The Screengrab : heroes

Forgotten Films: "American Perfekt" (1997) and "Diamond Men" (2001)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The addition of Robert Forster to the cast of Heroes may not be enough to save the faded series, but it'll keep us from deleting it from our DVR for a while. We admit it, we love this guy, almost as much as Quentin Tarantino does. (We'd be willing to consider the possibility that we love him even more than Tarantino does, but let's face it: presuming that you might love something even as much as Tarantino does is a risky thing to do.) It was, of course, QT who put Forster back on the radar in 1987 by giving him the best role of his career as the sage but seducable bail bondsman Max Cherry and tucking his performance into a movie, Jackie Brown, that actually got booked into theaters. But there are other people who were rooting for the man, and a year before Jackie Brown, Forster played the male lead in a smart, quirky little neo-noir called American Perfekt that bypassed theaters but caught a lot of people's attention when it made it to cable. The movie, written and directed by Paul Chart, is a sinister-edged road movie about a criminal psychiatrist (Forster) who decides to take some personal time and conduct an experiment in which he decides to leave all important decisions to the flip of a coin. Inevitably, the decisions come to include matters of life and death. Perfekt has its own weird vein of dark humor and a clutch of striking performances by the kind of actors who ought to be carrying big movies on a regular basis but have become more likely to find themselves playing third fiddle in a remake of Basic Instinct (such as David Thewlis) or getting a role on The Sopranos only to be replaced by another actress after your first short scene has hit the airwaves (such as Fairuza Balk). Balk enters the picture after Forster's first road partner, Amanda Plummer, has Mysteriously Disappeared. The movie has slowly established itself an Internet cult, some of whose members got very excited, and in some cases indignant, when the coin-flip business turned up in No Country for Old Men. Presumably all these people had never heard of Two-Face and subsequently died of massive heart attacks while watching The Dark Knight.

Perfekt gives the viewer a choice taste of Forster at his most affable and untrustworthy. After his Oscar-nominated turn in Jackie Brown, more filmmakers started seeking Forster out with hopes of tapping the vulnerable, world-worn quality that Tarantino showcased so well. The best of these films may be Diamond Men, a gentle little charmer written and directed by Dan Cohen. (This film did actually make it into theaters. Unfortunately, it opened a couple of weeks after September 11, 2001, which was not a great time for small, underpublicized movies.) It too is a road movie: Forster plays Eddie, a widowed salesman for a jewelry company who spends his life tooling from one loyal customer to the next in the Pennsylvania area he has built up over the years. After a heart attack, he's saddled with a younger, brasher partner (Donnie Wahlberg), ostensibly because the company's insurance carrier will no longer let him serve as sole custodian of the merchandise in transit, though you'd have to be dumber than Eddie's boss thinks he is not to recognize that his real function is to teach the ropes to his future replacement before being shoved out the door. And if you don't expect the Wahlberg character to begin to warm to the older guy and care more about him than about his own career future, you must not have seen many movies. But Dan Cohen worked in the diamond trade himself, taking over his father's business after his death, and the movie has the kind of affectionate feeling for and detailed knowledge of a way of life that can give a picture like this enough individuality to transcend its own formula. Eventually, Eddie find romance with Bess Armstrong, as a middle-aged New Age Buddhist ex-hooker. I remember a stretch there in the 1980s when Bess Armstrong's face seemed like a hard thing to avoid if you wanted to watch TV or go to the movies; Diamond Men was just about the first time I'd seen or thought of her since they canceled My So-Called Life, and I don't think I've seen or thought about her since, but the sheer weirdness of her role here must have gotten to her, because she's rather appealing once you abandon the idea that she's going to attack Eddie with an icepick that she keeps under a pillow. Then again, she probably benefited from being partnered with Forster. Both these movies incorporate the special quality that has helped keep Forster's career alive even though it may have made him seem like less of a bet for superstardom than other actors whose reserves of charisma made them seem unapproachable: he just seems like really good company, whether you're in the movie with him or watching him in the audience. Like a lot of great character actors, he makes being fun to watch seem like a lost art.

