Exploiting the Archives: Godzilla, King Kong and Other Monsters I Have Known and Written About
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Exploiting the Archives. It’s the much too infrequently updated column where I shamelessly exploit my twenty-two years of constant toil as a pop culture writer by highlighting some of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many articles I have written over the course of my decades in the business.
This column serves several purposes. It’s a much-needed reminder that I haven’t always been a grubby, self-published weirdo just barely hanging onto the fringes of pop culture media. As recently as a decade ago I was a professional pop culture writer and an author published by the most prestigious division of Simon & Schuster with a thriving career and a promising future. Now I’m a half-mad recluse writing for an ever-shrinking audience but I have my dreams, and my memories, and a fuck-ton of professionally copy-edited old-ass pieces to my name.
What kind of old-ass pieces? Well, I am agog with excitement and anticipation about Godzilla: King of Monsters. It’s that new movie where Godzilla battles EVERY other monster, including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Youtubers Shane Dawson and Logan Paul.
It promises to be better than Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s unspeakable botch of the Godzilla legend, Godzilla, which I wrote up for my Forgotbusters column over at The Dissolve. Did I end up loving Godzilla? Of course not. Jesus, I just referred to it as an unspeakable botch. That is not positive!
I wasn’t crazy about the last Godzilla movie, primarily because he didn’t fight all the other monsters. I enjoyed the agreeably stupid Kong: Skull Island a whole lot more because its elevator pitch is essentially, King Kong, but also somehow Apocalypse Now as well. In connection with the release of Kong: Skull Island I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair where I wrote about the symbolic and metaphorical resonance of every major version of King Kong up until that point. The piece also appeared in a special Conde Naste magazine on monsters, which was cool, but I didn’t get paid any extra for it, which was less cool.
Speaking of King Kong, I also wrote up the wonderfully idiotic King Kong Lives for My World of Flops. In case you’re not familiar, that’s the movie where King Kong is in a fucking coma for much of the first act and then at one point squares off against hillbillies. It’s real, real dumb and was a whole lot of fun to write about.
In conclusion, I have written a lot about monsters and now you can read about monsters as well. It’s the next best thing to watching monsters fight each other in the motion picture Godzilla: King of Monsters, but, you know, less visceral and more literary and pretentious.
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