Cloverfield

[innerSpaceman]

Ya know what, fvck spoiler tags. If people click on a thread called Cloverfield after the movie called Cloverfield is released, I think they can expect the conversation to be about Cloverfield.


Be warned.












Because everyone else dies, I think it's implied (but admittedly only implied) that Lily's helicopter gets away and she is the lone survivor.

Much as I'd like some mumbo jumbo about where the monster came from (um, some scientist could say he's from Planet 10, I suppose), I much prefer sticking to the gimmick of everything being from the POV of ordinary people.


If we were involved in such an incident, we would not know squat about the monster. I prefer this type of film to not be in the 50's style of military and scientific POV. For instance, I prefer the Spielberg War of the Worlds because it's from a civilian point of view, to the Pal War of the Worlds that had the scientist as the main character.


Since the explanations are going to be random and rather silly anyway, I rather like the unexplained "reality" of regular people we can identify with, who wouldn't know what the fark is going on.

[Gn2Dlnd]

I just saw it at Downtown Disney, and pretty much enjoyed it. there was a woman behind me, though, who, after every trailer said, "Stoopid." I didn't hear her during the movie, but at the very end I hear, "STOOpid!" I LOLed a little, inside. Shakycam didn't bother me much, but if you're looking for a happy ending, this ain't your movie.
I'm posting from my phone, so I can't open spoilers, I'm curious to know what that bit of dialogue was at the end. I couldn't make it out, but I figured it wasn't just random chatter.
I think JJ Abrams made this movie just so he could finally show a goddam monster! For everybdy who complains he doesn't show the monster on Lost? "Look, there's a monster. Happy?"
I guess I still don't understand why it was called "Cloverfield," so I suppose I'll do a little interweb research on military code names. It does occur to me, though, that since the tape we're seeing is in the possession of the government, a little non-shakycam explanatory wraparound wouldn't have been hard to justify.

[blueerica]

I need to think about it a tiny bit more, plus I decided to have a few beers tonight, and wouldn't write what I meant to, anyway.

All in all, I loved Cloverfield. Far better than I expected. I was halfway shocked - and halfway smug with my jaded opinion on other people's movie preferences - that people were so vocal about how awful the film was. I'm sure it had to do with the lack of clearly defined acts, the "realistic" footage, etc... but I felt that the film was raw and real. It's like so many parties I've been to - all the characters were there, just, perhaps a bit over-the-top with its realism... But, I loved it.

I honestly though that at the end they said

Spoiler:

We got them to watch it

Or that might be the beers talking - real beers, smuggled in from California. But, it's a reasonable facsimile to what I thought I heard a few hours ago in a dark, empty theater.

[Gemini Cricket]

I liked Cloverfield as well. The name Cloverfield was used in the text at the beginning of the film. I think it was a military code name for the tape.

After the first 20 minutes, I got used to the shaky Hud-cam.

I liked how the introduction of the monster with a big thud rocked everyone's world, including the audience's. Very effective.

I often have gripes about the performances of actors in these kinds of disaster flicks. Often it seems that the stakes aren't high enough in their brains and give sort of hokey, dramatic performances that lack realism. I didn't worry about that in this film. It was very realistic, imho.

One gripe that is GC once again beating a dead horse: ad placements. Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew, Nokia, Nokia, Nokia and Sephora, Sephora, Sephora... BLEH!

When I was working at Paramount this summer, I got to see the New York sets trashed for this film. It was neat walking through it. Cars and buildings covered in dust and huge holes in the ground and green screens everywhere. Seeing it also answers my question that I hadn't seen any camera setups anywhere. One thing that did give away some of the monster for me was a huge footprint that was in the middle of the street. At first, I thought they were trying to revive Godzilla once again... Also, last summer, the words "Slusho" was everywhere. One of the characters was wearing a Slusho shirt. It was also the codename for the film on the lot.