Insufficently Forgotten Films: "The Big Fix" (1978)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: This post-counterculture private eye movie stars Richard Dreyfuss, who also served as co-producer, as thirtysomething West Coast shamus Moses Wine. Back in the glory days of the '60s student protests of which the young Moses was a part, he had a thing going on with a blonde rad-lib played by Susan Anspach. Now, she's working for a California gubernatorial candidate who is being targeted by a smear campaign; someone is seeking to tar him by claiming that he's associated with supposedly scary figures from that period, including fictionalized stand-ins for Abbie Hoffman ("Howard Eppis", played by F. Murray Abraham) and Cesar Chavez. Wine, a recent divorcee who makes wisecracks while his heart is breaking, investigates the smears while reflecting on how neither adulthood nor America has turned out quite the way he envisioned. In the course of his investigation, he discovers that the "violent radical" and fugitive from justice Eppis is hiding in plain sight with a wife and kids in a tract house, having settled down under a false name and joined the rush to collect all the "goodies" he can from the System.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It's a pitiful mess. The director, Jeremy Paul Kagen, came up through directing for TV, and after a brief spree making such feature films as The Chosen, The Sting II (the one where the roles originated by Paul Newman and Robert Redford are passed to the obvious second choices, Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis), and Big Man on Campus (also known as The Hunchback Hairball of L.A.--when you've got two potential titles as charming as these, how can you decide?), it was to directing for TV that he scuttled back. For a while there, Kagen seemed to be having a lot of trouble getting the sixties out of his system: one of his TV films was the 1975 Katherine, in which a pre-Carrie Sissy Spacek played a rich girl who developed a social conscience and became a member of the radical underground, and his first theatrical feature, 1977's Heroes, starred Henry Winkler, in a failed bid to be recognized as something other than Fonzie, as a (get this) Vietnam vet (got that?) who, having been made lovably wacky by his traumatizing war experiences, travels cross country to reconnect with his old war buddies and start a worm farm. (He chatters baby talk while his heart is breaking. And while the audience is puking.) A decade later, Kagen would restage the Chicago 8 trial for a 1987 TV film called Conspiracy.

The Big Fix was one of the first Hollywood films pitched at an audience of people who'd grown up during the '60s and who thought they were changing the world at the time but now found themselves entering their thirties with kids and mortgages and stable jobs and friends who were getting ready to vote for Reagan (or even, shudder, entertaining the thought of voting for him themselves) and who might respond to entertainment that helped them find their bearings. Five years later, The Big Chill would clean up playing to that demographic, as would, another five years down the line, the TV series thirtysomething. Both of those laid their concerns right out on the table without the genre sweetening of a private-eye thriller. And both were much, much, much better made than The Big Fix. I've never met Jeremy Paul Kagen and don't really know anything about him but his filmography, but I think it must be safe to conclude that he's a hell of a nice guy, because anyone who's been entrusted to bring in a major feature film and proven himself as incompetent at making a complicated plot and key actions lucid and coherent as Kagen's work here would have been driven out of the business pretty quick if people weren't rooting for him. Of course, nobody ever walked out of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep fuming in disgust because he couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur. It's a mark of how dreary Kagen's work is that a viewer has plenty of time to ruminate on how how little success he's having figuring out what's supposed to be going on.

