Tag Archives: kaiju

Godzilla: King of the Monsters review

08 Saturday Jun 2019

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King of the Monsters?  That’s an awfully binary way of looking at kaijus!

by Thom Yee

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Godzilla: King of the Monsters images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

If you’re one of those [very] few people who’s spent a lot of time around this site over the years, reading our reviews, getting a sense of where our tastes lie, and maybe even paying a bit of attention to our overall website design, you might think that we’re all of us big time kaiju fans.  We’ve covered most of the major monsters movies that have opened in the last seven years.  There’s giant monsters in at least one of our five randomly generated banner images.  And, at least for me, Pacific Rim ranks almost irrationally high on my top 10 favourite movies [monster or not] of all time.  And that’s not even mentioning my ethnicity which all but gives me no choice but to be into things like giant monsters… and martial arts and… like, math probably.  But I’m not a kaiju guy [or a math guy].  Not really.  I’ve never watched Evangelion and have no plans to.  I couldn’t recite to you the names of any famous giant monsters beyond Godzilla and MechaGodzilla.  And I could count the number of Godzilla movies I’ve seen (including the subject of this review) on one hand even if two of that hand’s digits were forcibly removed (note, I didn’t say it was going to be my hand I was counting on).  And yet there’s still something inside of me, something foundational, something primal, that draws me to movies like Godzilla even if those things aren’t quite enough to make me a full-blown fan of the genre.  And I bet those same things are in most of you too. Continue reading →

Kong: Skull Island review

18 Saturday Mar 2017

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‘Twas beauty killed the—what’s that. He’s still alive? Oh… well never mind then.

by Thom Yee

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Kong: Skull Island images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

So, I’ve never actually seen the original King Kong, not all the way through or all in one sitting at least. That’s not something I regret either despite being ‘the movie guy’ in my group of friends and despite being a person who prides himself on his knowledge of movie history. It may ultimately be a failing on my part, but I just don’t have a great deal of patience when it comes to the classics, and, as has been the case with Citizen Kane, The Graduate, or Scarface, I doubt that I’m going to see the original King Kong anytime soon. I’ve seen parts of it of course, the same way we’ve all watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory, pressed the wrong floor in a cramped elevator, or eaten at Subway, but there was never any intentionality behind those viewings, so while I have a pretty good idea of what the movie was about, I don’t really know what people see in it. But I have seen the 2014 Godzilla. Continue reading →

Godzilla (2014)

24 Saturday May 2014

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures and Toho

Images courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures and Toho

If you have even a passing interest in Godzilla (and I assume you must considering what you’ve done to arrive here in the middle of this sentence), over the last few weeks you’ve probably been seeing and hearing a little bit more about the character and series than you normally do. This year marks sixty years since the release of the very first Godzilla, the debut of the iconic Japanese monster and the first steps of an icon that would go on to star in more than thirty movie that broke free of their homeland and gave birth to an entire genre of… grown men dressing up in rubber monster suits and trampling all over obviously fake cities as allegories for nuclear terror and mankind’s contempt for nature (is contempt the right word?).

And what better way could there be to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the venerable series and symbol of Japan than with an all-new 2014 movie produced in America, with a British director, filmed in Canada, and set for release more than two months later in its homeland than most of the rest of the world (that’s right, Godzilla opens on July 25th in Japan)?

Continue reading →