My parents were here not too long ago, on their annual visit to New York. It was the usual fare: my mom bought a set of hard plastic cutlery at Target and also got unconscionably amounts of disposable ones at Whole Foods and also asked the hotel for some metal ones, while my dad and I had heated arguments about ChatGPT because, as my colleague Salwa said, “dads love ChatGPT” — and I famously don’t. (Also, through extensive field research, my mom has uncovered a plot by Duane Reade to cease physical operations by draining their stores of any significant cosmetic products inventory… stay tuned for a full exposé).
Also as usual, my dad and I watched lots of movies (he has bought so many that his AppleTV library is almost its own streaming service). One of those was Godzilla Minus One, which I had heard good things about but which, sadly, we did not like. We assumed it could be that Japanese cinema conventions were not landing with us Westerners, so we decided to give Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla a try (yes, Roland Emmerich directed that Godzilla — I didn’t know that either). I saw it in theaters when I was 8 years old but a fetus, and remembered very few things about it: an Asian man saying “Gojira” as a flame moves back and forth in front of his face, a line about someone quitting their job at the end, the fact that (spoilers) the last shot is an egg hatching. I suspected it was probably bad, but I was curious to see how much.
REALLY BAD, was the answer — so much so that it’s probably worth watching just to experience it yourself. The first half is a disaster movie that suffers from jumping wayyy to many times across the globe only to piece together what we already knew because of the movie’s title: there’s a giant-ass lizard on the loose. And while on that topic: the movie cannot decide how big Godzilla is. One second he’s (she’s? I think they explain at one point how he can be male but also lay eggs, but I can’t be bothered) as tall as the tallest skyscrapers, then he shrinks to T-Rex size (let’s say, 2 or 3 floors), then back to gigantic. It makes for a confusing kind of engagement: should we be afraid of it like we fear a tsunami, or like we fear an angry elephant? Not the same, movie! Actually, maybe we shouldn’t be afraid of him all, because it’s really the U.S. army that destroys most of Manhattan — they shoot down so many buildings with missed rockets that I hope there was a human rights trial after the credits roll… they need to be held accountable for their reign of terror.
The second half, on the other hand, is a very incompetent ripoff of Jurassic Park. Godzilla lays a shit ton of eggs and they’re hatching, giving birth to creatures who look nothing like their fa/mother and instead like velociraptor VFX models that were rejected in JP’s pre-production. Some of the scenes are shot-for-shot JP recreations, and we could forgive it if we at least cared about the humans they are chasing, but we don’t. There’s a lady who’s a TV journalist (I think) and potentially the main character, if she had a personality. There’s Matthew Broderick having just one expression throughout the whole time, one that betrays he’s half excited about this potentially ushering in his leading man era and half worried he’s made a huge mistake. And then there’s Jean Motherfucking Reno, who is in this movie for no discernable reason. I would actually watch a different movie about him being in this one; the plot would be a French actor struggling with the decision to play a role in an American blockbuster that is not only incredibly stupid but also offensive to the nation of France, since it blames the creation of Godzilla not on the U.S. but on them. It would be about Hollywood’s dominance of the film world, about national pride in the face of imperialism, about artistic integrity… I smell Best Foreign Film!
The whole experience led me to reflect that the clearest memory I had of this movie from my childhood was not any particular scene from it, but the poster, pictured above. Most notably, I don’t remember the poster in a vacuum; it’s in the context of our local Cinemark offering a “Godzilla combo,” which consisted of a gigantic tub of popcorn with the poster emblazoned on it. We bought it, because we were not yet disillusioned with movie marketing or the film industry in general… but we couldn’t finish it, because Argentinians, like most other people outside of the U.S., are not used to eating enormous quantities of food, and the fact that we could buy it for cheap did not change the fact that it did not fit in our stomachs. And isn’t that Godzilla in a nutshell? The movie’s tagline was literally “Size does matter.” It’s not about quality, it’s about quantity: “You’ll get a lot.”
Walking around the city the next day with my dad, he commented on the fact that I grew up in the age of multiplexes; in Mendoza, we had the aforementioned Cinemark and a Village Cinemas (an Australian chain that operated in Argentina via a U.S.—now Mexican—joint venture). Both of them were in malls, but my dad remarked that throughout most of his youth, he would go to cinemas that were not a) not in malls and b) had just one theater, playing one movie. I sort of remember being very little and doing the same in a theater where we saw some Disney movies (I had a tiny Aladdin poster that I think I got from there), but hearing about it this time landed with me as a radical concept: one screen, one movie. So simple and elegant. Which one changed first, I wondered… were there too many movies that needed screens, or were there too many screens that needed movies?
Whichever it was, that artificially created demand (much like the supposed Argentinians who wanted all that popcorn) gave birth to a supply of movies that all promised the same thing: “You’ll get a lot.” It’s the promise of most things America has made: “none of the hard, unsavory parts — just the tasty stuff, and lots of it.” “All bangers all the time.” An empty promise made of empty calories; by and large, you will not get a lot, or at least not a lot of what you want. As a kid, I couldn’t finish the popcorn, so what I got was not a lot of yum, but a lot of nausea. As an adult, I feel like I don’t get anything from blockbusters. The one thing I can say for the 1998 Godzilla is that it at least did not demand any homework, unlike its current counterparts in the Monsterverse: 5 movies and 2 TV shows plus comics, books, and videogames — I’m sure there’s a study plan somewhere out there of what order you need to consume them in and what you need to remember from each one. We get a lot… it just tastes like nothing.