The Big Fix also served notice to Richard Dreyfuss that his movie career might be added to the list of things that he was about to be able to regard, along with adulthood and the American political system, as personally disappointing. Dreyfuss had just enjoyed perhaps his best year ever, starring in the blockbuster Close Encounters of the First Kind and winning an Academy Award as Best Actor (for The Goodbye Girl!) Having set this project up, he must have hoped that it would be the start of a new stage in his career, but it actually announced the beginning of a long downward slide. He would only make three other movies (The Competition, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and The Buddy System) in the nine years before he re-emerged, playing third fiddle to Nick Nolte and Bette Midler, in his next hit, Down and Out in Beverly Hills. The chastening experience of his time in Siberia seemed to have done him some good as an actor. If The Big Fix had, by whatever intervention of God or the devil, somehow been a hit, and he'd felt encouraged to go even farther in the supposedly adorable mixture of (unconvincing) self-deprecating humor and tear-stained lonely-boy heroics that he was peddling here, things could have gotten really gross really fast.

WHY, FOR SOME PEOPLE, IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: The character of Moses Wine was created by Roger L. Simon, for a series of mystery novels that began with two books--The Big Fix (1973) and Wild Turkey (1974)--that were first published by Straight Arrow Books, the short-lived literary imprint of Rolling Stone magazine. (Carrying on the roman a' clef element from The Big Fix, Wild Turkey included a knockoff of Rolling Stone star writer Hunter Thompson, called "Gunther Thomas.") Simon also did the screenplay for the movie, which led to a Hollywood career that includes a co-writing credit on one actual good movie, Paul Mazursky's 1989 adapatation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story. The most interesting thing about the first Wine novel and the movie made from it may be a shift in tone that says a lot about how much things had changed in five years: in the book, ol' Mose still harbors dreams of progressive political change, which are embodied in the candidate he's working for, but in the movie, the candidate is a doofus and all hope is dead. Moses Wine has yet to rear his frazzled head in another movie, but Simon has continued to grind out novels about him, and in 2003's Director's Cut, Wine opened the floor with the announcement, "I knew I was in trouble when I was starting to agree with John Ashcroft-- me a lifelong card-carrying left/liberal and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, who had espoused every so-called progressive cause from anti-nuke to pro-choice to saving the West Indian manatee, arrested at a half dozen demonstrations and bashed over the head by at least as many cops, nodding approvingly at the utterances of our Attorney General..." Wine goes on to explain that his "political about-face" is a "symptom of the times in which we lived. Like others I wanted to help, be Rosie the Riveter or even Clarence the Computer Chip maker, but I didn't have the skills for any of that, and besides we were told to just go about our normal work, that simply being vigilant would be enough to fight terrorism, whatever that meant." What this shrugging manifesto meant was that Simon himself had been so badly scared by 9/11 that he was now a lockstep Bush supporter, and just as his earlier novels had tried to fuse the images of Jerry Rubin and Humphrey Bogart, now he was trying to inject that World War II gung-ho spirit into his bilge. At the same time he was promoting his own political about-face on-line, at his blog and his site Pajamas Media, and in profiles with conservative writers who seemed charmed to find an actual living cartoon of a decadent Hollywood liberal type who was so eager to make cartoon attacks on the left.

Simon still peddles the Moses Wine books on his website, as if, for all his blather about how wrong he was in his younger days about who the bad guys, he has no sense of shame about having set that awful hippie-smart-ass sterotype in stone and tried to pass it off as a heroic image. Maybe he doesn't. In his own writing and in interviews, Simon comes across as vain and shallow, and utterly unconcerned about sounding as if his road to Damascus moment was motivated by something more than sheer, stark terror of the Islamofascist menace; maybe he loves his younger, dopier self too much to disown it, even as he sneers at anyone who would have agreed with him at the time. It's amusing, though, that in recent weeks, the McCain campaign has appropriated the same tactic that the villains used in The Big Fix, desperately trying to link Barack Obama to members of the Weather Underground. The fact that they're trying to do that to a candidate who was in elementary school at the time makes you wonder just how scary and confusing the world is going to seem to some people when we finally reach the point that nobody cares more about "the sixties" than the present, if we ever will. If Simon had been luckier--if, say, a brick had fallen on his head on September 10, 2001, and he'd lapsed into a coma and didn't come out of it until a week after Katrina--then he might today be able to sell a few copies of The Big Fix by touting it as a dire prediction of the corruption and self-debasement of the McCain campaign, but instead, he's been one of those sad lost souls wandering from TV studio to TV studio insisting that, because of his faith in John McCain;s honor, he believes that his candidate must be too senile to know what his own campaign is doing--now, get out there and vote for him, dammit! More recently, he heaped shame upon himself by declaring "interesting" another idiot's theory that Bill Ayers ghostwrote Obama's first memoir. All this must have given Richard Dreyfuss something to chuckle about to himself as he hung around the set of Oliver Stone's W., bestowing his own Blofeldian impersonation of Dick Cheney on posterity.

