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-Pimp feather. Not as good as a blowjob but better than being teabagged bay a sweaty panda.

-Teabag. The kind of movie where about ten minutes in you feel like you have some dude’s pubic hair in your mouth.

-Steaming pile. You are willing to pay more to get out of the theater than you paid to get in.

Ratings confusing
and infuriating?
-Here’s what they mean

Okay, so I watched ‘Cloverfield’ for the first time the other day and I started asking everyone I know, or I should say everyone who’s opinion I care even a little bit about (if you didn’t hear from me, that should tell you an awful lot about where you and I stand) what their impression of the film was and the overwhelming response was something like “OMG DOGG THAT MOVIE TOTALLY SUKKEDD!!!!!!111 YOU DONT EVEN GET TO NO WEHRE THE MONSTER CAME FRM OR WHY ITS MAD???!!1**”

If you go into this film wanting it to hold your hand and tell you every detail about the monster, where it came from, why it’s all pissed off, you’re going to come away disappointed. Another complaint I heard was that the monster didn’t get enough face time. Here’s a newsflash: Cloverfield is not about the monster. The creature is an incidental element that drives the story. That’s it. I feel like the monster got too much camera time, in fact. One of the eeriest moments of the film was when the main characters are out on the street and the creature is glimpsed between wrecked buildings as a kind of shadowy ambiguity.

The story is really about some yuppity (a cross between ‘yuppie’ and ‘uppity’) New Yorkers in a panic that centers around Jason, who was supposed to be leaving for a job in Japan a few hours before shit hits the fan, Hud, the dude who is obviously holding a camera for the first time in his life since he can’t hold it still or frame a shot to save his life (you’ll see the irony in that statement in the third act), Marlena, who is the most interesting of the bunch and who’s leg is constantly humped by Hud, and the smokin’ hot piece of ass, Lily.

The story starts out kind of vanilla with the main characters mingling and carrying on with their meaningless lives at Jason’s going away party until all of a sudden the building shakes and the lights flicker. Everyone floods out to the streets. The first few scenes after the initial attack are an obvious invocation of the images of 9/11 which is alright with me. They created the desired effect.

Once the dust begins to settle and the characters get a hold of themselves (relatively speaking, they all flipped their wig before the story began in my sensible, Midwestern opinion) Jason receives a cell phone call from his main box, Beth who is injured and trapped on her 49th floor apartment, which we also learn happens to be leaning on an adjacent building, and feels it is his duty to rescue her.

While there’s only so much of “Queasy-Cam” a person can take, the film does a great job of creating the illusion that everything is unfolding as the audience sees it, and part of that is not revealing too much about the creature and what its motivations are. Seriously, if that’s you in the middle of Manhattan while all hell’s breaking loose, are you going to be asking why the monster’s all pissed off or are you going to try to get the fuck out of there while trying not to shit your pants? I submit the latter.

Also, as an aside to everyone I know: If we are ever under attack by, I don’t know a giant monster or anything, and I have the opportunity to escape when you are trapped-PEW-I’m the fuck out of there. Sorry.

**An actual quote from my brother. I’m not exactly sure how someone can express poor spelling and all caps over the phone, but he did it. He liked ‘The Notebook’ and is not openly gay. Figure that one out.

Cloverfield
(2008) PG-13

November 26, 2008

Silky says, “It’s not as bad as your friends said it was”.

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