Level Orange

Not to take anything away from my friends in the great land of Japan, but somehow director Matt Reeves and producer JJ Abrams have managed to create something entirely new for the giant monster movie genre—a gripping and engrossing giant monster movie without a giant monster.

I was even more pleased when the movie came to a close and the other people in the audience around me were completely perplexed and unsure of what they had just seen. Given the level of promotion for Cloverfield, I’m not sure where people got the idea that this would be some sort of kaiju extravaganza.

In fact, I’m glad it wasn’t that at all. Not to spoil anything, but if the sheer terror of your everyday life being turned upside down without any rhyme or reason doesn’t evoke even the most basic of emotions from you, then it’s probably better that you stick to men in rubber suits.

Now that I’ve got my Xbox 360 back and can watch HD DVD movies again, I took a few minutes to crack open the copy of Carlito’s Way that I won a while back from Filmspotting. I didn’t even get to really dig into the film itself, but went for the extras first.

Watching The Making of Carlito’s Way, I found the appearance of Edwin Torres, the author of Carlito’s Way and After Hours, the most interesting. Not because he wrote the stories that the movie was based on, or even how much he wanted to capture the authentic Puerto Rican angle in 1970s New York. Rather, it was the realization of how closely Al Pacino must have studied Torres and modeled his voice and speech patterns for his performance in the film. There are times during the documentary when I could’ve sworn I was hearing Pacino’s Carlito Brigante, when in fact it was Torres himself. And here all this time I thought Pacino was simply “making up” some strange Latino-urban-gangster accent, when according to Torres, that’s just the way the people he knew talked. Go figure.