Robots Are Evil When They Look Human

                                         
 

Isaac Asimov would be angry to know that his three laws are being ignored by the latest batch of robots.  I’ve noticed that the more the robots look like humans, the more evil they are.  These new waves of robots endanger humans, go crazy, or murder for the sake of longer life.

Review: Godzilla vs the Sea Monster

This film has neither Ishiro Honda's direction, nor Akira Ifukube's musical score, nor an original script. It was instead directed by Jun Fukuda, scored by Masaru Sato, and used a script originally intended for King Kong. Would you believe that it actually works?

Review: Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda

 

The canon of serious film study literature regarding the kaiju (giant monster) genre is limited to G-Fan magazine, David Kalat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series  and a few other selections that limit themselves to summation of the plots of the twenty-eight Toho movies and one American production.

With Peter H. Brother’s 2009 work, Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda, the bookshelf of academic appreciations of the genre has another addition edition.

Let me preface this by saying I’m approaching this review as both a Godzilla fan first and a cinema fan second.  That’s important because Brothers does an exemplary job of examining all the works of Honda--not only for his achievement with the fantasy films.  For that reason one could use this as a film studies text.  My main interest was Honda’s kaiju movies.  If I seem to lean towards the Godzilla films, you can understand my perspective.

Who Should We Blame When A Movie Fails?

 

Football fans know that a team loss can be a brutalizing event.  Most often, the defeat can be attributed to one player underperforming: a kicker misses a field goal, a receiver dropping a pass, or a defender letting an opposing player slip by for huge gain. Others will argue that the individual player’s mistake wouldn’t be as grave had not the rest of the team (offense, defense, or special teams) played well.  In some cases, the quarterback will take full responsibility even when his defense may be the cause of the defeat. Coaches will accept losses as their own even when their authority to lead the team is usurped by owners or managers.

There’s no definable point where true blame can fall on a football team that fails.

Likewise, the movie industry runs into the same dilemma in finding fault.  With so many involved in the process, pinning blame for a movie’s failure is difficult—if not impossible.  In certain situations one can attribute some blame to the people in key roles.  Here’s a list of the people involved in making movies and why those people should or should not be liable for a movie’s failure.