Movie Review: Cloverfield (2008)

A "found footage" monster movie, Cloverfield cleverly captures the perspective of defenceless civilians as a monster rampages through Manhattan.

The film is presented as an amateur video recorded by a group of New York City friends. Jason (Mike Vogel) and his girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) are throwing a farewell party for Jason's brother Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is relocating to Japan. Their talkative buddy Hud (T.J. Miller) is in charge of filming testimonials, and captures Rob arguing with his life-long friend Beth (Odette Yustman), who storms out. Meanwhile, Hud pursues the attention of Marlena (Lizzy Caplan).

Thunderous explosions soon rock the area as a massive beast emerges from the ocean and starts to inflict massive death and destruction. The partygoers scatter and the army moves in, but the monster proves impervious to military weaponry. A phone call reveals Beth is in danger, so instead of evacuating, Rob, Jason, Lily, Hud and Marlena infiltrate the danger zone to try and reach Beth's apartment building.

With most monster movies focusing on the larger fight to defeat the creature, Cloverfield spends time with the little people who are usually the inconsequential rampage victims. Here it is the army, and to a certain extent the monster itself, that are in the background, while the film joins a small band of civilians trying to skirt the carnage. Helpless, weaponless and driven solely by courage, the survivors have to navigate a war zone using just their wits.

With the what and the why of the monster's invasion inconsequential, director Matt Reeves and writer Drew Goddard (backed by producer J.J. Abrams) have to create a narrative foundation, and so the rather superficial story of Rob wanting to reach and rescue Beth is pushed into service. It's rather flimsy in terms of character interest, but sufficient to steer 85 minutes of action towards ground zero of destruction.

The film's real spectacle, for better or for worse, is the hand-held camera work. Deploying the technique popularized by The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield absolutely delivers the gritty, amateur, and right-there cinéma vérité feel; it is also borderline nauseating. Reeves makes good use of the camera's constrained field of vision to deliver startling glimpses of the monster and its scampering kin (reminiscent of creatures from the Half-Life computer game), as well as a few effective shocks, notably when the group of survivors try to make progress in the spooky subway tunnels.

With pinches of humour, an amiable cast, and strategic dollops of gore, Cloverfield provides the requisite thrills, finally giving voice to the often trampled victims of massive ugly demons from the deep.

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Movie Review: The Night Before (2015)

A Christmas bromance comedy, The Night Before has plenty of good laughs but just as many flat moments.

Ever since both his parents died in a 2001 car crash, Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has depended on his good friends Isaac (Seth Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) to see him through the Christmas season. Isaac is now married to Betsy (Jillian Bell) and expecting his first child, while Chris is suddenly enjoying his finest season as a pro football player. But Ethan is still emotionally stuck in neutral, working menial jobs after having allowed the love of his life Diana (Lizzy Caplan) to get away.

The friends agree that this will be their last Christmas together and the night looks promising when Ethan steals coveted tickets to the secret Nutcracker Ball party. Betsy supplies Isaac with a treasure trove of drugs as a gift for his last Christmas before parenthood, and he is quickly mixing substances and zonking out. Meanwhile Chris goes on a quest to secure weed to impress his teammates, which means that legendary dope dealer Mr. Green (Michael Shannon) gets involved. With the three friends pulled in different directions, their fun is threatened before it really starts.

Directed by Jonathan Levine, The Night Before is a decent attempt to create a modern Christmas fable for the adult bro-therhood crowd. The usual suspects of sex, drugs and men behaving badly are invited to this bash, and while several moments are cringe-worthy, many others are really quite funny. There is enough plot about friendship, growing up, and moving on to hang the immature shenanigans on, and Levine keeps the action hopping and wraps things up in just over 100 minutes.

The rapid-fire improvisation is obvious, and Levine does his best to stay out of the way of his stars as they do their thing on a whim. The actors are often caught staring intently at each other to catch the next line and lob it back, and the sense of anything-can-happen-next is hit and miss, as can be expected.

Ironically, The Night Before is at its worse with the obsessive quest for weed, but at its best when Isaac mixes enough illicit substances to lose his surroundings. Rogen draws good laughs as he hallucinates his way through New York City, culminating in a church service encounter with Besty and her parents that should have been longer.

Michael Shannon injects suitable gruffness as Mr. Green wanders in and out of the movie at regular intervals, and the script makes half-hearted attempts to invoke the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future. James Franco and Miley Cyrus joint the party (literally) late on as themselves, as Ethan finally learns that he will have to earn his way to a meaningful relationship with Diana and Isaac gets his first brush with the tests of parenthood.

The Night Before is unlikely to ever be considered a first-rate Christmas classic, but it deserves a middling place under the tree.

