Kick-Ass

Year 5, Day 197 - 7/16/13 - Movie #1,488

BEFORE: Last film with Nicolas Cage, and the last film before Comic-Con.  I've got 24 hours before my plane takes off, and I could probably squeeze one more film in, but the linking is telling me to wait.  I don't see an actor connection to the next film on my list, so I'm going to try and watch one or two films in San Diego and improve the connections at the same time.  Besides, I should probably devote some time to proper packing, seeing as I just spent an hour searching the house for my iPad, which I only use at conventions to play films and take credit card orders.  I usually keep it in a milkcrate by my desk with some graphic novels, but since it wasn't there, I was convinced for a while that I took that crate to my storage unit, and I'd need to make a trip there tomorrow morning.  I finally found the iPad in another comic book box, so I'm not freaking out as much.  (Yes, I should probably set up the iPad to do other things, like watch movies, but I haven't had the time.  Too busy watching movies...)

THE PLOT:  Dave Lizewski is an unnoticed high school student and comic book fan who one day decides to become a super-hero, even though he has no powers, training or meaningful reason to do so.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Super" (Movie #1,094)

AFTER: I waited a good long time for this one, or at least it feels like it - it wasn't available anywhere when I did my last superhero chain, and I was starting to wonder what the hold-up was.  Was it because the word "ass" is in the title?  Finally it appeared on PPV in late 2012 and I picked it up for $1.99.  I'm thinking that was a bargain.

I'm tempted to cry foul at the violence here, which is graphic and extensive - and some of it is directed at a little girl, for chrissakes.  But she gives as good as she gets, and then some.  What should I make of the image of a girl, age 12 (at time of filming) shooting guns, killing bad guys, even slicing off their limbs?  And yet people seemed to have more of a problem with her saying the F-word and the C-word, but I digress.  I realize it's all special effects, and the little girl didn't shoot or stab anyone, but still...is this inappropriate or entertaining?  Can it be both?

The title character is one of those nebbishy teens, the everyman, who wonders why people don't put on costumes like comic-book heroes and go out and fight crime.  Then, when he gets beat up, he realizes why people don't put on costumes and go out and fight crime.  But he hooks up with a father/daughter team who are much more professional in their methods, and their mission to take down a drug kingpin.

There's more, of course, but I don't want to say too much.  The stunts are impossible, the violence is over-the-top, and the plot has some nice turning points.  This turned out to be either the most ridiculous superhero film, or the coolest thing I've seen in a while.  Can it be both?

This represents the new age of superheroes, where they appear in YouTube videos and have web-sites and MySpace/Facebook profiles.  Heroes for the generation raised on "Kill Bill" and "300".  Kids who've had to witness terrorism, school shootings, and inner-city crime.  Is this what we get as a result?  A little girl who plays with knives, swords and guns?

It still comes off as disconcerting - like that Onion headline that read "Cute kitten thinks of nothing but murder all day".  But I'm afraid to give the film a lower rating, because I don't want Hit Girl mad at me...

I think that with all the furor over school shootings, or kids having access to guns, this film walks a very fine line.  Or maybe it erases it completely.  With some people trying to link violent video-games to violence in the real world, it's a little weird to see a character shooting people in a "real" situation in a style very similar to a first-person shooter simulation.  It's almost like the film is trying to provide the link that legislators are looking for, and I'm not sure that's the connection that the movie + videogame industry wants made. 

There's an odd paradox with superhero movies, since there are no real superheroes, any movie or comic-book reality that portrays them with powers is automatically not ours.  But when you open up a Marvel or DC comic, you might see people within that reality reading comic books.  Why would they have comic book heroes in that world, when they have the "real"  thing?  And in a case like "Kick-Ass", if the real people get inspired by comic books to become heroes, isn't that putting the cart before the horse?  I think they worked neatly around this, though, by portraying costumed heroes with no superhero powers.  So it's a world without costumed heroes...until it isn't.  

I think this is a good place to stop for a bit, and process what I've seen today.  5 days at Comic-Con, plus a 6th day to travel back, then I'll probably have to catch up on sleep, so if I don't catch a film in San Diego, I'll post again in about a week.

