Smells like hurl: Cloverfield

Monster movies aren’t really my shtick, unless they happen to be cheesy “B” monster movies that make me laugh, or something like Jurassic Park, which at least has a sort of scientific edge to it, if an implausible one. So, the Cloverfield trailers that appeared on TV a while back did not move me.

Something about the storyline turned me off: a group of trendy young people from New York flee an impossible, gargantuan lizard. Too deep for me.

Worse yet (or “better yet” in the view of many), much of the production was filmed with a camcorder (“reality” cinema, you know), generating lots of deliberately herky-jerky, topsy-turvy footage. Think: The Blair Witch Project Meets Godzilla. Or maybe Godzilla meets the Tilt-a-Whirl.

I can feel that larcenous, piss-injected popcorn coming up, just thinking about it.

In all fairness, maybe it’s a great movie.* If you like that sort of thing. However, it seems that Cloverfield has been inducing genuine nausea in some people – a result of the “dynamic” nature of the “cinematography.” So, if you should go to see the big lizard chasing the hipsters and generally making a mess of New York, despite the proliferation across this nation of high performance military jet-aircraft with tactical weapons capable of leveling buildings of steel-reinforced concrete…AND, should you catch a whiff of street pizza in the theater (or maybe those banana-scented crystals like the janitor in grade school used to deoderize kid-barf loci), you’ll know just what happened.

Let’s hope it doesn’t happen to you. If you like disorienting carnival rides that possibly stink of vomit, you’ll probably be fine going to see Cloverfield.

Some viewers finding ‘Cloverfield’ nauseating to watch

Thousands of moviegoers were no doubt clutching their seats while watching Cloverfield, last weekend’s No. 1 film at the box office. A few of them were clutching their stomachs as well.

Since the movie opened Jan. 18, some patrons say they felt nausea and dizziness while watching the horror flick, much of which was filmed in a jerky motion with a hand-held camera.

Erika Hasegawa, 32, was watching Cloverfield at a theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday night but had to leave in the middle of the film.

“I’m really nauseous right now — just hold on for a second,” she said, before walking down the hall and retching in a trash can….

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“Hey, it’s a big freaky monster – where’s yer camcorder?”

*Probably not

Starbucks corporate analysts: sausage on a roll stinks like a dead dog

I like coffee, a lot. I drink it every day, all day. But as it is with so many other things here in post-millenium America, a lot of people can’t be satisfied just enjoying a cup of good coffee. They have to turn it into a culture and yammer on about “bouquet” or “citrus overtones,” shell out tips equivalent to the price of their beverage, and tap their foot in 4/4 time to the 5/4 time signature coming out of the sound system.

And what a bunch of smelly, nouveau-rich, pop-culture mock-elitist bullshit the article below is. You’d think that a breakfast sandwich was on par with ass, to warrant a position as shallow as this.

As for “atmosphere” – well, Starbucks, Inc., I like your coffee, but I find it virtually impossible to either read or chat with free-form jazz blaring out of the speaker over my head. I know another writer who routinely goes to McDonald’s for his personal “coffee/idea sessions,” specifically to avoid the distracting nature of the Starbucks “atmosphere.”

Irony of ironies, that worldly philosophers, painters, and writers of a bygone day, if brought to the present, might choose somewhere other than Starbucks to hatch their world-shattering ideas (there’s a short story in that – go ahead and use it). Possibly even because they couldn’t get sausage on a roll, there.

Starbucks: Ooh, That Smell

What’s that smell!?

If that is what you were thinking when you walked into a Starbucks recently you are not alone. Analysts agreed on Thursday that the smell of warm breakfast sandwiches is causing a major brand crisis for the coffee giant.

“The warming breakfast aroma is its biggest problem, overwhelming the coffee aroma that Starbucks views as critical to its experience,” said Bear Stearns analyst Joseph Buckley.

Added JPMorgan analsyt John Ivankoe: “We will welcome the removal of this food … because in certain cases the stores did in fact smell like cooked processed food, and not at all like coffee….”

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