Bootleg, Monsters, and Stereotypical New Yorkers

No! Not another blog about Cloverfield! This would be #3! No, I won't blog about Cloverfield, I went to see a movie with my friends on my birthday last saturday called...uh...Alfalfa Pasture...yeah...well anyway...

I enjoyed this movie, I would have enjoyed it more with some little changes, but nothing huge. I try not to fall into anyone else's hype because that usually ruins a movie for me. There's something to be said about being a pessimist, I'm never disappointed. Yes, I do plan on dissecting the movie so their will be "spoilers" if you can call them that. It's a monster movie, there is running and screaming and dying so I don't really know how you can "spoil" it.

The Characters: I could have done without the entire "party" part of the movie, 20 minutes just to introduce the characters and give them 'depth', as much depth as 20 something single New Yorkers can have anyway. I didn't find them entertaining, intriguing, or interesting at all. I have t-shirts that are more witty than these characters. In fact, I finally turned to my husband and said, "If someone doesn't die soon I'm leaving". The more they talked, the less I cared when they finally bit it.

Death and Destructions: Awesome. I think this was pretty close to how it would go down should anything like this actually happen. I feel like JJ Abrams did a really good job translating basic human reaction into a feature film. But I think some of the acting needed a little help. Obviously not everything translates into a film. You can't have a bunch of people talking over each other and no one is THAT good with a camera in that kind of situation. Speaking of which.

The Camera: This was some sort of superman swiss army knife camera. It's got lights and night vision and can survive pretty much everything including helicopter crashes. That thing has got to be covered in Nerf.

Gore: Pretty minimal for this kind of movie. Yeah sure, someone gets carried by with a chunk of his stomach part missing but other than that it was really not awful at all. Almost unrealistically clean. They run by an ambulance packing up some victims and the camera man is too busy looking at his running mates (Yeah right!) everyone stops and stares at accidents. And at one point they pull a girl off a piece of rebar stuck in her shoulder, they put the camera down (so he could help) at such an angle that you can't see anything. I doubt this one done to keep the gore down so much as how do you fake ripping a piece of rebar out of a chuck of flesh. You don't. Then the cameraman gets eaten and you don't really see anything other than the camera flailing around and you end up looking at him laying on the ground, you can only assume that he's in pieces.

Acting: If you are going to add some acting in between the running, it should be realistic. Everyone thinks its so easy to act scared but really it's not all screaming and crying, I think there'd be a lot more crapping of pants, swearing, and making deals with God.
And romance? Give me a break, who cares? I don't have time to care, I'm trying to see a monster! Crying about your dead brother? Is that really how you would tell your mom over the phone? Uh uh, nope. They flew through the 7 steps of grief pretty dang quick.

Comic Relief: Good job to the cameraman who's name I don't remember because it doesn't really matter. He really should've gotten more camera time, but I guess that's a little hard when you're the one filming. He had some good lines, which I also don't remember right now. ..but they were good.

So anyway, I was pleased by the movie over all. I've heard talk that there will be a sequel which I would see if it happened but I wouldn't be heartbroken if it didn't. I will be working with Tom to post a piece of bootleg film that we got so be watching for that in the next couple of days. It's probably the best 30 seconds in the whole movie.