CLOVERFIELD... I saw the film tonight, and thought it was pretty good. However, many in the audience two of my friends and I watched it with made negative comments right after the ending (cause it was abrupt), but those people are ignoramuses. C’mon now— You must have a far more severe mental issue than ADD to not realize that the flick was treated as a ‘documentary’ from the very start... What makes you think it wasn’t gonna have that documentary feel at the end as well? What, did these folks expect some dramatic music (courtesy of Steve Jablonsky or John Williams) to accompany the final scenes in Cloverfield? Or the camera conveniently capturing footage on its own of the military folks who found the device inside the rubble (not to spoil the ending for y’all who haven’t seen the movie yet)? Wouldn’t that have been nice...



No, the movie was treated as if it was actually raw footage that was pieced together so government officials could view it and find out what happened (for those folks reading this who have ADD). Trust me— A movie that has more of a "WTF??" ending to it is something like 28 Weeks Later...or Rob Zombie’s recent take on Halloween. Basically, the more standard horror fare. I’m definitely gonna buy Cloverfield once it gets released on DVD.



What actually peeves me more than the local audience's reaction to J.J. Abrams' thriller is the fact Hollywood is making too many movies like Bring It On. You have Bring It On’s straight-to-DVD sequels, Stomp the Yard, Honey (but that one has Jessica Alba in it, so all is forgiven), Rize, You Got Served, the upcoming How She Move, and Step It Up’s sequel, Step Up 2 The Streets...whose preview was shown in front of Cloverfield (I had to do research online to find all the recent dance flicks, FYI). Um, just how many of these films do we need to see of a bunch of (insert any derogatory name for urban kids here) krumping and doing all that crap? Of course, that's Tinseltown. Gladiator was a hit in 2000, so, gotta make more sword-and-sandal epics that can also become huge successes...like Lord of the Rings, or major flops like Uwe Boll's recent In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Saw was a huge hit too, so, gotta make more torture porn like Hostel...and more additional Saw sequels (Saw 5 comes out this October...Good God). But I’m just going off on a rant here.



Basically, Cloverfield was good. And for those of you who read my last Blog on the film, the monster looked NOTHING like the image I posted. It looked more like something from the XBox video game Gears of War (which I also wrote a Blog on) or the creatures in The Mist (film review here) than it did a giant whale. And the pic below? Nope— Not a Monster Louse. But a really gruesome ending for one of the movie’s main human characters. Not to spoil the flick for ya. That is all.



UPDATE (January 21): A screenshot of the monster...



All images courtesy of Paramount Pictures / Bad Robot Productions

Twentieth Century Fox

THE X-FILES 2... ComingSoon.net has posted up four new images from the upcoming film, which gets released in theaters on July 25. Unlike the first X-Files motion picture (which came out in 1998), this installment will not delve into the aliens-among-us "mythology" that formed the backbone of the hit FOX TV series (which aired from 1993 to 2002) and the ’98 movie. The sequel will be a stand-alone film that deals with the supernatural. The actual storyline is closely being kept under wraps by X-Files creator and director Chris Carter.

The X-Files 2 reunites David Duchovny as FBI agent/conspiracy theorist Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as FBI agent/skeptic Dana Scully. Also in this movie will be Amanda Peet and, um, rapper Xzibit. Wow.

The CLOVERFIELD Monster? The image below has been all over the Web since last September, but whatever. Someone made this cool artwork depicting what he thinks the creature in J.J. Abrams’ upcoming film will look like. Don’t know how close this sketch looks to the real (so-to-speak) thing, but the "Monster Louse" looks pretty similar to what we see in one of the Cloverfield TV spots. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, there’s a scene in the commercial where a group of people hiding inside an Army tent see the silhouette of a creature attacking someone outside. The shape of that creature, from what I recall, definitely looks like the artwork below. Anyways, can’t wait for the film to come out in theaters on January 18.

...

I hope this film doesn’t let me down like Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s take on Godzilla did in 1998. *Crosses fingers*



Courtesy of HorrorMovies.ca

UPDATE: A screencapture of the scene mentioned above:

Annie Leibovitz

INDIANA JONES IV... The February 2008 issue of Vanity Fair focuses on this May’s release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Below are photos from the magazine:


Annie Leibovitz

Harrison Ford chatting with executive producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg on the Indy film set in Los Angeles.


