Just like the cover. Awesome. He's an exterminator robot who starts to hunt humans (Isn't that what every exterminator robot does?) And he's a knife killer? Great idea!
Cloverfield is sheer panic. As close to being in the thick of a disaster as you could get. It's to 9/11 what Godzilla is to Hiroshima, and I don't ever want to see it again. But it was something new: the monster film made as personal as possible. It's done at the expense of plot and exposition and resolution, but it's done beautifully and realistically. There are very few movies that make me really fear death, but this one did. I could not relax for hours after the film ended: desperation, fear, and vulnerability. 
American happiness is a temptation, one to which I've succumbed on several occasions. More than once I've grown weary of the pervasive gloom of my soul. Like millions of other Americans, I have tried to flee the sadness, attempted to escape, by any means possible, the weight, the fatigue, the fret. Let's be serious: Life, in any form, is terribly and irredeemably hard. Why shouldn't we all scurry from the heartache in the most superficial ways possible, through BlackBerrys and Lexapro and liposuction? Why shouldn't we bask in the gaudy glow of the pervasive American dream? What's lost in this collective stupor? What's wrong, finally, with wanting nothing but bliss?
At the behest of well-meaning friends, I have purchased books on how to be happy. I have tried to turn my chronic scowl into a bright smile. I have attempted to become more active, to get out of my dark house and away from my somber books and participate in the world of meaningful action. I have taken up jogging, the Latin language, and the chair of a university English department. I have fostered the drive to succeed in my career. I have bought an insurance policy, a PalmPilot, and a cellphone. I have taken an interest in Thanksgiving and Christmas, in keeping my hair trimmed short, and in meticulously ironing my clothes. I have viewed Doris Day and Frank Capra movies. I have feigned interest in the health of others. I have dropped into the habit of saying "great" and "wonderful" as much as possible. I have pretended to take seriously certain good causes designed to make the world a better place. I have contemplated getting a dog. I have started eating salads. I have tried to discipline myself in nodding knowingly. I have tried to be mindful of others but ended up pissed as hell. I have written a book on the hard-earned optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have undertaken yoga. I have stopped yoga and gone into tai chi. I have thought of going to psychiatrists and getting some drugs. I have quit all of this and then started again and then once more quit. Now I plan to stay quit. The road to hell is paved with happy plans.
My basic instinct is toward melancholia — a state I must nourish. In fostering my essential nature, I'm trying to live according to what I see as my deep calling. Granted, it's difficult at times to hold hard to this vocation, this labor in the fields of sadness. But I realize somewhere in the core of my bones that I was born to the blues.
The world of the dead is populated by the spirits of every person who has ever lived. The women live idyllic existences in small towns and cities. The men – all men – are two rival armies: the good and the brutal. Each person is conscripted at their death into one of the armies, the choice determined by the actions he or she exhibited during life. Upon conscription, each man begins a fight in a never-ending battle, on a field the size of a continent. He fights against other men. This is not Christian – it doesn’t determine the fate of the world. This isn’t
The armies of the good do not have enough soldiers. The brutal outnumber the good because of the warlike and feudal heritage to which men are heir. Today more good men exist in the living.
Recognizing this, agents from the Army of the Good come into the world of the living, a place that exists geographically accessible to the world of the dead, to its battlefield and cities. These agents are women, for the men must only fight. The women come here, ghostly but dressed in corporeal clothing, to kill good men who, in death, will swell their ranks.
Some living men – both good and evil – know of the truth of the world of the dead, and they kill themselves out of zeal to join an army. They are feared by the good but shunned by the brutal. They are rookies: it is the pain of life – as well as the inflicting of pain in life – that gives a dead warrior his skill in battle. The suicides may fight but not command.
The battle occurs on a plain large enough to see the sunset on one end and the moonrise on the other. It is wide, long, and green with grass and mossy rocks, like a cool and rainy land in the world of the living. It is trampled often enough to turn the ground to mud, but this never occurs. The battlefield remains pristine. There are puddles and flowers in the summer, and, in the winter, winds that howl like subway trains. The soldiers do not noticed. They fight incessantly, doing great harm without destruction to their foes. They battle clashes and would be visible from space if our satellites could be pointed properly. The fight goes on without spectators or judges.
Before they lift her onto the stretcher, the scarf falls from her face and I can see there’s been a homicide and I’m going to have to figure out who did it. I can tell it's going to be a long couple weeks before I can get this woman’s face out of my mind.
A patina of expensive wax smoothes the imperfections on the skin of his hand so that men find his handshakes difficult to judge. A gloss of musk and organic matter harvested from the banks of pure rivers has removed the dirt from the deepest pores of his face. Three Taiwanese women with little to dedicate themselves to aside from the cuticles of rich men tend to his fingers and toes. Their weekly ministrations and dietary advice ensure that the half-moons of his fingers remain white, not pink or red, and that his nails are neither too supple nor too brittle. These women care deeply about his nails because he pays them to do so.
