A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, October 17, 2026

Mothra vs. Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1964)


Cast: Akira Takarada, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Yu Fujiki, Kenji Sahara, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito, Yoshifuma Tajima, Jun Tazaki, Kenzo Tabu, Haruo Nakajima, Katsumi Tezuka. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa. Cinematography: Hajime Koizumi. Production design: Takeo Kita. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Akira Ifukube.

The contest between the benevolent insect god Mothra and the rampaging Godzilla sounds unequal. What's Mothra going to do, flap Godzilla to death? It turns out in Ishiro Honda's Mothra vs. Godzilla that the giant lepidopteran has a few unexpected tricks in her repertoire, not the least that she has progeny in the form of larvae with teeth. As usual, the humans are clumsy spectators, prone to do as much harm as good, but fortunately they have the help of Mothra's diminutive acolytes, the Shobijin (Emi Ito, Yumi Ito). We begin with a typhoon that washes a giant egg ashore, whereupon greedy promoters set out to make a fortune exploiting it. The egg, of course, is Mothra's, and fortunately we have an intrepid newspaper reporter (Akira Takarad) and a photographer (Yuriko Hoshi) who are more interested in getting the story than in making money. (The demise of newspapers is going to make such plots obsolete: Can we rely on intrepid podcasters to save the world in future encounters with giant monsters?) The movie is bright and busy entertainment with just enough sermonizing about human foibles to make it feel like the time watching it wasn't misspent.  

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