Also starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Nowhere Boy"), Chloë Grace Moretz (last heard in "Bolt"), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (last heard in "Paranorman"), Mark Strong (last seen in "John Carter"), Michael Rispoli (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), Clark Duke (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine"), Lyndsy Fonseca (ditto), Yancy Butler, Xander Berkeley (last seen in "Billy Bathgate"), with cameos from Elizabeth McGovern, Craig Ferguson (last heard in "Winnie the Pooh").

RATING: 8 out of 10 x-rays

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Year 5, Day 196 - 7/15/13 - Movie #1,487

BEFORE: Just two days until Comic-Con now, I'm planning to put my chain on hold after the next film, though I'm going to try and catch a screening of "Iron Man 3" while in San Diego, either at the convention or in a theater.  I should be able to block out two hours for a film somewhere during a five-day trip.  Nicolas Cage carries over again from "Season of the Witch" as we hit the real comic-book films.

THE PLOT:  As Johnny Blaze hides out in Eastern Europe, he is called upon to stop the devil, who is trying to take human form.

AFTER: Hmm, that's funny, I was about to mark this as a FOLLOW-UP to "Ghost Rider", then I couldn't find that film listed in this project.  So I must have watched it before 2009.  Not to worry, this film is just as appropriate as a follow-up to "Drive Angry" - both feature Nicolas Cage with supernatural powers, trying to prevent the ritual killing of a young child.  Of course, the presence of a cabal of monks also hearkens back to "Season of the Witch", plus the villain here uses dark magic and is able to place his soul in other vessels, which sounds a lot like Voldemort - so there's a shout-out to last week's "Harry Potter" wrap-up as well. 

I kinda dug this one, though I know it got a bad rap and did poor box-office.  OK, so it didn't make back its budget theatrically, but that still leaves DVD and cable, right?  I guess Ghost Rider is considered a 2nd-tier superhero, and really only the top tier heroes seem to do well in films.  Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Avengers and X-Men have all done well, but Green Lantern, Green Hornet, The Spirit, The Shadow, not so much.  Which is a shame because a motorcycle riding demon with a flaming skull head should come off as pretty cool.

Plus, the movie should look a lot cooler than the comic, just because it, well, moves.  A car chase should look better on film.  Stuff burning up and exploding looks better on film.  I don't know why Ghost Rider's skull is gray here and not white, but that's a minor point - I guess the white bones didn't read well on camera, or someone figured that since his head is on fire, the bones should look burned.

The comic books usually stick with the standard flaming motorcycle, but the film suggests that the Ghost Rider could use ANY vehicle for his purposes, and in fact shows him controlling a flaming truck and also a large piece of construction equipment, which looked really cool.  So visually the film has the advantage, but what about the story?

Turns out there are only so many different comic-book plots, and they just keep using them again and again.  Hero fights villain, hero dies and comes back to life, hero has to go on a quest.  It's all pretty basic Joseph Campbell-type stuff.  When you know the formulas, this film just comes off as a quest/chase combined with a standard loss of power.  And anytime a hero loses his superpower, it's just a matter of time before he needs to (or is forced to) get the power back.

But even though it's a little by-the-numbers, I'm willing to cut this one a little slack, because it hints at the larger aspects of the Ghost Rider story.  Fighting an agent of the Devil and his minion is pretty typical, but the question is raised about Zarathos, the demon who gives him his powers.  What is a demon but a fallen angel?  And they've riffed on this in the comics, too - it explains how Johnny Blaze is able to use the power of a demon to do positive things.

The kid he's trying to save here is named Danny, and it's shown that he has some otherwordly powers as well.  When they updated the Ghost Rider character in the comics a few years back, they retired Johnny Blaze and gave the powers to a teen named Daniel Ketch, so I'm wondering if this is hinting at the plot for the next film.  Even if Nicolas Cage doesn't sign on, they can just age this Danny kid by a decade, give him similar powers, and go on from there.  Smart.

