Cloverfield (2008)

Four days ago, after our grand evening with The Enemy we decided to not go home at 9:30pm but have a bite to eat at King’s Court and watch a movie. At the flick-o-drome we talked about the different possibilities and found Cloverfield pretty interesting since nobody knew what it was about. Tickets were bought and the fun began. It took me till today to write a review because I wasn’t able to make up my mind. But more about that later.

Cloverfield is a monster flick with a fresh concept. In an equation

Cloverfield = Godzilla + Blair Witch Project + Alien

A monster - let’s call it The Crab From Outer Space aka Space Crab shows up in Manhattan and starts to destroy everything. For more action it drops little Spider Crabs that attack and destroy, too. The civilians try to escape and the army tries to fight and kill the monster. In the middle of everything and not off Manhattan is a small group of civilians who have some - let’s call it unfinished business. They run around with a video camera. Yes, you’re guessing right. The “uncut footage” of this cam is the movie called Cloverfield.

I loved this concept. The shaky camera was ok with me (one of my buddies felt sick), the effects were great and the pictures were daunting. Just the story was really bad and destroyed Cloverfield’s potential to become one of the best movies ever and get a 10 out of 10 in my review.

So the maker of Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams, who you should know for creating Lost, had this cool concept and needed a story to make a movie out of it. Instead of hiring a good writer for cinematic productions he let one of his Lost writers do the job and somehow along this way created this mess.

During my internal progress of deciding whether I liked Cloverfield or not I surfed the net a lot. I found out that the name “Cloverfield” has nothing to do with the flick but is the name of the highway exit Abrams takes when driving to his Santa Monica office. I remembered this little parody on the writers of Lost and posted it to my tumblr site. I checked rottentomatoes for reviews tearing Cloverfield apart but found a 76% rating. I also wrote the outline for Cloverfield II. None of all that really helped me making up my mind.

To sum this up basically Cloverfield would be a 10/10 if there wasn’t this bad story. It kind of destroyed the whole picture. After letting all these impressions sink in I realized that I’m not able to give a really bad rating either; the concept is just too cool. That’s why I decided to give a 6 out of 10. So go out and watch this flick and try to get overwhelmed by pictures and action and not by the story.

Super Bowl XLII

Been watching the Super Bowl, too on Sunday. Not a big deal since millions of others also did that. Unfortunately nobody around here so again no Super Bowl party (the last one I attended was when the Patriots won their last title). Nevertheless I have to tell you that this was one of the most exciting football games I had the opportunity to watch.

So the Giants won. 17:14. I’m not really a fan of them but I liked their attitude. I saw their first few games this season and there was definitely improvement. And I liked that the Manning fam got the Bowl back to back. A great story!

Though first quarter was a bit slow and quarters number two and three a bit boring fourth quarter made up for all of that. Great drives with some lucky plays for the Giants. A few Brady Bunch sacks and great Giants defense. Guess they really wanted it more.

Here’s the NFL highlight flick for those who didn’t want to stay up till 4:30am for a great live experience.

The Enemy @ Kammgarn, Ktown

Finally the big night. February 1st 2k8. The Enemy (the “hottest” band from Britain) live in Ktown. The original gig date was in January but due to a flu or sore throut of the lead singer it got postponed. I was really looking forward to this concert, were listening to their CD “We’ll Live And Die In These Towns” all the time and got two buddies to join me for this event.

The location was the Cotton Club, part of the Kammgarn in Ktown. Though there were a few fans present the room was too big (there’s less that a quarter of that space per person in da club) so I didn’t really get that “concert feeling”.

Minutes before the concert Sven told me that Molotov Jive weren’t playing. So it’d just be The Enemy. That was fine with me. I got some songs by Molotov Jive off their Website and didn’t like them that much .

Almost in time at 8:45pm The Enemy came on stage and started to perform. There was enough space so we went way up to the front and ended up in row #3.

My very first thought seeing the band was “sh*t, these are kids!” (just tried to find out how old they are but didn’t find exact info. They’re up and about 18). And then my second thought “yeah, they’re that good!” They sounded like on the CD and that’s a good sign. Plus they know how to move the crowd.

