Couch Potato Saturday

Just to chill after a week of working for the man, I spent Saturday watching DVDS. Here's the summary.

The Simpsons Movie

Bland, middle of the road stuff to keep the masses happy. A tiny bit edgier than the TV show which passed its' use-by date around the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Two chuckles in the whole lot. People waited eighteen years for this? Sal enjoyed it more than I did, but she's a fart/bum joke kind of woman. Now a Family Guy movie might have some edge to it... or even better still, a Venture Brothers movie.

Banacek Series One I watched some episodes of this 1970s tv show about an insurance investigator played with an amusing smarminess by George Peppard. Good crimes in this. How do you steal a flat car from a train while the train is moving? How does a football player disappear while in the middle of a game? How does a million bucks vanish from inside a glass dome in the middle of a busy casino? Cool seventies stuff with guest stars like Margot Kidder and Joanna Pettit, Victor Jory and Broderick Crawford.

Nihon Chinbotsu I picked up from an Asian DVD shop for fifteen bucks. The name of the movie means Japan Sinks and it's a remake of a 1973 movie based on a 1973 novel by Sakyo Komatsu. The movie does a good job of balancing the people stories with the fantastically well done special effects. Islands sinking, tidal waves, volcanoes, landslides, massive destruction of cities and a string of underwater nukes are all done with an impressive realism. There are also some shocking scenes on a human scale. A grieving woman kneeling beside the body of her husband while she carries a dead baby is particularly shocking.

Finally Godzilla 2000 in which the big spiky guy goes up against an alien spacecraft that scientists found on the bottom of the ocean where it has languished for 60 million years. The space ship is around the size of the Burj Al Arab and absorbs information, which includes the data on Godzilla's DNA. Great special effects, a climactic punch up between Gojira and the monster created from his DNA and Tokyo, as usual, gets a severe kicking.