Overnight

Thanks to all of you e-mailing me the evidence, but it seems we've just been beaten by Peter Sciretta.

It looks like Cloverfield/1-18-08 is going to be called...

...drum roll, if you will...

...Overnight.

SlashFilm have a fresh piece up presenting most of what I've been told. And, as I've said before, I believe what I'm told. Check it out over there - I don't want to step on Peter's toes.

There's only one problem major problem that I've spotted so far: the really good Overnight domain names are gone - partly because of the 2003 film Overnight, the documentary about Troy Duffy acting like a selfish ass, by turns making me laugh out loud and other times hold my head and beg for it all to stop.

Both overnightthemovie.com, overnight.com, are gone.

And none of the other alternatives I tried were yet registered... unless I'm missing something.

Your Weekly Invisible Monster Picture

Taylor Dubose sent me the below photo from the 1-18-08 site. It seems that we're getting a new snap every week, or there abouts.

Movie Minesweeper - The Hidden Messages Edition

Hidden messages? What? Here's your Minesweeper for the evening.

- Nathalie Press - you know her, she's the one who isn't not Emily Blunt and whose career isn't Emily Blunt's career - is to star in Knife's Edge for director Anthony Hickox. On the plus side, hugh Bonneville and Joan plowright will be in the film too. In all sincerity, I'd like this to be good.

- Soderbergh is to shoot his Che Guevera films, The Argentine and Guerilla, using the Red One 4K camera - last discussed here in connection with Peter Jackson's short war film Crossing the Line.

- The money for How to Lose Friends and Alienate People has come together. I can't wait to see Jeff Bridges as Graydon Carter.

- Willa Holland, Anton Yelchin and Justin Chatwin have joined Susan Sarandon and her daughter Eva Amurri in John Stockwell's Middle of Nowhere.

- The Rocker writer Ryan Jaffe now has Don't Lean on Me set to go too. Meanwhile, Shelter scribe Karl Mueller has sold a pitch to Arnold and Anne Kopelson.

- Had Drive not been murdered by Fox, it would have become even more interesting.

- Sergio Machado is adapting the novel A Morte e a Morter de Quincas Berro D'Agua for the big ol' silvery screen.

- Kenny Ortega is directing remake of Footloose with Zac Efron? The original seemed to have some kind of influence on Death Proof (honestly) so I wonder what the legacy of this rehash might prove to be?

- Alan Parker is adapting Jamila Gavin's Coram Boy. Any Parker fans out there?

- IGN are disbelieving J J Abrams' recent comments and have decided that the Ethan Haas sites are related to Cloverfield/1-18-08. They don't know who first linked the film and sites... but I do...

- Darren Grant is to direct the burlesque movie Make it Happen. Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Tessa Thompson are to star - which should get it some attention, in certain quarters at least.

- The fifth Looney Tunes Golden Collection has been announced and this time it will include the Chuck Jones documentary Extremes and In-Betweens.

- John Moore has optioned the book The Book of Lost Things - not to be confused with Lost Book Found, a film I really regret not including on my top 100 list. Sigh. This one is a WW2-era fantasy that many have compared to Pan's Labyrinth. Or vice versa.

- The clash and fray between the MPAA and Courtney Solomon over Capitivity continues. This time, the articles of contention are 'offensive images' hanging outside of the premiere party.

-I was sent the spec of the R2 UK Sunshine DVD today, and so, it would seem, were DVD Times. I'll save the space and send you over there. Interesting to note that the alternative ending is less than a minute long - how much of the film is that going to replace?

- Sebastian Faulks is writing the next Bond novel, Devil May Care. A future film? Very possibly.

- Some more Doomsday pics have rolled out.

- William Gibson is spending some time in Second Life to plug his new book, Spook Country. There will even be a screening of his film No Maps for These Territories.

- American Gangster must be locked now because the BBFC have certificated it. Good stuff - almost 157 minutes of good stuff.

- The direct to DVD Bill and Ted is back in the news again.

- Don Cheadle vs. Guy Pearce - one out of two 'aint bad - are the stars of Traitor, an espionage yarn from Jeffrey Nachmanoff.

- Room 401 sounds like the Derren Brown zombie videogame stunt crossed with his latest show Trick or Treat. Well. A bit, anyway.

- The Cylons may not be what they appear to be.

- Some Dallas rags have gone under the hammer. Nothing to compete with the Ruby slippers, I'm sure.

- Martha Washington Dies is almost upon us. Rich Johnston has a point - why haven't some studio or another optioned this for a film?

- Claire Danes is playing Eliza Doolittle in David Grindley's new staging of Pygmalion.

- An age old fake Iron Man poster has started doing the rounds again.

- Sean Penn and Iggy Pop will be providing voices for the US version of Persepolis. At least the version for citizens of the US that can't/won't read.

- Alec Baldwin is disowning Shortcut to Happiness and has advised 'his fans' to not go see it.

I hope you enjoyed your hidde... er... Movie Minesweeper.

