The last time the Red Wings were in the Stanley Cup Finals I was on a trip to Clovis, New Mexico watching my friend Rusty Brian get married and then I was on a plane to Mission Springs campground in Santa Cruz, CA where I was spending the summer as a High School camp counselor. I didn’t see a single game of their 2002 Stanley Cup victory over Carolina. It’s been a long 6 years. I know, when I… a Red Wings fan say “it’s been a long 6 years” those of you from Chicago will cringe, thinking it’s kinda like a Florida Marlins fan saying it’s been a “long time” since they won the World Series. Hey sometimes it just stinks to be from Chicago (Blackhawks - 46 year Cup drought; Bears - 23 year SB drought; Cubs - 100 year WS drought). That being said… for a kid who became a Red Wings fan back in 1995, it’s been a long time since we’ve been in the Stanley Cup. And this time, I’m not missing a game!

I saw this over at Wil’s blog and couldn’t resist doing it myself.

My movie meme

1. One movie that made you laugh
The Big Lebowski

2. One movie that made you cry
Field of Dreams.

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
The Empire Strikes Back

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
Bad Boys 2

6. One movie you hated
Open Water

7. One movie that scared you
The Descent

8. One movie that bored you
Doomsday

9. One movie that made you happy
The Goonies

10. One movie that made you miserable
Who Killed the Electric Car?

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
Those sick torture movies that are popular now… Hostel, Saw, etc.

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Samwise Gamgee

13. The last movie you saw
Cloverfield

14. The next movie you hope to see
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

15. Your favorite movie
Donnie Darko (Directors Cut)… or Pan’s Labyrinth

I had hoped to see Cloverfield in the theater back in January when it first came out but never got around to it. So while I was in Blockbuster the other day looking for another film I was using in a message at youth group I picked it up. I can’t remember where, but I had been hearing some discouraging things about Cloverfield since it came out. Regardless of what people had been saying I was going to give it a shot, not the least bit because J.J. Abrams was involved in the project.

I loved it. And in retrospect I’m actually glad I had heard some negative reviews because I saw it without it having been over-hyped. To grossly oversimplify, Cloverfield is somewhere between Blair Witch and Godzilla. Some kind of creatures begin to attack Manhattan but we see everything from the point of view of a hand-held camcorder manned by one of the main characters. To paraphrase the filmmakers, there’s this huge disaster happening on an enormous scale but we’re looking at it through a soda straw. While the camera work made some moviegoers sick… literally, I found that it drew me right into a familiar (and by now, predictably boring) storyline - the disaster movie. The creative perspective given to this storyline in effect redefined the boundaries of a disaster movie and the result is anything but campy.

[spoilers ahead] Cloverfield just entirely abandons many of the staples of the disaster film. We don’t get to sit in on any high-level military meetings on how to kill off the monsters. We don’t get to see the the monsters arrive and brush by unsuspecting people before it all hits the fan, we don’t really even see the “end” of the whole drama. Instead we simply get the hand-held camera view of what happens to 4 friends in the midst of this whole disaster. We know as much as they know. We are as in the dark as they are. There is no third person narrative, we experience the entire film from the first person point of view. As a horror technique I found this extremely effective because the anxiety that accompanies ignorance is so much greater than the fear from a well framed close up of some really well done digital creature. For much of the film we are really very ignorant of what is really happening. There is the tidbit of info from the random solider, but for the most part we walk through the film in the dark with the main characters.

The opening credits set the premise that the film we are watching isn’t a film, it’s just a tape that was found in the wreckage. There’s no editing, there’s no commentary, we’re just going to watch what was on this tape. This would seem like it would significantly limit the ability to do any character development or deeper storytelling. However the filmmakers used the “this is just a tape” premise to their advantage in a move of brilliance. We find out pretty early on in the film that our videographer, Hud, didn’t use a new tape, but he’s taping over a pretty special video his best friend and our protagonist, Rob, had taken of a day he spent with longtime friend, Lily, who for that one day, became something more. Lily is trapped in an apartment and Rob, against all common sense is going in after her. We are able to get a little backstory and character development from some of the gaps between Hud’s filming where the original tape isn’t recorded over. Genius.