I grew up watching television and movies. My sister and I would watch pretty much every movie that we came across, which was a lot considering we grew up with a black box (free porn when I was 11 years old? fuck yeah!). I can’t really call myself a movie buff as I’m not familiar with some of the jargon they tend to throw around like neorealist or cinema verite, but when you’ve seen the vast majority of Hollywood movies that came out in the last two decades, you pick up a thing or two. I’m a product of the post modern generation.
Last night, I watched How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and Yes Man. I know, I know. Why the hell would you watch those mediocre movies? Maybe I got nostalgic. Maybe I miss the days when I was younger and would watch crappy movies. But the thing is, I enjoyed myself. They were entertaining movies. I’m no snob but I know what makes a movie good. They could have been much better, but they weren’t. They were missing something. Yes Man was a competant movie but nothing really made it a classic like Dumb and Dumber or Ace Ventura. It felt like a follow up to Liar Liar without the supernatural element. I was still entertaining, though. There were some clever jokes in there and Zooey Deschanel is pretty fucking hot.
Have you heard of Watchmen? Of course you have. I’ll admit it. I put off reading it for years until a few months ago, when I just read it straight through at once. I was somewhat prompted by the movie coming out within months. Seeing the trailer piqued my interest, but reading the book completely turned me off of the movie. “They are going to ruin MY Watchmen!” are some of the nerdiest thoughts you can read, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think that to some degree. But after watching a few clips, I’m coming back around. It might turn out alright. Those that have already seen it have good things to say about it. It won’t be perfect, no adaptation really is (especially ones from comic books), but it might be pretty good. If Kevin Smith likes it, I can’t really complain much. I’ll just be annoyed and voice my displeasure after watching the living fuck out of it on IMAX.
I’ve been pretty lazy about posting updates since the beginning, despite it pretty much being my unofficial new year’s resolution. I’ve just been busy with coming back to Portland, setting things up, paying bills, getting the water to work again (it went out while I was gone), working on finding a job and everything.
But I digress, I still don’t know what this site is going to be about but I know I don’t want it to be just another personal blog about some personal life. Those are boring, cliche and a dime and a dozen. Who wants to know about my day-to-day life? I barely do. I don’t need to document it for the the world to see, either. Let’s just stick with opinions and see where that takes us.
With that said, I just saw Cloverfield tonight. I went in with little to no expectations. I’d only seen the trailer with Transformers last summer, and didn’t get into the hype. I was pretty satisfied. Without giving anything away, I thought the camera gimmick was very well done. Many people criticize the movie for the gimmick or for the shallow characters or unrealistic actions, but I don’t think they really saw what the movie for what it was. You’re watching a video that people filmed for their friend’s going away party that turns into a documentations of some fucked up shit going on in the city. There isn’t going to be built up dramatic scenes that you don’t see in real life from an invisible third person perspective. Things that we see are happening to the characters that hold the camera, so we’re not going to see scenes where the camera holder shouldn’t belong in the first place.
Other complaints were how it invoked images from 9/11 too much. I don’t see how a movie set in New York involving some disaster on a realistic level can’t do this. It’s impossible. The movie does a really good job at what it’s trying to do: put us in a roller coaster ride. It also captures the contemporary setting pretty well, with everyone having cameras in our post-YouTube society.
I highly recommend the movie. It’s a simple story with a simple plot, but that’s not the point of the movie. You can know all the major plot points and spoilers and still enjoy the movie because it’s all about the process of getting from point A to point B, not so much why we’re on the journey in the first place. It’s a real breath of fresh air to see a monster movie that is more about the characters than the monster. There are no larger than life characters. We don’t know where the monster came from, why it attacks, etc. but that doesn’t matter. It’s just a plot element. The characters aren’t involved in anything to do with attacking/defeating the monster. It’s pretty much just a story about the little civilians in a modern Godzilla. I like that about it.