On Wednesday our Cake-loving member received Cloverfield from Netflix, which we came home and watched after a League business meeting/pizza outing. It was a lot better than I'd thought it would be going in, as I hadn't heard anyone say a nice thing about it besides fellow Leaguer Onyx. In the end, there were too many points where the characters grated on me or their actions didn't follow any sort of logic to keep me from really loving it, but I can't say I wasn't entertained for 80 minutes.
The movie really made me think of a Blair Witch Project with a much bigger budget. I'll come clean: I'm a big Blair Witch Project fan, and still feel the movie doesn't receive the credit it deserves. Even taking the low-budget blockbuster and insane grassroots marketing phenomena away, it succeeds as a creepy, disturbing horror film.
In high school (back when I was younger and a bit more naive) I shot a Blair Witch parody with some friends. We edited straight on VHS and filmed it all in one weekend in the woods behind my house. My memory is a bit foggy, but I believe we were searching for Joan of Arc, rather than a witch. We ended up handing it in, in lieu of a paper for history class. I got a B, which was nice enough.
Coincidentally, a lengthy, insightful look back at The Blair Witch Project from The Onion AV Club's Scott Tobias was just posted here this morning. It's a great read, even if you're not a fan of the movie - it expresses a lot of the same feelings I have about it, nearly ten years later.
Ten years? I'm feeling old.
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