Cloverfield was a brilliant marketing campaign. Much like it’s follow-up, 10 Cloverfield Lane, which opens Friday, Cloverfield appeared out of nowhere from the black hole of secrecy that JJ Abrams apparently owns a timeshare in. The concept is great. It’s basically experiencing a Godzilla attack from the standpoint of the tiny ant people running out of its way. It uses the “found footage” style of filming, but the conceit is that the attack happened at a party where they were filming it so it largely works.
I say “largely” because it doesn’t quite get pulled off, but it’s still a lot of fun and I enjoyed it. My favorite moment is at the beginning of the attack when the stakes are announced by Lady Liberty’s head bouncing down the street toward our group of survivors. Statement made. JJ Abrams produced it, Matt Reeves directed it and went on to do Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and writer Drew Goddard is the showrunner on Daredevil. 10 Cloverfield Lane looks like a completely different film and Abrams has already said we won’t see the monster, but I’m intrigued to visit this world again.
Cloverfield is a great underrated film 🙂
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Cloverfield is head and shoulders above Blair Witch, and Paranormal Activity, and just about every other film that uses the found footage trope.
This is completley off-topic, but have you seen the trailer for the Ghostbusters reboot? No comment if you haven’t. Just… watch it. Because the English language has no descriptive words that suffice. The people who fist set down the grammatical rules could not have forseen this eventuality. Maybe Wall*E, carting garbage around a post-apocalyptic wasteland for no reason, could have devised a descriptive word, born of his cosmic predicament. As it stands, a better philospher-poet than I needs to set his sights on this trailer. Also, we need to know which Sony executive greenlit the film, and sic a poet on him, too.
You can tell I’m taking this hard. The original Ghostbusters is one of my most beloved movies. I with it regularly, and belly laugh every time. It’s a perfect comedy, with dry, subtle humor and brilliant stars who are having such a good time that it seems like every joke is off-the-cuff. The characters are not buffoons. They’re collage professors. They’re SMART. Ackroyd doesn’t even have any jokes. It’s just his performance that’s hysterically funny. And Bill Murray gets his best role, and gives his best performance, and I quote him regularly. I love Ghostbusters, and for the first time ever, the current Hollywood insanity is hitting home.
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Lol that was freaking awesome and worth having to watch the trailer sigh. I feel the same. I put it up on the Facebook page but I had no words to do a Trailer Time on it. I should’ve had you write it.
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For the first time in my life I can’t play the devil’s advocate, because it would make me feel unclean. Linus is totally stumped, Dave. I’ll cop to all my sins, but throwing the first stone would feel sooooo good.
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