Vaughn Chronicles

Cloverfield (A)

Many might disagree with my scoring of the movie, but I really don’t care, this movie kicked my ass seven days from Sunday.

This flick was intense as any I have seen in a very long time. I don’t remember ever feeling adrenaline flowing as much as Cloverfield induced. This is a modern monster classic, and it does it so well, yet J.J. Abrams adds his own ingredients to the classic monster recipe. The main ingredient he adds is the cliffhanger, there aren’t any scientists letting the audience know what it is, where it came from, and how to kill it. Now, people hate cliffhangers, everyone does. Initially I felt a little ripped off at the end, but my imagination kicked in, and took over from there. That was the point, this was what so many reluctantly ignored, they were ignorant and they needed the ending to be spoon fed to them. Cloverfield to me represents a new age in filmmaking. Utilizing not only traditional mediums of advertisements, but introducing viral marketing, and ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) into the mix. Viral marketing is somewhat young, but not entirely new, it went so well for Cloverfield, that many fan sites popped up about it, and had everyone talking about it.

The movie was shot entirely with a Panasonic HD mini-cam, and the budget for the flick was only $25 million. That it folks! $25mil… Most blockbusters are at least $100mil. The premise of the movie being a tape recovered by our Government was great, it really made you really feel you were experiencing something great, something on a very personal level, and something very tragic. A love story is thrown into the flick, and is one of the things that grab you further into the movie; you really feel their pain, and their love.

I would have given this movie an A+ if it had not been for a couple of things I feel inclined to nit-pick. First off, it’s that literally everyone at the going away party looked like a model. I know its NYC, but not everyone there looks like a model, trust me. Secondly is the character Marlena Diamond. Her humor didn’t feel right, it felt a little forced, and stale. Lizzy Caplan was pretty good in Mean Girls, but in Cloverfield she looked identical to Zooey Deschanel in every scene (not thats a bad thing at all, just if she was going to be like her, fucking be LIKE her and step up the acting, k?).

T.J. Miller was great as Hud, bringing a much needed comic-relief to a terrible disaster. Wonder if anyone else noticed the person with the camera was named Hud, as in H.U.D. (Heads Up Display), coincidence or not, good shit.

I do plan on seeing it again, just for the experience, if you haven’t, I insist you do, its quite a ride.

~Vaughn

Start: Hemet, California
End: Newport News, Virginia

I had originally planned on making 4 posts, each for a day of driving I did back to Newport News. I decided, in what a couple people called “laziness”, to just sum the entire thing up in one post. Its my blog, if I want to be lazy, I will :).

So, starting over, summing it up, here we go.

My initial plan was to leave Hemet at around 7-7:30AM, get a good head start, beat that awful L.A. county traffic, and get to my hotel a little early to relax. This didn’t happen of course, because women are too emotional :). I ended up leaving at around 9AM, which completely shot my mood and dipped my moral into the shitter. This would be my longest driving trip ever so far, and possibly the longest in my life. One end of the county, to the other.

Surprisingly traffic wasn’t all that bad that morning, minimal at best.  Highway was a constant 80MPH, with the occasional slow back down to 70-ish when passing the State Troopers (or called Sheriff’s Dept. in CA).  About 25min into the trip, I drove past a massive wind farm, which had to have had at least 500 windmills, giant ones, around 80-100ft tall. It was pretty amazing seeing these things move. Driving out of CA, thru AZ and into NM wasn’t very eventful. The desert was beautiful… for about 5 min, before it became the most redundant shit I’ve ever seen.

Oklahoma was the most fun to drive through. Not because it wasn’t desert, but the terrain was constantly changing, so I always had something to look at. Driving through OK was also somewhat boring, I think I passed 10 cops radar-gunning in a span of 30 seconds. This continues throughout the entire state. My hotel the second night in OK was awful. The room smelled like curry (the owners were Indian), and I happen to book the last room… above the main office.

The third day I was driving to my Grandparents house in Tennessee. I was there last year, but before that It’d been 10 years since I have seen the place. Most of their land was built into freeways, and the entire city looks completely different. Its a shame, they added 2 more lanes, wow. The traffic is STILL low, a lot of fucking good all that trouble the local government caused for so fucking little. Staying with my Grandparents was nice, I visited my Aunt and Cousin, with her daughter Jordan. That baby is going to be so beautiful when she grows up, red-ish hair with blue eyes.

Heading out of Nashville I managed to leave early, 6:20AM. It was nice, I was rested, one of 10 cars on the freeway at all times, just cruising. Around 9AM I stopped and grabbed a couple of breakfast burritos at McDonald’s. Although fast food, those little burritos are bloody amazing! On this last leg back to VA, I drove through part of the Appalachian Mountains, the views were breathtaking. Looking over you could see miles and miles of countryside. Now, I’m a city boy at heart, and despise living in the county, damn was it beautiful. Finally getting onto 64-east above Richmond I was psyched, but nearing Richmond, the new highway layout some retarded person, some idiot saw fit to appoint as engineer, was terrible, and confusing. I ended up accidentally going almost 50 miles south of Richmond. Calling my Dad, a.k.a. my GPS Dad, helped me get back on track. It was finally night when I got back onto 64-east, and I knew where the cops usually sit and hide on this route. So I cruised at around 85MPH with some other cars until my exit at Ft.Eustis blvd. A few minutes down Warwick and I was home.

It was so odd being home, as I had been living in CA for the past 4 months. My room was turned into a pseudo storage room. Hugging my girlfriend was so nice, seeing as how I hadn’t been able to for 5 days. She helped me re-arrange my room back to normal. I honestly don’t remember much else of that night, being tired as hell from 4 days of driving.

All in all, it was an amazing experience, I might do it again one day, but with someone else with me, to take turns driving lol.

~Vaughn