No Zytrons In Range

The one sentence review: Cloverfield is unfortunately kind of disappointing, and bring your Dramamine if you’re sitting close to the screen.

Look, I like kaiju movies. I like serious Godzilla, the Godzilla of the 50s and 90s. I like crazy Godzilla, the Godzilla of every other decade. Yes, even Godzilla’s Revenge. (What? It’s funny… don’t look at me like that.) I like crazy Gamera, and I believe honestly that Gamera truly is friend to all children. I like the serious Gamera of the 90s, which are still pretty crazy when you think about them, just with more gruesome effects. I even like Garuda, even though it’s not really in the same genre.

I’m also the first person to proudly say that despite its name, kaiju movies are an American invention, damnit. Even if you don’t think King Kong counts, there’s still this awesome little flicked named The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which not only fits the genre’s conventions perfectly, but was released a year and change before the original Godzilla and had special effects by Ray Harryhausen and was written by Ray Bradbury and you really can’t beat that.

So what I’m getting at here is you’d think I’d enjoy Cloverfield simply by default, and I didn’t really. It had some moments that were truly worthwhile, but the film as a whole just didn’t gel for me for whatever reason. And it didn’t help that…

Spoilers Ahead

… the monster sucked! All I can say about the monster is that it’s a good thing the cast and crew kept it such a tight-lipped secret, because if they’d released photos of it I think it would have hurt their chances at the box office. Yes, gentle viewers, New York was being destroyed by a monster that not only had killer lice, but literally could not stand upright. Being one hundred feet tall? Scary. Waddling around on flippers? Not scary. The two even out to give the general reaction, “eh.” When the reaction to the main character of your film is “eh” (and let’s face it, people go to kaiju films to see the monster), then you got problems.

The second problem is that Cloverfield doesn’t explain anything. Where does the monster come from? I dunno. Why is it in Manhatten? No clue. How come when the little killer lice bite you your head explodes? Shrug. I’m ignoring the questions that apply to all monster/horror movies, such as: “how come weapons that can penetrate 20′ thick reinforced concrete are useless against a fleshy creature?” and “why the hell are they just standing there gaping when they’re in mortal danger?” Even Spielberg’s War of the Worlds gave a BS explanation for the alien’s presence. (They buried the spaceships a million years ago, then teleported into them under cover of a thunderstorm… God that movie sucked.)

Cloverfield also makes use of the new popular technique to make movies and TV shows look “more real” by not using a Steadicam at all. Actually, the entire movie is a first-person viewpoint from a camcorder held by one of the characters, which flashbacks provided by the un-erased parts of the tape he was recording on, so that when the camera jogs or skips you see a few minutes of what it recorded a couple weeks before the events of the movie. I thought that was pretty clever. I’m not a huge hater of the hand-held camera look like a lot of people are, but I do want to warn you if you’re going to see the movie that this camera moves. There are several-minute long scenes of it pointing randomly downwards while the characters are running. There’s one shot where the camera falls 40′ to the ground. (I want to know what model that is, damn it’s durable.) Unlike, say, I Am Legend or Battlestar Galactica which are filmed with hand-held cameras that are held pretty steady, the camera in Cloverfield really, really moves. I sat too close to the screen, don’t make the mistake I did.

So, in short, despite some exciting moments, I think the negatives of Cloverfield outweigh the positives and I left the theater pretty disappointed.

(A pre-warning: don’t read this post if you don’t like extremely nit-picky complaints. No griping about it later on, you’ve been warned.)

Dear Microsoft,

What is this?

That might be a little hard to read, so let’s make it a bit bigger and call out exactly what I’m talking about:

What is that weird gap to the left of my network status notification area (or system tray) icon? Is that some other notification icon that just happens to be invisible and really skinny? Is that the network status icon taking extra space to use later? Or maybe Google dropped the ball and their Google Desktop icon (the one to the left) is taking more space than it needs.

Now I know why there’s space to the left of the clock, it’s to set it apart from the notification area. Is that mysterious gap supposed to represent a division between Microsoft-installed icons and third party ones? Is that what that is? Is it just a bug? Will it be fixed in the upcoming SP1?

I know it’s a tiny, stupid, petty thing, but it drives me nuts every time I look at the task bar.

A relatively recent Firefox update, I think maybe 2.0 when it came out, added a clever new feature. It saves a running log of your session so that, if Firefox crashes, the session can be restored as if it was working all along.

(Normally I’d gripe about Firefox crashing at all, but since it runs third-party code in the form of plug-ins, I suppose there’s not all that much the Mozilla Foundation can do about it. Being a Mac user from the Classic era, and remembering the horror of Extensions, I’m particularly forgiving on this front. The session restoring is better than nothing.)

The problem is what Firefox thinks an “interrupted session” is. Specifically, if Firefox is running and I log out, restart, or shut down, Firefox, the next time I start it up I’m presented with the annoying dialog box from hell: “Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly:”

No, Firefox. It didn’t close unexpectedly. I chose “Log Out” from the goddamned menu, and I expected it to close. How else could I log out if my applications didn’t close? Der.

This presents two different possibilities, listed in order from kind of stupid to completely stupid:

1. The Mozilla Foundation believes that Firefox users are so stupid they won’t realize that the OS will have to close Firefox to restart.
2. The Mozilla Foundation is so stupid that they don’t realize that the OS will have to close Firefox to restart.

So what does Google have to do with this? Well, they’ve introduced a new plug-in for Firefox called Google Browser Sync which, well, it does pretty much what the name implies it does: it syncs all browser settings between multiple computers. It also, lo and behold, has a feature where it can save your session and restore it, much like Firefox’s built-in feature that does the same thing.

The only difference is what Google considers an interrupted session: Any time Firefox is closed, for any reason, your session is interrupted. Were you finished browsing? Doesn’t matter, if you close Firefox, your session was interrupted and Google Browser Sync will “helpfully” ask if you want to restore it.

Firefox’s definition of “interrupted session” is stupid. The OS telling Firefox to quit isn’t an “interrupted session” no matter how you look at it. But Google’s definition is beyond stupid, I’m afraid. My only question to the developers of Google Browser Sync: How do I end my Firefox session without interrupting it? Do you have to go back to your homepage before closing it? Or maybe go to “about:blank”? Whatever it is, please tell me.

Well, it’s only a matter of time before a Google executive finishes setting up their projector for the high-roller tech demo, opens up his copy of Firefox and sees this:

And the feature will be gone forever.