Also starring Idris Elba (last seen in "Prometheus"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2"), Violante Placido, Johnny Whitworth, Fergus Riordan, Christopher Lambert.

RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of wine

Drive Angry

Year 5, Day 195 - 7/14/13 - Movie #1,486

BEFORE: The annual Feast is going on in Williamsburg, Brooklyn - that's the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, but we just call it "The Feast".  I'm sure the religious aspects of it are very important to some, and the fund-raising aspect is important to that parish, but we just go for the food.  And the lifiting of the Giglio, but mostly the food.  We had dinner there on Wednesday night, and as with any street festival, the first night is always the best, partially because all the oil in the fryers is fresh, but also because at that point I haven't had a great calzone or sausage + peppers hero in about 51 weeks.  I usually follow those up with some coconut shrimp and lemon ice, and we get some fried Oreos to take home.  For some reason, I seem to gain weight this time every year.

As stated, Nicolas Cage carries over from "Season of the Witch".

THE PLOT:  A vengeful father escapes from hell and chases after the men who killed his daughter and kidnapped his granddaughter.

AFTER: Maybe I should have saved this chain for October, with all the monsters, demons and witches that have been populating my movies for the last week.  Oh, well, too late to turn back now.  Besides, in many ways this film plays like a comic book, with resurrected people with healing powers, Satanic cults, impossible stunts and over-blown violence.  It's a bit like "Sin City" mixed with "Ghost Rider" with a little of "Red State", all directed by Tarantino. 

Hollywood action films have a long history of defying reality, especially when it comes to stunts and such.  How many times have we seen cars fall off a cliff and explode on (or even before) impact?  What about villains shooting hundreds of bullets at the hero, missing every time, thus allowing him to get off that ONE bullet that finds its mark?  Or a thousand other impossible things?  And yet instead of crying foul, audiences just keep demanding more.  And bigger, and louder.  Movies take people to far-off lands, into the ocean depths, and across the galaxies, and we all say, "Wow! That was great!  What else have you got?"

I say this to preface a film with a heavy buy-in.  A man escapes from Hell - though how, exactly, we're not quite sure.  That would have made a great beginning for a movie, I'm just sayin', instead of starting the story after he's already done that, and then we all have to play catch-up.  His daughter got mixed up with a cult after he died, and now his infant granddaughter is in trouble.

Turns out the Devil doesn't like it when somebody escapes, so he sends the Accountant after the guy.  The Accountant is a great, complex character - it makes sense that someone needs to do the bookkeeping in Hell, since it is a giant cosmic prison.  How else do they keep track of time served, or punishments endured?  Turns out the Devil also doesn't like it when people sacrifice babies in his name, so now the Accountant has two problems.

It's hard to nitpick when a film just goes ahead and sets up its own mythology, its own set of rules for how things work in the afterlife.  Who am I to say otherwise?  Whatever needs to happen to bring about a suitable conflict and resolution here, the movie just says, "Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles..."  And along the way there are huge explosions and impossible stunts, lots of people get shot, and everyone has a good time.  The audience, that is, not those people who got shot. 

The last song before the credits sounded very familiar - it was a cover of "Alive", which is a Meat Loaf song from "Bat Out of Hell III".  Very appropriate usage - and you can't stump me when it comes to Meat Loaf.  Great job avoiding the obvious and overused "Highway to Hell". 

Sequel, please!

Also starring William Fichtner (last seen in "The Longest Yard"), Amber Heard, Billy Burke (last seen in "Fracture"), David Morse (last seen in "The Long Kiss Goodnight"), Todd Farmer, Jack McGee.

RATING: 6 out of 10 bullet holes

Season of the Witch

Year 5, Day 194 - 7/13/13 - Movie #1,485

BEFORE: Just 4 days until Comic-Con, which is just enough time for a 4-movie Nicolas Cage chain that is also sci-fi/comic related.  See, everything's going to be just fine.  It's kind of weird that Hollywood was so hard up for material a couple years ago that they had to make old Donovan songs into movies, but hey, whatever.  They had to pay the electric bill until the "Avengers" movie came out, I totally understand.  Linking from "Harry Potter and the whatevers Part 2", Helena Bonham Carter was in no less than FOUR films with Christopher Lee (last seen in "The Man With the Golden Gun") - "Dark Shadows", "Corpse Bride", "Alice in Wonderland" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", so let's go that way.

