It's quite a different thing altogether to experience something personally.
For the past 6.5 months, I have spent way too many hours of my life preoccupied with researching, web-searching, and imagining what terrifying events January 18, 2008 might bring to us.
Tonight, I found out 1st hand.
It's called Cloverfield. By now most of America has seen a preview on television, the internet, or right before Transformers in July. Probably the most recognized symbol of this movie is the ominous graphic of the Statue of Liberty--without her head.
Now I know exactly why she is missing her head.
I just returned from seeing a pre-screening of Cloverfield with my wife and a friend. As the credits rolled less than 2 hours after the Paramount logo twirled onto the screen, I sat in my theater chair
motionless;
speechless;
almost smiling.
Producer J.J. Abrams is a genius. I will say nothing in this post about the movie's characters (any of them!), nor about the plot line. But quite frankly, I'm glad to know that Abrams and Matt Reeves (the movie's director and personal friend of J.J.'s) will enjoy amazing financial success from the upcoming nationwide release of this movie. I say this because Abrams (and Reeves, too) is a genius.
Without giving anything important about this movie away, Abrams is a genius not because of a completely original idea for movie (because, as you see, it's not!), but because of the way he has packaged this movie from start to finish: with the mysterious trailer at the beginning of one of the biggest movie releases of 2007 which kept geeks like me scowering for more info ever since, to the amazingly creative internet ad campaign which never seemed much like movie advertising as it did story-telling, to the entirely novel way the film was written, shot, and cut.
To tell you the truth, Cloverfield is quite a simple story--a story more about human relationships than anything else. But it's a simple story that pulls you in early, takes you for a tornado-of-a-ride, and then drops you back into your theater seat motionless, speechless, and almost smiling. While Abrams himself would admit that the generic idea of the story isn't at all original, the premise in which this idea is set absolutely is.
For your own good, I would implore you to see this movie on 1-18-08 (this Friday!). It could change your life.
And to Abrams, Reeves, and the rest of the Cloverfield team: Thank you for sharing your gifts.
-David
P.S.
For snapshots from the movie, visit http://www.1-18-08.com/.
P.P.S.
Flip the pictures over.