Two gay men apply a level of attention usually reserved for the restoration of antiques to his hair. His hair must every day look effortlessly tousled. This is careless look that requires constant vigilance each morning to secure any stray follicles. Only aesthetically sanctioned cowlicks may remain.
After his hair, skin, and nails are attended to, he brushes his teeth. He scrapes his tongue with a silver half moon bought specifically for that purpose. Once it tarnishes, he discards it. His teeth have been sealed behind a veneer so thin and strong a samurai would find it impressive.
His single vice, his single aesthetic flaw, is his eyes, which several decades filled with memories he tries to hide have suffused with an abnormal number of burst capillaries. These capillaries feather into still smaller vessels, meaning that his eyes are less white than red. This is how he keeps himself humble, by not correcting his eyes. By this, he thinks, he stays a normal man. This is a willful and sentimental error, and as such is no act of humility at all.
The sky above the village burned a boiling rose of pinks and oranges. The hills ran red with the blood of the men who had died on their horses.
On the street stood the best men. The best men pointed their pistols at one another and fired.
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A wild horse running rampant and unbridled through the dusty main street startles an obvious drunk into cursing. I lean backwards further in my chair and imagine that the creaking of wood beneath me is the neighing of the stallion.
A trio of hairy and powerful men dressed to urbanely for their station exits a saloon just as the horse, brown with white whorled hair on its face, passes by the doors. One man is shocked by the wind of its passing. Another curses as he drops a brown bottle, which clatters down the stairs. The last whistles as if to signal the horse, which kicks and catches him in the face. The man falls in a heap as if the floor beneath him has uncouthly given way. The horse gallops off, its hooves neither bloodstained nor cobbled.
The man below curses again and opens the flap of his coat pocket to withdraw something. The man atop the hill raises his rifle to his shoulder in a perfect and unbroken arc. He fires it almost immediately and then allows his arm to drop to the side just as quickly. He does not pause even to see the man below fall, a bullet through his spine, stopping him peacefully and abruptly.
Receipts are the effluvia of any transaction, the mold spores of the consumer machine - constant reminders of what you buy – a piece of gum to a fighter jet. They’re a form of impersonality. They imply that the seller won’t remember the buyer, and that even though the two may never meet again, each has put such importance into the purchase that it needs to be remembered. A receipt is insurance against forgetting, a piece of paper recounting the banality of buying and filling it with significance. That’s all we get from buying: a piece of paper, and when we look at it later, the blackout-drunk wondering of what the fuck it means.
The night I get cut off at the bar for the first time, I pick up S. from the airport and we go straight home where we have two shots of scotch each. It’s 1 pm but we’re ready. S.’s tall, so when I hug him hello I feel like a little kid. He’s cramped and weary from the flight, and he drinks the scotch slowly. I drink mine fast and don’t get a buzz. We go visit T., who gets us drunk on 3 bottles of Charles Shaw white wine – sweet and thick, and I don’t like it, but I drink it anyway. T.’s always had a thing for him, and she tells me so when S. is in the bathroom. What about your boyfriend, I ask, and she says, I don’t know.
We sober up later that night over tea and a movie. It’s the food that does it, thick plates of beans, rice, and lard, storing the alcohol in you like pollution waiting underneath an empty lot.. We go to the bar, inevitably. S. will drink cheap beer and T. will drink a lot. I’ll drink tall boys and whiskey all night and talk literature and movies with Jake and Kenny and I will feel like a man, like it’s good to have male friends now. First T. will get cut off, and then me, and it will be funny, because I’ve never been cut off before. About 1:30 when I go to the bar for another order of beer and whiskey and the bartender will bring them to me – a big can and two shots – and he will say that I can’t have any more. T. will ask S. to come home with him, and he’ll say no. I’ll pay my bill, and then, later, when S. and I are home, she’ll call him and they’ll flirt. I’ll get mad for reasons I can't quite identify, and I'll yell, but I’ll be too drunk to have any effect. What passes for concern on my part is, in reality, a basic bitterness due to my jealousy at how easy others can find love. S. will tell me about the yelling the next day. The next day she’ll come by and it will be strange and I will pretend that nothing happened the night before, nothing worth recounting except S. wrestling the scotch bottle out of my hands, wrestling a bottle I’ve grabbed so I could take up to my room and drink it fast because I’m sick of hearing them flirt. And we’ll tell the story later on, like it’s funny, and everyone we tell it to will laugh, but there’ll be a part of it no one mentions, a part that isn’t that funny at all.
Each man’s sadness is composed of many regrets, fears, and memories, all interacting with frightening subtlety. The loneliness of his 9th birthday party, the one no one attended is reinforced by his memory of blacking out drunk in a hotel room in
Woody Guthrie