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The Movies Of Lizzy Caplan

All movies starring Lizzy Caplan and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Mean Girls (2004)

Cloverfield (2008)

My Best Friend's Girl (2008)

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

127 Hours (2010)

The Interview (2014)

The Night Before (2015)

Allied (2016)

The Disaster Artist (2017, cameo, as herself)

The People We Hate At The Wedding (2022)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Interview (2014)

A mindless raunchy bromedy, The Interview carries its limited premise well past the funny stage and into exceedingly tedious territory.

Entertainment television show host David Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen) land an interview with North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un (Randall Park). Before they can travel to Pyongyang, CIA agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) recruits them to assassinate the dictator by pressing poison into his palm.

Once they arrive in North Korea, nothing goes according to plan. First they lose the poison, then Aaron tangles with a tiger. David spends time with Kim and they strike up an unlikely friendship, causing David to question the mission. Aaron falls in love with Sook-yin Park (Diana Bang), the dictator's chief propagandist. When Kim reveals his true colours, David and Aaron have to make their move and their troubles multiply.

The Interview caused an international incident, with the humourless North Koreans giving the project much more publicity than it ever deserved by issuing all sorts of threats ahead of the film's release and perpetuating the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment's servers.

Left alone, the lame film would have likely died a quick death. Co-directed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, The Interview suffers from a lazy script that relies almost solely on frat boy humour intended to appeal to impressionable 12 to 16 year old boys. Every other joke surrenders to a mention of body parts, excretions or pornography, with Franco delivering the majority of his lines with an over-the-top wide-eyed maniacal zealotry. When merely mentioning the anatomy is not enough, The Interview resorts to on-camera hacking of body pieces in the name of fun.

Rogen mostly stands back and allows his co-star to careen out of control. Lizzy Caplan as agent Lacey, Randall Park as Kim Jong-un and Diana Bang as propaganda officer Sook deliver by far the more controlled and watchable performances. The two good moments in the entire movie involve the out-of-place tiger and a Soviet-era tank.

The Interview may have made for a useful 15 minute sketch. Stretched to a seemingly endless 112 minutes, the film is disqualified for aiming low and hitting nothing.

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Movie Review: Mean Girls (2004)

A high-school comedy about girls fitting in, Mean Girls brings plenty of edgy attitude and delivers a funny, uncompromised story about the perils of the pack.

Sixteen year old Cady (Lindsay Lohan) has been home-schooled all her life, Now her parents have relocated from Africa to Evanston, Illinois, and Cady has to face the wilderness that is her local high school. She meets two happy independent-minded students in semi-Gothic Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and openly gay Damian (Daniel Franzese), but Cady is soon exposed to the most envied girl trio in the school: the pretty, fashionable, cool and snooty Plastics. Their queen bee is Regina (Rachel McAdams), and her clique consists of the submissive Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and the quite dense Karen (Amanda Seyfried).

Regina sizes up Cady and gives her a chance to join the troop. Janis seizes the opportunity to use Cady as an informant to reveal the secrets of the Plastics. Cady starts to develop a crush on classmate Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), but learns that he's off limits because he was Regina's former boyfriend. It does not take long for Cady to be both horrified and seduced by the mean-spirited behaviour of the Plastics, and to learn that belonging means making difficult choices.

Directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey (who gives herself a small but shiny role as a teacher with problems of her own), Mean Girls pulls no punches. Life in suburbia is portrayed as a hazardous jungle with the animals barely concealed beneath a veneer of civility, and Cady's challenge is to adapt to her new environment or be eaten alive. Waters keeps the laughs coming in a compact 97 minute package, and the humour is continuously juiced with the poison spewed by teenagers defining their turf and individuality to scare away the perceived competition.

Without fully escaping the limitations of the high school comedy genre, Mean Girls manages to stretch. Cady makes every mistake in the book, attempting to be nice, having a foot in a couple of camps, and trying to join the Plastics while simultaneously spying on them. She is of course doomed to fail in the most spectacular way, and Mean Girls gets the environment right: the long-established rules of place will dominate the individual, redefining social norms is bound to fail, and belonging to competing herds is not smart: it is treason.

Cady flirts with the dark side and demonstrates to herself how easy it is to transition from eager wannabe to a broadly despised pretender. To regain her balance she will need to learn to carve out her own niche, rather than try to change the evolutionary order. Fey does struggle a bit with the final chapter, as Cady's attempts at atonement are clumsily (and literally) run over by a bus.

Before Lindsay Lohan embarked on her career-destroying lifestyle, she was one of Hollywood's most promising young actresses, and here she proves why. Lohan finds the space for Cady to be both the smart outsider and the eager wannabe, grounded by a stable family-oriented upbringing but not immune to the seductive forces of cheap popularity. In contrast Rachel McAdams did use early roles like Regina as fuel for a successful career, and here she goes all-in as the embodiment of haughty entitlement. Regina has the perfect role model in her mom (Amy Poehler), a woman with all the money she needs to not care about what it means to be a parent.

Mean Girls is smart, sassy, real, rude, and often, a riot of laughs.

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