THE PLOT:  14th-century knights transport a suspected witch to a monastery, where monks deduce her powers could be the source of the Black Plague.

AFTER: I liked the premise where this film started off, namely that the Crusades were ultimately a really bad idea, though it's a bit surprising to suggest that any of its participants could have grasped this concept - that following God and following the Church could be two very different things.  That's a very modern idea, to the point where I doubt a film could have gotten away with implying that as recently as a decade ago.

Beyond that, it turns into a pretty obvious quest film, but then there are some nice twists, and I've got no complaints about the effects, which would probably seem more killer if they hadn't followed "Cloverfield" and "Super 8".  I'm trying to judge this one on its own merits, but considering how I tend to watch movies, that ship sailed a long time ago.

I guess I'm left struggling with "Nicolas Cage plays a 14th Century Crusader", and I imagine that a lot of other people got hung up on that as well.  The cinematography is not great, I realize that they didn't have modern lighting back in the 14th century, but does so much of the film need to be so dark?  It's often difficult to tell what's happening because everything is so washed out, or gray on gray.  Ah, Wikipedia says the film had "extensive uncredited reshoots by Brett Ratner" - that explains a lot.

Also starring Ron Perlman (last heard in "Tangled"), Claire Foy, Stephen Campbell Moore (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn"), Stephen Graham (last seen in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"), Ulrich Thomsen (last seen in "The World Is Not Enough"), Robert Sheehan, Brian F. O'Byrne.

RATING: 5 out of 10 dead monks

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

Year 5, Day 193 - 7/12/13 - Movie #1,484

BEFORE:  I get so frustrated when I fall another day behind due to something stupid like not having my Flash Player updated - but then, who's to say that's not part of the process?  What if something like that was fated to happen, and the chain takes that into account?  Like the way all those serial killer films made it possible for me to be watching sci-fi films right before Comic-Con?  Maybe these delays will enable me to tie in with not just "Man of Steel", but also "The Wolverine", opening July 26?  I've got just the spot for it, between the superhero films and another Hugh Jackman film - so why the heck shouldn't I do that?  It's like it was fated to be.

And putting this film next to "Super 8" - due to the presence of smart, precocious child characters, along with big scary beasties (you see the connections, too, right?) also means it's falling on the day of Manhattanhenge.  What's that?  It's one of the two days each year where the setting sun perfectly aligns with the majority of Manhattan's numbered cross-streets, so the sun will sink on the horizon right between the tall buildings.  The difference between this and Stonehenge, of course, is that Stonehenge was specifically built for the purpose of lining up with the sun on the solstice, and Manhattan's buildings were not made for this to happen, instead it just kind of does.  (You gotta figure, the sun's gonna set in that spot at least one day per year...)

Sure enough, my non-planned linking continues - Elle Fanning from "Super 8" was also in a film called "Ginger & Rosa" with Timothy Spall, who has a brief appearance in tonight's film.  I'd hoped for better, but I'll take it.

THE PLOT:  Harry, Ron and Hermione search for Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes in their effort to destroy the Dark Lord.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" (Movie #1,081)

AFTER: Well, I watched Part 1 about 15 months ago, and I'm not sure if that's longer than most movie-goers had to wait between the two movies.  Anyway, I had to review the plot of Part 1 on Wikipedia just to remind myself where the damn thing left off.

This is one of those films that's pretty much critic-proof.  Like someone's NOT going to see the eighth film in a series, after seeing the first 7?  As if...  I probably should watch all 8 films through at some point, but please, not now.  I feel like it's enough of an accomplishment for me to scratch this one off the list.

I will say that the big climactic battle, which seems to take over most of the film, is enormous, and complicated, and enormously complicated - but remarkably well thought-out and choreographed.  You need a scorecard to keep track of all the players, but then I know there are some people much younger than myself that manage to juggle all 1,027 major and minor characters, so I should at least be able to give it a go.

