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 Unlucky Clover To be sure, that’s a good-looking door with a mighty impressive lock. But is it going to stop the Cloverfield monster, a beast that’s big enough to smash its way through New York City? Seems doubtful. Still, when you consider that the monster these people are fleeing was known on the movie set by the cutesy name Clover -- well, you can forgive the error in judgement. Find out more behind-the-scenes info about Cloverfield on the following pages. Cloverfield Confidential How do you keep a $25 million movie project about a giant monster smashing Manhattan a secret? Tell the actors they’re making Felicity ’08. By Bryan Reesman The J.J. Abrams–produced Cloverfield attacked multiplexes and scared up a surprise earlier this year: It was a hit. A big hit. The movie about a group of self-obsessed 20-something New Yorkers fleeing a large-scale reptilian assault on their city made more money during its opening weekend in January than any other movie has ever earned during an opening in that chilly month. For a monster movie that stars no big-name actors and was shot in a herky-jerky style -- through the camcorder viewpoint of one character -- that is an impressive feat. Even more impressive, though, is that the filmmakers managed to simultaneously build buzz about their movie and keep its details, especially those about the starring monster, a secret. Given Abrams’s Alias past, it makes sense that the film relied on a little deception along the way. The filmmakers released cryptic trailers and even created MySpace pages for characters that never appeared in the film. But the hoodwinking started even earlier than that. From the beginning, the scope of the project was kept under wraps, even from the cast. But now the veil can be lifted. With the completion of its profitable run at the box office, the movie’s heading to DVD, so director Matt Reeves and his cast members have agreed to declassify their cinematic secrets.  Secret Number One: Don’t work with a script. “There was initially only an outline,” says director Matt Reeves, who, as a writer, created the series Felicity, which starred Keri Russell. “It was only circulated among certain people. There wasn’t a very long paper trail on the movie. The cast thought they were coming in to audition for either Star Trek or maybe some updated Felicity. They’re like, ‘This doesn’t feel like a relationship movie. What is this?’
“We didn’t have a script at that point. And when we finally started making the movie, the actors had scripts with their names on them. So if the script ended up on the Internet, we would know who it got down to.” Luckily for the actors, no such leak ever occurred. That’s probably because the stars didn’t care to be mocked by the filmmakers anymore than they already had been during auditions. Lizzy Caplan, who plays Marlena Diamond in Cloverfield (and whom you may remember from her role as Janis Ian in Mean Girls), says one of the scenes the actors were tested with was about a group of young people squabbling as they prepare for a party. “It seemed like a coming-of-age movie,” she says. “For the callback, we had that same scene, coupled with a new scene in France. The girl in the scene was plunging an adrenaline shot into the heart of this guy. They asked us what we thought this movie was about. We guessed, and they just laughed maniacally at us because we had no idea. They later told us that scene was from Alias.” Secrets Numbers Two and Three: Set the movie in New York; shoot mostly in Los Angeles. But when shooting in New York, don’t always bother with permits. “We shot about a week and a half in New York, and that’s it,” says Odette Yustman, who plays Beth Mc- Intyre in the movie. Ah, but what a week and a half it was. For a pivotal scene that takes place on the subway line to Coney Island, the filmmakers had not secured permission from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to film. “We just got on the train with some equipment,” says Michael Stahl- David, who plays Rob Hawkins in Cloverfield and formerly starred in NBC’s short-lived New York–based series The Black Donnellys. “That was wild, thinking, ‘Wow, this is the $25 million J.J. Abrams movie that I’m doing?’ It was like six people on the F train.” Secret Number Four: Tell no one; hope for the best. “We were sworn to secrecy,” Yustman says. For her, that was difficult. For other actors, it made making Cloverfield more enjoyable. “I found it kind of fun, actually,” says Jessica Lucas, who plays Lily Ford. “Most of the time when you’re doing a movie, everyone knows what you’re doing. It was fun when any time my friends asked me, to be able to say, ‘I can’t tell you.’ ” Still, with that deep-undercover approach comes inevitable hype, which in turn leads filmgoers and critics alike to wonder whether the movie is hiding something good or just covering up its flaws. “I was nervous when I went to see it -- I’m not going to lie,” Stahl-David says. “But love it or hate it, I think it’s unconventional. It’s original.” Monster Mash
Count Cloverfield’s “Clover” as one of our five favorite giants of the big screen.
