8nov26

Last night was lusciously misty and just the right kind of cold.

Today’s newsletter is out.

• STARLOG magazine is relaunching, apparently as an annual
• just came across this: weird book dealer Lock Books
• Austin Kleon mini-posters about making stuff, v useful and timely

Today I am thinking about connecting this notebook to Substack as a syndication. A lot will depend on whether I can disable comments and whether or not I can be arsed to do it at all.

(Via Pink Beam Press)

STATUS: once I have beaten my coffee machine into making actual fucking coffee, I intend to spend the day in the kitchen cooking and batching meals
READING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: SUNERGY, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Suzanne Ciani
LAST WATCHED: GODZILLA MINUS ZERO

GODZILLA MINUS ZERO is mostly very well done. The last half hour was, for me, a bit of a letdown – there’s an energy drop, the final battle takes less space than expected and there’s a lot more of actors emoting at things off-screen than felt right or effective. But the things that work, really work. The score is excellent, and very much knows when and how to unleash the original GODZILLA signature music. The aerial set piece is extraordinary, and the pace of the thing is generally marvellous – it does not fuck around, and I really appreciated that. It’s a machine gun of a film, moving at a hell of a crackalong. It picks up pieces from GODZILLA MINUS ONE (which I’ve only seen in the monochrome version!) and juggles them around to fine effect, and a few of the themes too. One of which is a gorgeous twist on the protagonist’s past as a kamikaze pilot. 

No spoilers, but there is a revenge plot in there that is illustrated beautifully.

There is very clearly going to be a third film, as they set up one big cliffhanger and a few loose threads.  Which, perhaps weirdly, I think is a shame, because it felt to me like a writer and director summoning the last of their energies. The effects budget is larger, and you can tell, but that comes with its own pressure to achieve more, and there’s the sense that effects led the nose of the structure a bit. 

As good as MINUS ONE? Probably not, quite. But for a good two thirds of its runtime it is inventive, high speed, gorgeous and ruthlessly brutal. 

PAPERWORK: Sharpening one of these up later, as I have some visual development to do.

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