposed to sell art to the audience that wants it. Not a mutually beneficial relationship, but rather a perpetual feedback machine where a few people in power pull the strings to maintain that power continuously with no other goal in mind, and at the expense of the resources they use to do it.

And you know what really kills me is that if they had just made a normal god damned Godzilla movie I wouldn't even care. I'll take off the They Live! glasses and consume if you just did what you were supposed to do and put forth the minimum effort to at least pretend like you care. If you don't think modern audiences want the very core of what makes a Godzilla movie a Godzilla movie well then why the fuck did you buy the license? Buy the license to something you know for a fact modern audiences DO want. Why is that so difficult for the suits to understand?

Things are also coming to a conclusion for me. In the past few days my mood has been swinging around more wildly as the last little bits of life I have left in me are going out. Godzilla has been a huge part of my life since before my earliest memories, the age of two to be precise, and much of who I am can be tracked using Godzilla as a measurement, so much so that having my life flash before my eyes basically looks like Godzilla clip show. I don't mean to sound shallow, there's more going on here and more to me than just that, but I think by the time I get up to Godzilla vs. Biollante what I'm talking about should be pretty clear.

If you haven't picked it up, what I'm talking about, and what this post is going to be the first part of, is a series where I watch every Godzilla movie, the one episode of Zone Fighter I have, the cartoon, hopefully Always 2, and assorted other bits over the course of a week leading up to May 16th. It's going to be as much of a retrospective of what was once the greatest monster that ever lived in the imagination of man as it will be an extremely personal journey for me. If that sounds like a bummer to you, then you don't have to read it. I don't really have an audience with this blog and I've only ever used it in the past for... well, things I just wanted to say at the time. This isn't going to be any different.

One last thing that I'll say before I get on with it is that I'm going to write these in real time. This intro is being written before I've started and each entry will be written after each I've watched the film in question. I don't really have a plan on what I'm going to get through today, but as we move along I'll have more of an intended structure.

So let's get on with it and start the final countdown of a Mal and her Monster: