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:

Steam is the worst thing that has ever existed, WORSE THAN HITLER

RAGE. It's not just the name of id's latest game. As it turns out, the name isn't so much of a metaphor as it is the actual physical product itself. Maybe that doesn't make much sense, but you have to understand that whatever the fuck is in that $60 dvd case, it sure the fuck isn't a god damned video game.

So, I've got this video game sitting here, right in front of me, and I can't play it. Why? I don't know. I've been searching for a solution for an hour now and nothing really works. What I've found out is terrifying. For one, the game isn't even on the fucking disc. I'm sorry, the three discs. For two, even if the game is installed on the fucking computer it WILL NOT RUN. FOR NO FUCKING REASON.

Just to reiterate:

 - The actual fucking game is sitting right FUCKING NEXT TO ME
 - It is already INSTALLED ON THE MOTHERFUCKING COMPUTER
 - Despite that, because I'm not the person who installed it, I can't PLAY OR EVEN INSTALL IT

I CAN'T PLAY A FUCKING GAME I HAVE SITTING RIGHT IN FUCKING GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF FAGGOT ASSED CUNT-SWALLOWING TURD WAFFLE SHIT-SUCKING BALL-LICKING FRONT OF ME.

Mature Themes (HG 11?)

There's a new Ariel Pink thing happening. After touring the entire planet like four times, he finally got the whole live outfit (R-real, Tim, ...Aaron, and... the fourth one...) in a studio and wrote a whole fucking album of NEW things (except the cover), which is 12 completely NEW songs, not just a rehash like the "corporate sampler" was (which wasn't ALL old stuff, but that was certainly a large chunk), one of which is available already thanks to 4AD.

He's ALSO going to be by Austin on September 7th and then at the Granada in Dallas the day after.

Naturally, I will be making both.

And that's not a "maybe" thing. I'm GOING to both. That's the end. It's non-negotiable.

So what is post-BT Ariel like? From what I can tell so far, a little more coherent, and sort of '82-'86 sounding. Sort of like a soundtrack to an 80's teen movie. That's kind of a new directing to take hauntology in, near as I can tell, if only because it's so specific, but then again, it's not like other people haven't been specific before.

And I think the only reason it does sound so specific is because I'm used to a really nebulously placed Ariel. Sure, Somewhere in Europe/Hot Pink is as 70's punk as you can get, and Among Dreams or Shower Me in Lipstick is obnoxiously 86, but still, MOST of his output is confused and mixed and muddled as far as pinpointing exact styles go, and that's part of the reason I love him so much. Geneva does her specific period style, WaVVes does his, and Ghost Box do their thing, but Ariel was always very fluid and free-form. In fact, the earliest stuff that still exists online is borderline, and sometimes just plain industrial in its construction. Equus and Rainy Den both come to mind.

The whole album is likely to run the gammut again. Even flirting with 90's stuff, which is traditionally not his style since he's been active SINCE the 90's, but Butt House Blondies certainly heads in that direction. I'm only really getting into this because a post that just says "omg new Ariel Pink I'm so happy I could burst" is sort of pointless.

But it does raise an interesting question: what is POST-Hauntology? Or, where do we go from here?

See, the whole thing about hauntology was that, after John Cage, concrete, industrial, minimalism, sampling, and music that writes itself, what else is there to do but lather, rinse, repeat? Hauntology took that and ran with it, but not with current trends, but old one. Looking back several decades, taking those themes and styles, and revisiting them. Turns out we weren't really DONE with them yet. There was so much more to do. Last decade was really nuts too, we had everything. 70's, 60's, 80's, and even 90's. Some even went waaaay back and did 20's sounding ethereal soundscapes. For various reasons. Chiptune music exploded, and with the advent of youtube being more important than the radio, suddenly there was a way for EVERYTHING to reach its intended demographic. There were some trends, sure, but if you wanted it, it was there.

Another aspect of revisiting older styles was the actual "haunting" part of it. "Music that sounds older than it is" is an incredibly shallow descriptor, and something no one actually does on purpose. And I mean that, too, no one who's any good at it does it on purpose. There is some sort of bizarre sub-species of nostalgia associated with it. It's not really "boy howdy I miss the old days" but sort of like... um... this is hard to explain.

You know that feeling when you listen to an Ariel Pink song for the first time and it's just so inherently familiar? Like you've known it all your life? But it's sort of weird and alien? Like the 70's or 80's of a different timeline where disco never died or something? It's sideways nostalgia, but... even that doesn't quite get it.

It's very haunting, I guess is the best term.

But now that it has been explored enough for people to become familiar with it, and it to ooze into every facet of popular culture (except Hollywood, who still hasn't gotten the memo), and long enough for solid trends to develop (the 80's obsession from 2008 onwards becoming connected to chillwave, for example), what's next?

Is it now "done?" Is there more out there to discover or do? Are we stuck in a perpetual cycle of repeating ourselves like modern fashion is? With the ability for all tastes to find all markets, does it matter? Is there anything left?

I don't really know. What I DO know is that I've been sort of ambivalent about music lately. I've been mostly listening to Firesign Theater and Psychedelic Archaeology. Ariel was touring Mars and I couldn't be bothered to keep up with anyone else. I don't know what Geneva or WaVVes or Telepathe or anyone is up to anymore.

This is mostly because Trish Keenan had to go and die on me. I've been avoiding a lot of things because of that.

And I don't really HAVE a guess about what's next, because I don't know enough about what's going on anymore to comment. I feel sort of lost in the whole thing now. Maybe oversaturation is partly to blame and the bubble will burst or something. Maybe we'll go back to Romantic-era hauntology. Maybe we'll do hauntology-hauntology. Not sure how that would work but whatever.

But considering what happened to noise (homogeneity, nothing left to do, not really intimidating anymore, etc.) it's not likely there's much left to do there. I remember hearing about a new NON album, which doesn't seem to be forthcoming at the moment, that would be really intense, since Boyd was the only one who ever seemed to "get it." Noise is noise is noise is noise, but when you DO something with it, that's when it turns into something special. Carnis Vale and Embers come to mind.

Anwyas, this is getting long so I'd better cut out.

Oh, the Deacon IS a xenomorph, just not a jockey alien. Lindelof seems to be implying that it's an egg-layer, too. Don't know what that's all about. For the record, I liked Prometheus better than the last Alien movie, because its cons and pros cancelled each other out, so all that's left is whether or not you have a special like for Alien movies, which I do, so I think it just barely squeezes out ok. AlienS vs. Predator (which doesn't need the subtitle because it's alienS vs. and not alieN vs., which is just one more stupid aspect of that movie) has too much weighing against it, with the only real positives being the continually masterful work of Tom and Alec as well as the introduction of the Praetorian into the film series for the first time. OH! And Ms. Yutani makes an appearance, and they finally explain how we invented FTL so fucking fast. Other than that, the movie is a mess. Prometheus > AvP:R.

I MADE A LIST! My favorite Alien movies (in order! :3)
7. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
6. Prometheus
5. Alien
4. Aliens
3. Alien: Resurrection
2. Alien vs. Predator
1. Alien 3

This list is just for fun, though. In reality, AvP and Rez are about equal in my books, and I have a love/hate relationship with the original movie that straddles the line of how I feel about Prometheus even though I definitely like Alien more than the movie where Space Jockey look like humans and also created humans by seeding Earth with DNA even though RNA came first and if they just dropped DNA then why do other lifeforms on Earth besides humans exist and... ok, I'm not going there. :/

How did I get from Ariel Pink to Alien movies? Whatever.

Buy buy.

Prometheus stuff (spoilers but, who cares?)

Prometheus has been out in at least England and France for a number of days now, and with the gracious spoilers of the cool crazy euros at www.prometheus-movie.com I have more than enough information on the monsters in it. Which is, you know, the whole fucking point of the movie.

This deal here is being written with two things in mind: trying to get some common names out into the public (prolly won't work but whatever) and to examine what connection these creatures have to the xenomorph breed of alien from all those other movies. Let's start at the beginning.

BLACK GOO

 Now, I want to make it clear that I haven't SEEN the movie yet, it won't come out here for 5 days. Therefore all knowledge I currently have is extracted from what others have told me. Without this first hand experience, my understanding of easily the most enigmatic aspect of the monsters, the black goo, is going to be pretty bare bones.

I know that those ampules/canisters/urns are either made or or contain or are leaking this black goo substance. When the atmosphere inside the buildings they are contained in changes, there are some weird optical effects with the goo that signals some sort of change. I haven't seen exactly what happens, so I have no freaking clue what the deal is with this stuff.

What I know for sure is that the goo turns things into other things.

In the opening scene, an engineer (a term I've started using to refer to these bastardized retarded versions of the actual space jockey from alien) drinks the goo or something, and his body dissolves... then there's some stupid bullshit about Ridley flunking history class but that's not important. Think of it like the Elder Things who, in At the Mountains of Madness use Ubbo-Sathla's tissue to genetically engineer Shoggoths as organic tools that can form any organ necessary, but one of their experiments escapes and, 4 billion years later, you have the current roster of Earthlings. Lovecraft's monsters go back to the beginning and offer a way cool version of panspermia that, while still stupid because it doesn't address the fact that the Elder Things still had to have evolved on their own to begin with, at least doesn't interfere with real world knowledge even 80 something years after the story was written.

In Prometheus, the engineer creates DNA in the Cambrian period, when animals were old hat in the real world.

So, whatever.

But it's wishy washy. Expose some indigenous LV223 worms to the black goo and they turn into a Millbworm. Humans exposed to it become something only called a "Gray Man" so far. Except not every time, I think. It's hard to tell.

Whatever the specifics are, we can be sure the black goo is a substance that alters the DNA of the organism it comes in contact with. Yes, this means engineer have DNA. And Aliens, but we already knew that since they can be cloned.

LV223 WORM ---> MILLBWORM

 Iapetus over at prometheus-movie.com came up with this name after I became exasperated with the sheer volume of names for the same thing. Cobrahugger, Cobralien, Xenocobra, Protohugger, etc. None of those work because:

1. It's not a hugger
2. It's not a xeno
3. It's not proto anything

"Cobra" sort of works based on the flaring of the wings and the pose it strikes prior to attacking, but "Millbworm" is a much cooler name as far as I'm concerned.

What I know about this adorable little fellow is that it is the result of a goo-mutated indigenous alien worm from LV223, and that it kills by jumping down a victim's throat. It's also adorable.

GRAY MAN

 The second stage here is the only one that's actually in the movie. The gray man doesn't mutate into a xenomorph, this is just the only picture I have of it because... well, it's stupid looking.

Just some sort of crazy guy with a messed up face. Nothing to see here.

The real story is that Holloway, who is also exposed to black goo, has sex with Shaw at one point, leading to the creation of the... liverburster I called it at one point, but the truth is the difference between a "liverburster" and the bodyhugger is just size.

The creation of this thing is one part black goo and two parts human. This is important because the goo seems to affect Fifield and Holloway differently, and as we'll see with the bodyhugger, this is a process that MUST have occured many times before, so I think the complicated haphazard process in Prometheus is atypical, and the gray man is a sort of mutation that wasn't supposed to happen.

And remember, goo + engineer = earthlings. That includes humans, who are central to the creation of the bodyhugger in this film.

All I'm saying is that Prometheus makes it look like an accident when it's clearly intentional, so the Gray Man is probably not the REAL reason the bodyhugger is born. It just worked out that way.

BODYHUGGER

"Liverburster" form. The featureless-chestburster looking end facing the camera is actually analogous to the mantle of a squid. The "tails" are actually five tentacles arranged in a star shape... exactly like an Elder Thing.

This is a doodle by Blood from prometheus-movie.com and, as you can see, in the center of these tentacles is a facehugger ovipositor. This creature shares a function with the facehugger, but the results are different...




...maybe.

At any rate, it implants the "proto alien" into it's host. Which then bursts out. Sure, sure, sounds familiar and everything, but the thing is, we don't know what the hell a "proto alien" acutally is. So whether or not this thing is effectively a facehugger is completely unknown. It also isn't very important, either, because of what might possibly be inferred from the murals.

PROTO ALIEN

 The "Proto-Alien" certainly is related to the xenomorphs, this can be assumed safely based on the appearance, because it wouldn't look like this if it wasn't the intention of the filmmakers to imply a connection with the previously seen xenomorphs.

WHAT the connection is is completely unknown.

One idea that a lot of folks seem to be implying for no good reason is that THIS is the Jockey Alien we've been waiting for for 33 years. This is a totally valid possibility. If this is the case:

1. it means the bodyhugger really IS a facehugger, but that...
   A. it implants adults into the host rather than chestbursters OR
   B. this is the Jockey BURSTER, and just so happens to have fully developed limbs sort of like the bambiburster, and this might explain the absence of a tail.

 However, it could be a completely separate branch of creature, a cousin of the xenomorph, if you will. In that case some possibilities are:

2. This creature isn't a "Jockey Alien," but a "Jockey Proto-Alien." As in, this is the base, not the variation
   A. So if this creature had a similar life cycle to the known xenomorph and somewhere along the line facehugged a dog, the result wouldn't be the "Dog Alien" we've already seen, but a unique variation potentially called a "Dog Proto-Alien."
      I. Which brings us to the logical conclusion that the "strain" or "branch" of xenomorph we are already familiar with is simply the result of a bodyhugger impregnating not an engineer, but something else, most likely a human.

That last bit happens to be my own personal theory at the moment, but just to be clear, my endorsement doesn't mean I know anymore than you do. In fact, I probably know less, since I haven't even seen the damn movie yet.

The last of the popular theories is that this really is a PROTO alien and:

3. The creature we see here is somehow responsible for creating the known xenomorphs in their current form through some unseen process and this is merely a proto-form caste early in it's development.

There is one theory, however, that is not dependent on any of these previous assumptions, and could be true of all three. Remember this mural?

 It's been noted that it appears as if the figure is wearing a crest similar to a queen alien, but the body seems "off" from a normal xenomorph. One logical conclusion upon seeing the proto alien is that this figure represents the "queen proto alien." Now, this could mean a jockey alien queen as a normal xenomorph, it could mean that this branch of the bodyhugger ALSO has a queen stage, or it could mean this queen might be a missing link between these prototype creature and the advanced xenos from the other films.

We just don't know.

However, I really need to step in for a second and say that Ridley doesn't seem to be the kind of guy who is capable of coming up with ideas this interesting and complicated. And Lindelof "wrote" lost. So, these chuckleheads have no fucking clue and I guarantee they didn't come up with an answer to reveal in Prometheus 2. In fact, Ridley already said that Prometheus 2 will have even less to do with Alien.

So, it follows that, if we're shown something that look like a queen form of the alien at the end, it's probably just that: a Queen Alien molted from the proto alien. This pretty heavily implies the proto alien is effectively the jockey alien, because I sincerely doubt the ability of these writers to come up with such a cool idea as a branched xeno tree.

But then again, maybe I'm dead wrong and it's not that at all. WE JUST DON'T KNOW.

So please, for the love of pete, stop calling it a fucking xenomorph. You have no proof.