Godzilla vs. cold

For reasons I cannot explain, and even now don't fully understand, I spent last night at a Godzilla movie. Godzilla va. Mechanagozdilla. Actually, it was pretty good. I was impressed that Godzilla's blue streaming fireballs were not just hot, but radioactive. Which gave rise to my favorite scene of the movie: The tough, loner female pilot crawls into the downed robot's smoking head to operate him manually. Her captain warns her to "get rid of the radiation." So she ejects some sort of smoke into the room from the walls, and poof! Radiation's gone. I thought that was pretty cool.

The movie was my friend M's idea. I got to tease him about taking me places where I was sure to meet eligible men. The audience was full of interesting, pale, slouching men in their late thirties and forties. The German guy behind us had some sort of post-nasal drip problem, and the young man in a fedora on our left did not, I'm sure, own a razor. Last night, the Castro Theater was a veritable cornucopia of static DNA.

We were treated to an interview before the movie. It was with a Japanese guy who was the actor in the Godzilla suit, for real. He said he studied his cat to get the eye and movements right. It worked. "He looks like a pissed-off squirrel," M said.

M's friend P joined us. He's only limping a little from the shark bite. What was it like, to be bitten by a shark? Not that bad, he said. First off, it was a young shark, so it wasn't that big. P didn't feel any pain when it bit him, or even a squeeze. Just the sensation of being slammed into. Like a truck running into your car from behind. He was pushed forward on his board, with no idea what hit him. He turned around to see and there was this shark just sitting there under the water, with P's leg in its mouth.

"I think it got ahold of something it wasn't really expecting," P said. He's probably really tired of telling this story. But he was a good sport about it.

The other funny thing that the Japanese stunt actor told us was that the fight scenes between Mechanagodzilla and Godzilla were really difficult to film. "Mechanagodzilla's arm comes out to here," he says, putting an extended arm on the translator's shoulder. "Godzilla's arm only comes out to here." He bends his arm at the elbow to demonstrate. "So when I tried to hit Mechanagodzilla, I couldn't reach him. I would run into him with my head before I reached him with my hand. When I did that, the teeth in the mask would break. So the costume designer got very mad with me. He's yelling at me and I go to bow, and my head falls off. It was very difficult."

You can learn a lot about a culture by watching its movies. But the Japanese have always been a bit more than I can understand. Samuri movies, stomach-lurching anime, and giant fire-breathing puppets stepping on cars. Maybe we're not getting the whole picture here in the US.

Bad news: I came home with a cold. It's been going around forever. Someone gave me an Emergen-C. I'm hoping for a quick recovery, before heading north for Thanksgiving.