Thursday, January 24, 2008

Bombs away

Three things about old things.

I called Grandma on Saturday and the entire conversation revolved around me growing up. Not in the past tense, mind you, and there was no reminiscing about my childhood. She thinks I need to grow up and start acting my age. Unsaid, but understood, was that this wish extends to the Governess as well.

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Why is fishmonger still a word? All the other –monger ending words have new and contemporary replacements.

Costermonger - grocer
Whoremonger - pimp
Warmonger – hawk
Ironmonger – General Motors
Rumormonger – blogger
Cheesemonger – cheese making blogger
Woodmonger – rednecks from out past where Rt 66 ends who drive by your parents house on Sundays and offer to cut down their trees

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Listen, I’m not a monster movie guy. I’m a zombie/vampire movie guy. But I do know that to make a successful monster, you can’t have it vary wildly in size throughout the film. See The Hulk.

ATTENTION. I AIM TO “SPOIL” CLOVERFIELD AFTER THIS POINT.

Through the entire movie, the Jjbramstein monster is giant. We are led to believe it’s at least Statue of Liberty big or 39 stories big based on things that happen off camera. It’s also big enough to take the majority of a B-2’s Mark 82 dumb bomb payload directly to the spinal column and survive. And it reacts to this attack by taking down a 50+ story building and knocking helicopter circling at several hundred feet out of the sky.

Yet…

Yet when it shows up to Central Park and kills Hud, its about 40 feet tall, tops. A motionless Hud should have been too small for the monster we’d so far seen for the entire movie to have even notice.

To illustrate further –


On the right, Hud prior to an incredibly violent helicopter crash that should have killed everyone on board. On the left, Hud after.

Imagine standing over a single Nerd candy on the floor. Now try to bend over and snatch it in your teeth in one quick dart.

Versus…

Imagine sitting at a table with a generic Cobra officer in front of you. Now bite that.

Other than that one small fault, I found nothing wrong with Cloverfield. It was a cinematic tour de force, genre reinventing film, the jokes about character soiling themselves were off the hook and the wildly unstable camera movement certainly didn’t cause headaches in me or nausea in my already woozy wife.

1 comment:

sbma44 said...

re point 1: Why does grandma feel this way? Most likely she believes, understandably, that it's impossible to be an adult still in possession of a sense of whimsy without being either a child molester or reclusive chocolate factory owner or both. Well I say we're going to be the first generation to prove her wrong, god dammit.

Further, I say we're also going to be the first generation to prove that American economic vibrancy can be maintained despite a majority of the country's workers being paid primarily to waste time on the internet. It's all going to be fine, until something EXTREMELY BAD happens (see also point 3), and then it won't be.