Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which partially sold itself as a rescued artifact and ingeniously took advantage of nascent Internet
marketing to whip audience interest into a fervor, Cloverfield is a guerrilla-style exercise in “found footage” subjectivity, unfolding
completely in handheld style, with often canted or shaky camerawork. Reframing a classic monster movie conceit as a post-September 11
allegory of big city trepidation, and skillfully evoking more dread than
lasting cathartic release, it’s also a thrilling, skewed slice of cinematic terror tailor-made for our times.

Like the aforementioned film Cloverfield chronicles the plight of a group of young
people fighting for their lives trapped in an unforgiving outdoors — in this
case an urban jungle under siege by a gargantuan rampaging monster, and
hundreds of hostile smaller, scurrying creatures which pose every bit as much
of a threat. The project owes its existence to the participation of producer and Lost
hit-maker J.J. Abrams, who’s quietly setting up his own brand-name film factory, albeit in more diverse fashion than comedy man-of-the-moment Judd Apatow. Yet the style, unique framing device and
top-shelf execution are what ultimately help sell this mash-up of
classic genre filmmaking and new-school tropes.

Cloverfield opens chillingly, with a silent title card that stamps the subsequent video camera footage as a found audiovisual document from the U.S. military. The first portion of the tape reveals the tender morning
after a hook-up between long-time friends Rob (Michael David-Stahl, above left) and Beth
(Odette Yustman). The videotape (and thus the movie) then leaps forward a
month, to the evening of a huge going-away party for Rob, who’s preparing to
move to Japan as part of a promotion.

Tasked by his girlfriend Lily (Jessica
Lucas, above right) with recording the event, Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) passes off
the duty to friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who fruitlessly tries to engage Marlena
(Lizzy Caplan, above middle) in flirtatious small talk. The party takes a turn for the
awkward when Beth shows up with another guy. Rob’s suppressed feelings of affection
come bubbling to the surface, words are spoken in anger, and Beth leaves.

Suddenly, a massive jolt shakes the remaining
revelers, and the power goes out. As the group heads outside to see what
exactly has happened, fireballs explode on the horizon, and utter havoc is unleashed.
After one route of evacuation is sealed, Rob receives a distraught cell phone
message from Beth, and becomes determined to make his way to her apartment to
try to find her. Friends in tow, the group sets out, but when the destruction
and fighting on the streets between the creature and the National Guard gets
too intense, they seek shelter underground, and try to traverse subterranean subway
tracks.

Nicely balancing confusion and
interpersonal anxiety with these grander, under-siege segments, Drew Goddard’s
screenplay is a thing a pared down grace and lean, muscular virtuosity. It
starts by sketching out the underpinnings of character in fine fashion. After
18 brisk, well-plotted minutes of typically angsty young adult introduction, the
movie yields to mayhem — basically an hour-long dash through urban hell.

As with other apocalyptic and sci-fi
movies, Cloverfield squeezes some
bedazzlement out of the destruction of familiar, iconic buildings and
monuments. Here it’s the Brooklyn Bridge, in a grim obliteration that serves as the film’s first mass-scale,
panicky set piece. There’s also the beheaded Statue of Liberty, which arrives
early in the movie, and additionally serves as the perfect visual metaphor for America’s
still-lingering apprehension over the state of world events and its own
security. Yet director Matt Reeves (a co-creator of
TV’s Felicity, whose other feature
credit is 1996’s The Pallbearer) also
proves himself effective at simplistic evocative imagery, as with a coachman-less
horse-drawn carriage wandering through Central
Park.

Key to substantial gratification with Cloverfield are two bits of necessary surrender:
succumbing to its overall framing device, and accepting the notion that such
trauma unfolds against a PG-13 backdrop, which is only really a matter of
language, coming after movies like Superbad
and the Hostel films have made coarse exclamatory talk integral to their stamp of “realism” within their respective
genres. The action sequences here — which include a bravura night-vision attack in the
subway tunnel, as well as a ferocious street battle with real military sniper fire that Hillary Clinton would surely remember — are so tensely effective as to eradicate any legitimate
quibbles with the rating for the rest of movie, a problem that arguably plagued Live Free or Die Hard last summer, at least in advance of its release.