In Other Blogs: Hangover Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You’ll have to excuse my disheveled appearance and fogginess of mind this morning, but the Red Sox made me drink a lot last night. Was that an amazing comeback or what? Am I right? Huh? Oh, right. Movies. Let us segue through this Beyond the Multiplex post on Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, as Andrew O’Hehir ponders his love for Madge and the obstacle in his way. “Does A-Rod possess the spiritual and/or aesthetic wealth that Madonna and I share? I say nay. He may not, for instance, recognize the precise odor of hipster familiarity surrounding Filth and Wisdom, which seems like a movie Jim Jarmusch might have started in 1991 and then abandoned because it wasn't going anywhere. Filth and Wisdom isn't laughable or embarrassing; instead it's rather sweet and 100 percent recycled, which might not be a bad way of describing its creator at this vulnerable time in her personal and professional life. It's a little bit Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, a little bit John Waters, a little bit Darren Aronofsky, a little bit (God help us) Desperately Seeking Susan. It's dumb. I sort of liked it.”

At his new blog Hollywood & Fine, Marshall Fine disagrees. “The phrase ‘Madonna’s directorial debut’ does not so much trip off the tongue as sound like a punchline, which is appropriate in this case. Based on Filth and Wisdom, she hasn’t lost her knack for creating unwatchable cinema. Filth and Wisdom is a silly stew of phony profundity that will have you checking your watch almost as soon as the movie starts. Like Hiro on Heroes, Madonna has mastered the ability to make time stop – or, at least, crawl. Are we there yet? No, sorry, better settle in for a long slog.”

Did you know that the Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent has a blog called, oddly enough, The Phil Nugent Experience? Not only is it the finest source of hilarious and insightful political coverage in all the Bronx, but occasionally Phil even writes about movies. What can I say – the man loves his job so much, he does it in his spare time. Here Phil defends the unloved Intolerable Cruelty. “For me, the Coens' fun machines tend to turn cold without a strong, magnetic performance at their center. The warming star power at this movie's core is generated by Clooney, who parodies his own image by magnifying his golden boy attractiveness to such a degree that the gap between it and the Miles's myopic, self-enthralled fatuousness becomes an amazing thing to behold. (It's much more entertaining than seeing him send up his image in Burn After Reading by having the other characters react to him as if he were the irresistable George Clooney even though he seems to be imitating Warren Oates.)”

It’s never too early for Halloween at Arbogast on Film, now in the midst of a month-long 31 Screams celebration. Today he looks at the original 1958 version of The Fly. “I'm not sure what to make of the flyman. As most of the dead scientist's intelligence was retained within his manfly brain, there obviously isn't much left for that of the flyman... who screams pitiably as he meets his doom. His voice is high-pitched - just within the range of human hearing - but his pleas are unmistakeable. ‘Help me,’ he cries out. ‘Help me.’ And as the spider draws closer, it sounds as if he is yelling ‘Go away... go away’ to the spider in childish desperation. And that's just it-- this scene horrifies, it cuts to the bone because it's like watching a child being murdered right in front of you.”

