Author: latepaul

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Well Read? Me? ha ha ha!

OK, so I don’t do many of these so-called “meme” thingys – but lists can be fun and this came up on a blog I found whilst tag surfing.

Bold means I’ve read it.
Italics means I intend to read it (yeah right!)
[] means I love it.

List is from The Big Read

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 The Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

The partial-bold ones are not a mistake, they represent ones I’ve not finished.

So, about 12-15 depending on whether you count the partials, actually slightly better than I thought when I first saw the list. Anyway I’m off now to read some more of no. 50.

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To Mooch or to Cross?

I have a bookcase that is overflowing with books. Many of these are books I’ll never read, or never read again. In the past I would have — after a suitably long procrastination period — have taken them down to the nearest charity shop. However I recently became aware of two different websites that I wanted to try out.

The first, which I heard of through M. is www.bookcrossing.com. The idea is that you register your book, which gives you a unique book number, write a little message inside the cover and then “release it into the wild” i.e. leave it in some public place. The message includes a URL which is specific to the book and if the finder visits the site they can then create a journal entry for the book. In this way you can share your unwanted books and track their progress around the world.

The other site is www.bookmooch.com which is a book swapping site. Here you simply list a number of books you want to give away. For this you accrue points. You spend these points on “mooching” books from other users. The system is set up so you’re giving away about twice as many books as you’re receiving, which works out ok because the postage on two books is usually less than a new book.

So I’ve been thinking which one of these sites to use. On the one hand I like the idea of tracking a book, but then again I’m not sure of any suitable public places to release them in that I normally go to. BookMooch cost money in terms of postage, but on the other hand I get books in return. Then again, I already have an impressive pile of unread books without adding to it at the moment.

Solution: I’ve joined both. I’ve registered a few books to release via book crossing – I’ll think up some places to release them even if I have to make a special trip somewhere, and I’ve added a list of books I’m prepared to send off to Book Moochers. In fact I’ve already had my first request for one.

I’ll let you know which turns out to be the better system.

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Buffy Rewatch Season 1

Buffy Re-Watch: 1.06 The Pack

Giles: Xander’s taken to teasing the less fortunate?

Buffy: Uh-huh.

Giles: And, there’s been a noticeable change in both clothing and
demeanor?

Buffy: Yes.

Giles: And, well, otherwise all his spare time is spent lounging about
with imbeciles.

Buffy: It’s bad, isn’t it.

Giles: It’s devastating. He’s turned into a sixteen-year-old boy.
Of course, you’ll have to kill him.

One of the things I’ve noticed about favourite books, movies, TV eps — and The Pack is definitely a favourite — is that it’s often more a question of cool, poignant or otherwise enjoyable moments. A favourite book/movie/episode has a few such moments and the enjoying is not only savouring them but also the anticipation of the build-up and the frisson of the fall-out from them. A truly great episode is simply a collection of such moments one after another, seamlessly and smoothly connected – usually by a theme.

What are my “moments” from The Pack then? Well there are three – Xander being mean to Willow when he tells her he’s dropping geometry, the slo-mo walk toward camera of the pack backed by rock music and the final scene. The first because while it’s awful to see Willow in pain, it’s nice to see her feelings for Xander brought out.

The second, well those things always look cool if you don’t over-do them. I can think of four instances in the first two seasons of BtVS – this is the second.

And the final scene is a moment because it’s where they fix the pain we had in the earlier moment. Xander tacitly apologises to Buffy and Willow whilst pretending not to remember. Plus he lets Willow know that he loves her – clearly it’s friendship love but still… And of course the final joke is funny – which always helps.

Those are the moments but the underlying goodness of this episode the Xander-Willow relationship. (Are you getting the fact that I like the idea of these two as a couple?) There’s also the usual high standard jokes in the dialogue such as “kid’s fat”, “weird behaviour award” and the quote I began with.

Speaking of which, like NKaBotFD, The Pack is summed up by such a quote, it’s another High-School-as-Hell-with-monsters-as-issues metaphor episode. The metaphor is obvious but it works well nonetheless.

