Cloverfield Monster Opera

Usually I don't post fan films but I was struck by this video from a performance artist named Norman from New York City. He left me a link to the video in the comments and I must say I enjoyed the video.

Norman has created a story he feels is similar to the Cloverfield Movie and takes 6 of his reasons to back up his thesis. Essentially, he believes a story he is working on based on the island of Manhattan "being alive" is similar to the Cloverfield story.

He even takes the Caisson's disease and incorporates it into the story. That's a nice, unique touch. Caisson's disease is a decompression sickness (think the "bends") that occurs in areas where one goes from a compressed environment rapidly to a decompressed area. Gases in our blood don't like that and it can be fatal.

Caisson's disease gained a lot of attention when workers mysteriously died while working on the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1870's. Norman has made a really nice and stylish video with some cool editing and music to back up his story. It's definitely worth a view.

Personally, I believe the monster will be some giant, ugly monster who goes ape-shit on the city. However, the fun part of running this blog is finding the ideas of others.

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New Cloverfield Website? T.I.D.O -Tidowave

Could the hackers of the Tagruato Corp. website be a mysterious activist group called T.I.D.O ?

The boys at unFiction have uncovered a new site that may be affiliated with the Cloverfield Movie. Tagruato is a business that makes Slusho, among other things. The T.I.D.O (Tagruato Is Destroying our Oceans) mocks the Tagruato Corp by claiming the large Japanese business is "Bleeding the oceans dry."

One post on the site boasts about a Tagruato Scientist who died.

Death of Tagruato Biologist!

Many thanks to our friend in the field who passed the original article on to us. It’s translated below:
YOSHIDA MEDICAL RESEARCH MOURNS THE LOSS OF MARINE BIOLOGIST
Tagruato suffered a large loss yesterday when Kazui Ichigawa, 63, and his family were found dead early in the morning.
His body, along with the bodies of his wife, Rie

T.I.D.O.'s mission statement:

The T.I.D.O. Wave is the latest initiative from Les Guerriers de Mère-Terre, a nonprofit, grassroots, environmental activist organization dedicated to saving our planet from the world's most nefarious corporations. The Wave is our most ambitious mission to date, taking on one of the most despicable foes Mother Earth has ever come up against -- Japan based Tagruato. By informing good people like you of the evil deeds being waged by this reprehensible conglomerate, we hope to gain your support in our efforts to take them down.

Tagruato is primarily concerned with "deep sea petroleum excavation," or as we call it, bleeding Mother Earth dry. In their heedless efforts to join the ranks of fellow Earth Blood vampires, Tagruato has treated our planet like its own personal cesspool. They have operated with utter disregard for our ocean's fragile ecosystems. They violate areas that have never before been molested by man's poisonous touch, destroying precious bionetworks that have flourished for millions of years without our interference. They have already wreaked irrecoverable damage with their contemptuous drilling. And they are only growing bigger and bolder, foregoing any restraint and sanction in exchange for the relentless pursuit of the almighty buck. They must be stopped! The future of our planet may very well depend on it.

By nature, Les Guerriers de Mère-Terre are not a violent or destructive assemblage. We believe that every problem has a peaceful solution, and will do all that we can to avoid bloodshed. However, evil forces such as Tagruato often refuse to adhere to diplomacy. When they snap our olive branch over their greedy knee, we must use it to stab them in the heart.

Make no mistake -- Mother Earth is at war. Her adversary is Mankind. It is a vicious foe, ruthless, pitiless, and presided over by fools. That is why She needs us. We will fight at Her side till the day She takes us Elsewhere.

• unFiction forums: [Question] Tidowave.com? >
• T.I.D.O Wave website >
  

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CLOVERFIELD has been seen! First Reviews

Ain't It Cool News (AICN) has got word of a special New York screening of an unfinished Cloverfield. A few emails to the editors are posted below. Take it or leave it. AICN is a great site that is right more than they are wrong so be warned there might be some Cloverfield Spoilers included below.

Hey folks, Harry here - got the following brief review of CLOVERFIELD...

Just saw CLOVERFIELD in a small screening in NYC. IT WAS AWESOME!

I know - you want to know more. Join the fucking club! You also doubt the validity of the claim. Well, I checked with folks to see if it had indeed screened. It was at a Viacom in-house screening with unfinished visual fx.

