Mothra (1961): adapted by Shin'ichi Sekizawa from the novel by Shin'ichiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta; directed by Ishiro Honda; starringFuranki Sakai (Bulldog), Hiroshi Koizumi (Dr. Chujo), Kyoko Kagawa (Photographer), Yumi and Emi Ito (Twin Fairies), and Jerry Ito (Nelson):
The giant Japanese monster movie for people who also enjoy musicals. Mothra only awakens when an evil, um, night-club owner absconds from Mothra Island with the two literally little, singing women who, um, are the centre of the island's normal-sized-human religious life? I don't know.
So anyway, Mothra hatches when the women are spirited away. A plucky Japanese reporter nicknamed Bulldog, his plucky camera-woman, and his plucky government pal work tirelessly to free the little women and get them back to Mothra Island. Too late. Young Mothra swims to Japan, cocoons herself, and emerges as the Mothra we all know and love.
Mothra gets to lay waste to Japan and seemingly American ''Rolisica' and its 'New Kirk City,' where the evil night-club owner takes the women. I feel like Japan is acting out some closeted aggression towards the United States here. In larval form, Mothra's special power is shooting goo at things. In adult form, her main power is generating windstorms by flapping her wings. Won't someone get those little women back to their island? Perhaps the first post-colonial Toho Studios giant-monster movie. Recommended.
The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell (2012): Campbell's newest novel comes with what initially appears to be a fairly innocuous cover -- until you realize that it's impossible to duplicate what the person on the cover is doing with his hands. Unless, maybe, you're double-jointed. I didn't check on that.
At the taping of a British talk show much like The Jerry Springer Show, soon-to-be-30 Luke discovers that his father isn't really his father, and his mother isn't really his mother, thanks to DNA tests. His uncle seems to know something about this, but he dies of a heart attack before he can tell Luke much of anything. As Luke starts to delve into what his uncle knew, using that uncle's strange journal as a guide, more deaths and disappearances follow.
Luke's expecting his first child with his partner Sophie, a classical guitarist. Luke himself is a rising comedian who specializes in an act that's an odd combination of mimicry and commentary on the foibles and failings of people. Luke's always been a terrific mimic, and was incredibly precocious in a way that seems like a sly homage to the precocious, early-reading H.P. Lovecraft, whom Campbell emulated early in his own precocious writing career.
And Luke was plagued by nightmares as a child about vaguely human-shaped things creeping into his bedroom to watch him at night. Now the nightmares have returned. Soon, they're no longer nightmares: they're what Luke sees in the daytime.
In what is Campbell's shortest novel in decades, a fabulous blending occurs of some of his own mythologies (references to other Campbell works span almost his entire writing career, from "The Franklyn Paragraphs" of the 1960's through The Doll Who Ate His Mother of the 1970's to The Grin of the Dark from 2004) and an assortment of myths and legends about fairies in the British Isles. "The Kind Folk" is just one of the terms used by fearful people to curry favour with fairy, who were not traditionally known for their kindness.
Luke's quest is extremely personal, though there are potentially apocalyptic ramifications to his quest to understand his origins. His uncle mapped out hot spots throughout the British Isles where another world seemed to be leaking through into this one -- and when Luke visits these places, very odd things start to happen. And people other than himself start to see the figures from his childhood, and not simply in dreams.
It's a solid, understated effort from Campbell, one whose chills are often existential, and whether or not the myths and legends of Fairyland herein are 'real' or invented by Campbell, they possess the haunting quality of real legend. Highly recommended.
