The Godzilla Tree

This is my second Christmas season as an eccentric widower living alone with two golden retrievers. I honestly haven’t been feeling sad or anything, but as of Dec. 6 I also had not done anything to make the house any more festive than it usually is. Drag the tree out of the basement and put it up? Meh, maybe one of these days.

Then I started getting mysterious texts from Samantha Hernandez, a friend since we worked together at the Door County Advocate back in the day. She’s now with the Des Moines Register.

“You may or may not receive something soon,” said the first text.

“I may or may not be waiting with bated breath,” I responded.

A few days later, another message: “It may or may not be on its way.”

“I may or may not watch for it,” I replied.

Finally the post office tracker told her it would arrive Dec. 6. Sure enough, there was a package on the doorstep when I came home that day.

Now, I may or may not have mentioned that Godzilla is one of my guilty pleasures, and much more so since Toho Studios, to mark the big lizard’s 70^th anniversary, released Godzilla Minus One, the most magnificent film in the series since the first one. I have told everyone I know that they need to see that movie even if they have no interest in seeing a Godzilla movie.

And so imagine my delight when I opened the package to find a Godzilla Advent calendar.

Each little door has a Godzilla figurine behind it — the first 16 are two-dimensional and the last eight are little 3-D action figures. Little gold threads are included, and most of them have holes so you can turn them into ornaments.

Most of my decorations are still in the basement, but I went to the store and bought a little tree to hang my Godzilla ornaments. Every day I’ve been dutifully opening the Advent calendar and withdrawing a tiny monster.

Not all of them have a hole for hanging, so those are marching around the base of the tree.

I am grateful to Samantha for turning a somewhat curmudgeonly season into the sweet season of expectation and giving that it’s supposed to be.

And if you still haven’t seen Godzilla Minus One, why not?!? You may or may not agree that it’s magnificent.

Of course I bought the BluRay

I am pleased to report that my favorite line of dialogue has been restored in the BluRay edition of Godzilla Minus One, which was released this week: “We can’t rely on the U.S. or Japanese government.” I was dismayed when the Netflix translation watered down the line, but the disc restores the theatrical translation by Anthony Kimm.

Are you surprised at all that I bought the BluRay on the first day it was available? It’s been a treat watching the various features that are included along with the film. “The Making Of” feature is fascinating, seeing how the scenes were filmed in a specific order to take advantage of the actors’ time. As each actor’s scenes are completed, they’re given flowers and an opportunity to make a little speech. So many of them say they feel honored to be part of a Godzilla movie, a series that one actor even said is how Japan is represented to the world.

The 7-year-old inside me is tickled to see such a great movie emerge from a franchise that was so silly for awhile.

When I was a young comic book nerd, I believed that great stories could be told in that format, and my fellow comic book nerds know that Amazing Spider-Man #33 and Fantastic Four #51 are among the proof of that theory. I obviously wasn’t the only true believer — so many great stories were told that they had to coin the term “graphic novel.”

And so when a great movie is made in the giant-monster genre, I’m over the moon. Arguably only two truly great films had been made featuring giant monsters — King Kong (1933) and Gojira (1954). And now there are three.

Godzilla has seen a resurgence in popularity over the past decade, since Hollywood got involved and made the very fine movie Godzilla (2014) and its sequels, but Godzilla is a Japanese creation and their work is clearly the best. Of the half-dozen Godzilla movies made in the last 10 years, clearly the best are Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One, products of Toho Studios.

You may not be able to rely on the U.S. or Japanese governments, but you can surely rely on Toho to deliver.

A Godzilla-sized dilemma

The day after the election, I was torn: It was the last day the extended re-release of Godzilla Minus One was being shown, but it would mean skipping out before the end of Wednesday night church to drive to a theater almost an hour from the fellowship hall.

But first I needed a nap after a late night following election returns and an early morning covering a local human services board meeting. Before anything, I needed a little nap.

How exhausted was I? I woke up almost three hours later, five minutes before Wednesday night church was to begin 25 miles away.

