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Verdict on Cloverfield: well worth seeing in the theater, at least maybe for a matinee. The entertainment value in this movie, if it’s up your alley at all, is in having the explosions and monster roars blast out your eardrums, and in getting kind of dizzy from watching a first-person camcorder account of running away from said monster on the big screen. Kate and Jay, naturally you can get away with waiting for it on Pay-per-view. Just invite me over, please.

Some people seem to have loved it, some people hated it. I’m surprised the people who wound up hating it were dumb enough to shell out $10 for it in the first place. Cloverfield is what it is: a big freakin’ monster from God-knows-where shows up and starts chomping on New York, and we watch a handful of devastatingly good-looking hipsters try to stay alive. That kind of movie either is or isn’t your bag, and if it is, you should like it just fine. Imagine two parts Godzilla (largely without the cheeky Matthew Broderick humor), one part Blair Witch Project (the cinematography/perspective), and one part Aliens (yes, for reasons you’ll just have to see).

The vertigo induced by seeing it on the big screen is part of the ride; I was definitely holding onto my armrests at times. While the news reported a few cases of actual motion-sickness, I didn’t get too close to that, though the fate of a couple people on the screen tried to tip my stomach in that direction. And if you really let yourself get into the movie, I think there’s something about the first-person perspective that actually makes you a little more nervous about thinking you’re about to see one of the characters die that typical movie framing can’t match.

Yes, there is enough stupidity in the movie to complain about, but it’s hard to make a horror movie if you don’t have at least a few characters who, by some mental defect, are inclined to head towards danger rather than away from it. If you’re inclined to be more angry at stupid characters than wowed by special effects, you probably ought to pass. If one unbelievably, unnecessarily, unforgivably cheesy line between lovers at a time of impending doom is going to stick in your craw and make you wish they had two vials of poison to end it all, again, pass. And if you’re going to get so hung up on the improbable physics of an a biological villain, no matter its size, that seems to laugh off Sidewinder missile impacts, well, you should’ve stopped reading at “monster.” But the cringing-at-stupidity scenes amount to about 90 seconds total in over an hour of rollercoaster death and destruction, so it’s a small tax to pay to uninspired script writers.

The final caveat is that you’re not going to leave with any answers. We can only hope that the producers are smart enough to turn this into a long-term money-milking website where obsessive fans go for weeks after the movie’s made its sums, trying to piece together what the hell happened beyond the limited observations of one recovered camcorder. Apart from that, though, prepare to walk out with a sizable WTF? hanging over your head — again, see “one part Blair Witch Project.”

I think I’m up for another matinee if you are.

Saturday morning I did my first ride with the Atlanta Intown Touring Club. We meandered around about a 13 mile route (after Anna and I biked the 5 miles over to downtown Decatur) and hit 5 or 6 cemeteries — some “historic,” some just plain “old” — over a couple hours. My favorite had to be Sylvester Cemetery, where a bunch of us puzzled quite a while over the terribly unfortunate Dickerson family, who had a lousy time keeping their many children alive past their third birthday.

The final stop, naturally, was Oakland Cemetery, where the staff was getting ready for its second night of Halloween tours, followed by restocking our carbohydrates in the form of beer at the Standard (hint: avoid the quesadillas; they’re just lame, in an overpriced and uncreative way), and then more liquid carbs at the Brewhouse. After about 25 miles of riding that day, it wasn’t the bucket of PBR that was making me walk all wobbly.

If you’ve got two wheels and fancy local culture, you should definitely check out the touring club.

As much as my political affiliation is an abomination in my family, I often think of myself nonetheless as a somewhat conservative Democrat. Plenty of my Democratic cohorts seem to think so, as well.

Furthermore, I am not particularly a fan of Michael Moore. I often feel like he makes it hard for me to wear the mantle of a “liberal.”

I didn’t even really want to see Sicko, at least not in the theater. My choices were that, or go for a hike just outside of the city. I find hikes just outside of cities silly.

All of that being said, after today’s flicker-show, I have decided that when I complete my Ph.D., I will be moving to France, rather than face the horror it will be trying to find health care as an unemployed rocket-f’ing-scientist.

So, goodbye. Er, au revoir.

While cleaning up the house last weekend, I heard an interview on NPR with programmer-turned-musician Jonathan Coulton. More interesting than quitting the day job is his Ze Frank-like approach to building an online following while giving away lots of great content and trying to crank out a new song every week. After hearing a couple of his tunes performed in the NPR studio, I headed over to his website between dishes and laundry and downloaded a few of the free tracks; I’ll purchase some of the not-so-free ones once I assess my finances. (Yes, I’m down to counting single dollar purchases. Merry Christmas.)

Thinking about independent musicians like Coulton, the recent news about disappointing sales at the iTunes music store, and the online social organization gizmos I’ve been tinkering with have really raised some interesting questions in my mind about a new model of music distribution on the net…but that’s another story for another day.

For now, click on over to Coulton’s music store and give a listen; I highly recommend Re your brains on the Thing a Week II album, and of course, the geek ballad of the everyman, Code Monkey on Thing a Week III. He seems to rotate which handful of tracks are available for free; in today’s selection, Shop Vac is pretty campy but still fun, and who can resist George W. Bush talking about his Duty?