Let us get to the downside of my evening with The Enemy. This evening lasted exactly 45 minutes. That’s the eleven album songs plus one unreleased new song. That’s it. No extras, just an arrogant “see you next year”. So my message to the band:
HEY ENEMIES! THAT’S NOT HOW TO TREAT YOUR FANS! Fine, you got some sold out gigs in Manchester coming up. The Apollo. Sounds and looks big. Less that 100 fans at the Cotton Club can’t compete with that. Still they are fans who payed good money and were willing to come not once but twice to see you play. So please have the decency and play one or two extras, introduce the band and make it at least 60 minutes of gig time. Thanks fellas!

Lovelybooks

I love reading books and I prefer a novel to watching TV. In my opinion books and novels are movies for the mind (and I’m talking about the super, uncut, extended directors-cut edition). Besides being taken to a whole different place, time or even world, I also have the feeling to spend my time more appropriate than in front of the tube. Nevertheless reading books is a lonely hobby. It’s not seen as “cool” and it’s easier to find people who call you a nerd than people who share your passion. So who do you want to talk to about the books you read or are currently reading?

Yesterday afternoon I got a link to a website from my girlfriend. She had read about it somewhere and thought I might be interested in it. She was right. The site is called lovely books and I instantly liked it.

Lovely books is basically like last.fm but with books instead of music. A web 2.0 site for people who like to read. You can show your books on a virtual shelve, rate them and write reviews on them. In addition you can find book recommendations, discover new books and chat with other book lovers. On your members page visitors can find the number of titles on your book shelve and take a look at each one of them. There is also a section showing the book(s) you are currently reading, a short info on you and a list of friends you made while using lovely books.

The service of lovely books is free. Once you are signed up you can start adding books to your virtual bookshelve. You do that by typing keywords or a ISBN into a search field and hit the enter key. The search engine uses the lovely books database or the ones from amazon-com or amazon-uk to find what you entered. Once you see your book in the  results list you can drag it into a box called “bookshelve” and that’s it. When you click on a book you are taken to the book’s page where you can rate it, write a review or add tags. You can also see who owns the book or is currently reading it and find links to similar books.

Lovely books is not only intended for readers but for authors, too. They get the possibility to address their audience, interact with readers in chats and discussion groups and give insight where they get their inspiration from by showing off their bookshelves.

Sounds like lovely books is a great place for people who love books. I see the possibility of reading groups or book clubs for people around the world. Is there a catch? Unfortunately yes. Lovely books has only a few members. In addition the people behind the service have decided to establish a different community for every language instead of one global community with different language sections. This results in 5200 members for the German version and in just 370 for the English one. To keep lovely books alive and get it up and running they will have to place some ads and convince their members to spread the word. I am convinced so go to lovelybooks.com and sign up!

IMified

It’s been some time since I subscribed to my last Web 2.0 toy. Browsing through Google Reader I stumbled upon another gimmick I had to check out.

IMified is another public beta. Instead of doing the 30-second username, password, email address signing-up routine (like you do at all those *lr-sites), you send an instant message to the IMified client. Once you are in the IMified bot sends you a menu.

The navigation is command line style. You type a number - say 2 and get the reminders sub menu where you can 1 - add a reminder or 2 - view your reminders. Type “M” to get back to the main menu.

When typing 4 in the main menu you get a link leading to your account site. There you can add/edit some basic account settings and add widgets and shortcuts. Adding a widget lets you communicate with Web 2.0 services through your IM client without opening a browser window.

Besides reminders and to-do lists IMified lets you communicate with all your favorite apps. For example you can send/receive messages, links and events to/from your Pounce account, post and receive Twitter and Jaiku updates and post to Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr. IMified offers a bunch of widgets and it is supposed to be easy to create your own ones.

Controlling all your accounts through one service sounds nice. Sure thing it is handy when you are in a rush or on the road. I do not yet see me using IMified when sitting at my desktop. Even my old laptop has the resources to run a browser window (at least most of the time) so there is no need to type my way through menus. But maybe I’ll discover a function I haven’t thought of before and then my life will not be worth living without IMified. Nevertheless a nice toy!