Of course, some films released in the first half of each year are so incredibly good that they capture an audience and keep it captured for long enough to compete with those that are freshly delivered in December.  This is particularly true for films that excel in categories like music, effects and animation.  Nonetheless, studios like Pixar have to base their decisions to release great films in June on a lot of market study.  They’re giving up awards and a ton of free advertising by doing so.

I think there is value in looking at the wasteland that is the first half of a year in film, and making a note of what was great during that time.  For example, at the time of this writing, Kick-Ass has an incredible 8.1 weighted average rating over at IMDB.  While that rating will certainly fall a bit once it is released on DVD, I’ll bet there weren’t 50,000 people in the world who knew that Kick-Ass existed for more than a month before it was released, and this says to me that the film actually is quite good.  It’s reputation is built on results, rather than hype.

There was a lot of disappointment at the movies in the first half of 2010.  Alice In Wonderland was a rare Tim Burton dud, Clash Of The Titans positively stunk, and someone paid Uwe Boll to release a third Bloodrayne movie.  Someone should really put a stop to that guy.  I realize that I’m not among the first billion people to say that.  I often wonder if he watches great films and considers emulating them.  I know of one that everyone should see.

The best film of the first half of 2010 is How To Train Your Dragon.

What a masterpiece!  From the spot-on perfect voice performances by Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson, to the simple and elegant Dreamworks animation, to the pitch-perfect script, How To Train Your Dragon is a joy to behold.  I’ve allowed the film to envelop me three times now, and I doubt I’ll get tired of it any time soon.  I knew I was hooked in the first minute:

This is Berk. It’s twelve days north of Hopeless and a few degrees south of Freezing to Death. It’s located solidly on the Meridian of Misery. My village.

In a word? Sturdy, and it’s been here for seven generations, but every single building is new. We have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunset. The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice or mosquitoes. We have…

Dragons have long been confined in animated films to the stuff of cliche.  If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.  Not this time, though.  The dragons in How To Train Your Dragon don’t conform to any particular shape or size or manner that you’re used to, and it works.  By the same token very little in this film conforms as expected.  The screenplay doesn’t follow the book on which it is based at all.  The characters are called Vikings and look a bit Viking-esque, but don’t sound much like you’d expect Vikings to sound.  They sound more like characters from Torchwood.  The music in this film is way, way beyond your expectation.  Stratospherically good music.  Let me be perfectly clear.

The John Powell music from How To Train Your Dragon will win the Academy Award for best original score at the Oscars 8 months from now.  At a time when composers like Michael Giacchino and Alexandre Desplat have cemented themselves as the newer heavy hitters in the film scoring business, John Powell just did the equivalent of stepping up to the plate and crushing a first pitch into the center field bleachers.  He scored a lob kick over the keeper’s head from midfield.  He got the one-punch knockout in the first round.  I’ll stop with the sports metaphors.

I couldn’t wait to buy the score for this film.  I made that decision in the first five minutes of the movie.  It’s that good.

I hope, if you have not yet seen How To Train Your Dragon, and it is still playing in a theater nearby, that you go do so immediately.  If that is not possible, I hope that you pick it up on blu-ray when it eventually arrives (and at this point, Dreamworks is so utterly surprised at the reception and box office for the film that they have not yet announced a release date for the video).  Furthermore, I hope that when you do see it on blu-ray, you realize that it is even a better film than the version you’re seeing.  It was epic on the big screen.

I was hesitant to review the film before I had seen the whole thing.  I have a long-standing belief that the quality of a movie is a constant – that if you’re offended by the first third of a movie, you aren’t likely to find the last 2/3 very appealing, either.  In films where there is lots of action, it is quite typically spread out throughout the film.  So with Cloverfield, I had originally seen enough of the film to pass personal judgment.  But writing a review and talking about a movie publicly requires more care.  There are exceptions to the consistency rule.  I’m sure that I will see a film some day where I am bored-to-tears for 98% of the duration and then ripped to the edge of my seat at the very end.

Thinking of The Sixth Sense, perhaps?  I ruined that film’s twist by leaning over to my wife about 15 minutes along and speculating “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and my speculation was the exact twist ending.

