Subtitles finally backfired on me.

The Movie: Godzilla: Final Wars, directed by Ryuhei Kitamura
Recommendation: Broomie
Reason: He's a huge Godzilla fan, dating back to apparently watching a lot of the movies when he was a kid. I didn't know that until he brought this home...

The only Godzilla movie I've ever seen was that wretched 1998 bomb starring Matthew Broderick. From what I have been told by Broomie, it was a travesty akin to the mauling Uma Thurman gave to my beloved Emma Peel and Poison Ivy. The basic outline, which I was unfamiliar with when I saw that Americanized 'adaptation', is that a bunch of monsters break free of their prisons and start attacking something, usually Japan. In the case of Final Wars, they were attacking the whole world. They were everywhere! Kaiju assaulting North America, Australia, etc. was pretty cool, even though all of those multinational locations looked oddly like Japan.

It was a neat experience watching a Godzilla movie with a dedicated fan. During moments that were a little confusing to the unwitting, Broomie was glad to provide a bit of basic education. He identified characters like the Mothra Twins and Minzilla, plot devices like the aliens (who are apparently never good, ever), and got a pretty good laugh out of Zilla, aka Monster X.

I have to say I enjoyed this one, not in an "American Beauty" sense, but for the same reasons I've enjoyed movies like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a fun movie that revelled in what it is, was so completely self-aware that it didn't even need to acknowledge it, and just went for the gold. By the end, monsters punching each other was just good clean fun.

-115/365 down, 250/365 to go