why i won't be seeing cloverfield

ok. i get that to some people out there that title might seem a little shocking. (well, not shocking, but, maybe a bit weird?) but it's serious.

i will not be seeing cloverfield.

honestly, i'm sure it's a decent enough movie. i just have no interest.

1. it's godzilla. actually, my first thought when i saw the first previews was that it was a war of the worlds style invasion movie - which would not have been more interesting, or better. but my point is, i've seen godzilla. the original. the sequels. hell, i even saw the awful as all hell remake. okay, so it's a different take on godzilla, from the point of view of the victims (more on this in a second) but it's still, essentially, a godzilla movie. honestly, i had at least hoped it would be something "different" (not a giant reptile that might have come from the sea... maybe a giant bunny rabbit? or the stay puffed marshmallow man, making it actually a remake of ghostbusters told from a different point of view... no i'm not being entirely serious, but i'm trying to illustrate my point that godzilla is just sort of pointless).

2. it's the blair witch project. okay, so i'll admit i got sucked into the blair witch hype of 98 or 99 or whatever summer that was. i did. it was new, sort of. and it was - from a storytelling point of view - not even a terrible movie (though most of the storytelling was told off camera in all of the lead up and various viral marketing). yeah, it quickly became a joke, and is one of those movies that's scary like a scary campfire story is scary - it depends mostly on the environment in which you see it. but that whole "from the point of view of the handheld camera " thing just... ugh. one of the reasons blair witch works is that you NEVER see the witch, or even if there is a witch. the end, where they seem to die in the manner that some of the various townspeople describe how the "witch" killed before does seem ton indicate something, but you still just don't know, which is what makes it "scary." granted, reveals in horror movies can be scary - when you finally see freddy krueger, it's that much scarier because of how little you saw him up to that point. it's sort of a hallmark of the horror genre. but giant monster attacking new york movies DON'T work that way. the fear is not from the surprise, the fear is from the giant thing going to eat you unless you find a way to stop it.

i will throw one exception here, where i can see cloverfield working a little better than blair witch. for a movie like this to work you need to a) suspend your disbelief enough to believe that such clean images can come from a handi-cam with apparently unbelievably long battery life, and to believe that - while it's just a movie - it's "real" enough for you to invest yourself into it (blair witch did a decent job at this, though if you saw the movie in anything other than a dark, relatively quiet movie theater, it worked quite a bit less) and b) you have to give a shit about the characters. blair witch failed at that a bit, as you really kind of hoped - despite her desperate pleas - that the lead character/narrator was going to get it, and soon. if anything, you invested a lot in hating her. cloverfield seems to create characters for you to like and feel for, which, assuming you've suspended your disbelief enough, makes the rest of the movie that much more effective.

3. it's still just torture porn, sort of anyway. the shaky, slightly grainy images. the feeling that the subjects of the film are being brutalized by an unseen force. okay, it's not hostel or saw or anything like that, but it still owes as much to those movies as it does to the above. now, this might seem a bit of a stretch, but at the same time, there's not much else you can really call young, pretty people, being randomly picked off by something or someone. i mean, it doesn't seem to be the unmittigated gore fest or anything but..

4. jj abrams. granted, i like jj abrams. i liked felicity - yes, i LIKED felicity; i liked Alias (at least the first few seasons); i like Lost (what i've seen of it at least). but... there's just seems to be a sense with this movie that since he's behind it, it can't be touched, and therefore must be awesome. a lot of directors/producers fall into this trap, especially after they've had a decent string of successes that are in some way "unconventional." so this might be a slightly cynical/bratty point, but had anyone else been behind a movie like this, would it have been given as much positive hype? MAYBE spielberg (he was certainly given a bit of a pass on his remake of "war of the worlds") but i think that a lot of creators would have gotten far more critical eyes cast in the direction of this movie. would someone else have even gotten this movie greenlit?

5. viral marketing works, but can easily go wrong. truthfully, the days where an advanced campaign like "cloverfield" has had really work are gone. we're hit with so much information now, that the second something becomes part of the entertainment hype machine, it's fucked as every detail gets leaked, whether it's true or not. when cloverfield was first being marketed, it seemed very cool, and interesting (and maybe worth seeing). the best part for me was that it was largely a disinformation campaign - we were told NOTHING, not even if cloverfield was the real title (which a lot of reports had said it wasn't - that this was just another smokescreen meant to give the movie a further air of mystery and disinformation). but ultimately, maybe because of the writers strike - how much do writers have to do with marketing campaigns and movie titles? - or maybe because of something else (that's green with dead presidents on it), this all fell apart and it quickly became just another overhyped monster movie with an "interesting" angle.

maybe i'm just cynical, and i can see all of what i said easily being dismissed as me just disliking a popular movie because of hype. and maybe that's part of it too. granted, i've been known to love movies that have been hyped to death, but something about cloverfield just doesn't fit for me.

so i ask whoever's reading this one thing: convince me. without spoilers if you must, but convince me that this is a movie i should see - if you do and i see it and like it, umm, you'll get a prize. or something (no idea what but i'll come up with something).

saturday morning shenanigans

why on earth do tom and jerry now have superpowers? (at least that's what the commercial for whatever their new kids WB program seems to indicate)

this is worse than when they started to talk...

i'm sorry if my french was bad

so i'll probably post later about comics, such as the whole one more day/brand new day fiasco going on with spiderman (brand new day = not such a bad first issue, actually), and the amazingly good "lost annual" from the teen titans (i expected it to be good, it was written by the original writer and had allred doing the inks and such, but i had no idea how awesome. seriously, it's books like this that justify my reading comics!)