Which is odd because in many ways The Pack shouldn’t work as well as it does, the concept is just too silly. Although you could say that about the show as a whole. It works because everyone commits to the silliness, and they write/direct/act well. However there are times when the silliness threatens to show through. It works best when the pack are acting like what the metaphor points to – bratty teens – not what they actually are – hyenas. So in the slo-mo walk or the stealing hot dogs scene the pack are cool and threatening whereas in the scene where they are found sleeping in the woods, drooling from their recent pig-feed, or when they attack the SUV, well the inherent ridiculousness is hard to hide. Fortunately those scenes are in the minority.

Another thing that helps the episode is nice performances in a couple of minor roles – the zoo keeper and the gym class teacher. They both do a lot with relatively little.

Finally I’ve got to note the passing of our first TV principal. I liked Flutie. The actor that played him made him likeable and funny.

So, overall, something a guilty pleasure since a) it’s very silly and b) the stuff I enjoy is the relationship stuff. But once again that could go for the entire show.

8/10

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Buffy Rewatch flubbage

Son of Flubbage

When I re-(x3)-launched the blog I promised myself that I’d curb the self-indulgence and reduce the ratio of flubbageousness to actual content. However having had a little run of review posts I think I’ve earned a small amount of flubbage-iosity. So here it is.

I guess the first, and main thing is that I’m enjoying my blog more. A big part of that is blog stats. I love blog stats. In the past, in the dim distant free-LJ-account past, the only way I had of tracking whether I was being read was to see how many comments I got. Mostly I got none. But with WordPress I can see how many views I get, where they’re coming from and stuff like that. Which is cool because I can see what works in terms of promoting the blog.

And what seems to work is all the stuff I knew – posting on other blogs (where I’ve got something genuinely relevant to say. I’m not a spammer), putting a link in my sigs for where I already post, posting regularly. Also one thing I didn’t know worked, but does, is tagging. I used to think of tagging as organisational stuff for me, but it’s also fodder for the search engines and for WordPress blogs at least it puts you in the tag surfing system.

Tag surfing is my new favourite hobby. Basically WordPress gives you a page of recent posts with the same tags, or related ones, in other blogs. It’s a kind of random way to find other blogs you might be interested in and it’s already swelled my Google Reader subscriptions a little.

Speaking of posting more regularly, I am, as you’ll have seen, doing the Buffy Re-Watch posts again. I’ve decided the best way to do this is to do compilation posts for multiple episodes and single posts for the standout eps. When we hit Season 2/3 there’ll be long runs of stand-out eps but until then it’ll save some space and keep the momentum up. The idea for this came from this post.

Anyway speaking of Buffy Re-Watch…

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Dr H. Fan Art

Here’s something cool. Dr. Horrible fan art. Check out Wonderflonium.com

I’ve got “The Death of Billy” as my new desktop background.

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movie reviews

Spiderwick Chronicles

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a movie based on a series of fantasy books for kids (which I’ve not read). It had positive reviews to varying degrees and I was in the mood for something reasonably light last night so I chose this.

A good choice I think.

Though perhaps a little patronizing of me to call it ‘light’ when Kermode called it ‘a horror movie for kids’. What can I say? I am a wimp when it comes to horror but I can cope with fantasy goblins and ogres. Besides is it patronizing to say that I thought it enjoyable?

So the movie is the story of a family moving into an old house, the eponymous ‘Spiderwick’ estate, they inherited from an old relative. Decades before it was the home of Arthur Spiderwick, a self-taught expert in fantastical creatures, who wrote his ‘field guide’, a compendium of information on the various array of goblins, fairies, bogarts, sylphs (?) and others that roamed, invisibly most of the time, in and around his home. Having completed the book it instantly became dangerous because its secrets would allow the local ogre to take control and then, as one character had it, ‘you all die’. Arthur Spiderwick protected his book with charms and a semi-friendly brownie/bogart and promptly disappears. Eighty years later the kids of the family, two twin boys and their older sister, find the book and get caught up in an adventure trying to protect it, and one another, from the grasp of Mulgarath (that ogre I mentioned).

