Movies
The Real ‘Godzilla’ Returns to Japan!
Fan site The Good, the Bad, and Godzilla has been compiling breaking news from the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, Nikkei, and the respected movie website, Eiga.com, in which a new Japanese Godzilla movie has been announced!
In the first “Domestic Godzilla” since the 2004 Godzilla Final Wars, Toho Company Ltd. will be producing an all-new Godzilla film to be released in 2016.
“The screenplay is currently in development and we plan to start shooting next summer. We cannot announce cast or staff selections at this time. And we’re still deliberating whether to bring Godzilla to life via CGI or man-in-suit,” said Taiji Ueda (producer of Trick: The Movie ~ Last Stage), who will oversee the new “Godzicon” group – an organization to discuss and decide a wide range of strategies for promoting Godzilla – as Project Leader.
“This resurrection will be the centerpiece for ’16, and this is the force of our words.”
They plan on making something bigger and better than Hollywood’s version.
“The passionate voices of the fans clamored for a resurrection (of the Japanese Godzilla). We will bring the monster back to Japan, with the same high-quality, by bringing together our collective know-how, which we’ve been striving for, so we can’t lose to Hollywood,” he said with confidence.
This shouldn’t be too hard, although I am interested in seeing if they decide to take on Godzilla in digital form.
No matter, this is big news for purists looking for a new Japanese Godzilla film.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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