Harry Knowles has seen Cloverfield, and he’s not only declared it a safe target for the sploogery of his army of fanboys––he’s got a surprisingly evocative take on how the much-hyped hybrid of Godzilla and Blair Witch breaks the monster movie mold:

The movie is fucking brilliant. It’s what we were told it was going to be. An intimate perspective on an impossibly grand scale human disaster beyond most human levels of comprehension…

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My post on Huey Lewis’ two, questionably classic contributions to the Back to the Future soundtrack garnered some impassioned responses. Ryan Stewart wrote in to defend the track that I called the lesser of the two, Back in Time:

Cassette? Um, I own the LP. Back in Time is the best example ever of a plot-song. It’s that 1/1,000 that actually work, and work really awesomely, and the kind of thing they’d never have the guts to do these days.

Oh yeah? Well, never underestimated the guts of David Gordon Green. A friend of Spout pointed me to this Stereogum item from Monday, in which Seth Rogen, writer and star of Gordon Green’s Summer 2008 comedy The Pineapple Express, confirms that none other than Huey Lewis was commissioned to write “a track reminiscent of Power Of Love” for the movie. My source says he’s heard the song, and he confirms that it incorporates “lyrics that tell the plot of the movie, with ‘Pineapple Express’ in the chorus.”

So is the plot song ready for its comeback? Are YOU ready for the plot song’s comeback? Can you even name the last film that featured a full-on plot song? I can’t. While you’re pondering all of that, watch the above clip from The Pineapple Express. I’ve heard one or two whispers that the film could very well show up at Harry Knowles’ Butt-Numb-A-Thon this weekend (which, sadly, I’m not going to be able to attend), so we might get a full review of Huey’s contribution sooner rather than later.

I’m getting ready to fill out my first-ever application for Butt-Numb-a-Thon, Harry Knowles’ annual 24 hour, marathon film festival. My tastes do not always neatly dovetail with Knowles’, but for years, friends who have attended past BNATs have come back with rapturous reports. Another cause for excitement: this BNAT will be the first to take place at the new Alamo Ritz, which is replacing the old and much-beloved Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin.

Like a Telluride for genre geeks, the lineup is a total mystery before the festival begins, and lucky attendees must stay in their seats for the full 24 hours or risk missing something. About half the films are vintage and/or lost classics, the other half are (generally) Hollywood films that have yet to be released. Last year’s audience was privy to the premieres of Knocked Up, Black Snake Moan, Rocky Balboa, 300 and Dreamgirls, as well as screenings of The Informers, Inherit the Wind, and a “1976 X-rated animated” film called Once Upon A Girl, which caused my friend Jette Kernion to write, “Harry, I am sending you the bill for any psychotherapy I may need as a result of watching this thing.”

The application is rigorous: in addition to answering questions about Kurt Russell movies and “celebrity sexual fantasies” (presumably, they’re not one and the same), you’re instructed to upload “your favorite photo of you from a past Halloween Celebration or Costumed affair.” Out of thousands of applicants, Knowles hand-picks the couple of hundred eventual attendees. My chances of being deemed worthy of attendance are probably pretty slim, so cross your fingers for me, and if you want to apply, all the info is here.

[Via Matt Dentler]

Harry Knowles’ Fantastic Fest closed last night with a (badly kept) secret screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. We weren’t there, so let’s go straight to those who were. I’ll update this post as more folks weigh in. Suffice it to say, at this point, the first negative word will be news.

• Mike D’Angelo [via GreenCine Daily, via Twitter]: “Not much more than formal mastery and a ferocious Day-Lewis turn, but hey, that’s plenty.”
• Marjorie Baumgarten for Variety: “There Will Be Blood was indeed an unusual choice to close out this year’s Fantastic Fest, as Alamo Drafthouse Cinema founder and host Tim League was the first to admit. Though the film hardly belongs to the science fiction, fantasy, animation, and crime genres that attendees had been snacking on all week, League attested in his introduction that the film is undeniably “fantastic.” [...] However, it took Ain’t It Cool News‘ Harry Knowles to point out during the Q&A that Plainview was the “best monster” he had seen all week. Anderson responded that Dracula was in his thoughts as he was writing the screenplay. “There Will Be Blood” indeed.”
• An anonymous text messager, also via Variety: “Easily one of the best movies of the year.”
• Matt Dentler: “God Bless P.T. Anderson, for making his fifth consecutive slam dunk. I’m just so stunned and impressed and shaken by this film.”
• Jeffrey Wells, quoting reader Dan Brown: “‘I know the film won’t be well received by everyone. The two and a half-hour running time might be off-putting for Middle American styrofoams but I was really into the movie right from the start.’ The most interesting sounding aspect, he adds, is that ‘the first 15 to 18 minutes of the film are dialogue-free.’”
• Scott Weinberg at Cinematical: “It’s more than a ‘departure’ for the director; it’s a monumental display of ‘evolution’ that’ll wow the established fans and impress a helluva lot more new ones. This is a dark, compelling and effortlessly engrossing film, one bolstered by a lead performance that ranks among the very best of Lewis’ impressive career.”
• John DeFore at The Hollywood Reporter: “Director Anderson’s critics might not know what to do with this picture, which has none of the attention-grabbing flourishes of earlier films — no hailstorms of frogs or deus ex machina pianos here. The closest it gets to self-conscious showiness is its closing scene, a confrontation as memorably strange as the fireworks-popping, “Jessie’s Girl”-belting drug deal in Boogie Nights.”
• Peter Martin at Twitch: “In several important ways, though, There Will Be Blood was the perfect film to close the festival. First, it is a major stride forward by Anderson. Not only has he left behind the present-day San Fernando Valley suburban milleau of his last three films, he has greatly sharpened his storytelling abilities and broadened his visual palette. Second, this is a tale in which the characters fully embrace their emotions, resulting in sometimes over the top behavior that’s familiar to anyone even mildly acquainted with genre fare. Third, the film features a monstrously entertaining performance by Daniel Day Lewis, embodying a man quietly hellbent on achieving success, and you can never have too many monsters at Fantastic Fest.”

See also our spoileriffic report from the Blood preview at Telluride.

Richard Kelly’s re-tooled Southland Tales screened at Harry Knowles’ Fantastic Fest this weekend, and reaction, though still mixed, skewed decidedly more positive than at the film’s infamously disastrous debut at Cannes over a  year ago. “Most of the complaints about the film are accurate to varying degrees,” writes Todd Brown at Twitch. “That said, for those who make it through the initial overload of information and can latch on to Kelly’s vibe, Southland is also a dazzlingly smart, funny, and engaging work, one that fuses political fears with apocalyptic religiosity and techno-dread and wraps it all in a glossy, colorful package.”

But Mike Curtis disagrees: “One wonders if the whole thing were just a huge joke on us the audience, the investors, Hollywood, and everyone else desperately watching to see how he’d follow up on Donnie Darko. A big ‘Psych!’ shout out to all of us - and we stand here confused - was this a joke, a mess, or just a failed multi-layered thingamabob?”

More from Matt Dentler and Fantastic Fest mastermind Harry Knowles, with more surely to come.