THE MONSTER: Godzilla
THE BACKSTORY: The granddaddy of giant movie-monster mashers, Godzilla is a prehistoric sea creature that lived blissfully undiscovered in the ocean until he was mutated by a blast of atomic radiation.
STRENGTHS: Breathes radiation fire, has titanium-tough scales, and seems to have somehow learned the martial arts.
WEAKNESSES: Stumpy arms, lack of speed (and quickness), and Matthew Broderick.
BEST MOVIE: There are so many to choose from. But we’re partial to Godzilla 2000 because it undid the damage of Godzilla, Broderick’s lackluster U.S. version of Japan’s favorite monster.
THE MONSTER: Gamera
THE BACKSTORY: An everyday turtle is given a megadose of radiation during a nuclear-weapons test, which causes it to become supersize and fight against weapons proliferation.
STRENGTHS: Can walk upright, breathe fire, and even shoot fire out of its shell.
WEAKNESSES: Is occasionally nice to children.
| BEST MOVIE: Though the monster debuted in the ’60s, its best appearance was in 1999’s Gamera 3: Revenge of the Iris.
THE MONSTERS: Brown Gargantua and Green Gargantua
THE BACKSTORY: Cells from Frankenstein’s monster mutate and grow into two giant, hairy humanlike monsters. Yes, really.
STRENGTHS: Mostly, just strength and size. And, in the case of Green Gargantua, the ability to live in water.
WEAKNESSES: Electricity and lounge singers. Yes, really.
BEST MOVIE: There’s actually only the one movie, the Japanese-language film War of the Gargantuas from 1966. It starred West Side Story’s Russ “Father of Amber” Tamblyn.
THE MONSTER: Gwoemul
THE BACKSTORY: At
an American military base, a careless doctor has a large quantity of
formaldehyde dumped down a sewer drain, and a sea creature that is
exposed to the chemical mutates into a giant squid-like monster. At
least it isn’t radiation this time.
STRENGTHS: Can eat people -- whole.
WEAKNESSES: Arrows.
BEST MOVIE: Again, there’s just the one movie, 2006’s The Host, but it was the biggest box-office hit in South Korea’s history. -- B.R.
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[dl] Books
Bottle of Red, Bottle of White With his new memoir, wine expert Sergio Esposito is feeding the growing American appetite for the best Italy has to offer. By Joseph Guinto  Two hours, three courses, and two bottles of wine into lunch, I finally feel like I’m getting to know Sergio Esposito. Going into this marathon meal, I thought I had a pretty good sense about this co-owner of Italian Wine Merchants -- a wine store and private-event and dinner space in Manhattan that’s also owned by Iron Chef Mario Batali and Italian wine guru Joe Bastianich. After all, I’d read Esposito’s new memoir , Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy (Broadway, $25), which is a sort of travelogue about his journeys through the Italian countryside -- his meeting, dining, and drinking with the country’s best winemakers. In the book, Esposito talks about how his family immigrated from Naples to Albany, New York, when he was a boy and about how he discovered his love of wine -- cheap, California jug wine, though it was -- while sitting on his uncle’s lap and getting a single sip at family meals. It sounded familiar. The Italian side of my family came from Sicily in Southern Italy and settled in upstate New York -- Syracuse, in our case. And, like Esposito, I fl ed the torturous winters of upstate New York at my first opportunity.
