TiVoPlex
By John Seal
July 3, 2007
Wednesday 0704/07
6:00 AM Encore Action
Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991 JAP): First the good news: this quartet of recent Toho kaiju eiga are appearing uncut on premium cable for the first time today after extended runs on the commercial-bedizened Sci Fi Channel. Now the bad: they're all airing in pan and scan, so you may want to keep those widescreen versions you recorded off Sci Fi. First up this morning is the third of Toho's ‘new' Godzilla series, in which Big G tangles once again with three-headed villain Ghidorah for Tokyo stomping rights. There are also treacherous space aliens mucking things up, human characters about whom you won't give a damn, and lots of bad dubbing. It's followed at 7:50 AM by Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993), an ostensible sequel to 1974's Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster; at 9:45 AM by Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla (1994), in which our hero squares off against his interstellar doppelganger; and at 11:45 by Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), in which the Godzilla saga finally reached its (temporary) tragic end.
3:00 PM Sundance
Tales of the Rat Fink (2006 USA): Remember those wacky trading cards back in the 1970s that featured outlandish, heavily stylized representations of anthropomorphic hot rods? The automotive equivalent of Garbage Pail Kids, they were inspired by the art of custom car designer Ed ‘Big Daddy' Roth, who finally gets the full scale documentary treatment in this most enjoyable feature from director Ron Mann. Mann has a penchant for pop culture - witness his 1988 effort Comic Book Confidential, which gave recognition to MAD magazine founder William Gaines, counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb, and others - and Tales of the Rat Fink is a worthy addition to the canon. If you can get over Mann's cutesy decision to tell the goateed beatnik's life story via his automobiles - voiced by celebrities such as Brian Wilson, The Smothers Brothers, and Matt Groening - you'll have a great time. Also airs at 10:00 PM.
5:00 PM Sundance
The American Ruling Class (2005 USA): One of the abiding myths of American culture is the belief that we live in an economically fluid society, where anyone who tries hard enough and pulls at their bootstraps with sufficient force can become the next Bill Gates. While there's a tiny, tiny grain of truth to that maxim, the United States is rapidly becoming as stratified as any corrupt third world dictatorship or monarchy, with the upper classes skimming off huge portions of the nation's wealth and leaving the rest of us with the table scrapings (oh, and that bootstrap myth to keep us working extra hard). This very odd pseudo-documentary, produced by the BBC and narrated by Lewis Lapham, tries to convey this message through, of all things, song. It's a noble effort to put lipstick on a pig, and ultimately fails as either polemic or educational tool. Still and all, anything that alerts us to the pernicious class system has its heart in the right place, and you can't fault director John Kirby for trying.
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