But Cloverfield, if anything, is a movie that builds excitement as it goes.  The initial premise is this – the audience are all being allowed to see footage recovered from a spectacular event.  The footage was taken by persons who were on the scene.  The scene is New York City.  The footage is entirely contained on one tape.  It is not congruous.

And therein lies the clever bit in Cloverfield.  It’s hard to explain, but I’ll try:

Imagine that you and I had a video camera and we recorded various parts of a day we spent together.  Let’s say that we got 80 minutes of footage all together, spread out over most of the day.  Now imagine that the tape is rewound in the camera, and then we watch a few minutes, and then the camera is accidentally handed over to someone else, who sets out to document other events.  Well – there goes our previous recording.  Except that this third person stops every now and then and fast-forwards the tape a few seconds before he continues his filming.  Now what have you got?

If we did this in real-life, without any planning, you’d have a mess.  But if it was scripted just so… it might be the most magical voyeurism around.

Cloverfield was written by Drew Goddard, who also wrote several episodes of both J.J. Abrahms’ television shows (Alias, Lost) and Joss Whedon’s (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel).  Goddard has no small task.  Unlike most scripts, he does not get to write straight, trade-off dialogue here.  Instead, the dialogue takes a back seat to the purpose of each line delivered.  Handicam or no, excellent sound effects or no, the realism of Cloverfield depends almost entirely on the script telling the actors what to do.  What they say is almost lost in the din of haste to run for our lives that constitutes the movie, once it gets going.

And let’s not overlook the sounds of Cloverfield.  Of course, we are amazed by how seamlessly New York City can be destroyed all around actors nowadays (witness I Am Legend), but the grandeur that is modern CG-visual green-screen super-double-throwdown fakery would be undermined in one second if not for sound effects being proper, and Cloverfield deserves an Oscar for sound.  I hope that it is remembered a year from now.  Note that the entire narrative is captured by a single handicam, so the only music in the movie is that which the handicam’s microphone encounters during one scene.  Music often takes some of the load from the shoulders of sound engineers – mistakes can go unnoticed by the listener, whose ear is busy with an orchestral score.  Not so in Cloverfield.  In many scenes, the lack of score heightens the terror much more than screeching violins could have.

The in-front-of-camera acting is mostly handled by Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas and Michael Stahl-David, who plays the leader-of-the-pack, Rob.  This is really Stahl-David’s first major movie role, to which he graduated from a leading role in the short-lived television drama The Black Donnellys.  He does an excellent job of keeping the continuity of the character, which cannot be easy when filming takes place over days and weeks.

J.J. Abrahms, of course, is the defining personality of Cloverfield, and it resembles his most major work – television’s Lost – in several ways, the primary of which is a willingness to leave all which is unseen by the camera unknown.  This is not an absolute.  In one scene that drew gasps from the audience, the camera is taken into a television shop and pointed at a newscast.  This essentially gave the movie a second camera for a moment, and was a trick that was not overused.  Abrahms and Goddard are happy to leave the audience wanting more, and in some cases – such as a clear understanding of exactly what it is making all that noise – much more.  In our screening of the movie, many in the audience were demonstrably upset when the credits began to roll.  Their complaint was that too many questions had been asked and not answered.

I believe that, if this is an issue, then it is a risk that you take when you go to the movies.  I knew one person (perhaps the only one in the world) who knew nothing about The Fellowship Of The Ring when she went to see the film.  Afterwards, she was quite frustrated that “it didn’t have an ending.”  This has never been an issue for me, even when I was expecting a different ending to a film than was delivered.  In particular, with what some call “hyper-realistic” movies such as Cloverfield, the less unlikely the ending, the better.  In overly-contrived drama, we often get (and have come to expect) a huge spider web of events to lead to an unforeseen conclusion, or a conclusion through which we get a very high amount of closure.  In reality, there is little closure, and Cloverfield‘s ending is exactly the sort of punctuation mark that reality would have, were it being viewed on the big-screen.

I give Cloverfield an A-, or an 8 out of 10.  My hope is that its success doesn’t spawn a rash of single-hand-camera gimmick movies, because that is a very difficult method to pull off, and it could never be used as a crutch.  If for no other reason, think of the jalapeno hot dog eating public!