Annie Leibovitz

Shia LaBeouf and Karen Allen (reprising her role as Marion Ravenwood...last seen in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark) on set in Downey, California.


Annie Leibovitz

Cate Blanchett as Russian spy, Agent Spalko. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull takes place in 1957—in the midst of the Cold War—as Soviet agents pursue Indy as he goes about looking for the mysterious crystal skulls.

And of course, here’s the poster that is currently displayed at movie theaters everywhere. It is created by artist Drew Struzan, who did the posters for the first three Indiana Jones films and all 6 movies in the Star Wars saga.


Paramount Pictures / Lucasfilm Ltd. / Drew Struzan

SOUNDWAVE REDUX... After posting this entry about him (and his tape cassettes) being out of place in the 21st Century, I thought I’d share these cool images I found online of Soundwave and Megatron’s other right-hand man, err, Decepticon; Shockwave. A fan updated the design of the two Waves and gave them the look of the robots you see in the live-action Transformers film. These are NOT actual movie concepts. Soundwave was suppose to have been in Michael Bay’s blockbuster, but fans were unsatisfied with his initial design (Soundwave was suppose to have transformed into a helicopter...but the role of evil chopper was given to Blackout instead), and Frenzy ended up becoming the Decepticon tape player in this year’s film. Soundwave is currently the top fan favorite to show up in the sequel...whenever that gets made. Damn WGA strike.


Courtesy of Transformers Live Action Movie Blog


Courtesy of timshinn73

Soundwave in his original design (from the 1980's cartoon)...

Twentieth Century Fox / Paramount Pictures

TEN YEARS AGO TODAY, the movie Titanic came out in theaters nationwide. The reason why I’m bringing this up is because the film was pretty popular during my senior year in high school. Even dudes who looked like gangmembers in my class say they saw the film at least 4 times at the multiplex, haha. No BSing. James Horner's orchestral score for the film was sold out for weeks at music stores everywhere (at least the compact disc version), and so was the "James Cameron’s Titanic" movie book (um, published by HarperPerennial) at major stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble. Also, Celine Dion’s hit song "My Heart Will Go On" was freakin’ being played on the L.A. radio station KIIS FM every other hour (okay, maybe I’m exaggerating with that part). The reason why I watched the flick in the first place was because my British Literature teacher (who worked at a Barnes & Noble bookstore and was able to hook me up with a copy of "James Cameron’s Titanic") was giving extra credit if my class showed him our ticket stubs. So how many times did I watch the 3-hour epic, you ask? Well let’s just say...the only other movies that I saw more than the 1998 Best Picture winner was The Phantom Menace (Hey, it was the first Star Wars film in 16 years. In fact, many Star Wars fans thought that Episode 1 was gonna surpass Titanic’s $600 million domestic box office gross. They were off by around $170 million), Revenge of the Sith and Transformers. How many times did I watch these three films, you ask? No comment.

Next year marks 10 years since I graduated from high school. I have no idea who’s planning the class reunion. Of course, in the Age of MySpace, Friendster and Facebook, are reunions even practical now? We may not see old classmates in person ever again, but at least we know what they’re up to by visiting their profiles on these websites (assuming they haven’t made their pages private, of course). Anyways, just felt like being nostalgic. That is all.

THE DARK KNIGHT Teaser Trailer... The preview is currently being shown in front of I Am Legend at regular movie theaters everywhere, and was made available online in High Definition Sunday night. Here are a couple of screenshots from the trailer...







I might watch I Am Legend again...but this time in IMAX. The reason being that I want to see the 6-minute preview to The Dark Knight that is shown in front of Legend. Heath Ledger is gonna be crazy as the Joker. "Why SO serious?"