And as I said it’s a lot of fun. It’s not incredibly original but it’s well done. Hogsqueal the hobgoblin as the slightly disgusting, alternately brave and cowardly, humourous sidekick is the kind of thing we’ve seen before — but nonetheless entertaining for that. If you’re not a fan of CGI then you might have a problem because that’s what’s used to realise the creatures. I didn’t find it any more distracting to the story than I would have done costumes or animation.

It’s quite quick paced and certainly doesn’t out-stay its welcome, despite I’m guessing, having had to cut some material from the books. I think this shows in particular in the part of one of the twins Simon, whose only real function is to get himself kidnapped instead of his brother Jared, whose story this really is.

The film is at its best when we’re chasing or being chased by goblins and wotnot. In a couple of moments of ‘family drama’ it descended into sacharine sentiment. I don’t know, maybe kids need or like an unsubtle approach to emotions but it jarred for me.

In fact I’d say this movie has two messages. The most obvious and least successful of which is about father-child relationships and the importance of being there for your kids. The more subtle and better realised is that knowledge, in the form of learning, is power, and that it can be exciting and an adventure. The central item in the plot after all, is essentially a text book. My inner nerd, the kid that had to be kicked out of the classroom at break time to play with the other kids rather than read under the table, quite likes that.

So overall, an enjoyable, undemanding piece of entertainment.
7/10

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Buffy Rewatch reviews Season 1

Buffy Re-Watch: 1.05 Never Kill a Boy on the First Date


“Clark Kent has a job. I just wanna go on a date.”

“Never Kill…” is an important episode. It dramatises something I think is one of the core ideas of the show. Not “High School is Hell” or “Monsters as Metaphors” those are the how. The what is encapsulated in that quote I began with – the conflict between being The Slayer and being a normal girl. The show in the early years did a great job of using the horror genre to talk about every day problems the audience could identify with. Later on it got harder to do that and not repeat themselves, until by season 5+ these were pretty much just telling stories in that world, without so much the direct parallels. However one thing that runs all the way through from Welcome to the Hellmouth to Chosen is the way being the Slayer isolates you and yet how Buffy still tries to live a normal life, connecting to those around her. To varying degrees she succeeds but often at great cost.

It’s this conflict that’s not only at the heart of the show but, I believe goes a long way to making it what it is. After all, the danger with something that wears its feminism so clearly on its sleeve as BtVS does is that you become po-faced and preachy. What rescues it from that, apart obviously, from humour and lots of it, is the fact that Buffy is not just a hero she’s an ordinary teenager. She likes boys and shopping and chatting with her friends. She gets frustrated with adults who don’t understand what’s really important, like dates and having the right shoes. So this instantly gives us a way in, makes her identifiable and makes us care.

Another way Never Kill… is also a key episode for the Season 1 over-all arc. It introduces the idea of the Annoying One who has a lot to do with the finale. So given how important this episode is it’s a shame it’s not a better one. I mean it’s still very good, there’s lots to enjoy. But that’s mostly Joss’s humour and some good performances by Sarah and Tony Head, but still on a BtVS scale it lacks something. Partly I think it’s that the show is still finding its feet. I think you can tell that there’s still a lot they haven’t figured out yet. It hasn’t yet quite broken out of the mode of a teenage show, albeit a slightly quirky one. You can see this in the costumes (some very short skirts) and even some of the dialogue –

“You’re acting a little overly, aren’t you?”

“Tonight! Isn’t that so?”

“Yeah, so it is. It sure is so.”

I’m not sure but this sounds to me like it’s deliberately intended to sound teenage-ry. Joss talks about trying use real teenager slang at first and then gradually developing something else, something that was unique to the show, so-called “Buffy-speak”. So compare the above with for example:

“Ooo, two points for the Slayer, while the Watcher has yet to score!”

Giles: Well, you know what they say. Ninety percent of the vampire
slaying game is, is waiting.

Buffy: You couldn’t have told me that ninety percent ago?