And finally, with W. arriving in theaters today, our good friends at Spill have reimagined Oliver Stone’s film as a Sarah Palin biopic:

Find more videos like this on The Spill.com Movie Community<

Morning Deal Report: Ben Affleck on the Town

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Gone Baby Gone director Ben Affleck “will rewrite, direct and star in The Town, a Warner Bros. adaptation of the Chuck Hogan novel The Prince of Thieves,” according to Variety. He’ll play a thief who falls for a bank manager in the movie “based in Charlestown, Mass., a gritty blue-collar Boston suburb similar to the one that Affleck captured in his directorial debut.” Way to make those Red Sox season tickets work for you, Ben.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Loser gets shot at redemption by coaching team of young misfits. This time around it’s called The Winning Season and stars Sam Rockwell as the has-been coach “asked to run the local high school's girls basketball team,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Emma Roberts and Rob Corddry co-star.

Seven Children of the Corn movies simply weren’t enough, so the original will be remade. David Anders of Heroes and Kandyse McClure of Battlestar Galactica will play “Burt and Vicky, a couple with marital problems whose attempt at a second-honeymoon driving trip ends up taking them into a seemingly deserted rural community that conceals a grim secret among its rows of tall corn.”

Related:
Unwatchable #71: "Gigli"
Trailer Review: "Choke"

DVD Roundup for August 26, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s bumper crop of Westerns necessitates a temporary name change for this column.

DVD of the Week: 1962’s How the West Was Won may not have been the greatest classic Western ever made, but it was almost certainly the biggest, boasting three directors (Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall) and an all-star cast (led by John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, and Richard Widmark) to tell a Western family saga spanning half a century. In addition, the film boasting some stunning Western vistas designed to fully exploit the three-screen Cinerama process- this was one of only two narrative features to be exhibited using honest-to-goodness Cinerama. The biggest advantage of this week’s new Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray) of the film is that it comes closer than any DVD edition to date to replicating the look of Cinerama in digital form. Instead of the “join lines” and standard 2.35:1 ‘Scope framing of previous editions, this new edition of the film features a new technology that effectively unifies the three Cinerama frames into the original aspect ratio of 2.89:1. There are also a number of special features, notably the 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure that explores the famed camera process, as well as a trailer, archival featurette, audio commentary, and plenty of collectible memorabilia about the film and its stars. Nothing will be quite like watching How the West Was Won in Cinerama, but this new edition makes the home viewing experience better than ever.

In other oater news, this week also brings the Warner Home Video Western Classics Collection, which includes the 1960 remake Cimarron, Escape From Fort Bravo, Many Rivers to Cross, Saddle the Wind, The Law and Jake Wade, and The Stalking Moon, with each film also sold individually. In addition, Warner is also releasing the Errol Flynn Westerns Box Set (Warner), which contains Montana, Rocky Mountain, San Antonio, and Virginia City. And don’t overlook the Blu-Ray only release of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (Warner).

Meanwhile, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas (Fox, also Blu-Ray); David Mamet MMA drama Redbelt (Sony, also Blu-Ray); the acclaimed documentary Chicago 10 (Paramount), Lynch (Ryko Entertainment), a documentary about the ever-popular David Lynch; Uwe Boll’s must-see Postal (Universal Music & Video Distribution), costarring former DVD Digest contributor David Huddleston; and the latest release from our pals at Benten Films, Team Picture.

Other classics coming to DVD this week include: a new pressing of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Criterion); the Henry Selick-directed The Nightmare Before Christmas Collector’s Edition (Disney); Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen Special Edition (First Look); and Monica Bellucci’s nude body transforming into a rolling landscape for your enjoyment in Brotherhood of the Wolf: Director’s Cut (Universal).

In TV on DVD, there’s Entourage Season 4 (HBO), Everybody Hates Chris Season 3 (Warner), Heroes Season 2 (Universal, also Blu-Ray), NCIS Season 5 (Paramount), and The Shield Season 6 (Sony).