Yet even with our commonalities, and though he’s immediately gracious and hospitable and looks and sounds a lot like one of my cousins, there’s something closed off about Esposito at first. Indeed, it’s not until after we’ve polished off a variety of Italian cheeses, a house-cured fennel-studded salami, some white anchovies, cured Sardinian eel, ravioli stuffed with prosciutto, and a pan-seared turbot fillet served with cuttlefish and are crunching through a selection of cookies that he starts to open up -- smiling, laughing, and tossing out a few words that are saltier than the pecorino we began the meal with. Luckily, for the purposes of this story, there’s a nice simile here. Italian wine, like Esposito -- one of the foremost authorities on the subject in this country -- can be hard to get to know too. And it is certainly impossible to fully appreciate unless you’ve experienced it with a meal.  Therein lies the problem for Italy’s best winemakers, whose stories Esposito shares in Passion on the Vine. “People like instant gratification,” he says during our meal in Italian Wine Merchants’ vintage tasting room . “And with Italian wines, you might not get that. It can take awhile to understand them. When I do speaking engagements about wine, people will say to me, ‘Italian wines don’t have a single identity,’ and I say, ‘Yeah. Duh. That’s the point.’ ”
But the point is also the problem. The greatest marketing weakness of Italian wines is their greatest viticultural strength. Perhaps no other country sports the tremendous diversity of wine styles that Italy does. Hundreds of different grapes are grown there, resulting in hundreds -- at least -- of different styles, from those in the chilly north to those in the steamy south. You can get your Cabernet, your Merlot, and your Chardonnay there, sure. But you can also get Sagrantino di Montefalco and Teroldego, which may be more expressive of the regions in which they’re grown but which you’ll rarely find in your corner wine store. On top of all that, Italy is so geographically and even culturally diverse that some Italian winemakers aren’t even recognizable as Italian. For instance, if you drink Chianti, you’ve probably heard of the names Ruffino and Antinori. But how about Aleš Kristancˇicˇ ? Doesn’t exactly sound like a character on The Sopranos. This is where Esposito can help. In Passion on the Vine, he introduces us to many winemakers, including Kristancˇicˇ, who heads the Movia winery. It sits on land where Italy’s northeastern Friuli-Venezia Giulia region meets Slovenia. Kristancˇicˇ is a maverick who believes in challenging wine buyers, especially professional sommeliers. “Aleš wants you to struggle sometimes,” Esposito says. By way of example, our meal begins with a bottle of Movia’s Puro, a sparkling rosé that is bottled unfiltered, which means that when it’s opened, it has a layer of yeast and sediment that has to be disgorged. That’s done by holding the bottle upside down in a bucket of water. “I said to him, ‘Aleš, how do you expect a sommelier to go through all this in a busy restaurant?’ ” Esposito recalls. “And he told me, ‘That’s exactly the point. I want them to stop for a second and to understand what they are opening -- that they are not just opening a cork on another bottle, but to think about where this bottle came from, who made it, and how it was made.’ ” That’s also what Esposito wants to get across to readers of his latest book. He wants us to know who the best producers of Italian wines are and why their products are worth our time even if they don’t have cute animals on the labels or the kind of big fruit flavors that American palates have been tuned to in the last couple of decades. “The greatest insight you’ll ever have into a wine is knowing the person who made it,” Esposito says. “When you meet someone like Bartolo Mascarello or Bruno Giacosa or whoever it may be, you learn that their wine is, in some cases, a mirror image of their personality. If they’re humble people, they make humble wines. If they’re full of themselves, that comes through too.” Still, even with Esposito’s help, we can know these winemakers only at a distance. Unlike him, we may never cook a rabbit-sauce pasta with them in their kitchens. So for the rest of us to ultimately get to know the best makers of Italy’s best wines, we have to go a little further. We have to meet them, or at least their products, at the table. “People in the U.S. separate food and wine and family, but in Italy, they all are the same thing,” Esposito says. “You don’t have wine without food, without family.” He points to a bottle of Manzoni di Valentino Pinonero, a red wine made from pinot noir grapes and which we’re having with the seared turbot, and adds, “For me, this wine supports this food. It’s a symbiotic relationship. The problem is, you need to know the food to figure out the wine. So that makes it a little more complicated than just grabbing a bottle off a store shelf.” Complicated, yes. But deliciously so. | Three Names to Know
Here is a trio of Sergio Esposito’s favorite winemakers. Bruno Giacosa, Piedmont “Giacosa
makes a great sparkling wine and a great white wine. And all his reds
are great, too -- from Nebbiolos, Dolcettos, all the way up to his
Barbarescos and Barolos, which are fantastic.” Giuseppe Quintarelli, Veneto “Quintarelli
makes completely different wines. He makes Valpolicella, Amarone, and
Recioto , plus sweet wines. If you stocked my fridge with just
Quintarelli and Giacosa [wines], I’d be happy.” Gianfranco Soldera, Tuscany “I think Gianfranco Soldera is the best winemaker in Italy. I did a tasting from wines in his cellar with Eric Asimov of the New York Times, and they were so good that Eric said to me, ‘I think I’m going to start crying.’ ” |
C O O K I N G C L A S S | What food goes best with wine? How about Sergio Esposito’s own mother’s recipe for a slow-cooked rabbit sauce that in Passion on the Vine he describes making with Maurizio Anselma, one of Piedmont’s greatest winemakers. The book wasn’t exact on portions, but Esposito seemed pretty sure I could figure out how to make it. “It’s all in the book,” he said. “You just have to follow what we did.” Here’s my best guess. Pasta with slow-cooked rabbit INGREDIENTS 6 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sweet paprika
1 rabbit, deboned and cubed
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
4 large shallots, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper, or to taste
1 tablespoon each of chopped fresh rosemary and thyme
2
pounds roma tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped. (If tomatoes are out
of season, use two 28-ounce cans of whole San Marzano tomatoes,
drained, crushed by hand, and with the juice squeezed from them. Or try
three containers of Pomi-brand chopped tomatoes, also drained.)