But if you're not a Potter-head, these spells and magic doohickeys can get extremely confusing.  I can't remember all the spells from the previous films and what they do, and after forcing me to learn what a Horcrux is, now I had to learn what exactly a Deathly Hallow is.  Wait, something can be BOTH?  That seems like a bit of a cheat.  Then how can you use one to destroy the other, if they're one and the same?  Actually a lot of these magic things feel like story cheats - somehow they always manage to have JUST the spell they need at a specific moment.  Or, they realize at exactly the right time what a magic object can do, which is all too convenient.

There's still a long list of things I don't understand, like the Dumbledore family tree and how Voldemort came to be who he is - they must have explained this stuff at some point and I just failed to make note of it.  Someday I'll revisit and pay more attention.

Also starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Warwick Davis (all last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1"), Alan Rickman (last heard in "Alice in Wonderland"), Michael Gambon (last seen in "The Book of Eli"), Ralph Fiennes (last seen in "Skyfall"), Robbie Coltrane (last seen in "The World Is Not Enough"), Helena Bonham Carter (last seen in "Les Miserables"), Maggie Smith (last heard in "Gnomeo & Juliet"), John Hurt (last seen in "Melancholia"), Jason Isaacs (last seen in "Friends With Money"), Tom Felton, Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "John Carter"), Matthew Lewis, Evanna Lynch, Bonnie Wright, with cameos from Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Vanity Fair"), Gary Oldman (last seen in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"), David Thewlis (last seen in "Anonymous"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "Men in Black 3"), Julie Walters,

RATING: 7 out of 10 banking goblins

UPDATE: I'm at my office in Manhattan, with my camera, ready to take pictures of the glory that is Manhattanhenge, AND...it's raining.  Lots of clouds, I doubt I'll be able to see much of anything tonight.  This is about the 5th year in a row that I've either learned about the date too late to see it, or been out of town, or it's rained.  And that's twice a year, so I've really missed the last 10 of these things.

Sure, I could come into the city tomorrow, but it will be Saturday and I'm usually not prone to do so.  I'll see how I feel.  

Super 8

Year 5, Day 192 - 7/11/13 - Movie #1,483

BEFORE: One week until Comic-Con, I got my boxes of DVDs shipped out yesterday via UPS to my hotel, they should arrive one day before I do, and if they're a day late, then they'll still be on time.  Hey, it's not my first rodeo.  Now I've just got to pack my suitcase on Monday with the various office supplies and paperwork I'll need at the booth, and try to knock off a few more sci-fi films before my plane leaves next Wednesday.

I offer a glimpse behind the curtain tonight, at how I select and collect my films for the list.  Quite often one film will suggest another, and since I mostly burn my own DVD's at the 4-hour speed, usually fitting two films on a disc, it's only natural for me to program in pairs.  (Why not?  Hollywood often releases two similar films close together - like two films this year about the White House being attacked...)  So I'd kept an eye out for this 2011 film, to pair on a DVD with "Cloverfield".  The only problem is, it never showed up on the premium cable channels.  Perhaps it was on PPV, but I just sort of assumed it would have aired on HBO or Showtime by now.  So I tried iTunes, but it's only available for purchase there, not rental, and I didn't want to pay $9.99 to see this.

Enter Amazon.com - there it was, available for streaming to Amazon Prime customers, for the low price of zero dollars.  That seemed pretty fair, but in order to view it, I needed to upgrade my Flash player.  In order to upgrade my Flash player, I needed to upgrade my browser - and I'm betting that to upgrade my browser, I'd need to upgrade my whole Mac OS.  See, this is how they get you - and once I start upgrading, then where does it stop?  Then I'll find out a whole bunch of software that I'm used to doesn't work any more under the new OS, and I have to upgrade THOSE too, at extra cost.  Uh-uh, my computer may not be current but it works (mostly), and I want to keep it that way.