In season 2, 3 and beyond the skirts get longer and we get more of the second kind of dialogue. That’s when I feel the show has found and is playing to, its own audience rather than chasing a “demographic” or some-such. Not that there’s a lot of that, but it’s not completely absent.

Perhaps another reason for me personally not to out-and-out love this ep is the prophecy. Prophecies in the Buffyverse have a habit of being self-fulfilling. In fact a major part of a seasonal arc in Angel was built around just such a concept. I don’t mind a prophecy having that sense of irony that the outcome is changed by the telling itself, but in order to be called a prophecy there needs to be an element of genuine mystical foresight. Telling a group of vampires that on a certain night five people will die and then having those vampires go out and kill five people on that night, is an instruction not a prophecy.

One final reason is that Owen is, despite the way he’s cast, a bit wet. They got the right kind of boy that you can imagine Buffy and Cordelia drooling over, but that whole shy, Emily Dickinson reading, talks about bees thing seems out of line with that somehow. I get that he’s supposed to have more depth but he just seems a bit too other-worldly in a weird way. And of course at the end the script requires him to do a complete 180 and want to become a danger-thrill-seeker. Now I can see how that might happen, reaction to his earlier, don’t get out much lifestyle but… I dunno, it just makes him overall seem much less impressive than he could have been. Probably that was the point but it left me wanting a better foil for Buffy. Oh wait Angel’s waiting in the wings, maybe he’s the one to… 😉

This is getting long so just a couple of note-worthy things to erm, note before I wrap it up:

  • pedants and continuity types, notice that Giles says “I don’t have an instruction manual”. Later on we find out about the Slayer Handbook
  • more Willow-Xander-Buffy-Angel love quadrilateral hints – with Owen and Cordy thrown in too – not so much as with Witch but still cool.
  • “OK at this point you’re abusing sarcasm” is one of the few BtVS quotes that can be easily re-used in everyday life. Trust me I’ve tried and most Buffyspeak, however cool, are too specific to work out of context.
  • first of a run of gags about the Library – the ‘batcave’ of the Scooby gang – actually being used as a Library.

So, overall, it’s an episode that deals with a, if not the, major theme of the show. It comes from a season where it’s not yet become the show I fell in love with but it’s still full of a lot of fun stuff.

7/10

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book reviews

Watchmen

I used to read comics when I was a kid. First stuff like the Beano and Dandy and later 2000AD. Being into all things SciFi I thought the later was really cool, but at some point, for some reason, like watching Dr Who, I grew out of it.

Then when I was 21 someone I was working with told me about something called “a graphic novel” which was, so I heard, a kind of grown-up version of a comic book. The particular book under discussion was Dark Knight Returns about the return to cape-dom of a middle-aged Batman. I borrowed it from my enthusiast friend and did enjoy it but I remember thinking that whilst it wasn’t for kids it was still more adolescent than adult, like action movies and heavy metal. (I suspect if I re-read it now I’d be kinder to it. At 21 I was still too young to enjoy things that others might have  thought of as childish.)

I don’t think I picked up another graphic novel until after I’d become a Buffy fan. It was from other fans recommendations that I bought Watchmen. Of course when I saw that it had big stretches of actual text in it I gave up on it.

What can I say? I’m lazy.

But then a few days ago I noticed that there was a trailer online for an upcoming Watchmen movie. I didn’t watch it, instead I pulled out my copy of the book and started to read. I couldn’t put it down and I finished it a couple of days later. And this is my review. I make no attempt to summarize the plot, nor to avoid spoilers. If you’ve not done so already, I strongly encourage you to read it.

So ok, I get it now. Because I read the Dark Knight, I’ve read various Buffy-related comics (mostly the origin one and season 8), and even the two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ones and whilst they are all to varying degrees enjoyable, I never really got the whole “comic books as an artform” thing. Until now.

Watchmen really is on a different level from those other books. I think it’s because of the depth of it, the layers of story and the sheer density of concept. That and extraordinary visuals. Take for example the iconic cover-art image and see how that’s used and developed on the very first page. This kind of thing — starting on a small detail and pulling back and back until a fuller picture (literally and thematically) is revealed — is done throughout the book. It’s no wonder people want to make this into a movie. It’s like a pre-drawn storyboard for itself.


