The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 30

TV SCHEDULE C6 ARCHITECTURE C7 ENTERTAINMENT C4 15-21211 iAw)5 Tl IE VANCOUVER SUN MAY 20, 1(W8 Monster cliches crush Godzilla GODZILLA Starring Matthew Uroderick, Jean Reno, Maria Pitillo, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer. MA. KATIIIRINE MONK SUN MOVIli CRITIC Run, run, run for your lives! Godzilla is back and he's going to gore oops bore you to death. A loose collage of horror cliche lifted from a variety of sources, including the original American Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1956) and Ridley Scott's now-classic Alien, Godzilla's first of many flaws is its complete lack of surprises, creativity or interesting second-takes on classic kitsch. When you've seen every shot before from the giant footsteps, to the egg-chamber, to the velociraptor-like hijinx of the Babyzillas in the midst of Madison Square Garden the fear button is replaced by the one that reads "blase." Sorry, but at this point in time, we've seen too many symbolic enemy.

Not only was Godzilla Japanese, glowing with radioactive energy and fiercely destructive, he was, in essence, created by the hands of man making him the heir to the monster throne once inhabited by the likes of the ancient Golem (the Hebraic dust monster), Frankenstein and Mr. Hyde. Regardless of their massive dimensions and changing shapes, the message behind the monster myth has always the same: In trying to save ourselves, we usually create the beast that will bring about our own demise because we are ignorant about our own, potentially evil, nature Such was the core of the first Godzilla movies as they showed us the dark side of the atomic age in moody black and white. The new Godzilla is also radioactive, but here, in glorious colour and ambitiously digitally rendered, the monster is a beast unto himself. He swims where he wants, crushes cities without Tomorrow in the Sun sum Willi iai cities destroyed better, faster and scarier by dinosaurs, lava flows and tidal waves to really care about what a really big foot is going to do to the Big Apple.

prejudice and has no connection to our world whatsoever. For Godzilla to really work his magic, he must be a reflection of ourselves a lost soul perverted by the wanton Marke Andrews looks at the history of Godzilla In the premiere Issue of Queue magazine t- The retread factor could have been forgiven had director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) firmly planted his tongue in his cheek instead of waffling between sincerity and complete send-up. But Emmerich clearly had no idea where to put the accent on this pricey disaster of a disaster film that has Matt Broderick playing a scientist in search of Godzilla a giant mutated dino-lizard born in the radioactive mudpits of some South Seas atomic atoll. At times, he tries for the same style of deadpan humour that made Independence Day so entertaining, but it fails because the one-liners fall flat. The rest of the time, Em-'merich goes for the serious ran- CALISTA FLOCKHART: The star of Ally McBeal was one of the TV season's winners, a breath of fresh air in a cloud of stale retreads.

1 ftory backed by special effects. 'I acts of modern man. There is no connection here and that's why this movie, like most modern monster movies, fails miserably. They fail because in these warm and merger-friendly days of globalization, we've lost track of the enemy. There are no absolutes anymore: no man in white, no man in black.

Everyone is grey and so the world has become a far more ambiguous place morally, socially, sexually, politically, etc. Without absolutes, or at least the perception of such, the monster myth collapses a fact which Godzilla proves several times over as it drags its scaly green fanny across the screen for the better part of two hours in search of meaning. The poor beast has no place to go no empire to destroy, no lesson to teach, no man to make wiser and so he wanders aimlessly until he's finally destroyed. By the end of this miserably bloated mind-number, we've learned nothing, felt nothing and. seen little of the evil within our hearts.

In the big picture, Godzilla may be the bleakest statement yet about the '90s, where skin-deep concerns such as special effects, big-name stars and superficial struggles in the big city outweigh the need to understand who, and what, we really are. At the Granville, Oakridge, Park Tilford, Station Square, Coquitlam, Scott 72, Clear-brook, Harris Road, Mission City, Cottonwood, Caprice White Rock and Caprice Tsawwassen cinemas. bui 11, 100, ians Decause ine special effects are mediocre and the story is downright more tellingly than Ally McBeal. Praised as a breath of fresh air in a cloud of stale retreads, vilified as a betrayal of professional women (Ally's constant hankering for men, her unfocused attention span, those short 1 skirts that add new meaning to the term legal brief). Despite its detractors, Ally McBeal became that increasing rarity in mainstream TV a show people gathered around the water cooler the next morning to talk about.

This was also the year an obscure and obnoxious cable cartoon made the cover of Newsweek and Rolling Stone and carved its own niche in the popular Zeitgeist. The ascendancy of South Park reflects a sea change in the way people are watching TV: No show created specifically for a specialty-channel audience captured the popular imagination so quickly. And small wonder. For many viewers, mainstream TV is becoming, to borrow a phrase from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's lexicon, carbon-dated beyond passe. For those of you who spent this past TV season curled up with a good book or, better yet, hiding under a rock here's some of what worked and what didn't.

