Movie Review: Cloverfield

Saw Cloverfield this past Friday-there’s only one word to describe it. Epic. In my opinion, the best movie I’ve seen since American Gangster. The movie focuses on four friends who survive when a giant “thing”(the much anticipated Cloverfield Monster) attacks New York City. The movie is shot from the point of view of a handheld camera, as the group treks across the city in search of a young woman none of them are even sure is still alive. Along the way, the U.S. military and the monster are locked in a massive battle, and survival is fraught with peril and hardship.

What I liked most about this movie was how it was shot documentary-style. It made everything seem much more real. For instance; there is a point in which the population of New York City is being evacuated via the Brooklyn Bridge, only to have the bridge attacked by the monster. Having this shot from a first person view rather then a third person made it a helluva lot more intense. But if you have motion sickness or anything along those lines, I would definitely not recommend seeing this, at least on the big screen. Everyone came out of the theater a little dizzy, but most everyone enjoyed it.

(Spoilers ahead)  The story goes like this: a group of friends is throwing a going-away party for one of their friends, who is moving from New York to Japan because of a promotion at work. The friend who is moving, Robert Hawkins, is depressed because of a fight at the party with his ex-girlfriend Beth, who he professes to still love. His brother, Jason, best friend Hud, and friend Lily all try to console him, but they are soon interrupted when a loud boom is heard from outside the apartment. As major portions of Manhattan lose power, the party guests filter out to the street, with Robert, Jason, Hud, Lily, and a woman Hud has been hitting on, Marlena. Things really get shaken up when the head of the Statue of Liberty lands in the middle of the street, causing chaos and an attempt to leave the city through the Brooklyn Bridge. When the fleeing civilians cross the bridge, it is attacked by the monster, killing Jason. Rob gets a call from Beth, who tells him she is bleeding, and he promises to go help her. Rob, Hud, Lily, and Marlena head back into the city to find Beth, and get caught between a U.S. military attack against the monster, which is revealed to be a crab/dinosaur-like thing. The group decides to take refuge in the subway tunnels, only to be attacked by mini versions of the monster, which had jumped off of it following its entrance into the city. Marlena is bitten and has a bad gash-the group makes it above ground to a military hospital, where Marlena is tagged as a bite victim. She dies shortly thereafter. A sympathetic soldier directs the remaining trio out of the hospital, but tells them that they have until 6 AM to reach an evacuation point before Manhattan is leveled.

The trio reaches Beth’s apartment, and successfully remove her from underneath the rubble and reach an evacuation point where helicopters are ferrying away the few stragglers left in the city.Lily is loaded onto a helicopter and taken to safety, but Hud, Rob, and Beth are told to wait for the next helicopter, which they board. As the helicopter lifts out of New York, the monster is seen collapsing under the strain on an aerial attack by a B-2 bomber…only to rise back up and strike at the helicopter, causing it to spin out of control and crash. The three friends survive the crash, only to run into the monster in Central Park, where Hud is killed by it. As Rob and Beth take refuge under a bridge, they enjoy their last moments together as Manhattan island is destroyed by aerial bombardment.

I thoroughly enjoy this movie, and highly recommend it. Five out of five stars. This is Kolametal, signing off.

Youtube traffic continues to grow

Courtesy of the New York Times

More content begets more viewers, which, in turn, beget more content. That’s the virtuous cycle — the network effect — that has propelled Google-owned YouTube to the No. 1 spot in online video.

Those network effects are helping YouTube outperform the growth of the overall market for online video, which itself is growing at a rapid clip. In September, Google sites accounted for 28.3 percent of all videos watched online, according to comScore. By November, Google’s share had grown by another 3 percentage points, to 31.3 percent, comScore said in a report Thursday. Google’s nearest rival, Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, accounted for just 4.4 percent of the market.

Interestingly, the top 10 video sites accounted for less than half of all videos viewed online. That means people are watching video here, there and everywhere on the Web. And they’re doing so more every day.

During November, 138 million people, or about three-quarters of Internet users in the United States, watched on average 3 hours and 15 minutes of online video, or 45 minutes more than they watched in January. That’s still less than the amount of time average Americans spend in front of their TVs each day. But the data are likely to be skewed by the smaller number of people who watch online video “for absurd amounts of time,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research.

“If you are CBS, the fact that people are watching a few hours of online video a month is of some concern,” Mr. Bernoff said. “But if there is some member of your audience who is there for one or two hours a day, you’ve lost them. They are never coming back.”

Those that have been lost by TV are likely to be found on YouTube, where 74 million people watched 39 videos each on average in November, according to comScore.

Source: New York Times

This is Kolametal, signing off.

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