So, free streaming via Amazon Prime on my wife's computer, then.  (If this doesn't work, now that I've lost a whole DAY to Flash/browser issues, I'm going to chuck "Super 8" off the list and go see "Pacific Rim" instead.) But this also provides a bit of a thematic link to tomorrow's film - and as my reward, one actor carries over from "Cloverfield", his name is Tim Griffin, and he played "Command Center Officer" in last night's film, and "Commando" in tonight's film.  Hmm, he may be a bit typecast as a military sort - but, hey, just because I didn't notice him in "Cloverfield", it doesn't mean that he didn't do a heck of a job.  The world needs background players, too.

THE PLOT: During the summer of 1979, a group of friends witness a train crash and investigate subsequent unexplained events in their small town.

AFTER: Ah, my instincts were good once again.  This film has a lot in common with "Cloverfield", namely the presence of a mysterious monster, a group of young people in peril (OK, youngish in "Cloverfield") and then we've got all the handheld camcorder footage one night, and the next we've got kids making Super 8 movies - that's quite a coincidence, I'd say.  Both films also follow the track of not letting the audience see the big beastie for the majority of the film - thus saving money on effects shots.  Sorry, I meant to say "thus building up suspense".

This film also demonstrates how hard acting is, especially for kids.  I think it's because they haven't had much life experience, so they don't have as much to draw from - or they don't realize how much work (or maybe how little?) goes into appearing so genuine.  When you ask kids to play another person, but to act natural, there may be a bit of a disconnect there.  The actress who plays the girl gets it mostly right, but I think you can tell she's been in more movies than the others.  The lead boy came off as mostly a blank to me - he's great at staring at something in awe or in shock, but the emotions that should follow just aren't there.  And some of the actors who play his friends are just the opposite, they try too hard and end up overemoting, which is sort of the Disney Channel sitcom approach.  Less is more sometimes, kids.

If you watch the end credits, you'll see a bonus, which is the "actual" (OK, not really, but you know what I mean) Super 8 film that the kid characters were seen making.  It's B.S. of course, because some adult probably spent a lot of time and money making what would LOOK like a film kids would make, with jump cuts and continuity errors and sub-par acting delivery.  I wonder, if you set out to make an intentionally crappy film and then do so, did you succeed in failing?  Because it's easy to make a bad film, but most people do it by failing to succeed instead.

Still, this may remind you of your teen years, or as I call them, "those awkward years between being an awkward child and an awkward adult".  I'm trying to recall what it was like when I was a kid, and though I hadn't specifically determined I was interested in filmmaking, I exhibited a lot of behavior that should have made it obvious I was headed in that direction.  I watched a LOT of TV, and kept track of a lot of music, not just the Top 40 but also a lot of novelty records, many of which appeared in old films.  I got involved with theater groups, which seemed like a good way to interact with girls - though I never got a date out of that, at least I got to dance with them on stage, and got some acting experience at the same time.  And of course I watched "Star Wars" over and over, and sometimes frame-by-frame, and this got me interested in the filmmaking process in a roundabout way.  I even took it upon myself to transcribe the "Star Wars" radio dramas via typewriter, which seems ridiculous now, but I learned about script formatting in the process.

I didn't pick up a 16mm movie camera until college, because I was focused on coursework in high school (plus singing and playing clarinet) - but once I was in film school I became a sort of one-man band, acting, directing and doing in-camera editing, sometimes all at once.  Just like Orson Welles, only without any great story ideas.  Thankfully those films are lost in the mists of time, or maybe they're in my basement, and I chose a career path where I'd work on other people's films for more money and less creative input.

Back to my questions about distribution, now - since I'm in the film biz (tangentially) I deal a little bit with contracts and distribution models and such.  Though my boss has an agent that's supposed to deal with cable channels (mostly by ignoring them, it seems...) I'm still constantly mystified by the process.  I realize we're living under a new paradigm, with the Netflix and the YouTube and people watching movies on their phones (Wait, is that a thing? Why would anyone do that?) but it seems to me that if you've got a product like "Super 8" to market, you'd want the maximum number of eyeballs to be able to access it, and signing an exclusive deal with Amazon streaming would seem to work against that.  Wouldn't it be better to make a film available on DVD, premium cable, Netflix and Amazon, all at the same time?  It would be like having a restaurant AND a food-truck to maximize your sales opportunities.