ALEX STRACHAN SUN TELEVISION CRITIC If it's true that we are what wc watch, how docs that explain Dharma Grog? A throwback to the screwball comedies of the '30s and '40s, about a strait-laced professional falling hcad-over-hecls with a free-spirited, latter-day flower child, Dharma is but one of a tiny handful of hits culled from 30 pretenders that debuted last fall. In an era of record bank profits, fiscal conservatism and corporate mergers, Dharma's ascendancy hints at something more meaningful than winsome nostalgia a groiindswell of New Age revisionism, perhaps, and a yearning for renewed Flower Power. Or perhaps it is just a funny show. Oddly, in a year when more than 60 sitcoms trolled the airwaves, genuine laughs seemed that much harder to find. This was a year when a debutante viewers loved and hated in equal measure evolved into a mainstream hit, thanks to a computerized dancing baby and long-ago forgotten ballads swept off the bar-room floor and recycled as latter-day feminine angst.

No show in recent memory reflected the split personality of today's TV audiences inane. Granted, a story about a giant monster eating New York or Tokyo was never genius, but, as a new addition to the monster pantheon, Godzilla did have something to offer from an intellectual perspective. When the first of the lizard kings stormed on to a movie screen in the mid-1950s, spewing his fiery breath and awkwardly two-stepping over Tokyo, the movie quickly became a cult classic because the world was a different place. Science fiction was a new, emerging genre built on the foundation of old horror reels and new phobias surrounding the escalating Cold War. At the time, Godzilla was the perfect incarnation of man's WINNERS Freshman class Dharma Greg South Park Dawson's Creek Oz Working Veronica's Closet LOSERS Failed first grade Of 13 new dramas and 20 new sitcoms that debuted last fall, these fell by the wayside: Between Brothers, Built to Last, C-16, Cracker, Dellaventura, 413 Hope Street, Head Over Heels, Hiller Diller, Hitz, Jenny, Meego, Nothing Sacred, Over the Top, Players, Sleepwalkers, Teen Angel, Timecop, The Tony Danza Show, Total Security, Union Square, The Visitor and You Wish.

Midseason debuts fared little better. January's losers included Push, Prey, Significant Others, The Closer, Three, You're the One, House Rules, That's Life and Four Corners. Trivia note: This season marked the first time a show was cancelled before it even made it to air. For the record, that ignominious distinction belongs to Fox's Scott Baio retread Rewind. WINNERS Top of the numbers (average for May sweeps) Seinfeld, 38.8 million viewers Merlin, 37.1 million viewers (miniseries) ER, 30.2 million Friends, 23.2 million Frasier, 19.3 million Just Shoot Me, 22.8 million The X-Files, 18.2 million The Simpsons, 14.8 million Drew Carey, 14.7 million Ally McBeal, 14.3 million LOSERS Not-so-sudden-death The Naked Truth, Ellen, Cy-bill, Soul Man.Urkel and Grace Under Fire (again) went to their graves.

No tears there, i anything as long as it is new. The X-Files was more widely seen this year than ever, but look how the numbers evaporate during reruns: 22.9 million watched a new X-Files on Nov. 23; just 13 million tuned in for a repeat on March 22. Further evidence: 24.8 million watched on Nov. 9, 27.3 million on Nov.

2 and 10.7 million on Aug. 24. So guess which was the repeat? WINNER Drew Carey Much ado was made about Jerry Seinfeld's pay raise, but Carey didn't exactly settle for nothing. His salary per episode vaulted from $60,000 to $250,000. The Drew Carey Show is VTV's highest-rated prime-time sitcom.

0 but plenty of tears are being shed for Seinfeld at least by those who failed to notice the show stopped being funny two years ago. Tears are also being shed for The Larry Sanders Show, soon to be gone before its time. WINNERS Award shows More than 55 million viewers watched Titanic sweep the Academy Awards on March 23. Oscar wasn't alone: 24.3 mil-' lion tuned into January's Golden Globes, 25.1 million watched Bob Dylan and Sarah McLach-lan win prizes at February's Grammy Awards and 18.8 million saw Law Order, Dennis Franz and Gillian Anderson win Emmy Awards in September. LOSERS Reruns TV 101: People will watch 'o I 4 .4 ONE OF THE LOSERS: Danny Aiello couldn't find an audience in Dellaventura.

III SEE TELEVISION, C5 NOWHERE TO GO: Mediocre special effects and a stupid story..