The View From The Mountain

I took an old Godzilla model kit (the Playing Mantis re-release of the old Aurora kit), cut him in half, and placed him in this ocean diorama. The ship is a WW II transport vessel that I tweaked slightly to make it look more like a generic cargo ship. The ship was a cheap kit, the kind you can slap together in an afternoon. The "water" was a paste from Woodland Scenics called Flex Paste. After it dried, I painted it in the bluish colors of the ocean, and then covered this (after the paint dried, of course) with Water Effects, also from WS. This was a fun diorama for me to do, one that got started when I saw the trailer for the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters film. You can buy this right here.

Just how badly does Pacific Rim: Uprising suck? Pretty badly. Let’s put it this way, I was already checking the time, wondering when this piece of shit would be over, a mere ten minutes into the movie. A sequel to the charming and fun Pacific Rim , released back in 2013, Uprising never would have existed had the original not drawn huge box office numbers in China. The original Pacific Rim didn’t exactly set the American box office on fire, despite being an enjoyable pastiche of Japanese monster movies--the kind that have giant monsters stomping cities. Pacific Rim posited that there was a special force of giant robots, crewed by human pilots, that were sent out to stop these monsters, called Kaiju. The robots are called Jaegers. The sequel takes place ten years after the first film, in which the Kaiju were finally stopped. John Boyega, better known as Finn from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi , stars here as the son of the Jaeger leader (would that make...

Last month marked the tenth anniversary of The Dark Knight , a superhero movie featuring the Batman that had become a seminal film in many ways. It’s influences can be felt far and wide throughout Hollywood and beyond, and its ‘darkness’ has been blamed for the dire, funereal tone of such latter superhero movies like Man of Steel and Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice . I’ve come across many comments online where the poster wondered why people liked The Dark Knight because it was…you know, so ‘dark’ and ‘gloomy‘. Do the fans of TDK like depressing stories? Speaking as a fan of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, I can honestly say that, no, I’m not a fan of depressing stories. But then, I don’t consider The Dark Knight to be a depressing tale, anyway. When director Christopher Nolan set out to reinvent the Batman with Batman Returns (which is a great film in its own right) back in 2005, he wanted to set the Caped Crusader’s exploits in a far more gritty, low-to-the-ground ve...