All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Studios

I AM LEGEND... I saw the film last night, and it was pretty good. Kinda slow in some parts, but still pretty suspenseful. I’d have to say the movie reminded me of 2000’s Cast Away and this year’s 28 Weeks Later. It reminded me of Cast Away in that for much of the film, we see Will Smith just milling about...going about his everyday life while traveling with his companion dog Samantha around Manhattan. In Cast Away, we see Tom Hanks milling about for much of the movie while traveling with his companion volleyball Wilson around that uncharted island. I Am Legend reminded me of 28 Weeks Later in that at the beginning of 28 Weeks, we see Robert Carlyle (of The Full Monty fame) hiding with a group of strangers inside a house in the middle of a rural area...with all windows and doors boarded up with wooden planks so the folks will go undetected by zombies lurking outside. Also, Great Britain was quarantined by the U.S. military so that the virus that was unleashed there won’t spread to other countries (which it does...starting with France). In I Am Legend, Will Smith’s house (or should I say, mansion) has all of its windows and doors protected by giant metal shields at night, since the mutants (they’re never referred to as zombies in the film, but they pretty much have the same characteristics as the infected folks in 28 Weeks, and countless of first-person shooter games like Resident Evil) can only go out at night since they’re sensitive to the Sun’s UV rays during the day. They’re "vampire zombies", haha. Also, New York City was "ground zero" for the virus...and was suppose to be quarantined by the U.S. military. But much like in 28 Weeks, the effort in NYC failed. And well... I don’t want to spoil the rest of the movie for ya, but let’s just say that much of Earth’s 6 billion people were infected and killed. This is what I call a holiday film...



Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Studios

IRON MAN... I’m kinda surprised that it took me this long to write a Blog about next May’s film debut of this Marvel Comics superhero, what with the teaser trailer looking awesome and all (Robert Downey Jr. as scientist Tony Stark is hilarious...especially in this scene where a U.S. Army soldier is trying to take a photo with him inside a military Humvee: "I don’t want to see this up on your MySpace page. Please no gang signs. No throw it up, I’m kidding."), but oh well. The bottom-right image is a new photo of the armor-clad hero that was released by Paramount this week.



Iron Man will be released on May 2, 2008, and along with Downey Jr. stars a formidable cast consisting of Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges and Samuel L. Jackson.



Images courtesy of Marvel Characters, Inc. / Paramount

ARCEE... I’m pretty sure there are a lot of other fanboys (and fangirls?) out there picturing this scene in the movie, but what would be cooler and hotter than seeing Megan Fox ride a motorcycle through the thick of battle in Transformers 2? Not only a motorcyle...but one that transforms into an Autobot that’s just as agile in, um, robot mode as it is vehicle mode? Not only an Autobot...but a female Autobot? Yep, that would be awesome. I’m actually referring to Arcee, who was suppose to appear in this year’s Transformers but was dropped from the script due to a lack of screentime that would explain why there’s a chick who’s a member of the robotic race. Arcee was replaced by Ironhide for the film, and a motorcyle was still featured...in the scene where (in case you forgot already) Josh Duhamel’s Captain Lennox rides an Aprilia RSV1000R down the street while taking on Blackout.



Hopefully Arcee will be in the sequel, and knowing Michael Bay and his inclination to feature hot chicks and hot chick moments in his movies, the Megan-Fox-as-a-sexy-motorcyclist idea isn’t so farfetched. Just get the WGA strike over with so the screenwriters can finish the script ASAP (but still make sure it's a kick-ass screenplay) and Ms. Fox (I dread the day I have to call her Mrs. Green. Do research on Google if you don’t know what I’m talking about) begins motorcyle driving lessons. Have her practice enough that she doesn’t have to wear a helmet during filming...since covering up her sexy face and hair with plastic and fiberglass kinda defeats the purpose of having Megan ride a motorcyle in the first place (To hell with her going slow during filming and then altering the appearance of her driving speed in postproduction... I wanna see Megan GO FAST!! Haha). Hey, Carrie-Anne Moss did it The Matrix Reloaded. I think. Haven’t seen that bloated mess of a film in a long time.



FYI, I wasn’t the one who altered this Foxy pic below. Though I’m pretty sure Sam Witwicky would be even more aroused if Mikaela showed up on that purple cycle as Sam was getting chased through that parking lot by Barricade. Hell, maybe even Barricade would’ve been distracted by Arcee’s presence. Do Transformers mate? Just kidding.



All images courtesy of Dreamworks / Paramount