no. i'm going to talk about one of my weird, geeky obsessions (which, after all, is what started this blog).

french pop! (warning, this is a little picture and video heavy)

i love me some french pop. serge! francoise hardy! france gall! awesomeness.

i came to it originally - though i was actually familiar with serge gainsbourg for quite a while - through april march, in particular her album "chrominance decoder." half in french, half in english - it was actually one of the english songs that got my attention, thanks to those handy CMJ magazine monthly samplers.

april march - real name elinore blake - actually used to be a production assistant of some sort for pee wee's playhouse (along with rob zombie, which is just one of those odd coincidences in music history) and as an animator for spumco, specifically ren and stimpy.


she has a few albums out, so if you can find them, i recommend them all ("triggers" is the last one i know of).

here's a video:


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then came the "pop romantique" album, essentially a "french pop tribute album" with a lot of songs written by serge (plus a bob dylan tune translated into french by lloyd cole), and a few originals (one by air, featuring francoise hardy and the other... i think by ladybug transistor though i don't recall at the moment). i had heard francoise prior to this, doing the french bits on blur's "to the end" (the version from the "country house" single).

the best songs on here are the ones by Ivy (l'anamour), which probably owed something to the fact that their singer is french born. and heavenly's "Nous Ne Somme Pas De Anges" which i had heard before (i forget which album it was on originally) but still loved.

also around this time - early 2000 - i was studying in the UK and picked up a recording of belle and sebastian's "black session" (a french radio show, which a lot of great artists have performed for... a little john peelish, but with longer sessions). which featured a song called "poupee de cire, poupee de son" (probably available for download somewhere, and video of which is on their "fans only" DVD collection). and when my favorite band covers something, i am hooked...

and then there's serge. what can i say about serge. definitely a pervert (i mean, what kind of man writes a song called "lemon incest" for his teenage daughter?) but also a pretty brilliant songwriter. his collaborations with bridgette bardot and jane birkin (and numerous others). this, however, is the serge i know:


before this goes on too long, i'll just talk a little about one more artists, and that's france gall.

the original artist of serge's "poupee de cire, poupee de son," as well as "laisse tomber les filles" (which later April March covered as "chack habit"), she was a very popular artist, even being selected to perform at eurovision for Luxembourg (performing "poupee de cire" for all of europe, and winning!). unfortunately, she didn't get the subtext of the song (or of "sucettes," which was ostensibly about lollipops, but also about oral sex) and ultimately felt that Serge used her (which he may have done).




"poupee de cire, poupee de son" is probably my favorite song of the "genre," not just because of the belle and sebastian cover, but because i truly just enjoy it. twinkle, a british singer from the 60's, did an english version which i haven't been able to find anywhere, but the original, well, the original french is just the best. so to close things off, here a clip of the original france gall eurovision performance:



the belle and sebastian performance (from the fans only DVD):



and just for extra geekery, a marching band performing it:

sucks to your assmer

and sucks to your regular blogging!

kidding.

first, a holdover from the christmas posts that never happened.

honestly, i think everyone who has a TV and basic cable should watch the brilliant creation that is The Venture Bros. on Adult Swim (on Cartoon Network). a parody of everything from Johnny Quest to The Fantastic Four and other things like that, it's possibly one of the best cartoons on tv (what else can you call a show that has an entire portion of dialogue taken from Bowie's "Space Oddity" and "Ashes to Ashes"?)

well, apparently they recorded some christmas songs, which you can hear here.(apparently, some people can blog about christmas things more regularly than others....). according to wikipedia, there's also a "fairytale of new york" floating around, though it's not on the above linked site. the monarch/dr girlfriend take on "peace on earth/little drummer boy" is especially awesome, as it also keeps the dialogue... sort of... (best to just listen to it, as my description can't do it justice).

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secondly, comics.

i haven't talked about comics, except for superman and santa teaming up, for ages. i'll probably get back that this year soon enough, but right now i just want to talk about one thing, and that's what's happened in spiderman (because apparently everyone in the comics industry is a buzz about it).

truthfully, i think keeping spiderman married would have been a good thing. and sacrificing that to let aunt may live, well, not so much. not that i hate aunt may, or have any great love for mary jane, but really? cheers to them for making mephisto a relevant force for the first time in a while, but part of me hopes they weasel their way out of it by summer (blame the skrulls? pocket universe?) i mean, to have the marriage just not exist anymore... (and how does them not being married bring harry osborne back to life?) honestly, it all feels too convenient to just be a "change in the status quo" especially since the marriage was such a change, as was the pregnancy, the clone saga , the unmasking... now none of these happened? do we just undo every storyline - good or bad - that revolved even slightly around their being married? and since it was undone by mysticism, shouldn't characters like dr strange sense it? or is everyone who deals in any way with spidey just going to have the portion of their memory lobotomized and retconned out? this isn't like "no more mutants" after all. sigh...

they claim nobody liked the marriage (comic fans seemed to be largely ambivilent, myself it never bothered me though i never felt it made for any great storylines. i never felt it aged the character or anything. and it's not like there aren't tons of married superheroes, many of which HAVE had good stories come out of their being married...). they claimed it was a huge hinderance (which just smacks of a lack of editorial creativity). honestly, i think they just wanted to do something extreme to grab headlines like they did when they killed captain america.

maybe it will last, maybe it won't. i'm leaning towards the latter (can marriage have comic book death?) but who knows...