Word: godzilla
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...standard of judgment, Hickey has endorsed without shame some of the great middlebrow passions of the past century, from Liberace to Perry Mason. His essay on Siegfried and Roy, the illusionists who make whole pachyderms dematerialize, is the best meditation on a pop-culture subgenre since Susan Sontag met Godzilla. He is suspicious of art that claims to transmit transcendent truths. Jackson Pollock wanted his spattered canvases to represent universal psychic turmoils. Hickey loves them but says they are better regarded as freedom made visible. "They stand as permission for certain kinds of human behavior." He tells the story...
...city. Stroll over wisteria-covered bridges and past 300-year-old pines toward the Sumidagawa River and hop a $6 ferry to Asakusa, one of the few historic areas left in this overdeveloped metropolis. Wander through the old-time shopping arcade, picking out souvenirs like lacquered hair combs and Godzilla figurines. Follow the crowds to the site of the 7th century Sensoji temple, where you can check your odds of landing the big business deal by buying a fortune. Slip Y100 into the slot and shake a metal can until a numbered stick pops out. Ask a bystander to read...
...hatred during the war, they earned its sympathy with the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan. The old villains were now victims; those damaged faces seized the heart with the same violent poignancy as the corpses at Auschwitz. From this collective sorrow and guilt, two genres were spawned. In the Godzilla movies, atomic blasts awaken a prehistoric monster (and he still hasn't gone back to sleep; the series continues today). There were also more serious parables of doomed romance, in which an unlikely couple represents the puniness of mankind in the smirking face of Armageddon. The glistening sand...
...Japan - the '50s flurry of Hollywood films like Sayonara (with Marlon Brando as a G.I. who loves a Japanese entertainer) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (this time with Brando as a Japanese!) - were mostly fond and sentimental. It was not until the country emerged as an economic Godzilla that Hollywood updated the old ogres with ruthless businessmen, in the film of Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun - and then changed the identity from Japanese to American, to stifle Japanese protests. This summer's big item is Pearl Harbor, and we'll bet the "enemy" is portrayed gingerly. Unlike...
...been taken from a movie magazine that was getting out some prerelease publicity; like the facts in most movie magazines, it was incorrect. There was never a man in an ape suit in any part of the film, as "Famous Monsters" pointed out. (That technique had to wait for "Godzilla...