I guess I won’t be seeing those extra 13 minutes of Godzilla anytime soon. I missed church and could have still made it to the movie, but that would have meant getting home after 11 p.m., and my body was clearly telling me that rest was most important.

Part of my response is not unlike the fabled fox who said, “Those grapes were probably sour anyway.” Godzilla Minus One is such a perfect film that the extra footage probably isn’t necessary anyway. It’s just an interesting curiosity, like the bonus tracks added to re-releases of cherished albums. It’s fun to hear them, but the artists’ original decisions were picture perfect.

As a compromise with myself, I called up the original cut on Netflix (the BluRay release is still two weeks away) rather than do any driving, and even then I fast-forwarded through about 45 minutes, from after Noriko is swept away until the beginning of “Operation Sink the Monster.” I’ve probably watched it a dozen times so far, and I still consider it a powerful, powerful movie and one of the best of the 21st century so far.

Something special about 6 o’clock

I went to see Reagan Friday evening with my new good friend, and it was a lovely trip down memory lane. As I posted on Facebook, “I was afraid they would never make a movie like Reagan. Highly recommended! Dennis Quaid and Penelope Ann Miller (as Ronald and Nancy Reagan) are wonderful.”

One of my good Facebook friends, the one with an inexplicable faith in the party that left Ronnie in his younger days, replied, “If this country was doomed to elect an actor as President, I would have wished it was Marty Sheen,” a reference to the actor who played the mythical Democrat president on The West Wing.

“They’re all actors,” I replied.

“Well, if you’re going to be cynical = we all are,” she said.

To which I could only think to reply with the Bard’s immortal observation, “All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players.”

The movie is one of those films that exposes how far out of touch is the average film critic. The latest rottentomatoes.com ratings show that Reagan has a mere 17% of positive reviews from the hoity toity with an audience rating of 98%. That is, I believe, the biggest gap in the website’s history. We damn deplorables have no idea what’s art and what’s not.

Back in the 1980s I wrote a couplet that I’ve never been able to extend into a proper song or poem:

I hear someone said once the world is a stage.

From what I can see, it’s a play about rage.

Ronald Reagan is one of those political figures who inspires a passionate response in both directions. I’ve heard Donald Trump compared to Reagan, but that’s more about the response — Trump has very little of Reagan’s charm or sense of humor. On the other side of the aisle are people like Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example.

Some people say that when you take a strong stand, you will get a strong response, and if you don’t make some people mad, you’re not trying hard enough. That’s probably true, but the level of rage out there is dismaying, and it’s even deeper than it was in the 1980s or ’90s.

There are folks whose job seems to be stoking the rage, which I find mystifying except for the fact that angry and fearful people are more easily manipulated. I wish people on both sides of the current conflagration could step back and think, “Why am I so afraid and angry about the idea that Donald Trump and/or Kamala Harris will be the next U.S. president? Who benefits from my fear and anger, and why do they want me to feel that?”

I honestly don’t know the answer to those questions, but I do think the world could use more of the attitude reflected in the friendship between Reagan the Cold Warrior and liberal House Speaker Tip O’Neill, as depicted in the movie. The film puts the words in Reagan’s mouth, but DuckDuckGo leads me to articles that quote O’Neill as saying about the D.C. culture, “Before 6 o’clock, it’s all politics, but after 6 o’clock, and on weekends, we’re friends.”

To paraphrase the old saw about quitting time, I think we need to remember that it’s always after 6 o’clock somewhere.

Truth in subtitles

Some movies are like roller coasters — sometimes you just want to go back for another ride.

And so it was the other day that I went back to stream Godzilla Minus One again.

Another thing about loving a movie that much — you memorize the best lines.

In fact, when Godzilla Minus One premiered on Netflix, I took a picture of the subtitle for one of my favorite lines —

I loved the story of the civilians who realize government isn’t going to come to their rescue so they have to beat Godzilla themselves.

Imagine my surprise when my favorite line came up two months later.

