In the grand tradition of blog series throughout the internet, Review All Monsters! has hit itself a snag, Owing, undoubtedly, to Netflix's hellbent urge to stop having DVDs involved with its DVD-by-mail service, there apparently aren't enough discs of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster to go 'round, so I find myself staring an unyielding "Long wait" in the face, as I have done for some days now. Meanwhile, my customary back-up plan of accidentally finding perfectly legal copies of rare or never-on-home-video movies underneath rocks in the magical forest has also come up short: it is unbelievably hard to find a Japanese-language torrent of Ghidorah on any of the sites I have ready access to. And so we wait: either for whoever is hanging onto my disc to mail it back, or for this fucking slow drip download to wrap up. Review All Monsters! will return, I promise, but right now I haven't the damnedest idea when it will be, or how much time it will take to get back on schedule.
In the meantime, I hope to share with you all soon the fruits of James Franco's limitless dipshittery.
Updated: Good news! Copy acquired, and while I have a sort of theme day planned for tomorrow, it might go up then at some point, or definitely Monday.
23 November 2013
9 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
Sorry to hear the rough news, Tim. For whatever it's worth, the Classic Media DVD has the Japanese version on it, and is available for cheap on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ghidorah-Three-Headed-Monster-Akihiko-Hirata/dp/B000OCY7IU
ReplyDeleteI dunno if that's a viable option for you, but might as well throw it out there, just in case.
If you're willing to brave some of the depths of the adware, bloatware ridden corners of the internet, here's a few sites with a GTTHM fan-sub. Maybe not quite as good as the officially licensed version, but it gets the job done. It's also embedded video, so the quality might be a bit wonky.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.novamov.com/video/4a87f34152e96
and
http://www.movie2kto.me/watch-movies/Ghidorah__the_Three_Headed_Monster__1964/8295
both seem to work.
Hope you enjoy it! This is probably my favorite of the Showa era outside of Gojira itself.
There is nothing more frustrating than when the magic forest comes up short. It's -t-h-e- -i-n-t-e-r-n-e-t- a magic forest, it's supposed to contain every media ever! Not just 150 copies of Transformers at different resolutions and file formats. :(
ReplyDeleteEither way, though, I look forward to the continuation of Review All Monsters!, no matter when that happens. :)
Got it!
ReplyDeleteSsssonic- I've definitely hit that stupid point I'm trying to only buy Blu-rays, even of things that clearly won't ever come out in hi-def. But those Classic Media DVDs are wonderful, and my local library has several. Just not this one.
Will- Thanks for the link, though I'm glad I don't have to use it - I do all this from a Windows PC, and I get scared off easily from places where I might catch something.
Not Fenimore- it's not exactly your point, but the whole "in the internet age, we have everything available all the time" argument that a lot of otherwise smart people make is one of the most pernicious and frustrating lies of digital cinephilia. You know what I haven't found on this infinite world of all movies, even in the dankest gutters of the internet? The two-hour theatrical cut of Greed (the theoretical reconstruction from stills takes about three seconds to find on YouTube). I'm sorry, but when one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the medium can't be found in the version by which it made its reputation over 75 years, then no, we do not have access to all the movies.
P.S. Yes, this means anyone who can point me to the not-restored Greed will be my new best friend.
I had some trouble finding Ghidorah for download and ended up having to spend a week downloading it at a trickle, but that's nothing on the agony of trying to find an English-subtitled Japanese version of Return of Godzilla, so I suggest you start looking now if you haven't already got your hands on it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads-up. I do have that one already, and most of the other things that I knew, theoretically, would be impossible to get from Netflix. It's these last-minute "what do you mean it's not shipping?" crises that are going to throw things out of whack.
ReplyDelete@Tim: Caveated that I know nothing about Greed or, indeed, film studies in general (one reason I love this blog is that you explain all this stuff so engagingly :) )…
ReplyDeleteI think that's a bit unfair. There's a difference between complaining that the internet doesn't have Japanese-version Ghidorah, which is obscure and specific, and complaining it doesn't have the original Greed, which as far as I can tell from wikipedia existed briefly, once, ninety years ago. The internet is a lot worse at the obscure and specific, in a lot of cases, than people think; but I don't think most people are seriously surprised the the internet can't bring back destroyed things from nonexistence.
THAT version might just as well be said to have never existed at all.
ReplyDeleteI'm talking about the 140-minute version prepared by the studio that was, until 1999, the only version that had ever been screened for any audience. It was released to VHS, but has been wholly superseded by the still-and-text reconstruction sponsored by TCM that year.
If I'm not mistaken, it actually aired on TCM this past fall, but I wasn't paying close enough attention and assumed it was the newer version, and thus did not DVR it when I had the chance.
Oh. Um, sorry. Failure of reading comprehension there. :( But I guess in that case your point is the same as mine, so we're all good.
ReplyDelete