Not to take anything away from my friends in the great land of Japan, but somehow director Matt Reeves and producer JJ Abrams have managed to create something entirely new for the giant monster movie genre—a gripping and engrossing giant monster movie without a giant monster.

I was even more pleased when the movie came to a close and the other people in the audience around me were completely perplexed and unsure of what they had just seen. Given the level of promotion for Cloverfield, I'm not sure where people got the idea that this would be some sort of kaiju extravaganza.

In fact, I'm glad it wasn't that at all. Not to spoil anything, but if the sheer terror of your everyday life being turned upside down without any rhyme or reason doesn't evoke even the most basic of emotions from you, then it's probably better that you stick to men in rubber suits.

Now that I got my Xbox 360 back and can watch HD DVD movies again, I took a few minutes to crack open the copy of Carlito's Way that I won a while back from Filmspotting. I didn't even get to really dig into the film itself, but went for the extras first.

Watching The Making of Carlito's Way, I found the appearance of Edwin Torres, the author of Carlito's Way and After Hours, the most interesting. Not because he wrote the stories that the movie was based on, or even how much he wanted to capture the authentic Puerto Rican angle in 1970s New York. Rather, it was the realization of how closely Al Pacino must have studied Torres and modeled his voice and speech patterns for his performance in the film. There are times during the documentary when I could've sworn I was hearing Pacino's Carlito Brigante, when in fact it was Torres himself. And here all this time I thought Pacino was simply "making up" some strange Latino-urban-gangster accent, when according to Torres, that's just the way the people he knew talked. Go figure.

That's right. I'm now down with the new hotness that is the iPod touch. It took me a few days to get it up and running, only because my old G4 needed a USB 2.0 port. So I had to figure in the cost of that, and then still wait for it to arrive and install it. Nevertheless, it's all good in the hood now.

That aside, Santa brought the rain this year. Not only am I rocking the Touch, but I stocked up on HD DVD movies, like the Harry Potter series, the Bourne series, Knocked Up, Transformers and some longtime favorites like What Dreams May Come and Smokey and the Bandit. I was kinda fiendin' for something new, but now there's lots to watch now!

Way back in July 2005, I posted about my rising interest in podcasts and listed some of my favorites. One of those was a movie review podcast called Cinecast, which, for someone like me who's always loved movies, seemed to match most of my sensibilities and even give me some insight into movies that I had either never heard of or just hadn't been able to see. I'd been listening for the past couple of years from a distance, not really engaging the hosts Adam and Matty (and previously Sam) or the community around the show, now called Filmspotting.

Recently, however, I decided to at least take part in some way and submit my answers for their Massacre Theater contest, where the hosts act out a scene and listeners are asked to guess which movie the dialogue is from. Personally, I love movie trivia, and for a while there, I would just listen and say "oh, I know that one!" and that'd be the end of it, but last week, that all changed.

Ok, well, no spoilers here, but rather, out there.

Just this week, I've come close to stumbling upon spoilers for Halo 3 a few times now, and from some unlikely sources at that. Not just gaming sites and forums, but sites like YouTube, MySpace, etc are no shelter from spoilers, it seems. It only takes one person to post or leave a comment that can ruin what's most likely a long-awaited experience for gamers around the world.

Other recent news also makes me think about how this affects other forms of entertainment, including books like the Harry Potter series, and films, like the just-revealed plot details of the fourth Indiana Jones film. It seems like there used to be a day when spoilers didn't exist, but that was only because the world was a different place back then--the days when we didn't have a global network which can spread information in an instant.

Imagine someone being able to give away the ending of The Empire Strikes Back way back in 1980, and how people would have been so pissed to have it ruined. And frankly, that probably did happen, but when news could only travel so far so fast in those days, it wouldn't have had nearly the same widespread effect that it would today.