LIVER LET DIE

An Arizona man has been denied a liver transplant, even though a liver had been donated to him by a dying friend, because Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System wouldn’t cover it. Read more here, but don’t read the comments if you don’t want to feel sick yourself.

A couple of movie notes:

Tonight at 7 & 9 p.m. Tempe’s MadCap Theater shows 1990’s Longtime Companion, one of the first high-profile features to explore the AIDS crisis of the time.

As I recall—I only saw it once, when it first came out—it had the feel of a well-made, well-acted TV movie. But it has an unforgettable scene in which Bruce Davison, who got an Oscar nomination for his trouble, talks to his dying husband (Mark Lamos)...

...& the heavenly final minutes, set to the Zane Campbell song “Post-Mortem Bar,” are soul-stirringly poignant.

Then Friday night, Farrelli’s Cinema Supper Club hosts a rather wonderfully random showing of the ‘70s epic Terror of Godzilla at 10 p.m. This one features The Big G facing off against one of his most notorious enemies…

Monster-of-the-Week: …Mechagodzilla, a robot knockoff designed by aliens to help them, well, you know, the usual—take over the world.

Mechagodzilla was introduced in the previous film in the series, which I saw in 1977 under its original American title, Godzilla vs. the Bionic Monster, a shameless attempt by the Yank distributors to capitalize on the massive popularity of the TV shows The Six Million Dollar Man & The Bionic Woman. Universal Studios, the show’s producers, sued, & the distributors capitulated—ridiculously, since Universal certainly hadn’t invented the word “bionic.” The movie was hastily retitled Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster.

By any other name, Mechagodzilla strikes terror into the hearts of Luddites everywhere. We prefer our monsters organic.