In the same vein, why make a web-site that requires people to upgrade all their software to view it?  It seems rather exclusionary.  Isn't the point of the web to disseminate information to everyone, in a way that's accessible across the board? 

Anyway, back to "Super 8".  I couldn't help but think that it seemed a bit like "Stand By Me" mixed with "E.T." and "Close Encounters", with some of the creepiness of "Poltergeist" - only to find out after that the whole thing was conceived as a Spielberg tribute, right down to the concept of kids making movies, which is what Stevie did while growing up.  Well, then, in that sense the film succeeded.   Hmm, it turns out that J.J. Abrams, the director of "Super 8" and his friend Matt Reeves, the director of "Cloverfield", were once hired by Spielberg to restore his old Super 8 home movies.  See, it all ties together!

Also starring Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning (last seen in "We Bought a Zoo"), Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Gabriel Basso, Kyle Chandler (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Ron Eldard (last seen in "Scent of a Woman"), Noah Emmerich (last seen in "Windtalkers"), Glynn Turman, with cameos from Dan Castellanata (last heard in "The Cat in the Hat"), Greg Grunberg.

RATING: 6 out of 10 missing microwaves

Cloverfield

Year 5, Day 190 - 7/9/13 - Movie #1,482

BEFORE:  I was waiting for a long time for this one to pop up on premium cable, and then it just never did.  Once again I point out how that process is a complete mystery to me - I never know when films will air on HBO/Showtime, and then some don't, which means I should have watched them on PPV, but of course by then it's too late. In this case the film aired on the Fox Movie Channel, which used to be commercial-free but no longer is.  I'm bending the rules to allow this in.  I could have waited until October since this counts as a monster movie, but my linking rules put it here.  T.J. Miller carries over from "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World".

THE PLOT:  Revolves around a monster attack in New York as told from the point of view of a small group of people.

AFTER: There's a nice tie-in with last night's film, which is a sort of similar theme - trying to get across a town or state to see a loved one, while destruction is raining down, or imminently so.  So that was a nice justification for watching this film now instead of at Halloween time.

But gad, it's like that "Blair Witch Project" all over again.  That film which featured supposedly "found footage" spawned a whole bunch of imitators, mostly of the paranormal/ghost activity variety, but here's one in the monster-movie genre.

I get it, somebody watches a film like "Godzilla" or "King Kong" and there's a camera everywhere, every shot of the monster is framed perfectly, cut to a close-up, and if you're aware of all that going on, then it could take you out of the moment and remind you that you're watching a film, so nothing is real.

But the alternative to that is to turn someone loose with a hand-held camera and no Steadicam - I call the result "Shakicam", and it usually gives me a headache.  The intended result is to look more "real", more cinema verité, but all I could think was, somebody spent a lot of money to make it look like they didn't spend any money.  It probably took a ton of professionals to make this "amateur" footage.  And thinking that took ME out of the moment.

In addition to all the shaking around and frantic filming while running away, there's an occasional cut to what USED to be on the tape that's being recorded on - this lets us know it's more "real", plus it's quite ironic to see the young lovers during happier times, before they were being chased by monsters or whatever.  Even more obnoxious is the dialogue, which seemed to be mostly people screaming, "Did you SEE that?" and "What is going on?"  Hey, characters, if you don't know, I don't know.

The result is like listening to the aimless conversations of twenty-somethings in a diner or something, when they go around and around and never really say anything substantial.  I know I sometimes have a hard time controlling my "fist of death" when I'm forced to endure this.

Still, I may recommend this to my wife, not because it's a great film, but because she enjoyed that "Blair Witch" deal, and if she watches this, she'll get to see a bunch of hipsters getting crushed.  And on top of that, their big party gets spoiled.  Sorry, trust-fund kids, Daddy's gonna have to find you a new apartment!

Also starring Lizzy Caplan (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine"), Michael Stahl-David, Jessica Lucas, Odette Annable, Mike Vogel.

RATING: 4 out of 10 cell phone batteries