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It’s Tuesday, September 13th, and here’s where we are…

Good intentions be damned, eh?

There is so much going on right now that I’m a little dizzy. It’s a good problem to have, for sure. On Wednesday night, I recorded a new appearance on Screen Drafts, and it may be one of my favorite guest spots I’ve done for them so far. You can download it now if you want to listen. The topic was Godzilla movies, and the guest who organized the draft was Graham Skipper, who has an upcoming book that any fan of Godzilla should be excited about. Godzilla: The Ultimate Illustrated Guide will arrive on Kindle and other ebook platforms on Tuesday, then hit bookstores right at the end of October, and it looks fantastic.

What made the event so special was that Graham invited Toshi to guest-draft with me on a team. I’ve been sharing Godzilla movies with Toshi since he was three years old, and he has made it very clear to me over time that Godzilla is his favorite thing. Period. Like more than food or oxygen or even girls. Well, maybe not girls, but it’s a close race. I’ve been writing the Film Nerd 2.0 columns since 2008, and at this point, Toshi’s in his senior year of high school. He’s taking film and journalism classes this year and he’s starting to think about his future. He’s a thoughtful, funny kid, but like any teenager, he’s got his self-doubts he’s working through. Being invited to be part of the draft was a big confidence booster for him and he rose to the occasion. You’ll be able to hear the episode at the start of the week, and I’m really proud of the way he handled himself overall. The real fun of it was the conversations we’ve had for the last month while we’ve been watching all of the Godzilla films again and comparing notes and building our lists on Letterboxd. I think Letterboxd is a delightful site for obsessive film nerds, and it is by far the least toxic version of social media I’ve experienced. It’s fun doing stuff like a Godzilla list or a James Bond list, and I use the site to keep my media diary straight.

That can be important because of just how much I ingest. There are movies that I see that basically just slide right off my brain. I saw two movies this week that I would describe as “fine,” movies that did exactly what they promised to do but that I won’t remember beyond a superficial level three weeks from now. One was Fall, directed by Scott Mann, and the other was Beast, directed by Baltasar Kormákur. Both of them lean heavily on visual effects, almost elevating them to cast member status, and both take a fairly straightforward thriller set-up and then hammer that one note mercilessly to varying degrees of success.