Michael Offutt's Blog, page 121

Is Godzilla going to be a misunderstood hero to the people of the Earth?

I think if you're reading this, then you've probably watched a trailer or two of the new Godzilla movie. It's pretty basic stuff: huge monster is destroying cities and wreaking havok and just generally being the most badass thing around. However, I'm beginning to suspect that (despite all the destruction and lost human lives that will result from this thing coming out of the ocean) Godzilla is a good guy.

Recently io9 highlighted a description found on a toy that's available for purchase as part of the extended marketing campaign for this movie. Read it for yourself:

"Possibly the last of an ancient species of giant amphibious creatures that evolved at a time when the surface of the Earth was over ten times more radioactive than it is today. Godzilla can convert his radiation stores into a violent, focused exhalation of atomic ray. Rarely seen, but spoken of in ancient Pacific Island myths, "Gojira" was last spotted in 1954, when the U.S. Navy encountered and attempted to kill him with an atomic blast in the Pacific Ocean. Since then, the giant creature has been living in the deep ocean – until a threat to his survival from an ancient foe forces him to reappear."

Combine this with some stuff that came out of the Austin SXSW convention when a select few were invited to watch a scene from the upcoming movie. This excerpt first appeared on The Nerdist:

"We return to the Honolulu airport just as the power is being restored to the tram. The crowd on the train has a brief moment of relief before all awesome holy hell breaks loose. The tram is thrown from its tracks by a massive Kaiju that stylistically looks like a combination of a mosquito and the Cloverfield monster. It looks like this is the creature the government had a bead on over the radio.

The tram dangles precariously as Aaron Taylor-Johnson reaches out to save his young ward. But even if he does, who will stop the creature destroying the airport? Who the hell do you think? In a pretty heroic reveal for a character that has already caused mass destruction in his own right, the King of All Monsters steps up to put a smack down. With a massive roar, we get our first full look at the original big bad ass. And he is gorgeous! A perfectly updated look of Toho's creation stands before us."
An image from the toy line that hints at what the new kaiju is going
to look like. From the trailer, I thought it was Rodan.So yeah, Godzilla smashes the smaller kaiju/mosquito thing. The last line of the description on the toy suggests that Godzilla has emerged from the ocean to attack an ancient foe. So maybe there's going to be this outbreak of kaiju in the film and Godzilla is there to deal with it and humans just get in the way. That makes me think this will be an even more interesting movie than I originally thought, because it shows layers of Godzilla that previously appeared only in poorly done Japanese films.

What do you think? Is Godzilla going to be a misunderstood hero to the people of the Earth? Or is he just another monster that wants to gobble people up? As usual, only the important questions are discussed on my blog. As you were :).

George R.R. Martin has given up on being the first person to tell his story and is going to let HBO do the job for him

I seriously need to rethink why I like A Game of Thrones so much and decide whether or not I want to keep watching it. More than likely (99% chance) I'm going to keep watching it. But here's why I'm upset: the tv series is going to spoil the entire book series. Allow me to elaborate.

It turns out that HBO's television series is going to tell the entire story BEFORE Martin finishes it. I have never EVER heard of this happening and it really makes me angry. Adaptations of books happen AFTER the book is published and written. The reason this is happening with Martin's story is simple: he's too f'ing slow and he has a contract with HBO, D.B. Weiss, and David Benioff (the show's creators). It's actually kind of ridiculous. Here's how it all went down (according to Vanity Fair).

In the article, Martin confessed that the show is catching up to his writing speed and that this is essentially something he had sworn would never happen. In Martin's own words, "They are. Yes. It's alarming." Fans (including me) have weighed in that season five (to arrive in 2015) will have to include events from The Winds of Winter--a book that Martin hasn't finished yet.

How do Benioff and Weiss know about the events? Well Martin's capitulated and is basically telling them everything from his notes. He's given them access to every character's fate in as much detail as he possibly can. Here's the actual copy from the Vanity Fair article:

[Benioff] "Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him [Martin] and just talk through where things are going, because we don't know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be. If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character."

So yeah, Martin has basically given up on being the first person to tell his story and is going to let HBO do the job for him.

Are you f'ing kidding me? Is this at all how an author is supposed to behave? The last book in the series is supposed to be called A Whisper of Spring. I guess underneath the title it will say, "Adapted from the television series."