I'm glad they used a relatively unknown cast. It added to the documentary feel of the whole flick.

I noticed a couple of could-be nods to old Japanese monster flicks. One, the main character going to Tokyo... and I believe in Rodan, the army was fighting what they thought was the big monster but was only fighting a bug that lived on Rodan...

I was impressed with the special effects. Loved them. And, like in Spielberg's War of the Worlds, the filmmakers realized that a special effect doesn't need to be in-focus and dead center in a shot at all times. It can be out-of-focus and partially seen.

I don't know if this is a sad revelation about me, but I love disaster films. I like post-apocalyptic films, monsters destroy city films and aliens attacking Earth films. Chaos is ichiban in my book.

I'd buy this one. If just to pause and rewind certain areas.

I wasn't too keen on the monster's design. A sort of Humanoid from the Deep crossed with a snake crossed with a spider and a snake... Meh. But I don't think any design would have lived up to my expectation of what it was going to be.

I was also thinking about how extremely long their trip to Coney Island was if there was still Coney Island footage at the end of the tape. And just how long was this piece of tape, anyway? Not to mention that the batteries lasted a long time... And cellphones usually don't work in subway stations, at least in my attempts at making calls in NY and Boston stations.

And I'm also wondering if Central Park was completely obliterated, how did the tape survive?

Cloverfield is the best B-movie in A-movie clothing I have ever seen. As iSm said, it was fun.

[flippyshark]

Regarding the length of the tape, I was doubly stunned, since, in the opening text, I could swear that it was identified as an SD card. Now that is some SD card!

[innerSpaceman]

Heheh, I noticed the product placements, too ... and immediately thought of Gemni Cricket!


But, um, they were on streets of New York where they might actually lean against the wall of a Sephora, and well, a big scene took place in a subway station where you could hardly expect to aim a camera in any direction without seeing an advert.

I'm not saying Nokia didn't pay to have it be their advert ... just that, especially in a film where "really happening" is the specific gimmick, fake ads and businesses would simply not do.





(I aslo "imagined" they looted some camcorder batteries when they did the cellphone batteries, but that doesn't explain how long that tape was .... although, the tape as shown in the film is 84 minutes long in real time ... is that unlikely or plausable?? - - - either way, lots of Coney Island. Maybe they filmed her giving him a blow-job on the tilt-o-wheel, but that part got taped over. Too bad, I'd like to see Rob's junk.)



.

[innerSpaceman]

I just read that J.J. Abrams' production company offices are on Cloverfield Ave. in Santa Monica, hence the movie's name which thus signifies nothing.

Can anyone confirm that? Insider-info Gemini Cricket??

[Alex]

According to Google Maps, Abrams's production company Bad Robot is located on the corner of W. Olympic and Camden Avenue and is about 3 miles from Cloverfield Blvd in Santa Monica.

It may just be a street name they see all the time and liked. Also, Santa Monica airport used to be named Clover Field.

Don't know if it is accurate but this page claims to have an email saying
that "Cloverfield" was just a code name and that they planned to eventually announce a different title but then it leaked out and all the movie geeks knew it by that name so they decided to leave it that way.

[innerSpaceman]

Yeah, i had always understood Cloverfield to be the Blue Harvest code name ... but G.C.'s on-the-set info above pegs the code name as Slusho.


Eh, who knows? Cloverfield is an odd name for this picture, with zero explanation given. I'll likely always think of it as the code name that stuck. The teaser that famously started the hype on this film did not have a title attached, so i like the idea that the code name just stuck after that teaser got such an amazing reaction.

[Alex]

Apparently there was serious consideration to titling the movie 1/18/08, which would certainly have strengthened the 9/11 comparisons but would have been even more meaningless since the movie is set in April.

A thought just occured to me. When digital projection is the standard, the technology could conceivably exist so that all of the time stamps in the movie would automatically display whatever date the movie was being viewed in the theater. I can't decide if that would be cool or not.