“One of the best bad movies I’ve ever seen.” That’s the review headline from an Amazon.com customer’s fairly well thought-out description of this movie that does, in the end, recommend Code 46 as well worth seeing. Like that reviewer, I have been wondering what to say about the movie, which does leave you sitting on the couch in a kind of stunned silence for a while, unsure if you need to own this movie forever, or if you got gypped. I’m inclined to think I’m going to end up of the former opinion.

I’ve already told a couple of friends that while I’m sure I know plenty of people who would hate this movie (sorry lot that they are :-P), I would definitely recommend it to dyed-in-the-wool fans of dystopian sci-fi and/or film noir, or anyone who considers themselves some degree of “theater geek” or “film geek.” But first, let’s get one thing straight: the trailer that I just watched for purposes of this posting, which you can see here, is so not an accurate depiction of the movie I watched yesterday. That trailer is for a thriller that doesn’t exist, pumped up with fast-paced techno, totally rearranged and horribly juxtaposed scenes, and selections of footage heavily weighted toward the most fast-paced snippets of film they could muster. I think this movie will definitely grab your attention, but it will not raise your pulse like that.

‘Cept maybe during the doin’ it parts. But anyway.

The first two types of film buffs that should like this movie are easy to call: this is a fairly interesting depiction of a dystopian near-future in which the sun has won its battle with our ozone layer; much of the suburbs and hinterland has been reduced to desert; movement between the oasis-like cities is highly controlled (by what seems to be a cross between Homeland Security and the insurance industry); and many people are genetically related to strangers due to widespread use of cloning and in-vitro fertilization, so you have to get a gene screen before you do it. It also definitely qualifies to a large extent as film noir, based on certain characteristics like

• “primary moods of…melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation and paranoia”
• “Heroes (or anti-heroes)…include down-and-out, conflicted hard-boiled detectives or private eyes”
• “Narratives were frequently complex, maze-like and convoluted, and typically told with foreboding background music, flashbacks (or a series of flashbacks)…and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration.”
• “The females in film noir were either of two types (or archetypes) - dutiful, reliable, trustworthy and loving women; or femme fatales - mysterious, duplicitous, double-crossing, gorgeous, unloving, predatory, tough-sweet, unreliable, irresponsible, manipulative and desperate women.” [Tim Robbins is framed by both.]

And a slew of other cinematographic elements fall in line with that genre as well. If you want a mood movie, in here you’ve got one. Particularly if that mood you want is, in the end, bad.

Finally, for the general theater/film geeks, this movie is just an impressive work to admire from the production point of view. Code 46 was shot in relatively short order, on a very modest budget of $9.5M — compare that to about $47M for the much slower, cheesier, barely-worth-seeing future-love remake of Solaris with George Clooney. I’ve got to whole-heartedly disagree with one cranky Amazon customer who whined that “the producers had so little faith in this movie that they decided to spend little if any money on special effects to convince the viewers that they were in fact in the year 2050,” a guess of the date made by Mr. Crankypants. What is impressive about this production is that by jaunting around the world and shooting on location in dingy, barren or crowded places most Western audiences don’t typically see (Shanghai, Hong Kong, India, United Arab Emirates), director Michael Winterbottom managed to convey the sense of a bleak near-future without having to wow us with hovercars (looks like we’re still driving Honda Odysseys, Toyota Priuses, and beat-up old Fiats in the future), laser guns, and digital megalopolis backdrops. Besides, this movie is, first and foremost, a love story; it just happens to be a romance thwarted by rather more complicated circumstances than we have to deal with now in the age of MySpace stalkers and Valtrex commercials. Winterbottom gives us just enough futurama to chill us, and just enough explanation to keep us from being distracted with “Wait, why is that the way it is” details.

Another bonus for the film geeks, and probably the strongest aspect of the film, is the role played by a very ethereal score, which is actually available on iTunes if you want to get a taste, or like to sit around in the dark listening to music that makes you woozy. (The soundtrack also includes an eye-misting closing selection from Coldplay, Warning Sign, which makes me really wonder: as good as it can often be, is Coldplay music really suited for anything other than soundtracks? Hmmm.)

Admittedly, the performances of Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton are not nearly among the most impressive of their careers (like Sam was all that interesting as the sputtering, pasty telepath in Minority Report); and the plot itself moves kind of slowly, even at times a bit disjointedly, although that could well be quite intentional to reinforce the discomfort of the starring couple’s suspended emotional state. However, the overall audio-visual presentation of the film, and the mood journey of the story, definitely makes this a must-see for anyone predisposed to this kind of flick along any of those three angles: as dystopian sci-fi, as film noir, or just as a well-filmed, frugally-budgeted piece of eye-and-ear-candy that manages to elicit an emotional response, even if a discomforting one.

[Blogger’s tech note: I’m trying something new with this post, giving it two categories to see if I can have it show up on the main page for a limited time and on the sidebar for a longer duration. Hope I don’t break anything.]

Take “The Station Agent” and add a healthy dose of “Life is Beautiful,” you’ll get this must-see flick that will make you laugh till you cry (and you ought to). Trailer.