Liberty City

I get the impression this is probably pretty well documented by now, but I noticed it by hand two weeks ago and by George I'm going to post it myself.

Monstrous (promotional title)

To cap a week spent discussing mostly Cloverfield and rip-offery, a week-ending post combining the two: the Cloverfield clone from The Asylum, entitled Monster. While I have little admiration for their general concept, I was impressed enough by Cloverfield having to do much of its shooting between its July 3rd trailer premiere and committed January 18th release date under intense scrutiny; Asylum had to scramble the jets to start throwing together their own version as soon the summer hype started (poor screenwriters, having to work on July 4th) and still be able to beat Cloverfield's release date by three days.

The Asylum entrusted directorial duties to Eric Forsberg, their go-to guy for all things tentacular: he'd previously scripted last year's 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea, during which I can only assume there's a doozy of a squid scene.

Monster is about two young female American filmmakers in Tokyo to interview an environmentalist when an apparent earthquake hits. They happen to catch some monstrous post-quake hijinks with the shakiest of cams, which seem to consist of a lot of large tentacles waving wildly in front of high-rises and in the general direction of military aircraft (up). The trailer is as close to the Cloverfield trailer as you could imagine; The Asylum simply can't make a movie look like I Am Legend, but they may have experienced their most skillful moment here. While Cloverfield's capable cinematographer Michael Bonvillain does his best to frame shots carefully enough to catch all the carefully planted visual cues, he still has to emulate uncertain, unprofessional, amateur videography. The Asylum's got the genuine article.

Trilogie

Belgian writer/director/actor Lucas Belvaux (brother of Man Bites Dog auteur Rémy Belvaux) spent nearly a decade of his life making a trilogy called Trilogie, released at last in 2002. The three films (Cavale, Un Couple Epatant, Après la Vie, or On the Run, An Amazing Couple, and After the Life) all detail closely related events in an overarching storyline, presented respectively film-by-film in the guises of thriller, romantic comedy, and drama.

Since Cloverfield already contains significant elements of all three, I don't expect it to proceed quite the same way, but I'm almost always a sucker for alternate-viewpoint or alternate-reality angles within a film, and after spending a good chunk of time yesterday mulling over similar approaches to a Cloverfield sequel, I'm fascinated to hear about trans-film experiments in the same vein.

Anyone seen the Belvaux films?

Cloverfield, over and overfield

Now that I've had a chance to see Cloverfield, I can finally peruse half an internet's worth of related stories, reviews, theories, rants, fakes, intentional and unintentional misinformation, etc., and it's to the movie's credit that I'm still doing so a couple of days later, despite the abundance of less-than-stellar conversation on, say, the IMDb board.

One of the more recurrent topics on that board (along with 'TOTAL BLAIR WITCH RIPOFF' and 'GET A TRIPOD') is the prospect of sequeldom. It had seemed likely enough, with producer/creator J.J. Abrams mentioning at some point along the way that he'd wanted Cloverfield to be an giant-monster franchise for America, but now Variety confirms that director Matt Reeves is in talks with Paramount for a sequel. Despite a large second-week drop (from first to fourth place), the movie cleared its $25 million budget and then some with an opening weekend gross around $40m, and though I've heard advertising budget estimated up to additional $25m, the movie's well in the black without the foreign/DVD numbers.

The idea of a Cloverfield sequel is fascinating; I can see all kinds of potential concepts. Reeves hinted in interviews previously that he'd considered an alternate-viewpoint camcorder story, possibly through the viewfinder of other folks glimpsed with their own cameras in the film. While that'd play too much like Cloverfield 1.5 for most viewers, it sounds like a bold experiment for a mainstream sequel. Alternately, we might see a version of events through the eyes of the military, a prequel fleshing out the internet-only backstory, or most likely, a sequel continuing the story in either of a couple ways I won't elucidate, to avoid spoiling the flick.

Cinematical writer Christopher Campbell wrote recently in his Exhibitionist column about why it's a good idea not to see Cloverfield in the theater, citing a sort of Youtubiness, a conceptual matchup between shooting on video and watching at home. It makes sense in theory, but Cloverfield also has an event quality to it that benefits from a very big screen in a dark room.

One of the things Cloverfield does well is leave space open, leave viewers curious for more information. Maybe it's training from five decades of Godzilla films, but a rampaging monster leaves us at least a little curious, and Cloverfield's web presence since its teaser premiere in front of Transformers bears that out. I'm not an ARGer, and my brief foray into Slusho and Unfiction back in July didn't last too long past my gleeful debunking spree (9th-12th), but seeing Cloverfield a couple days ago brought me right back into the fold, digging up extra movie in the forms of the other web resources.

If the guys want to make another feature, I've got no problem with it, although I doubt it'll be that alternate-viewpoint version of the same night. Cloverfield's uniqueness as a monster movie lies in its not realistic but realism-simulating approach, and if the idea is to start a new monster mythos, I'd like to treat it as real, which means a fictional deconstruction of, to begin with, a singular event: Youtube clips bouncing around, the monster equivalent of Loose Change showing up on Google Video and college campus screenings, and some people feeling the need to dig deeper while others prefer to move on with their lives.

Christopher Campbell's article and the intriguing nature of the internet content came together for me with the realization that what I'd like to see for a sequel isn't necessarily another 85-minute feature in a year and a half, but more pieces of this movie, when and wherever appropriate. Here's three minutes of it, and it offers more of what Cloverfield left me wanting than Mechagodzilla ever did, bless his anodized heart.

Tomoyuki vs. Yoshimitsu

With at least some small percentage of the internet abuzz over Cloverfield - who knew audiences were so hungry for a ground-level giant-monster flick? - let's check in with the latest on our good friend Gojira.

An effort has been underway to bring Godzilla to a deserving format. To that end, Godzilla 3-D (fka Godzilla 3-D To The Max [yes, really], fka Godzilla vs. Deathla), has been in the planning stages since at least 2005. It's designed for IMAX 3-D, and at 40-45 minutes, might qualify more as a novelty than a true entry into the Godzilla series. The exciting part, though, comes with the details. Deathla is described as a chlorophyll-consuming monster (read: environmental message), and the writer (and according to some sources, co-director) is Yoshimitsu Banno, whose first film work was as assistant director to Akira Kurosawa on several major works (Macbeth, The Lower Depths, Hidden Fortress, The Bad Sleep Well). Aside from the little-seen (7 votes on IMDb) cartoon Ninja the Wonder Boy, this would mark Banno's first directorial effort since 1971, when he gave us the wooly 'n wonderful anti-pollution tale Godzilla vs. Hedorah, or Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. Banno wanted to make a sequel immediately after, but producer Tomoyuki Tanaka - hospitalized during the filming - felt Banno's unorthodox flick had ruined the franchise. Banno would never make another film for Toho or, in fact, another feature at all until Ninja, fourteen years later.

In 2005, Toho gave Banno permission to make the film, but wouldn't fund it; since then, he's been seeking alternative investors. It's tentatively on track for a start date of February 2008.