But it’s so much more than that. It has great, intriguing characters. I guess most people like Rorshach – who’s morally ambiguous, possibly mentally unstable but badass in a way that fiction can’t quite resist. Personally I was quite drawn to Nite Owl. I liked that he was shy, fumbling, quiet man when out of costume and yet is so confident and competent with it. I love when he serves coffee and plays music for the victims of a building fire he rescues. Dr Manhattan, who is key to the entire plot, is fascinating too. He is to all intents and purposes an alien, even though his origins are human, and successfully communicating an alien point of view is something that’s done all too rarely, but it’s done beautifully here with the scenes on Mars in particular.

I think the thing I like most about Watchmen is the layering of different story elements in a way that complements or contrasts, but always adds to the overall thematic message. Take for example the sections with the excerpts from the fictional comic (“Tales from the Black Freighter“). I can think of a couple of moments where you go from an entirely different scene and we get the last line of dialogue from that scene, over a panel showing the kid reading the comic, the newsvendor talking about the events in the wider world, some background activity, perhaps the ongoing drama of the lesbian taxi-driver’s breakup, leading into a panel showing horrific scenes from “Tales” where a sailor is trying to reach his home on a raft made from the dead bodies of his comrades. When I first read this I stopped and not only thought how well done it was but wondered whether I’ve ever seen a movie or TV program intermingle so many different elements so successfully in such a short space of time. Then I wondered if it’s even possible and that’s why we need this artform.

Who knows? It’s very possible I just haven’t seen the right movies!

It’s noteworthy that this was written/drawn in the mid 1980s and whilst it didn’t feel dated it was “of its time” in the sense that one of the major themes is the ever present threat of nuclear war. I don’t have a problem with that, because I lived through that age and remember well that sense of impending doom bubbling beneath the surface. It was there in popular culture if nothing else. A younger reader might perhaps, not get those references immediately.

If it has a weakness I think it’s the ending. I’m not quite sure that I buy into the idea that a fake alien accidental one-off invasion would unite the world. At least I’m not sure for how long it would. There was also some stuff with an attempted rape that I was a little uncomfortable with at best. But that wasn’t a huge part of the story.

So overall it definitely deserves its high praise. 9/10

P.S. I have now watch the trailer and they seemed to have included all the main elelments that I’d expect. They’ve made the characters younger by at least a decade but that’s Hollywood I guess. Supposedly this is one of those unfilmable books but I’m not sure about that. I guess people have said that because a) it’s long, b) it’s got complicated effects scenes in it and c) it’s perhaps too adult to get a rating that will sell enough tickets. Well a) anything can be condensed – work out what the heart of the story is and make sure you tell that, b) CGI has come along way since 1986 and c) as has what you can get away with in a 15 (Dark Knight is a 12a!) plus some of the violence can be toned down without losing the tone.

It’s all a question of how good the movie makers are. We’ll see I guess.

Categories
movie reviews

Cloverfield

I’ve only ever walked out of a movie once. It wasn’t because I was offended at the content, or bored, or even because I felt the quality was so bad it wasn’t worth finishing[1]. No, the only time I ever walked out of a cinema viewing was when I saw The Doors. During a concert scene in which the camera was swooping in, up and around the audience, I felt saw nauseous that I had to get up and leave. I tend to have a similar problem with non-steadicam hand-held footage. I made it through Bob Roberts but it wasn’t pleasant.

So for this reason I waited until Cloverfield was on DVD so I could watch it on my not-so-large[2] TV. Even so I still had the problem. I made it about 13-and-a-half minutes in on the first attempt. But I wanted to see it, so today — having had no breakfast yet and armed with remote on pause-standby — I watched the whole thing. And yes it made me feel sick so this blog entry is about whether or not it was worth it.