Finally, this week’s action-packed lineup of Blu-Ray only releases includes: Errol Flynn (again) in The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner); Gov. Schwarzenegger fighting Satan in End of Days (Universal); the first season of NBC’s Heroes (Universal); Crockett and Tubbs hitting the big screen in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal), and the submarine thriller U-571 (Universal).

Turned Stick-Up Kid, But Look What You Done Did

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:30:00 GMT

The fifth and final season of The Wire, considered in some quarters to be the best show in television history, has wrapped up, and with an August release set for the DVD box set, it's ready to take what we're guessing will be a lofty place in the annals of TV drama. One of the great strengths of the show was its dynamite ensemble cast -- there wasn't a bad actor on the show, and it was a character actor's dream. Very few of the urban drama's regulars were established name actors; Frankie Faison, who played the politically adept police commissioner Ervin Burrell, was probably the best-known face to moviegoers from his appearances in the Hannibal Lecter films. And although the series gave a lot of otherwise unknown talents a chance to shine, a lot of fans wondered if their success on The Wire would translate to roles elsewhere.

As New York magazine's Vulture blog reports, after a few rough patches, at least a few Wire alums are going on to prominent roles outside the confines of HBO: Amy Ryan, after an Oscar-nominated role in Gone Baby Gone, is now a series regular on The Office; Lance Reddick is appearing in Lost and on the big screen in Fringe; Jamie Hector will have a recurring role on Heroes next season; Gbenga Akinnagbe appears in the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3; Idris Elba (who was so compelling as the drug kingpin Stringer Bell) will be in both Rocknrolla and The Unborn; Tristan Wilds, who was fantastic as corner kid turned stick-up boy Michael Lee, will be in (of all things) the upcoming Beverly Hills 90210 TV series; series star Dominic West will be in the sequel to The Punisher; and Michael K. Williams, arguably The Wire's most charismatic actor as the thuglife Robin Hood named Omar, will be appearing in high-profile roles in Spike Lee's WWII epic Miracle at St. Anna and the eagerly anticipated big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Which is all well and good, but if Robert F. Chew -- one of the show's greatest actors as the conniving drug dealer "Proposition Joe" Stewart -- doesn't get some big-screen time soon, we're gonna be most upset.

No Forgetting Kristen Bell

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

We’ve read quite enough about Jason Segel’s “chunky, blemished ass and little white man-boobs,” not to mention his mother’s horror at seeing his wee-wee onscreen. He may have written Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but by gum, Kristen Bell plays the title character and she needs a little love, too. Bell would have already appeared on movie screens this spring if Fanboys had been released as scheduled, but as Jack Clark of the New York Daily News learned, she has seen neither the original version nor the “Darth Weinstein” cut of the movie that remains in limbo.

Nothing will stop Sarah Marshall from arriving in theaters Friday, though it remains to be seen whether it will be Bell’s stepping-stone to movie stardom. Clark seems to think it’s a strong possibility given her broad appeal; not only has she sewn up the geek fanbase thanks to her three seasons as Veronica Mars and her stint on Heroes, she’s “doing well with frat boys, too - she's been on Maxim's Hot 100 list - and she's even scoring with vegetarians (PETA's World's Sexiest Woman).” So if you’re a geeky vegetarian frat boy, she’s pretty much your ideal woman.

As Sarah Marshall, however, she’s the bad girl who dumps Segel while his junk dangles in the breeze. (“At one point, there was a nylon sock involved," Bell says. "That just drew more attention to the situation, so we ditched it.”) Not that she has a problem playing the villain, as those of us who caught her turn as a con artist on Deadwood recall. “It was never anyone's intention to make her a bitch. The reason I was attracted to this project was because Jason really did give the 'villains' a chance to explain themselves, as opposed to a romantic comedy where you're told who to root for and who to dislike.”

