NOT TONIGHT, I'M ON MY PYRAMID

Once again I cannot sleep, a state brought about by general anxiety over my mother and the endlessness of kidney failure/dialysis and by the fact that insomnia is just one of the many possible side-effects of the illness. I tried using Melatonin tonight but it did not work, so I lay awake staring at the ceiling, alone in my head with my thoughts. I finally gave up trying to sleep and instead sought a long, boring movie to hopefully lull me to sleep. I chose CLEOPATRA (1963), the legendary ultra-expensive Liz Taylor epic whose box office failure nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. 

I saw CLEOPATRA in bits and pieces during my adolescence, when it used to run divided into parts over five days on The 4:30 Movie in the '70's, but I had never watched it from start to finish, and without commercials. Seeing it while under the thumb of insomnia as I have several hours to go until I must get out of bed, dress, and await pickup for dialysis affords me a new and interesting perspective on it. Yes, it's ridiculously bloated at over four hours, but it's not as dull nor as camp as its infamy suggests or as I remembered it being. It's lavish to the point where the budget practically pours off of the screen, and that extravagance makes it a festival of eye candy. Sure, the dialogue is often stilted, but that was, and frankly still is, par for the course with Hollywood historical epics, and at least it has a huge cast of top-shelf actors to deliver it. With that taken into consideration, I don't buy Liz Taylor as the very Ptolemaic Cleopatra from a visual standpoint (translation: she does not work as an inbred ethnic Greek; way too white), but she wears the gorgeous costumes quite fetchingly and delivers the queen's unflappable arrogance as easy as breathing. (Perhaps expressing more than a little of her own personality.) 

Anyway, I do not find CLEOPATRA to be anywhere near as bad as contemporary reviews and most opinions of it popularly espouse. It's simply the last huge Hollywood epic of the classic era, bigger than most, but also no worse than many. If you ask me, its only real crime was being an exorbitant flop, and critics and the audience always love to dog pile on a loser when it's down. For me the bottom line is that it's saving my sanity during my latest bout of inability to sleep, and for that I am most grateful to it. 

That said, it's back to ancient times with Liz and Dick...

GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023)

"We're gonna need a bigger boat..."

 

I've been on the go since waking this morning for dialysis, but I had to pop in briefly state that I thoroughly enjoyed GODZILLA MINUS ONE. I'm too wiped-out to write about it at length, but let it suffice to say that it's definitely one of the Top 3 that the franchise has to offer. 

 

It's the best of Godzilla films aimed at grownups, right alongside the somber 1954 original, as it's basically a drama about the last days of WWII and their aftermath for the Japanese, focusing on a deserter kamikaze pilot who encounters the pre-irradiated Godzilla and subsequently plunges into an ongoing state of PTSD and survivor's guilt. Returning to his bombed-out home, an orphaned girl with an orphaned infant (not her child) fallin with the pilot and the three form a makeshift family that does its best to survive. We follow them for two years and become quite invested in them, but then Godzilla, now mutated and rendered titanic by atomic radiation, returns...

 

It's all as serious as a heart attack and bears no trace of the signature goofiness of many of the series' entries. It's genuinely scary in parts, quite suspenseful, visually spectacular,and it featrures a Godzilla that's as mean and nasty as we have ever seen him. Here he's a complete and utter bastard, an implacable living holocaust that's just plain unstoppable. While entertaining as hell, there's no "fun" about any of the proceedings, as Godzilla's path of destruction is treated as the outright horror that it would be, were it to actually happen. The sequence where Godzilla razes Ginza is worth the price of admission, and it will have you on the edge of your seat.

 

If it's playing anywhere near you, do not miss this one on the big screen. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

 

 

 Poster for the Japanese theatrical release.