So Very Dark

Went and saw Cloverfield tonight.

I know that there are mixed opinions, largely in part to the Godzilla-esque ‘giant monster attacks city’ theme and the Blair Witch Project style filming-

<–Godzilla

<–Blair Witch Project

but I have to say that IMHO, they pulled it off.

The basic idea for Cloverfield is this:

A 20-something named Rob, living in Manhattan, has accepted a job overseas. His brother’s girlfriend organizes a going-away party for him, and plans to have someone walk around with a video camera, taping wishes of good luck to send with Rob so he has something to remember his good friends by. All of a sudden, in the midst of their laughter and glee, as the poem says, SOMETHING happens. No one is sure what…the whole building shakes, power goes out momentarily, everyone’s a little freaked. They all go up to the roof to see what they can see. Something explodes VERY near by. Everyone runs down to the street, where, through the chaos, falling debris and clouds of dust, it becomes apparent that something huge and alive is wandering around knocking things over and eating people a little. This is all caught on tape by Hud, the friend in charge of collecting well wishes from the party, and he continues to record as they attempt to escape the city and figure out what the f**k is going on.

The movie is presented as a government file, post catastrophe, the memory card recovered in ‘what used to be’ Central Park.

Overall, I feel it played very well. It really came across like some kids were having a party, had a camera running already and then some sh** went down, and then, later, someone found the camera. You get vague introductions of the characters, but not a lot of background. No one makes random commentary on stuff that we don’t see in order to fill us in on the details. There is no music or narration. There is a lot we don’t know about what happened. All the information we get is gathered from one memory card worth of data.

I liked it.

…

I didn’t have school last Monday ’cause of MLKJ day. So it feels kind of weird going back tomorrow, like I’ve been away for a long time.

Nothing much else new here. I found out that one my coworkers didn’t know what Invader Zim was, so I told him to go watch it, like, right away.

Through extreme pimping, I sold us out of copies of Good Omens at work. This past couple of weeks I’ve been keeping that as my ‘book I love’ at the register, and convincing people of how awesome it is and that they need to read it.

No reason. Just for fun. And because the book is frickin’ awesome.
Someone tried to convince me that Neil Gaiman is a Scientologist today (their reason for NOT buying Good Omens). First of all, I looked it up and found out that, as far as anyone knows, he ISN’T. His dad is, but if he ever WAS involved with the group, he isn’t any longer. Second of all, his writing is awesome either way, so what does it matter? The woman I was speaking to was basically of the opinion of ‘oh, well, his writing may be good, but who knows what he’s really preaching in there?’ *I* say, that is some straight up BULL-sh**.