Next on her plate, Bell faces what may be her biggest challenge yet: being romanced by Danny DeVito in Disney’s When in Rome. According to Reuters, Bell “plays a love-starved New York curator who steals magical coins from a famous Roman fountain but soon finds herself in a bizarre situation when she is pursued back to New York by a band of aggressive suitors -- the very people whose coins she took. DeVito will play one of the suitors.” We can only hope that, unlike Segel, the Penguin keeps his pants on.

Selling the "Cloverfield" Monster

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the arrival on Friday of Cloverfield, S. James Snyder reviews the marketing of the movie, which started last summer with a trailer strategically attached to the release of Transformers. (If you're going to try to coax people out to see a new movie in the misbegotten month of January, you can't start too early.) "By the end of the weekend, that cryptic preview — which purported to show the home video of a New York house party at the moment it erupts into chaos, as something gigantic, but never seen, attacks the city with huge explosives — had spawned its own universe of online traffic. Initially, people simply tried to find the title of the film, but as word spread that this was, in fact, the new unlabeled disaster film by producer J.J. Abrams, fans of Mr. Abrams's secret-filled TV serial "Lost" quickly scoured the trailer for clues. It didn't take long for Mr. Abrams himself to add fuel to the fire, identifying www.1-18-08.com as one of the film's Web sites, but ensuring fans there were others out there, waiting to be found."

The simulated-home-movie technique of the Cloverfield footage immediately calls up memories of The Blair Witch Project, as does the whole idea of selling a movie through hints and teases located on-line. But part of the brilliance of the Blair Witch campaign was the way the website and other paraphernalia attached the movie, such as a fake "documentary" that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, created an instant urban myth; some viewers enjoyed being able to pretend that the movie was "real", while some other, less canny viewers actually thought that it was based on something real and felt outraged about being hoaxed when they saw the stars on TV next to Jay Leno. That option isn't really open here; there can't be too many people who've seen the TV commercials showing a mysterious, bellowing something decapitating the Statue of Liberty and generally wreaking havoc on Manhattan who thought that it was really happening, though if there are any such people, they're probably planning to vote for Mitt Romney. Another point of comparison is Snakes on a Plane, the viral-marketed B-movie whose title and catch phrase were all but decreed by Internet feedback. That movie whipped up a firestorm of on-line interest that didn't carry over to the box office; the lesson that the makers of Cloverfield may have taken from it is that if you give the geeks too much control of the pre-release party, then everyone may have started fishing for their car keys by the time the picture opens. (Incidentally, "Cloverfield" was originally supposed to be a temporary code name for the movie, taken from a street address of the Bad Robot company offices, but it's become so identified with the project that now they're stuck with it.)

The Cloverfield marketing team has risen to the challenge of this brave new marketing world with an intricate set of interlocking come-ons, including one surprising tie-in: "In a recent episode of the NBC series Heroes, fans took note of the name and logo of a soft drink that also appeared on the T-shirt of a character in the trailer for Cloverfield — 'Slusho' — which led them to the Web site (www.slusho.jp) and a bizarre online commercial (viewable at YouTube.com) that seemed to have nothing to do with the New York disaster in the Cloverfield trailer. But that was until a new series of fake news reports was released online, all detailing the destruction of a drilling platform out in the middle of the ocean, supposedly owned by Tagruato, the fictional Japanese company that owns the fictional Slusho." In an effort to mix up all this Internet activity with a little real-world buzz, Paramount has also invited a couple hundred of the movie's close, personal "MySpace friends" to " 'Rob's surprise party' — the fictional party interrupted by rumbling explosions in the trailers — on January 17, the night before the film opens." Ultimately, though, an online marketer named Adam Paul insists that, "The key is that the movie has to actually live up to what you've promised in the hype," which sounds very old-school. We don't know any more about what's actually going to be on those screens come January 18 than you do, but we do know this: if audiences get their first clear look at the Cloverfield monster, whatever it is, and respond with laughter or snores, this surprise party is going to wrap itself up very quickly.