stlyrface

I'd like to amend Mongo's wish to see all copies of "Godzilla" destroyed, to state that all of the English versions of "Godzilla" should be destroyed. Many years ago the Public Theater in New York showed a print of the original Japanese version of "Godzilla" and you can't imagine the difference between the two versions. The Japanese version was stunning, like a kabuki play. Seen within the context of Japanese film and art the special effects, which I'd always thought were terrible, took on a startling realism. The plot, which was butchered when it was re-edited for American release, made perfect sense and followed a straight line to its logical conclusion. But it's clear and powerful anti-nuclear message simply couldn't be tolerated in American in the mid-fifties, and so the movie had to be completely trashed before it could be shown here. To the best of my knowledge, the Japanese version has never been made available on DVD or VHS in America, and I don't speak Japanese so I don't have any way of finding out if it's available in Japan. But I would give, well, a very large sum of money to get my hands on it. A truly underrated classic.

One of my favorite insults actually isn't from a movie, but from a cartoon. In the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Bewitched Bunny", Bugs discovers a witch luring two children into her house. The children turn out to be Hansel and Gretel. Bugs warns them that the witch is going to eat them and they flee the house, but on the way out they stop in front of the witch, kick up their heels, and yell, "Ach! Your mother rides a vacuum cleaner!" Every time I see that cartoon I just fall out at that line. I'm giggling now in fact. This is the cartoon where, at the end, Bugs tosses a bomb containing magic powder at the witch, turning her into a seductive female bunny. As the two of them walk off arm in arm, Bugs smiles at the camera and says, "Ah, but aren't they really all witches?" That line has provoked complaints from viewers in the past, one of whom filed a complaint with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. The record of disposition of the complaint can be read at http://www.cbsc.ca/english/decision/980203a.htm. That's worth a chuckle itself.

How about the most romantic scene in a terrible movie? I'll nominate the stoop scene in "The More the Merrier", with Jean Arthur and Joel McCrae. That's the scene where the two of them are sitting on the stoop and she's babbling on and on about how wonderful her fiancee is. McCrae keeps on putting his hand on her knee and she keeps on swatting it away. Finally she gets annoyed enough to turn on him, but before she can tell him off their eyes lock and -- bam! They throw their arms around each other and kiss. I understand that McCrae and Arthur came up with this bit of interplay while fooling around on the set one day. They took it to director George Stevens who agreed that it was good enough to put in the movie. But it's really the only thing worth watching in the whole film. The rest of the script is trite and cliched. Charles Coburn's character is an intolerable buttinsky, Joel McCrae's character is a complete wuss, and Jean Arthur MUST to be married off by the end of the film -- no happy single women allowed here. *bleh*