What a joke. I guess the joke's on us though because Martin is the one that is a millionaire twenty (or more) times over.

Cosmos blew my mind and Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the perfect man for the job

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one of my favorite people. I was really surprised to see that he was coming to Kingsbury Hall here at the University of Utah (on the hill) this March and even more surprised when I scored some tickets to the event for free! So naturally, as a fan, I tuned into the premiere episode of Cosmos last night and I was not disappointed.

For those of you who don't know Tyson, he's a celebrity astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. The guy is pretty amazing, having been influenced by a man I have profound respect for: Cornell's own Carl Sagan (sadly he left us before the turn of the century).

Cosmos is a reboot of Sagan's successful series that last saw television more than a generation ago. Last night's episode had us flying around the universe in a really cool ship that struck me as an all chrome version of the one that delivered the huge angry robot in "The Incredibles" during that movie's finale. Impressively, Tyson boiled down the many epochs of the universe's birth from the Big Bang to present day by representing it all on a twelve month calendar. All of recorded history on this calendar took place on the last day of the last month in the last sixteen seconds. That puts so much into scale. We are literally a blip that emerged during the last hour of the last day of the last month of the cosmic calendar and so much has come before us that the amount to study is literally immeasurable.

But most profound to me was Tyson's claim regarding the scientific method. "It's so powerful," he says, "that in just four hundred years it's taken us from learning about our planet's place in the solar system to making footprints on the moon." That's incredible, and I agree. We need to question everything, keep learning, and pass the torch to the next generation of scientists so that they can unravel more of life's mysteries.

Not long ago, I'd read that Tyson believed we should stop calling dark matter and dark energy by those names. Instead we should refer to them as "Fred" and "Wilma." This alone made me think that Tyson was perfect for this job: to create a show that would incite the imaginations of so many young people to use science as a way to explain our universe. And if you don't get the reference of "Fred" and "Wilma," it's because Tyson believed that the terms "dark matter" and "dark energy" were misleading. For one, science doesn't know what dark matter is. It should be called "dark gravity." And for another, just having the word "dark" makes people think that the two might be related, but they're not. So yeah..."Fred" and "Wilma" works beautifully.

Mr. Tyson, you blew my mind in your show last night. But in this case, blowing my mind is a lot of fun, and I hope you continue to do so as long as the show is on the air. Who knew learning could be so much fun?

Agents of Shield just went all X-Files this week

One of the best scenes ever. Dana Scully finds a frozen alien baby.Some of you are probably too young to remember the X-Files and that makes me sad. For what it was worth, the X-Files had a great first season and hooked me right off the bat with a weird arctic worm episode that led to more weirdness and an episode that even taught me the meaning of the word "exsanguinate." Well that first season ended with Dana Sculley getting an epiphany from a computer chip she found that ultimately led to her entering a silo, correctly guessing the password, and then pulling out an alien baby from a container (where it was frozen). And Tuesday night while I was watching A.G.E.N.T.S. I totally had a deja vu moment. Silo? Check. Strange alien-looking thing? Check. Password? Check (although Coulson got it wrong).
So who's the guy in the big jar? No idea.The main plot of the Tahiti episode revolved around saving Skye from a fatal bullet wound inflicted in an episode a few weeks earlier. Because her wounds were so bad, it required figuring out how Coulson got resurrected. We'd already seen the weird surgery performed on his brain, but all the science was saved for this episode for Fitz and Simmons to figure out (which they did). It turns out that there was a miracle drug. Naturally, this "miracle drug" was the by-product of a creature kept in a tank with tubes coming out of it. Of course, all this was located in a super secret facility.

So yeah...X-Files.

I've been kind of waiting for Agents to gel together; to get to a point where it sits well in my mind and I definitely think its gotten there. I look forward to new episodes like a fat kid looks forward to a cheeseburger. But it also is a much different viewpoint of the Marvel comics than I had originally anticipated. See...I thought the series was going to be about super heroes kicking ass and S.H.I.E.L.D. agents being alongside them. But now, I realize it's going to more of "The X-Files" meets "Mission: Impossible" (at least that's how my pitch would have gone).

On a side note, it was pretty awesome seeing Bill Paxton make an appearance. I hope we see more of him. 

