bloodyrosemccoy | Entries tagged with clovermonster

Due to a horrible gelatinous blob of cat on my lap a few days ago, I was unable to flee as I usually do when Mom and my sister turn the DVR to their favorite shows, Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice. This did not go well:

ME: So, this show consists entirely of unlikeable people making the worst possible decisions at any given moment?

MY SISTER: Isn’t it great?

ME: … Remind me again why you didn’t like Cloverfield?

MY SISTER: The camera was too shaky.

ME: Fair enough.

MY SISTER: Not to mention Cloverfield distinctly lacks Taye Diggs taking off his shirt, something this show delivers with great regularity.

ME: Well, as long as you have a good reason.

Just for that I made them watch the Jack Frost MST. If I get stuck watching incompetent doctors whining about how it turns out getting pregnant by their best friend’s husband or whatever was a bad idea, IMAGINE, it’s only fair that they get stuck watching some meat-haired Russian chase feathers and get turned into a bear by a guy in a mushroom hat. Though that logic might just be the head cold talking.

Current Mood: Pride of the Port

This time the Joker had somehow managed to train the Cloverfield monster to follow his orders.

Of course, those orders turned out to be, “Carry on.”

My subconscious has got to be running out of redshirts by now.

Current Mood: be-nightmared

Aw, now, that was just too short. My brother the Dude came home for the holidays, and he’s already going back to his damn engineering school.* We had to cram a lot of geeking into a few days, so Mom and Dad had to put up with quite a bit of nonsequiturs involving Batman or Transformers or Pixar. I told him about the latest escapades of his favorite aliens from my stories, the uninhibited and somewhat bonkers wooslets (he helped create them), and he told me a bit about Tae Kwon Do and about how the freshmen at CSM this year apparently find it offensive that they’re called geeks and are trying to counter the campus paper’s “Geek of the Week” column with “Non-Geek of the Week.” Denial.

I also discovered that one of his favorite kids’ movies is The Sandlot, which occupies a real soft spot for him the way It Takes Two does for me. It’s made me wonder about nostalgia movies. What’s a movie you will always love no matter how old you get, flaws and all?**

Speaking of movies, as a historic family marker, the Dude was here for the Great Epic New HD-TV And Blu-Ray Setup, which means we got to introduce Dad to WALL*E. Dad has spent years not liking cartoons, and then he saw Ratatouille and decided it was the greatest movie ever—and so he was totally ready to view the world’s cutest post-apocalyptic movie when we put on WALL*E—and lo, he loved it. But if you ask me, the greatest Blu-Ray experience was Transformers—but then, I just love the hell out of that stupid movie.

Maybe when he comes back I’ll make him watch Cloverfield. Nobody else in this family likes it; maybe I can get one person on my side.

*Bastard’s actually acquiring a useful skill. He’ll probably manage to get a great job straight outta college. Jerk.

**Actually, The Sandlot is a pretty quality movie. If you want a movie I think is a quality family film that occupies a soft spot, I’d go with Secondhand Lions, but I think I was past kid-age for that one. It Takes Two isn’t in that caliber, but I was ten when it came out and it’s damn fun.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Nobuo Uematsu ~ Fight Against Culex (Super Mario RPG)

Finally, the most important question fans of Cloverfield were left with has been answered!

What happened to Travis? (Warning ... les spoilers.)

Yes! We get to find out if Rob’s wishing Travis luck was prophetic, or if he was ultimately Monster Chow. Thank god; this kept me up at night!

Why yes, I am a geek. Thanks for noticing!

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Little River Band ~ The Other Guy (in honor of Travis)

Cranmere Day
No Socks Day
World Red Cross Day
Anniversary - V-E Day
Birthday - President Harry S. Truman (33rd President)
Liberation Day (Slovakia)
Victory Day (France)

While watching Cloverfield again, I was struck once more with the amazing genre-ignorance of the people in the movie. For some reason, this seems a greater crime than in other monster movies; this one is supposed to have some sort of parallel to this world—it’s the same place, only there’s a big evil deep-sea drilling corporation and a soft-drink-addicted 30-story baby monster kicking around in it.* And, apparently, there are no monster movies.

So while watching it, it’s easy to think, “Hah! Those fools! I would survive a monster attack! If they had chronicled a party with bunch of nerds, this would have been a different story—those nerds would be out of there so fast!”

And then I realized that these are nerds we are talking about.

If you followed a load of nerds through a monster attack, you would spend most of your time on the roof of their building watching some of them try to get a better look while others argue that you can only get a better look if you get closer, while a cluster off to the side would be theorizing as to how the monster got around the square/cube law, a couple more would be scoffing and speculating on which other, cooler monsters could beat it, one would get pissed that nobody was being smart and leaving but wouldn’t leave on her own because there’s a fucking monster loose, and there’d be at least four on laptops looking up whatever they could find on monsters from Wikipedia.** And they would do this until the building fell down.

Meanwhile the brave nerds would go off to try to tame the monster or get a picture of themselves or fulfill their dream of getting bitten in half. And can you imagine what it would be like if we found out the monster’s bite turned its victims into mini-monsters? There would be queues.

So on second thought, maybe being a monster movie buff is not a survival trait in the event of actual monster attack. It may even be bad for you.