Add to this - a quote that Moriarty heard one day whilst walking the picket lines from a famous type that had seen the film, but was not associated with it, that felt they had just made "STAR WARS". Now - personally - that's crazy Hyperbole... isn't it?

The film's budget is too small for it to be that amazing... right? But... what if? What if there's a payoff behind the mystery and the buzz. What if we're a month and a half away from a film that we'll all remember the promotion for - and remember when nobody knew what it was called... when the world was thinking H.P. Lovecraft and Voltron... and something called SLUSHO? What if, we're on magic time - getting ready for something... wonderful.... What if?

Here's two additional reviews we've received: -- The first of these two came from the alleged MARINE - the following reviewer wrote me back with a very detailed (regarding the screening, location, how he got in, etc... piece - but here's what he had to say about the review that I've removed...

hey harry

saw you put my review up, so i'm glad it didn't go to waste! that said, i wanted to let you know, that 2nd review, from the former marine or whatever, is 100% bogus. as incoherent as it is written, from what i was able to decipher, he definitely gets a lot of things wrong. most importantly, the protaganists are definitely not strangers, and the reason for the group moving in the direction they do once the attack is underway is explicitly stated by the leader of the group.

be well

and this:

hey harry

longtime reader, first time writer. i was at one of the Cloverfield screenings in NYC, and while the EFX and music weren't finished, i don't think the movie was that far off from being complete. anyway, i am a big Lost fan so JJ Abrams' involvement, coupled with the amazing viral marketing campaign they have used to promote the film, had me really fired up about seeing the film. just wanted to preface with that before sharing my thoughts, which i will keep as spoiler free as possible:

regarding the monster:
i don't know how much i want to give away b/c i think people are having a really good time hypothesizing about what the monster is, so let me just say that it's humongous, it's ugly, and you do see it in full view - no blair witch kind of thing going on here. SPOILER TAG i can also confirm the presence of smaller monsters (which look like the uglies from starship troopers kind of) / END SPOILER [put that in black on the website if you can]

regarding the story:
again, don't want to give much plot away, but there is a little of a backstory initially, but it doesn't take too long to get to the party scene from the trailer, and once the statue of liberty head comes rolling down laffeyette street [i think?], the movie is off and running, with NYC devolving into chaos as people avoid being caught in the path of whatever is destroying their city

regarding the movie itself:
the scares are of the "gotcha!" variety, but that is to be expected given the use of the handheld camera, which, by the way, is your POV the entire film, so those with easy motion sickness be forewarned. there are some pretty funny one liners delivered by our cameraman to offset some of the tension with levity. there are certain plot devices which require a large suspension of disbelief (esp in regards to cell phone usage), but then again, if i'm going to buy in to the fact that a giant monster is ransacking my hometown, who am i to draw any line?

overall i thought it was solid, definitely not great, and certainly not a genre redefinition. then again, my expectations were very high going in, so i might not be the best person to ask. my major critiques were:

1) it was somewhat predictable, and, as i stated before, the scares in the movie are less of the "creeping dread" variety and more of the "gotcha!" type.

2) again, i don't want to end the hypothesizing fun, but the monster isn't given much of a backstory or explanation. it just starts tearing NYC a new one one night.

that's all i got. no need to credit me on this one, just wanted to get a review out there that doesn't have everyone shouting PLANT!!1!"
(original AICN article)

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Slusho Shirts, Hats, and Hoodie

Check out the official Slusho Store for some Christmas gifts for the Cloverfield fan. You can grab Slusho shirts in light or dark for $18.00. The Slusho hats run $22 and the Slusho hoodie runs $28.00.

There's a $10 Off coupon for a hat and shirt if you use the code HAPPYCOMBO at the checkout.

• Slusho Store >
  

I bet if you order now you'll get the shirts by 1-18-08!

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Cloverfield Movie Plot Summerized

The (new) official site for the Cloverfield Movie has updated their menu to include a plot summary.

While this Cloverfield Movie summary does not really offer new information, it does pin down some clues that had us all wondering. The Cloverfield Monster is officially pegged as being the size of a skyscraper and the video style of the Cloverfield Teaser Trailer looks to be in utilized for the picture.