Why did I want to see it? Well first it had pretty decent reviews. It is clearly a monster movie and whilst they’re not top of my list of favourite genres they are at least genre and I like that. A large part of it was that the writer was Drew Goddard – ex-Buffy writer who was responsible for some of my favourite episodes. I wanted to see if he’d done anything fun with the old monster-attacks-city trope.

Oh, and Kermode, in his favourable, but not quite glowing, review had said that anyone who knows movies should be able to predict the final shots of the movie. I wanted to see if I could, and I did.

Cloverfield is actually a pretty straight forward monster movie — out of the blue a monster attacks New York, whilst everyone else is fleeing Rob, our hero, and a few of his friends head straight into danger by trying to get to and rescue, his not-quite-girlfriend — she’s the one who got away, the one he should have said I Love You to but never did. They reach her but then they’ve got to get out of the city and not all of them make it out alive. So that’s a fairly out-of-the-box kind of plot, what Cloverfield does that’s different is use the idea of ‘found footage’, it’s all supposedly coming from a video camera that one of the friends happened to be using at the time of the attack. Hence the shaky-cam and my spinning head.

Actually in some ways it’s a pretty good device because it allows them to do that thing that Jaws did[3] which is to hardly ever show the monster and then only glimpses. The movie then becomes much more about the effects of the monster rather than, the special effects that made it. This also gives the movie a feel akin to The Zeppo that we’re watching a story (a guy trying to find the woman he loves before it’s too late) that’s the foreground to a much bigger story (monster eats New York). Not sure it works that well because it’s not trying for humour but it does work.

I’ll just say briefly that there’s a clear subtext here. Just like some 50s alien invasion movies were really about paranoia about communism and the original Japanese monster movies were about anxiety over new technology and things like nuclear testing, Cloverfield could be read to be about 9/11. Indeed one of the characters is heard to say early on “Do you think it’s another attack?” Certainly there are plenty of parallels — the monster appears apparently out of nowhere, no-one really knows why it’s attacking and even the military are unable it seems to stop it. That sense of being caught up in a disaster that you have no real idea how or why it’s happening, is quite familiar. Even some of the imagery is reminiscent of 9/11 news footage. I’m thinking of clouds of dust and debris rolling down streets toward the camera. I don’t really want to say anything more about that just nod to it on my way past.

So the big question is, was it worth it? Was it worth making myself ill for? Well possibly, but a lot of that is the smug feeling of guessing the final shot correctly. But I could have gotten that from the FF button. I think it does work well when it’s evoking a sense of “WTF?” about what’s happening. I think showing the monster in passing is good. I approve of putting the human story front and centre and relegating the CGI to it’s proper place. I’m just not sure I cared enough about the people. The camera-device that works well for the monster makes it harder to show the intimacy of the central relationship — or maybe that’s the acting I’m not sure.

Also it was a fairly downbeat ending, but par for the course for monster movies, so maybe my lack of outright love for this genre let me down. And of course, selfishly, I can’t help thinking that they could still have had essentially the same movie without the need of a camera style that sets off my motion sickness.

Probably worth it if you’re a monster movie nut – 6/10

[1]I’m talking about at the cinema, TV is a little different.

[2]23in – I love TV, I love movies, I don’t see the need for a massive screen.

[3]Although it did it largely out of necessity because of technical difficulties with the rubber shark as I understand it.

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Watch this it’s Fun!

Title says it all really. I was thinking to review it but it doesn’t need it. 3 x 13-15min episodes of a web-based super-villain musical. Created by Joss Whedon + family and friends. And it’s Joss doing what he does so well – reversing a well-worn concept, the good guy is really the bad guy and the bad guy is the good guy and there are fun songs and silly jokes. Plus Barney from “How I Met Your Mother”, Mal from “Firefly” and Vi from Chosen.

Watch out for the ending if you’re a Whedon newbie – but it’s just Joss doing what he does. Plus, I’m sure the story’s not over.

It’s available free online until midnight tomorrow and after that I think you need to pay to download it.

My favourite songs are “It’s a Brand New Day” and “On The Rise” both from ep 2.

UPDATE: It’s back online for free. Click here to watch now.