But as far as enjoying the attack? Yeah, I think it helps with that a lot.

*Viral marketing is fun and educational!

**Possibly one would also be trying to get everyone else to watch the latest hilarious video from YouTube.

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Michael Giacchino ~ ROAR! (Cloverfield End Credits)

Today I was having a nice, fascinating, edifying chat with Mom about deep and abiding social issues such as midwifery and men versus women when she informed me that my sister and dad had just come upstairs after watching Cloverfield.

And they didn’t like it.

So I told Mom to step aside and put my dear 妹 on IM so that I could tell her, in capital letters, several times, that she and Dad are full of bullshit. Thus ensued a merry argument in which I insulted their taste in monsters, 妹 argued that the monster looked like a grasshopper and the Giant Space Fleas sounded like Donald Duck*, and Dad put in his comments (transcribed by 妹) on who could beat up the Cloverfield monster.** Then we told each other we were wrong and stupid one more time and she went to bed. (“Good night! Don’t forget to tell Dad that he’s full of shit, too!”)

Mom had long since gone to bed.

I was really enjoying our chat, but sometimes you have to set aside the subjects of sociology and how the world works and your brother’s job and the trials of life and focus on the really important issues.

*All right, so actually I said that. But she seemed to think that was a bad thing.

**Godzilla, Mothra, Predator, Alien, “those Transformers,” and the rat from Ratatouille, who would “boil the hell out of it.” 妹 herself added “the oozing skull,” from the movie of the same name as seen on Cinematic Titanic—only that’s really not fair, as there was no oozing skull.

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Janis Joplin ~ Mercedes Benz

Answer Your Cat's Question Day
Celebration of Life Day
International Day of Radiant Peace
National Speak Up and Succeed Day
Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day
Tu B'Shvat (Jewish)
Saint Vincent's Feast Day
Anniversary - Roe vs Wade
Ukrainian Day (Ukraine)

Know what’s odd? Seeing a monster movie this weekend also was weirdly an homage to Grandma.

I never got to see the best side of her. That side went away before I got very old. Instead, I saw the part of her that was left when the cool part faded—but I found out about it through Dad’s stories of his childhood. And one thing I heard a lot about was Grandma’s love of crazy stories.

If you were to meet Dad, you would get the impression of a pleasant, quiet man with quiet interests. You would never imagine that he’s the kind of guy who gleefully watches creature features, or reminisces about Thursday-night Star Trek with his mother. We’ve watched quite a few monster movies on AMC, and I’m always surprised when he wants to go see something like Transformers or explains how Alien is a magnificent movie. But I also think of Dad whenever I watch a good goofy movie. And I think of where he got that love from—Grandma, and her tendency to scare the pants off her nine-year-old son by taking him to such classics as The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

And I think that’s part of what passed it on to me.

Thanks for that, Grandma. And I mean it.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: MST3k ~ Gorgo

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (observed)
National Hugging Day
Squirrel Appreciation Day

What Cloverfield Has Given Me:*

Now I want a monster preserve in The Galaxy.**

( The Steve Irwin Of Space )

I think I have also been watching too much MST3k again, as evidenced by that last bit. And the monster-rescue is a job I will give to the commando ship peripheral to my Doctors! stories, the great and aptly named Deus Ex Machina. They’re my space opera outlet. And the planet Keedra is full of people like that. I'll explain someday.

Damn, sometimes I wish I could take something for what it is and not get assaulted by plot bunnies. But alas, I am endowed with the great will to create. Life’s hard.

*Other than a tendency to close doors all the way so the giant space fleas don’t get in, I mean.

**For those of you just joining us, one of the worlds inside my head—also setting for a series I'm writing about alien doctors.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Phil Collins ~ I'm On My Way (Brother Bear)

The funny thing about Cloverfield to me is that it’s got this very reality vibe, and everything about it seems to be an attempt to give it verisimilitude—no clever one-liners, no real In Charge people, limited monster money shots, home camera quality, no exposition—and yet it follows almost every single monster movie convention, except for two (discussed below), so if they had just one genre-savvy person around they could have warned our “heroes”* about some important things we all should know when facing giant city-destroying monsters:

( The Rules of Monster Movies are Spoilers )

I think what I loved most about this movie—aside from the fact that it was a scaryass monster and the effects were awesome—was how it messed with these conventions. You never expect to see giant space fleas or crawling eyeballs** on home video, but once you do you can extrapolate a helluva lot if you’ve seen any others.

Also, for the record, HAY YOU GUYZ THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME! I didn’t expect it to be, but it is.

*Although the other thing about this movie is that these people were not really heroes, but just people.

**Was this in the film? You don’t know!

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Annie Lennox ~ Love is a Stranger

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Different Tastes ...
Fukitoff, Phase Two: The Side Effects Strike Back
Family Movies
Closure
MONSTAR
Bonding Experience
Monster Mom
Mothra Steers Clear Of Droopy
Where's Optimus When You Need Him?

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Entries tagged with clovermonster

Different Tastes ...

Fukitoff, Phase Two: The Side Effects Strike Back

Family Movies

Closure

MONSTAR

Bonding Experience

Monster Mom

Mothra Steers Clear Of Droopy

Where's Optimus When You Need Him?