I have to wonder — which government toadies were so embarrassed about being called unreliable that they asked Netflix to change the subtitle? Was it the U.S. government, the Japanese government, or both?

I guess the original translation was too close to an actual, universal truth.

In praise of stuff

“I shouldn’t buy more books/records until I have read/listened to the ones I already own.” I’ve heard people say that and have even said it to myself sometimes. But …

It’s probable that I will never read every book in this house, or listen to every record again, or watch every movie again. But if I want to, I have them here. No one can stop streaming them or rewrite sections or otherwise make them unavailable to me.

Somehow possessions are becoming a bad thing. I suppose they would get in the way should I want to pack up and move somewhere else, but they comprise an archive of what has touched my heart over a lifetime. See this book? Hear this album? this poem? this song? this film? This moved me. This changed my mind. This gave me a better understanding of my fellow humans. This made me laugh. This was the song at the wedding; this we played at the funeral.

Mementoes of a life are physical expressions of a time worth remembering. I have a shelf full of books that I never actually read but I listened to the audiobooks, and I wanted to make sure I would always have the words at hand should I want to re-read them.

If I’ve learned no other lesson from the digital age, it’s that nothing digital is permanent. Passages are altered, special effects are adjusted, scenes are deleted, entire works are deleted, and what you first experienced can’t be re-experienced in quite the same way. It may be something as minor as watching the opening moments of Star Wars without being reminded that now it’s called Episode IV: A New Hope, or as momentous as reading a book that someone has deemed too incendiary to be allowed for mere mortals. That’s the difference possessions can make.

There’s also the political ideology that condemns property as somehow selfish. “Why should anyone own three mansions?” eventually becomes “Why should anyone own all this stuff?” Why should someone decide what’s appropriate for someone else? I love Ray Bradbury’s story of being shamed into throwing away his Buck Rogers comic strips. After a time he realized he felt lost without Buck — he was part of who Ray was becoming — so he said, “To hell with my friends, I’m going to collect Buck Rogers,” and saved his own life.

Our possessions define us and help people — and ourselves — see who we are, or who were were; that’s why we are fascinated by museums. And so I keep buying books and albums and DVDs.

Terribly strange memories

“How terribly strange to be seventy.”

The line from the Simon and Garfunkel song “Old Friends” — from which the album Bookends gets its title — sprang unbidden into my mind the other day as I limped around the house, favoring my knee.

“Can you imagine us years from today sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange …”

When that album came out, I had just turned 15 years old, and no, I could not imagine the year 2023, when I was destined to become one of those terribly strange septuagenarians. (Until last year, I never bothered to learn how to spell septuagenarian.)

That spring and summer, I would go to the movie theater and watch the amazing new film 2001: A Space Odyssey eight times, each time trying with limited success to understand what it meant. And I could not imagine that far-distant future so foreign that years did not begin with 19-.

Heck, I think by then I had been frightened by reading George Orwell’s ominous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, also set in a distant future society vastly different from our land of the free — a world with no privacy and constant surveillance where one could get in deep trouble by thinking or speaking the wrong kinds of thoughts.

Now here we are, and 1984 and 2001 and even 2023 are not in the future but in the past; that first Orwellian year is more than half my lifetime ago. How terribly strange.

“Old Friends” is preceded by an interesting montage called “Voices of Old People,” an audio collage of recordings Art Garfunkel made at homes for the elderly in New York and Los Angeles. When I first heard it, I was immediately struck by the very first comment, a guy who wished he could find a certain photograph that clearly had disappeared.

When I think of that recording today, my mind goes to an afternoon a long time ago in the 1980s, when a woman I desperately loved and I went to County Stadium in Milwaukee with the dear friend who had introduced us. The three of us sat in the bleachers on that bright sunny day and watched our beloved Brewers. I don’t remember who they played or who won the game, but I remember a photograph from that day, we three friends smiling broadly in the sun. Either we asked a passerby to take the photo, or someone offered because he saw what fun the three of us were having.

I got little in this world, but I’d give honestly, without regret, one hundred dollars for that picture.