{"id":6157,"date":"2011-03-05T23:34:15","date_gmt":"2011-03-06T04:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=6157"},"modified":"2011-03-05T23:34:15","modified_gmt":"2011-03-06T04:34:15","slug":"monster-mash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=6157","title":{"rendered":"Monster mash"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/81595350@N00\/5474832269\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm6.static.flickr.com\/5180\/5474832269_c2626cb3d0.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Not much of a Saturday, all things being equal, just the kind that seems to vanish out from under you. Beyond stopping by the library and the post office, I&#8217;m not sure that I did much of anything today.<\/p>\n<p>This evening, I did watch <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt1470827\/\">Monsters<\/a>, which manages to do a whole lot with almost nothing&#8230;and yet ultimately not feel like a whole lot in the end. It&#8217;s sort of a cross between <i>Cloverfield<\/i>, with that movie&#8217;s oft-unseen alien nasties but minus its shaky-cam aesthetic and interchangeable characters, and <i>District 9<\/i>, with that movie&#8217;s impressive yet low-budget special effects but minus the political commentary, or actually much of any script. The two leads work well together, with the unforced chemistry (perhaps of two people <i>looking<\/i> for chemistry), and the movie does a remarkable amount of world-building and raising of tension with very few appearances of the titular alien monsters. The Mexican locations are both exotic and familiar, suggesting a very real and lived-in world, with the creature effects, impressive as they might be, relegated mostly to the background.<\/p>\n<p>Which would be fine if the movie were as interesting as it was amiably exotic. In many ways, it&#8217;s effective because it <i>isn&#8217;t<\/i> a traditional, scary creature-feature. It&#8217;s less effective because it doesn&#8217;t ever seem to figure out what <i>else<\/i> it wants to be instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not much of a Saturday, all things being equal, just the kind that seems to vanish out from under you. Beyond stopping by the library and the post office, I&#8217;m not sure that I did much of anything today. This evening, I did watch Monsters, which manages to do a whole lot with almost nothing&#8230;and &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=6157\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14,28],"class_list":["post-6157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-movies","tag-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}