Cineastes holding on steadfastly to the notion
that less is more may balk at the degree to which the film reveals its monster.
While it’s true that this does if not undercut then at least muddy the water with
respect to the movie’s metaphorical associations, it’s interestingly handled
within the framework of the film, and seems a commercial tip of the cap as much
as anything, something that DVD interviews about its late production inclusion seem to support. It’s undeniable that Cloverfield
is, at its core, a metaphor for the terror and uncertainty of the real world,
from its aforementioned iconic poster and DVD cover image and willfully vague tagline (“Some
thing has found us”), which makes no mention of a CGI monster on which millions
of dollars was spent, to specific dialogue of choking despondency (“I don’t
know why this is happening”). Like much
great cinema, Cloverfield works on multiple levels; it’s incidentally a monster thriller.

Presented in 1.78:1 widescreen (1080p/VC-1), the picture in the film’s Blu-ray release is even crisper and clearer than on its standard DVD release, particularly as it relates to small object detail. Audio is anchored by a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix, with optional English, French
and Spanish subtitles as well. Even though the entire film is supposed to be comprised of amateur footage, it’s not wanting for clarity — especially in the sound mix, which effectively uses rumbling deep registers to convey the impending and above-ground terror in the disrupted party scene and subway track sequence, respectively.

A nice collection of supplemental features, all presented in high-definition, are almost all subtitle-enabled too, which is a nice touch. Director Reeves sits for an audio commentary track, and it’s a
thoughtful and substantive affair throughout. Even better, however, may
be a superb 28-minute making-of featurette
which intersperses interview segments with Abrams, Reeves, producer
Bryan Burk and other behind-the-scenes figures with loads of on-set
production footage from the movie’s semi-secret summer 2007 shoot. A
good bit of material here features Miller, since he’s the lens through
which so much of the movie unfolds (costar Margot Farley good-naturedly
chides him that he can “screw up everything twice, as an actor and a
cameraman!”), but Caplan also flashes her droll wit, and we learn that some of the actors stay out of breath by jumping rope between takes.
Reeves and editor Kevin Stitt, meanwhile, talk about the “soda straw”
approach of the movie’s visual scope — that is, creating a grand vision
captured in very restricted form. After 28 days of principal
photography in and around Los Angeles, the production moves to New York
City with a skeleton crew; there, even under the codename “Cheese,”
they amusingly discover pictures of their shoot posted to the Internet
within mere hours.

A separate 22-minute special effects
featurette duplicates a bit of footage, but does showcase plenty of
impressive green-screen work, from the Brooklyn Bridge sewquence and
other street scenes. Another six-minute featurette focuses more on the
creature design itself, with conceptual artist Neville Page talking about his work, the skin of the creature and its pupil-less eyes, which are modeled after those of a great white shark, nature’s most efficient killing machine. Blooper fun gets highlighted in a four-minute segment called “Clover Fun,” and there are also four brief deleted scenes and two alternate endings, all with optional commentary from Reeves.
Most of the former are judicious tonal trims (a wisecrack from Hud
during the ultra-tense subway sequence, for instance), but I did wish a
post-attack sequence between Marlena and Lizzy — part of a brief
re-shoot, in which she acknowledges the trauma caused by Jason’s death
— had been left in. The two alternate endings, meanwhile, are very much variations on a theme;
without spoiling the specifics of the conclusion, one is essentially a
different coda, built around a shot for which Reeves had great
affinity, while the other focuses on a very brief interstitial flash
which hints at the source camera actually capturing the film’s footage
being found.

The new addition to the
Blu-ray edition of the film is a viewing option called
“Special Investigation Mode” which establishes further spatial clarity, letting audiences track the
locations of the characters, the creature and the military via a box in the upper
corner of the screen. On the bottom, meanwhile, there’s an in-story, textual fact track, similar to something like the factoid track featured on the DVD release of First Sunday. For fans of the movie’s viral marketing campaign craving even more context and detail, this is an especially nice bonus.