It might be the reason why, sometime in the last ten years, I basically stopped going to the movies altogether. I was not willing to spend time doing movie homework (I stopped after Star Wars VII and the first Avengers) and I was never much of a fan of Oscar-winning movies, which is another way of saying “Harvey Weinstein movies:” highbrow aspirations with some lowbrow sex/violence thrown in to mixed results, plus a Godzilla-level running time (though to Harvey’s credit, he’s the one who convinced Tarantino to split Kill Bill in two, and we all know I love Kill Bill). There was, of course, the indie circuit, or international cinema, but I’m allergic to pretentiousness, and sadly that’s most of it.
(Yes I am impossible. Never said I wasn’t.)
But then Harvey went to prison, people stopped watching the Oscars, the whole industry collapsed, and I became, if not downright interested, at least curious about what was being put out. I think that honestly what appealed to me the most was going to a movie theater: in New York, for the most part, even multiplexes are not inside malls, so I get a bit of both — my dad’s experience of going to a dedicated space + my own childhood memories of going to the multiplex and thinking that the Godzilla combo was gonna make me happy. Eventually, I became anxious about all the money I was leaving on the table by not signing up for some sort of deal, so I eventually caved and got AMC Premiere, the one where you don’t pay ticket fees and get $7 tickets on Tuesdays.
Out of that was born a ritual I now love: every Wednesday I check the movie schedules for next Tuesday, and if there’s anything I’m willing to watch, I get a ticket — sometimes just for me, sometimes with a friend. I’ve seen some great movies (Problemista, which reader Francis Madi has reminded me I need to talk about in-depth now that it’s available on Max, or Talk To Me, which I have discussed before), some not great ones (Killers of The Flower Moon, Civil War — yes I’m trying to start fights I’m bored), and ones that were so terrible that I’m almost glad I saw them (Immaculate). The most recent one was Longlegs, which both scared the shit out of me (I had to turn on lights and check behind curtains in every room for a day after seeing it) and also involved wayyyyy too many dolls in its plot for me to take seriously (I need an edit without dolls. I think it would improve 173%).
Regardless of the movies, though, it’s the experience that I’m happy with. I get the small combo that you can only get on Tuesdays for $5, to silently protest the Godzilla excesses of my youth; I interact with Maria Menounos during the Noovie pre-show, or tell whoever came with me about her battle with cancer and what a badass she’s been; I audibly respond to every trailer with a “yes” or “no” once it’s over (or, if there have been too many trailers and I’m getting antsy, with a “let’s get on with it guys”). It’s a way for me to unplug and live in the monoculture — even if it’s just one I share with 20 other strangers tops (it is, after all, a Tuesday).
Which brings me to the real point of this newsletter, fifteen hundred words in: if you’re in New York and there’s anything you’re excited about watching, come with me! Hit the “Te Gusta” button and let’s set it up for a sweet cool $7. I don’t have anything that’s particularly calling to me right now except that movie where Josh Hartnett is a serial killer in a Taylor Swift concert — it’s a Shyamalan movie so it’s going to be bad but I think it might be a good kind of bad.
I’ve been loving organizing in-person hangs with people the more I unplug from the internet; the idea of making it a routine to watch a movie in theaters with peeps and discuss it after sounds awesome. So let’s go to the mall the movies! Together we can change the future of the box office by draining blockbusters of their mass appeal, restoring the world my dad grew up in and ending the fallout brought on by 1998’s Godizlla. Or, more likely, we just can have a good time.
Wait you said you’re organizing in-person hangs, what are they?
So far, the Franciscoverse spans:
Man Men Mondays: after one of my favorite shows ended up on AMC+, which literally not a single person has, I saw it as my duty to share the BluRay box set I bought for my birthday with the rest of the world. Co-hosted by The Realm’s Associate Artistic Director Alexis Williams, who mixes Manhattans that will give you alcohol poisoning, this group meets roughly once a month, watches a couple of eps, eats pizza, and barely talks about the show except to yell at the screen (my contributions are usually “WE HATE YOU MIDGE” and “WE LOVE YOU JOAN”). Next one is scheduled for Monday August 26th at 6pm!
French Brunch: this summer I decided to go back to studying French after a decade-plus of not taking classes. I truly suck at it; my pronunciation is okay because of the other Latin languages I speak, but the vocabulary fails me constantly — and I love it! It’s amazing to suck at something and suffer literally zero consequences. So in that vein, I convened a regular (and by regular I mean it’s happened once) brunch with the French speakers in my life in which we, well… speak French? We really stuck with it the whole time, even commenting on the crisis of the theater industry with our broken words. Next one is scheduled for Tuesday August 20th at 6pm (the “brunch” part fell by the wayside a bit this time).
A visit to the Museum of Natural History: inspired by the Mad Men episode in which Sally gets her first period, a group of us is going to the museum soon; hopefully we’ll remain period-free (and nothing will wake up). We haven’t set a date for this one!
If you’re interested in joining any/all, you know what to do!