Cloverfield

Last night I was watching the 2007 film Cloverfield, directed by Matt Reeves, on television. The film, which is set in New York City, opens with a group of friends celebrating one of their number (Michael Stahl-Davies) who is about to move to Japan. However, the party is interrupted when a giant monster goes on the rampage through the city, and the guest of honour is faced with a dangerous journey through the devestated city to rescue his ex-girlfriend (Odette Yustman). The whole film is made to look like it's been shot by one of the party guests on a camcorder (a little like the style of The Blair Witch Project), and it is pretty effective. The storyline of the giant monster on the rampage is as old as the hills, but it's usually told from the point of view of the scientists and military trying to learn about the monster and destroy it, while this film is told from the point of view of one of the fleeing millions. It is pretty tense and genuinely exciitng. The monster itself was pretty impressive.

After that I watched another movie called La Antena, a 2007 Argentinine film, directed by Esteban Sapir. The movie (the title of which translates as "The Aerial") is set in an unnamed city which is dominated by media tycoon "Mister TV" (Alejandro Urdapilleta) who has stolen the voice of everyone in the city, except for a singer known as "The Voice" (Florencia Raggi) and her eyeless son (Jonathan Sandor). The movie is shot in the style of a silent movie with no sound at all except for the music and two characters who very rarely speak. The dialogue and most of the sound effects appear as imaginatively designed captions. It's all extremely stylised and deeply surreal, including a man who constantly has a TV screen in front of his face showing an enlarged mouth, and the city's police chief who always wears a rat suit. If you can imagine a mix of David Lynch, Tim Burton, The Mighty Boosh and the 1927 German film Metropolis, than that is pretty much what the movie is like.

It was another pretty busy day at work today and fairly dull. However I am off work tomorrow so it's going to be a three day weekend which should be good.