wtf
07/09/2007
Cloverfield
This kind of thing doesn't happen in the upper reaches of Hollywood. J.J. Abrams, one of the hottest non-actors in Hollywood (he created Lost as well as directed Mission: Impossible III), doesn't just come out of nowhere with a new movie. Especially if that movie is what seems to be a mega-budget disaster flick set in New York. But that's exactly what happened last week, when a teaser trailer screened before Transformers. And it's big, like Statue-Liberty-crashing-down-in-the -middle-of-Midtown big.
The film is known as both Cloverfield and Clover, but neither its IMDb page nor its official Web site gives any detailed information whatsoever, except for the fact that it's coming out next January. After a few cameraphone-captured versions of the trailer surfaced last week, Paramount finally posted an official version to the Apple trailer page.
At his always-excellent indieWIRE blog, Matt Dentler has been on top of the story, and so have his readers -- one comment mentions a page that lists the myriad theories surrounding the film. Stay tuned to find out if any of them turn out to be true.
06/19/2007
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Why does it seem like the most interesting documentaries are always about people that I would probably hate if I met? The King of Kong is no exception: the movie centers on the conflict between Billy Mitchell, the best arcade game player in history, and Steve Wiebe, a middle school science teacher who has designs on breaking Mitchell’s twenty-year-old Donkey Kong record.
The trailer is so good I don’t even really have anything to add except to say that if you’re curious, you should head to the Billy Mitchell page on Wikipedia (the gamer, not to be confused with the American General from WWI) and check out his “notable scores.” I don’t know what getting a 3,333,360 on Pac-Man means, but I’m sure it’s really impressive.
Anyway, I’ll definitely be seeing this movie in all its nerdy glory. To that end, I found a quote from an IMDB user that made me even more excited: “[Mitchell and Sanders] are some of the strongest characters I’ve seen in a movie since STAR WARS.” Indeed!