1/2
bottle of dry white wine (from Anselma winery, perhaps, or something
from the Campania region, where Esposito’s family is from) 1 pound store-bought fresh tagliatelle 1/2 cup each of pecorino and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, grated DIRECTIONS Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pan over medium-high heat. Mix the flour with the paprika. Dredge the rabbit in the mix, and then shake off excess. Cook the rabbit over a medium flame for 5 minutes until browned on all sides. Pour off the oil, keeping the rabbit in the pan. Add 2 tablespoons fresh oil to the pan. Add garlic, shallots, and red pepper. Cook 1 minute. Add herbs and tomatoes. Cook several minutes to meld flavors. Deglaze
pan with half a bottle of dry white wine. Turn heat down to low. Simmer
for 1 hour. (This would be a good time to do as Esposito did and drink
the other half of the bottle of white wine with your guests.) Heat a pot of water for
the pasta. When the water boils and the sauce has cooked 1 hour, add
the tagliatelle to the water. Cook for the required time, strain, and
then add the pasta to the pan the sauce has been cooking in. Remove
from the heat and add the cheeses. Serve
in four individual bowls, topping each with a few sprigs of fresh
rosemary and thyme and a light grating of cheese. Drizzle the remaining
tablespoon of oil evenly over each bowl. |
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[dl] Misc.
Soul Survivor
By plugging into electronica, Jamie Lidell has broken from the current pack of Brit soul artists. By Bob Mehr  For
Jamie Lidell, now really is the time for a little bit more. Thanks, at
least in part, to his song by that name -- “A Little Bit More” -- and
its notable appearance in a recent TV commercial for Target, the
34-year-old British songwriter, producer, and burgeoning soul-music
star is poised for further breakout successes with his third album, Jim.
If he manages to connect again with the mainstream, as he did through his last album, 2005’s Multiply,
the Cambridge-born music whiz will become the overnight sensation
that’s lasted a decade. He has spent years honing his craft and
developing a following in the electronic underground. Lidell
collaborated with Christian Vogel on techno-funk outfit Super_Collider
while earning a reputation and has worked on electronic remixes of
dozens of songs from a variety of artists. But his biggest success came
with Multiply. That disc, whose title track popped up on Grey’s Anatomy and
whose content contained “A Little Bit More,” got Lidell noticed for his
unique talent of using his surprisingly rich and powerful voice to
blend soul music with electronic flourishes. It’s Motown meets the
future. Jim continues that tradition, with Lidell
again exploring the frontiers of a kind of cosmic R&B. The album is
an evocative sonic mashup of the new and old schools and marks Lidell’s
first complete album in which he moves from behind the mixing board to
stand in front of the microphone. We talked to him about that ongoing
transition. Has it been strange to shift from working behind the scenes to being in the spotlight? Well,
I’m not really used to, like, actually working. I like being a kind of
a musical bum and hanging around and making tracks. As soon as people
around you start to organize themselves into armies to go into battle
-- for sales or press or radio -- it all feels a little bit insane to
me. The shift in focus from being a guy who spends his days making
tracks and having a cup of tea to a guy who has dates and commitments
scheduled seven months down the line has been a bit of a shocker.  Although
your entire body of work is well known in Europe, your main exposure in
the United States has come through a couple of your songs being used in
an episode of Grey’s Anatomy and in a Target ad. Yes, I’m a
two-song wonder right now. I was very reluctant to jump on that train.
