Echoing my belief that the threatening thing you can’t see is ten times scarier than one you can, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy says the following in his Cloverfield review: “At long last, a lingering full-on shot of the monster is served up, and it’s not a friendly sight. All the same, a strong argument could be made for not showing the creature at all. The film’s initial hints at offering a new kind of horror eventually devolve into something essentially familiar, provoking idle thoughts that, in the vein of the ’50s sci-fier Forbidden Planet, it could have been more effective with an invisible but quite tangible threat.”

Nobody’s here. That I recognize. Empty streets, idle merchants, half-filled restaurants…the last quiet that Park City will know for 10 or 11 days. It all cranks up starting tomorrow. I shared a $34 dollar airport shuttle into town with Hollywood Reporter guy Gregg Goldstein — that’s the single most noteworthy thing that’s happened over the last eight or nine hours. It’s now about 3 or 4 degrees outside. Ice crystals in my nostrils. A big storm is coming on Sunday, the shuttle driver said.

Egyptian theatre, upper Main Street, Park City

Wasatch mountains, a few minutes away from landing at Salt Lake City airport — Wednesday, 1.16.08, 4:55 pm

Lower Main Street — 1.16.08, 9:25 pm

The Oscar statuette in this just-released poster looks like he’s made from liquid metal, the stuff that the T-1000 was composed of in James Cameron‘s T2: Judgment Day. In other words, subject to melting or shattering and (given the reported contingency plan to televise an “alternate” Oscar show if the strike isn’t settled) given to shape-shifting. Of all the years to use this visual metaphor…wow. As if the Oscar fathers decided to deliberately convey the ongoing anxiety. (Thanks to Awards Daily for posting the art.)

As the uproar over the exclusion of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days from the foreign-language “short list” continues to smolder, a thought comes to mind. Instead of ignoring the oversight and stressing the awards and lavish praise that this film has gathered since last May, what if IFC Films, the film’s distributor, were to make the Academy committee’s diss the focus of a new campaign?
What if IFC Films sought out the hundreds of “name”-level industry people who are mortified at what happened and asked them to sign their names to a petition that would run in consumer press and online ads, pleading with the public to see the film regardless and that doing so would be about more than just “buying a ticket” and “seeing a film”?
Or forget the public — what about a trade ad in Variety in which the film’s admirers say en masse that they’re disgusted by the Academy committee’s decision, and this incident makes clear that changes in the selection process are desperately needed?
People who care about these matters should stand up and respond as a community. You can’t just shrug and be cynical. You have to say “this can’t happen again…for the good of the industry and its reputation, we have to do something.”

Due to Sundance packing, air travel and general frenzy, the usual postings will be on hold starting now and continuing until sometime this evening.

The BAFTA nominations mean nothing in terms of Atonement Oscar odds. Joe Wright‘s film is still dead as far as its Best Pictures prospects are concerned. The British simply stood up for a hometown film, is all. Made in England, produced by Brits, based on book by British author, British actors, about England during World War II…hats in the air and 14 nominations! That said, it still is and will continue to be an exceptional, high-grade film. That no one really loves.
Update due to talkbackers claiming the film is loved by many, etc.: Of course it’s liked, loved and selling tickets. Which is why I used “really” to define the kind of love that counts, matters, means something in terms of awards. People admire Atonement as far as it goes, but this hasn’t been enough in terms of trophies on the mantlepiece.

“This is a lesson all the failed Iraq films of ’07 have learned — allegory works much better than brutal fact.” For whatever reason, this comment from HE reader “Howling Man” has parted the curtains and explained the failure of the Iraq War flicks in a way that, for the first time, doesn’t piss me off. I’ve been fuming for months about people’s refusal to see In The Valley of Elah and the others (poor Stop Loss — doomed before it even gets out of the gate) and I imagine I’ll continue to have this reaction regardless, but now I have a place to put it.

As predicted, Cloverfield‘s definite interest and first-choice tracking levels have gone up, and the expected weekend gross is now somewhere north of $20 million. It could nudge its way into the mid 20s…who knows? The general first-choice percentage is 17 and the first-choice rating among young males is in the 30s. The older male definite interest is in the 20s while female definite interest is around 5 or 6. Strictly being seen as a guy movie…although it’s much more interesting than what that label connotes.

“In a way, what Cloverfield does is put a name on the unthinkable,” director Matt Reeves tells L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen in a piece posted yesterday afternoon. He’s alluding to the 9.11 echoes — collapsing skyscrapers, mass evacuations across the Brooklyn Bridge, travelling dustclouds engulfing downtown streets — that makes the film “a repository for the collective unease felt in the wake of a national tragedy,” as Olsen puts it.

It’s intended, in other words, “to explore the very real and obvious fears we are all living with everyday, to let the audience have the experience but in a much more safe and manageable way,” says producer JJ Abrams.
But the subhead of Olsen’s piece — “JJ Abrams aims to provide an old-time rush” — is way off. The basic concept aside, there’s little about this film that stirs specific memories of rampaging monster flicks from the ’50s — those black-and-white B classics like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms or It Came From Beneath The Sea — or the color-photographed Japanese variants of the late ’50s and ’60s.
As I suggested last week in my inital review, Cloverfield is significantly different from those stop-motion or guy-in-a-monster-suit movies in two ways.
The old monster films were chock-a-block with attempts at rational explanations for the invasion (a beast awakened from a primordial sleep by nuclear testing, etc.) while the characters in Cloverfield don’t know anything and in fact barely get around to asking questions. (There’s one half-assed moment in which the actors try to piece it all together, but the dialogue is in the vein of “whoa, Wikipedia, dude.”)

And the old-time old monster flicks were always about prehistoric-looking beasts or variations thereof — King Kong, Rodan, Mothra, Gorgo, etc. The titanic Cloverfield brute is so divorced from this tradition and in fact is so “nonsensical” that he/she/it stirs associations that are more surreal than anything else. It’s more “whaat?” than “oh my God!,” this thing.
It’s almost a monster film by way of Luis Bunuel. I wrote before that the title could be It Came From Somewhere Deep in the National Psyche, but what we actually see is like a young boy’s nightmare or, as I wrote last week, like a half-nutty, half-horrible dream in the head of a Manhattanite on the morning on 9.12.01.
“I believe there are a whole lot of people who want to have that kind of catharsis and who don’t necessarily want to see documentaries about the very issues they are grappling with internally,” Abrams tells Olsen.