The Slusho Site

So, the Ethan Hass puzzles are apparently completely unrelated to the Cloverfield/1-18-08 film.

They are linked to Paramount it seems, as Paramount have had clips from the game pages pulled from YouTube. So people can be forgiven for getting so deep into that puzzle - there was a pretty solid piece of evidence.

The chap who revealed the sites to me in the first place feels 'dumb' now. I wouldn't - there were many, many rumblings about the two being connected, and plenty of linking factors.

But there is another site online that is directly linked... a site promoting Slusho, a drink we first saw in Alias and has now popped up in the 1-18-08 trailer.

I've put a picture at the bottom of this post revealing the Slusho logo in the trailer, and below that, a Slush desktop for you.

So, what's going on with this site? Unsuprisingly, it pretends to be Japanese, at least to some extent, but it clearly isn't; it offers some downloads, an e-mail address that you can contact to answer the question "Are you HAPPY?" and a 'History' page.

There are plenty of suggestions on that page that we're dealing with a sea monster here, and possibly one created by pollution of some kind. Have a look around and you'll soon see what I mean. Take it from me with a 100% guarantee: this is a related site and Abrams' contention to Aint it Cool that nobody had discovered it is, at best, out of date.

Direct Download Links For The Official Cloverfield Trailer

Choose from small, medium and large normal-definition Quicktime or 480p, 720p and 1080p high defintion.

The file is called 1-18-08. Just like I think the film is. Don't you?

Here's how Apple are representing the film. I'm now 90% sure this is the title.

Movie Minesweeper - The Card Shelf Edition

I'm currently watching Popworld in which they are playing Mark Ronson and Lily Allen's cover of Oh My God by The Kaiser Chiefs. The video is a flagrant rip off of Who Framed Roger Rabbit but, to be frank, nowhere nearly as good. It might be designed as an homage, it could be taken as an insult.

- Jeffrey Wells quoted J J Abrams directly on the whole Cloverfield issue, but then altered his post a little. Abrams became re-identified an anonymous person in Abrams' team, and a quick find-and-replace turned all of the first person "I"s in the piece to "he"s. Sometimes with comedic effect: "he've", for example. Tee hee.

- Incidentally, Abrams cannibalised Felicity for the idea of Cloverfield. The episode Docuventary was shot in a similar style, using all of the camcorder gimmickery.

- What's more, there's a new picture on the 1-18-08 site, time stamped five minutes before the first.

- A good chunk of the Comic-Con schedule has been unveiled. Max Brooks and George Romero having a chat? A programme of Pixar shorts - no doubt to unveil the DVD? The Golden Compass piggybacking on Shoot 'Em Up? Josss Whedon with 'a few surprises'? Yes, yes, yes and yes.

- A brilliant piece on Pixar designer Jason Deamer is up at the CG Society site.

- Yahoo have a slideshow of four new Fred Claus posters. I swear I can see little Jimmy Krankie in two of them.

- There's more one-set video from Indiana Jones IV doing the rounds, plus a few spoilers and spoiler clarifications.

- According to Coca-Cola (yep), European cinemas are suffering from very high staff turnovers. Anybody want me to manage their cinema for them? Or work in their programming department? I could be persuaded.

- The Haiti film industry is booming.

And now Fergie is singing on a commerical. Eurgh.

Movie Minesweeper - The Coming Down From A Ginger Biscuit Rush Edition

- Michael Bay is continuing to take all of the credit for Transformers. Film is a collaborative medium, Michael - stop peddling this egomaniacal auterism and polishing your knuckles on your chest. I'm sure he'll pass the buck when it comes to criticism of the film.

- Is the Cloverfield budget really only $30 million? I'm standing by my theory about the film's title, too. At least we now know some of the film's cast for sure: Michael Stahl-David, Odet Jasmin, Mike Vogel and Lizzy Kaplan. You can (currently) download a version of the trailer, but expect it to get pulled quickly.

- The Sunset Gower studios have been sold for redevelopment.
- The amount of screens hosting A Mighty Heart across the US is about to get slashed in what amounts to 'a retroactive platform release'. Now the genie is out of the bottle, however, I think this one will have pretty much run its course. Hopefully the appropriate egos were pricked.

- The autobiography of a roadie is proving the way in to a Grateful Dead movie. Home Before Daylight is being adapted by Michael Grais and will apparently also feature fictionalised versions of Ken Kesey and Jefferson Airplane. And a lot of drugs.

- Dustin Hoffman will direct and star in and is producing and co-writing an adaptation of Scott Turow's Personal Injuries. Yep - Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut might finally be coming almost 30 years after he fired himself from the chief's position on Straight Time.

- Germany have coughed up 6 and a half million dollars to go in the Valkyrie coffers.

- The Meg movie has been sunk again. That's one more movie New Line won't ever be producing. I don't mind: shark movies don't exactly have a great pedigree. Not like piranha movies.

- Jonah Hill has denied his involvement in Watchmen. Told you I was doubtful about that list. Of course, he could just be 'pulling a Shia'... but, nah. I believe him.

