Word: beastes
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Lavinia Currier's Passion in the Desert begins as a historical chronicle of the late 18th-century Napoleonic wars in Africa, but soon reveals more central concerns as a meditation on the ties between man and beast. The central conceit of the picture is a love affair, not as platonic or intellectual as you might think, that springs up between a soldier and a leopard. Yes, that is what I said, and it's a lot of ground for one picture to cover conventions of visual storytelling cannot easily accommodate such philosophical ambitions. It's hard enough to stage this...
...spine. Moviemakers have taken away his personality. Remember when he would jump up and down with glee after beating his enemies? He was always there to fight the bad monsters. At the end of one movie, a small boy waved farewell, plaintively calling, "Godzilla. Thanks a lot." The beast acknowledged him in a silent goodbye. It touched my heart. And in Godzilla 85, when the beast was lured into a volcano, I cried and thought, This cannot be the end of Godzilla! Now Hollywood has created a real monster--a souped-up, emotionless, dinosaur-like killing machine sans the charisma...
...then, everything had changed, collapsed, coalesced. An early fissure appears in 1951, when Brando brought Stanley Kowalski to the screen; the great beast was unleashed. With the mid-'50s eruptions of lurid B movies, Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book and the onslaught of rock 'n' roll, the revolution was born. Now teenagers were the social arbiters, and their pleasure was to love stuff their parents hated. They renounced grownup culture (which was turning pappy and repetitive) for a language of their...
Devlin and Emmerich approached the project gingerly, having rejected four previous overtures from Sony to take charge of Godzilla. The monster appeared to be unmanageable. Jan De Bont (Speed) tried to tame the beast for a while but gave up after Sony balked at the budget he wanted for a script that had Godzilla battling a shape-shifting beast. James Cameron (Titanic), Tim Burton (Batman) and David Fincher (Alien 3) were among the directors at one time considered to update Godzilla. When Steven Spielberg, who knows from dinosaurs, heard that Devlin and Emmerich were contemplating the movie, he tried...
That might be debated: the new computer-generated Godzilla has little of the personality of the rubberized beast. But at least he's faster. Says Devlin: "We realized that the reason behind the whole lumbering Godzilla was that they had to shoot a guy in a heavy-rubber monster suit and film in slow motion to give him some sense of scale." At 20 stories tall, says Devlin, "if you do the math, even if it walked at a gingerly pace, it's covering a lot of territory quickly." Adds Emmerich: "Godzilla can outrun any taxi, and that...