Everything's swirling
It's what I am.
Ealing cinemas and Godzilla Minus One
For the last 12 years we lived near Ealing it didn’t have a cinema. The last one closed in 2008 with the promise of refurbishment and reopening… it never happened. Ironically in all that time it did have two cinema entrances. One on the closed cinema that for a long time was all that remained of it, and one from the long closed Walpole Picture Theatre that had been stuck on a wall in a car park.
Since we left the area two cinemas have opened in Ealing, so at last the place whose name is so important in the history of cinema actually has somewhere you can see films again.
Last time we were down Hazel and I visited the Ealing Project to see a rubbish Hunger Games prequel, and on Tuesday night I visited the Ealing Picturehouse to see Godzilla Minus One.
I have always had a fondness for the Japanese kaiju films of the 50s and 60s but was unaware that the genre was still a thing, and since I had nothing better to do I thought I’d see how they compared to the “classics” of old. Obviously 21st century kaiju has eschewed the man-in-a-suit monsters in favour of CGI but in Godzilla Minus One the CGI monster was still aproporiately reminiscent of Godzilla of the past… I’m not sure whether the monster was a motion-captured person or 100% CGI but I liked that it still gave the impression that it was a man in a suit and therefore felt nicely real. The story is an enjoyable yarn, that occasionally loses momentum but has a thrilling finale that made up for that.
The Picturehouse screen was huge, frankly too big for the room, wacthing from the front rows would have been impossible, but from the back it did look splendid (and as there were only half-a-dozen folk there I had my pick of the seats). The air-conditioning was noisy which was a bit annoying in the quieter bits of the film… but… there weren’t too many of them!
Everything's swirling / last build: 2024-04-03 11:39