Books taught me that my torments were the very things that connected me with all the people who have ever lived

"Spritzing is not for everyone," CEO and co-founder Frank Waldman told Co.Design.
"But for digesting emails, social media streams, and news especially, it allows you
to read more in a shorter amount of time. My 87-year-old aunt-in-law just
started spritzing and she loves it." So there’s a new app available and it’s called Spritz and supposedly it lets you read way faster. Friday’s articles touted that a reader could consume 500 words in a single minute. By this week however, claims rose to 1,000 words per minute. I’m just like you in reading these “testimonials” in that I want to know how this is possible.
The science: Spritz works by giving you one word at a time in a 13-character space, and it carefully positions the words so that you never have to move your eyes at all. I guess “eye-movement” is a wasted activity that slows down your reading speed.
But then there’s this nagging “second question” that pops into my mind: why is the world in such a hurry? Maybe I’m old-fashioned or perhaps I’m looking for that elusive experience only hinted upon in EliseFallson’s blog (that of total immersion in a story), but I seriously think I could get no pleasure from Spritz. It seems like a tool that would be useful when trying to cram for an exam. But I graduated from college twenty years ago and (barring the occasional certification that needs renewing) I don’t intend to pursue serious college work again until after I buy my first home.  I suppose my long time insecurity about books and whether people are reading them or not begins with a general concern that 1) people’s reading habits are changing and 2) this is going to have a very real impact on my life.
If we begin to live in a world where people no longer value books as an immersive getaway, I think our ability to communicate effectively might become impaired. This goes beyond the plethora of spelling errors that I see every day in all walks of life. A few years ago, spotting spelling errors on public signs was funny and cause for a well-placed facepalm. But in 2014, I’m no longer laughing. I recognize it now as a symptom of a greater malaise affecting a whole generation of people who could care less whether something is made to any quality standard.
There’s also evidence (some anecdotal) that people who read fiction for pleasure are more open-minded and better able to deal with uncertainty. And in an essay published in Time Magazine, author Annie Murphy Paul claimed that “the deep reader…enters a state likened to a hypnotic trance. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions.”
On Elise’s blog and her post on “immersion” I expressed my opinion thus: The inimitable power of literature is to give context and meaning to the trials and triumphs of living. Author James Baldwin once put this thought this way: ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.’ I'd say there is no intellectual equivalent to allowing oneself the time and space to get lost in another person’s mind, because in so doing we find ourselves. And that is the crux of my fear.

So ladies and gents, if people are no longer giving themselves time to find themselves and connect with others through books, how on earth will they ever have the context to understand me as a person? After all, it is through ignorance and the lack of understanding that the seed of “intolerance” starts to bear fruit.

This Star Wars cosplay is seriously adorbs

My parents own a long-haired dachshund that looks exactly like this dog (only fatter), so it really grabbed my attention. Han Solo and Chewbacca never looked so good. I think any hardness that the world has inflicted on my heart just instantly melted away when I saw it. Courtesy of a photgrapher named Cuije. You can visit the website HERE. And yes, you're welcome :). Happy Monday.
Han Solo and Chewbacca! May the Force be with you.

This 8-Bit gif of Daenerys Targaryen telling Drogon to burn Kraznys to a crisp made my day

This is easily the coolest scene in "A Storm of Swords." Is anyone else looking forward to the return of A Game of Thrones?
You know you've made it when things like this start showing up online with regard to your books. 
Check out more at Buzzfeed HERE.

Sadly, the sign on the Godzilla busting nuke in the latest trailer is very believable

Click to EMBIGGENUnless you were living under a rock yesterday, you saw the second Godzilla trailer launch online and then deluge the entire internet with speculation over new monsters by kaiju-crazed nerds (raises hand). The one thing that stuck in my craw though was this screen cap of a Godzilla-busting nuke. Yes, that's a sticker on it that basically says "this is to kill Godzilla."

Folks we live in a world where peanut butter has a label on it that says "this product was made in a factory that handles peanuts." And yes, we live in a world where "hot coffee" has a product warning on it saying that "contents may be very hot." So is it really a stretch to imagine a world with a Godzilla running around in it where weapons like the one above, might draw some confusion by those using it?

Just imagine the dialogue:

Beffudled American: "Are we supposed to hit ourselves with this, captain?"

Answer: "No, you need to aim it at the enormous creature knocking over the Golden Gate bridge."

Beffuddled American scratches head and says, "Oh. Okay."