Finally, there’s also a special Easter egg on the disc,
able to be found by toggling right after lingering above the Spanish
subtitles option on the set-up scene. Doing so will yield a two-minute
clip of cast and crew members riffing in goofball fashion on one of the
military figures’ lines of dialogue in the movie — “Rack ’em and pack
’em, we’re phantoms in 15!” Cloverfield,
meanwhile, seems to be rightly enjoying a bit more than a mere 15
minutes in the pop-cultural spotlight; talks of a sequel or prequel persist, though Reeves and Abrams insist they have yet to come up with an angle that fully satisfies them. To purchase the film on Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) A (Disc)

Since its June 2007 debut, Army Wives, executive produced by Grey’s Anatomy‘s Mark Gordon, has become the most successful original series in the history of the Lifetime Television network. Billed as a patriotic and thought-provoking serial drama, Army Wives centers around five military spouses who share friendship, secrets, home and heartache. If the drama is of the pure paint-by-numbers variety, the series at least has the advantage of topicality on its side (John McCain and Barack Obama have both recorded introductions for the series’ second season bow), which should be meritorious enough for undiscerning blue-collar viewers merely looking for a little scripted fare that reflects the same sort of struggles they have to deal with on a weekly basis.

The show’s talented ensemble cast includes Emmy winner Kim Delaney, ex-JAG looker Catherine Bell, Sally Pressman, Brigid Brannagh, Brian McNamara, Commander in Chief‘s Wendy Davis, Sterling Brown and Drew Fuller. Executive producer Katherine Fugate created the series using as a blueprint Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives, by journalist Tanya Biank, who also serves as a consultant on the show.

Set on a South Carolina military base, the first season acquaints viewers with the intertwined stories of four women and one man tied to career members of the armed forces. Married to earnest officer Michael Holden (McNamara) is the elegant, educated Claudia Joy (Delaney), who serves as den mother to a disparate group that includes Roxy (Pressman), a raucous, fun-loving bartender; radio show host Pamela (Brannagh), a surrogate mother trying to solve a financial crisis; Denise (Bell); and Roland (Brown), a psychiatrist whose most important patient is his PTSD-afflicted wife (Davis). Far from family and old friends, the five turn to each other for
emotional support, companionship and advice, as their loved ones tackle
the dangerous business of defending the country. Bound together by pressures familiar to many military spouses, they build a bond that sustains them through sacrifice, loneliness and unforgiving conventions of Army life.

Boiled down, that means for some pretty pedestrian drama — an affair here, a pregnancy scare there, a secret held by Denise that could destroy her family — though the game cast are all engaged enough to keep things moving at a solid clip. A couple subplots and character arcs misfire in major ways, though — namely one involving Amanda, Michael and Claudia Joy’s college-bound daughter. It certainly doesn’t help that Kim Allen, the actress playing Amanda, is 25 years old but looks more like she’s 35, but the way her character is written is just grating, in all honesty. Things also reach a crescendo of ridiculousness in the season finale, which involves a suspected terrorist munitions theft/illicit sale and a spurned husband-turned-suicide bomber. The mode of storytelling, the filmic vocabulary and framing used in these segments — but also at other times throughout the season — is jarringly at odds with the tone and intent of the show, all lurking, lazy hand-held camera work.

Housed in a cardboard slipcase and presented in a widescreen aspect ratio with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, this DVD set includes all 13 episodes from the first season, including the aforementioned cliffhanger finale, and also comes with an array of exciting bonus features. Kicking things off are some episodic audio commentaries from Fugate, executive producer Deborah Spera,
director Ben
Younger, Delaney, Bell and more. Next up are bloopers and outtakes, a clutch of deleted scenes and an un-aired storyline from the show, complete with optional producer commentary. A Q&A session with the cast features questions submitted by fans; “Have at It,” meanwhile, so named after Pamela’s radio show, finds the series’ executive producers holding forth on the challenges and joys of production. Finally, there’s a featurette that offers audiences a glimpse of real, home-front Army wives, and tells their own personal stories of life in the service. This may be the best thing about the set. C (Show) B+ (Disc)