It took awhile for me to agree to do a Target ad, although I’ve seen
the benefit, of course.
But
with my whole solo career, I felt like it was a bit of an open book,
and a couple more chapters needed to be added before I closed that one
and moved on to something new. Even though I’ve enjoyed a little
success, with the new album I really resisted doing anything formulaic.
It’s a bit of a shame when artists feel they have to play to a
demographic or an audience. You just become like a food supplier then.
Maybe if I was more like John Mayer, or John Legend, even, I could ship
a few more records. But I prefer to do things in my own way, musically
speaking. You’ve
been lumped, somewhat incorrectly, into the whole UK old-school soul
revival that’s going on now. But you actually cut Multiply well before
that movement was in vogue. It’s funny: I did Multiply, and I thought, Maybe people will want to hear this kind of music again,
because I was really down with it myself. And at that time, there
wasn’t a lot of stuff coming out in England that sounded like it. Of course, now there are many British retro soul artists, including Amy Winehouse, Aimée Duffy, and Adele Adkins. I
don’t know how I fit into all that. I feel like I’m the schizo in that
crowd. Because, as people who’ve seen my live show can attest, I’m not
really loyal to a genre. I’m not loyal to anything. If you want to
think about me as an artist, I’m just as liable to draw on Can and Sun
Ra as I am on Otis Redding. I’m not a pure soul artist in that sense. I
guess you could say I’m the less clean version of Amy Winehouse. Well …
[laughs] actually, I don’t know if I’m less clean than her. Worth Your Money
Here are three new movies you should check out this month. By John Ross |
MOVIE: 88 Minutes
STARS: Al Pacino, Judging Amy’s Amy Brenneman, Cybill’s Alicia Witt, and Joan of Arc’s Leelee Sobieski
CSI MEETS 24 MEETS SILENCE OF THE LAMBS MEETS THE PAPER CHASE: Pacino
is a college professor and part-time forensic psychiatrist. Hey, who
isn’t these days? He gets a call -- possibly from a serial killer --
telling him that he’s going to be murdered in exactly 88 minutes. An
Oscar winner? No. But it’s always fun to see Pacino yelling his way
through a film.
BEST LINE: The potential killer tells Pacino, “Tick tock, Doc.”
WHEN TO SEE IT: In theaters April 18
MOVIE: The Life Before Her Eyes
STARS: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Brett Cullen
A QUESTION: Have you ever wondered what Thirteen’s
Evan Rachel Wood will look like when she’s all grown up and fortyish?
According to this film, which follows Wood’s character from high school
to adulthood, she’ll look a lot like Uma Thurman.
A MOVIE BUILT ON SAND: The
film, which involves Wood/Thurman dealing with a high-school shooting,
is directed by Vadim Perelman. He also helmed the gripping House of Sand and Fog, which was adapted from a National Book Award finalist. Life is
also adapted from a book, one whose story continually jumps from
present day to the past. It’s a difficult technique to bring to film,
but Perelman is up to the challenge.
DIRK NOWITZKI DOES NOT APPEAR: The film was produced by Magnolia Pictures, the independent distributor co-owned by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
WHEN TO SEE IT: In theaters April 18
MOVIE: Forgetting Sarah Marshall
STARS: Veronica Mars’s Kristen Bell and How I Met Your Mother’s Jason Segel
IT IS NOT SAMANTHA WHO?: While it’s true that both this movie and the ABC show Samantha Who? star slight, towheaded actresses who formerly appeared in cult TV hits, the similarities end there. Samantha Who? is
a Christina Applegate show about a woman who has forgotten her past
because she is suffering from amnesia. This is a movie about a guy who
is trying to forget his girlfriend (played by Bell) because he is
suffering from a bad breakup. Totally different.
IT IS ANOTHER CHANCE TO MAKE A STAR OUT OF A GANGLY, DORKY DUDE: The movie is produced by Judd Apatow, who was also behind The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
As such, the star is a relatable, good-natured doofus who looks
surprisingly like a combo of Steve Carell and Seth Rogen. Also, Paul
Rudd, who apparently is under contract to appear in all Apatow
productions, is in the cast.
WHEN TO SEE IT: In theaters April 18
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