One could say it's "tongue in cheek" but with the U.S. ranking 30 globally for students in mathematics, 23 in science, and 19 in reading I can't really argue with this. Sadly, the sign on the Godzilla busting nuke in the trailer is very believable.

The Claimed episode of the Walking Dead dropped the one carrot I really want but can I trust it

Has this guy figured out the apocalypse? He did say he's a lot smarter than
his friend Abraham Ford. I guess we'll see.Of course last night's Walking Dead was excellent. And added to the joy of watching all the shows that I love is the fact that the Nielsen's are paying me to keep a television diary for one week! Squee! Seriously, the Nielsen ratings should just always consult me on what's great and what ain't. But there is something gnawing away at me, and it primarily concerns the "claim" that Eugene (who is a scientist) somehow knows what started the zombie apocalypse.

So can the show actually survive this kind of revelation? I mean, IF the show goes there (and keep in mind that this is what I called a big "IF") will the explanation actually be satisfying? If it's a disease, well we've been there done that. If it's some other thing like the tail of a comet that came close to the Earth and bathed it in weird radiation or a religious explanation like "when there's no more room in Hell the dead shall walk the earth" will we like that answer?

I don't think I will. So the other thing that occurs to me is that this "carrot" that they are dangling in front of me is just a red herring. That something will happen to Eugene just prior to him opening his mouth seems like the most likely scenario. Hmm. Honestly, this show has gone a lot further than I ever thought possible with zombies, and it keeps surprising me at every turn. I look forward to seeing what they come up with next. But this "claim" by Eugene? I'm not sure I can trust it.

Does America have a cultural identity problem?

The new Godzilla poster that came out this week makes Godzilla look bigger than I have ever seen him. The tallest skyscraper in the shot barely comes up to his elbow. It makes me ask a couple of questions. The first (and most obvious one) is: Does this poster intentionally mislead its intended audience? I mean, the previous Matthew Broderick incarnation also had a huge Godzilla foot superimposed with cars and that movie's catch phrase was "Size does matter." So everyone that's been making Godzilla movies agrees that at least "size matters" for this particular kaiju film and that "bigger is better." And the 1976 King Kong had Kong so huge he was straddling the World Trade Center while holding a jet fighter. But we all know that Kong was never that big (not to mention that there wasn't a jet fighter getting caught).

The other question that pops up in my mind (again related to size and importance) is this: do Americans suffer from a cultural identitity problem? The gargantuan prominence of "Godzilla" (Japanese icon) in a clearly American city such as San Francisco makes me truly realize how much we borrow from other cultures to create our own kind of absurd take on things.

Let's just take a jaunt around the web to other bloggers (who are American) and see what we find. At Matthew MacNish's place abbreviated the QQQE we discover that Matthew identifies with all things Japanese. If we go over to L.G. Smith's blog, it's the British Isles. I am reminded of the time when Mitt Romney (as the Republican presidential challenger" said, "We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage" and hinted that he'd like to restore a bust of Sir Winston Churchill to the White House (when no restoration is needed because it's still there).

And then we have Katy Perry's new video.
It's tacky, cheesy, and I still love it. We've got the twinkies pyramid, a tattoo-inspired Isis at the end, neon and smurf-colored Egyptians, and it all screams "Bitch, we're fabulous" in volumes. Seriously, you should watch this video.
I guess my point, which really was started by staring at the Godzilla poster, is this: What is American exactly? I have trouble pointing out a distinctly American style because it all seems to be borrowed from something else. On Squawk Box yesterday on CNBC (I watch it in the morning because it has the best stock market news) one of the announcers said that Ralph Lauren is a distinctly American brand. Okay, so does that mean Polo shirts and all things Ralph Lauren are what Americans are supposed to look like?
Or is Ralph Lauren borrowing its fashion designs from some other culture?
When I travel to the southwest, I see a "style" of building that seems to have a very strong Spanish theme to it. When I look at our government buildings, I think "Greek." I mean, our capitol does have a resemblance to the Parthenon in Athens. Louisiana is of course very French. And Las Vegas is well, such a hot mess that it defies description.
Maybe Google's home page is the most uniquely American thing ever. It just says what it is in color and then is surrounded by a blank page. Maybe that's what America is: a blank page. And anyone can color it to be exactly what you want, which is arguably the most fabulous thing ever, but kind of boring too.

What are your thoughts on this topic?