"Five young New Yorkers throw their friend a going-away party the night that a monster the size of a skyscraper descends upon the city.

Told from the point of view of their video camera, the film is a document of their attempt to survive the most surreal, horrifying event of their lives."

• Cloverfield Movie Official Website >
  

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‘Cloverfield’ fans are Paramount’s slave-labor marketing bitches

Via Flickfilosopher, a critics take on the Cloverfield marketing.

Cloverfield is back. Remember the trailer for an unnamed movie everyone was so excited about a few months back, the one before Transformers about a mysterious monster attacking New York and knocking the head off the Statue of Liberty? There’s a second trailer now: it debuted before Beowulf over the Thanksgiving weekend and immediately afterward started showing up on YouTube in an impossible-to-watch cell-phone-cam version.

I watched it anyway, and found myself getting a little cheesed off. Not about the movie itself, but about how Paramount is marketing this. I can’t go into a press screening without having my bag rifled and my body wanded in search of cameras and other recording devices -- when I upgraded my cell phone recently, I made a point of getting one without a camera in it so I wouldn’t have to check it with the minimum-wage “security” guards who regularly harass we critics and our guests at screenings. It’s not like those pristine DVDs and downloads of new movies are coming from critics sneaking their cameraphones into press screenings, but we get subjected to this anyway.

But Cloverfield makes it clear, I think, that Paramount wanted geeks to camcord that new trailer, wanted it to end up on YouTube. Perhaps no one in Paramount’s marketing department realized that the first teaser trailer would be such a viral hit on the Web this summer, but they had to know the second one would be. This is the first movie for which “piracy” is a planned part of the marketing.

You can now watch that new trailer (as well as the teaser) in crisp, clear, “official” versions at Apple.com, and it’s even more obvious that it was not primarily intended to be seen in theaters but in a format you can freeze and rewind and rewatch. Lots of intriguing stuff slips by a mere frames. And, of course, you don’t have to bother with analyzing it yourself: All the Cloverfield nerds have done it for you. At CloverfieldNews.com, there’s an ongoing discussion about what each and every shadowy image and garbled sound might be. The sprawling Cloverfield fan community has even ferreted out a connection between the movie and Heroes.

Some folks, like my fellow Film.com contributor Eric D. Snider, are tired of all the coyness on the part of Cloverfield producer JJ Abrams and all the literal gameplaying required to figure out what the damn movie is about. I figure the gameplaying isn’t meant for us grownups but for kids with tons of time on their hands. Who else could be able to post something like this: “For the last few weeks, we have been devoting all of our time to the myspace accounts of the characters.” Seriously? All your time? To a movie that hasn’t even opened yet, and might turn out to suck. (That site, Cloverfield Project, hasn’t been updated since August, so perhaps someone got a life.)

I wonder if all these folks realize that they’ve become unpaid marketing managers for a multibillion-dollar corporation. (source)

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Cloverfield Makes Yahoo! Front Page

After being immersed in the 1-18-08/Cloverfield situation for months, it's nice to see the Cloverfield viral aspect take off. Up to now with the release of the 2nd trailer it has been rather mundane, with a few uninteresting MySpace pages and "Jamie Loves Teddy" page that may not even be related.

On the front page of Yahoo! this morning there is a feature post on the Cloverfield Movie. A small section is dedicated to the teaser and full length trailer. Also a very sparse picture section with only the poster and one picture when I checked it.


The bulk of the Yahoo! spread is centered around the Internet buzz. Yahoo! runs their buzz section based on Internet searches, kinda like Google Trends. Only Yahoo! breaks it down more like a blog post. They break down the keywords, like 1-18-08 and Cloverfield Clues along with Cthulhu to show you what people are looking for.

official Cloverfield poster

The Tagruato website has been a nice addition but it didn't get going until last week when it was "Hacked," fixed, and then updated. New pictures, about 15-20, have flooded the Internet along with the teaser and full length trailers.

A new official website for the movie, Cloverfieldmovie.com, was rolled out and a small bit of advertising appeared. A brand new poster featuring the "Cloverfield" title was also released. Even the hit TV show Heroes featured characters drinking the viral Slusho.


Cloverfield Trailer

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