- Is Brad Pitt planning to star in a remake of Bullitt? Probably not.

- According to Ethan Hawke, there was almost another Before Sunrise sequel. Why wasn't there? Apparently because people took the first two to heart too much. Er... okay...

- There seems to be a Speed 3 on the cards. This one will apparently have Dennis Hopper in it again, even though he died in the first one. I'm smelling direct to DVD all over this project.

- Dread Central have a poster and YouTube trailer for [REC].

- Father Henryk Jankowski is courting Mel Gibson with an eye to getting the actor/director to film his life story. Jankowski is infamous for pouring scorn, offering up both anti-communist and (allegedly) anti-Semitic rhetoric. I saw this link at Cinematical.

- The NY Daily News have quoted Danny Boyle speaking out against Eli Roth and his films. Well, I know what side of that argument I'm on and it definitely isn't Danny Boyle's side. He said "His movies aren't even particularly well done. They're not even scary. They're horrible, but that's not scary. It's not suspense. And if you watch my films in detail, there's actually not a lot of violence in them. You get numb with violence very quickly." That's just silly, Mr. Boyle. And I think you know you're wrong too.

- Zak Penn is writing the Dirty Dozen remake.

- Will Shaeffer has died. He was the composer of both The Flintstones and The Jetsons themes.

- Matt Groening has implied that there's no CG in The Simpsons Movie. That's not true: there's loads of CG, and you can see plenty of it in the trailer. The sequence with the bullet hitting Bart's skateboard is massively dependant on CG. Bit, yes, there's plenty of hand drawn stuff too.

- Minnie Driver is the new Lara Croft. Voice only: this is for a cartoon series.

- An EU promotional clip has upset a number of conservative politicians. It features 18 couples in excerpts from big screen love scenes and the main problem, it seems, is that some of these are homosexual couples. My problem, really, is how much of the clip depends on Jean Pierre Jeunet - couldn't they find any other films to include too?

- Haylie Duff is taking a role in The Kentucky Fried Horror Movie that was once earmarked for Jessica Simpson. Joe Bob Briggs and P J Soles are also lined up.

Viral Marketing Blog Has Appeared For This Cloverfield Film

There's a blog up and running now that is part of the viral campaign around Cloverfield. There's also a link there to a rather odd game you can play. Look closely at the screen capture below and you might get your first glimpse of the parasite.

Unlock anything astonishing and you can let me know. And please put your tips for the game in the comments section.

And check out the second film ick podcast for something on the film's true title.

The Second film ick Podcast

Michel Gondry, the true title of Cloverfield and CG For Indy... and more...

Movie Minesweeper - The Automatic Out Of Office Response Edition

Is this a slow news week? You bet it is.

- Catherine Tate is to return to Dr. Who for the entirety of the fourth series, as his 'companion'. This appears to contradict everything about the Tom Ellis story, but I'm still told "he's not gone for good - we'll see him again". Maybe in Torchwood?

- New Line have hooked up with HBO to bankroll and release a Sex and the City movie. All of the other details are just as rumoured from the last year or two. As part of the deal, Kim Cattrall has been given a deal for a new series on HBO TV.

- Keith David will voice Dr. Facilier, the villain of Disney's The Princess and the Frog. I love Keith David, and I really love the song that Belle and Sebastian wrote for him.

- Just a couple of days after I mentioned A Dog's Breakfast again, it pops up in the news. MGM have quietly released it directly to iTunes and Unbox - and you can download it now. Will I be able to download it in the UK? Seems not... I'll have to wait for the September 18th DVD and import that. Either way, I'm a little disappointed this is bypassing cinemas, but very glad that, at last, we'll all be to able to enjoy it.

- The official Cloverfield site is online. Rubbish - but online.

- Michael Jai White is in The Dark Knight. I expect we'll also see him in the big fat Kill Bill coming out in November, though he was cut from the episodic version.

- The IESB have some video interviews with Werner Herzog and his Rescue Dawn boys.

- The Alvin and the Chipmunks poster hasn't been getting much love. I'm not exactly surprised, looking at the thing.

- Ratatouille producer Brad Lewis has confirmed that his involvement on another, as yet unannounced, Pixar project is underway.

- Fangoria have a couple of exclusive 30 Days of Night shots.

- The poster and trailer for Catacombs have both turned up. I see Pink is being credited by her real name.

Cloverfield Trailers Popping Up All Over

Take your pick between the camcorder-created YouTube clips.

A slightly dark version. A closer version. A very distorted version.

How very in keeping with the film's aesthetic, eh? Was this part of the marketing plan?

Movie Minesweeper - The Smoking Ban Edition

- Christian Bale is hyping the next Batman film, and somewhat preemptively, the following one.

- Flooding has wrecked a location being used in the shoot of Baz Luhrmann's Australia and the schedule has needed some rapid rejigging as a result.

- Richard Roundtree has been cast in Speed Racer as Ben Burns, racing legend turned commentator.
- Joe Carnahan has posted a photoshopped LA picture to his blog, suggesting the look of White Jazz as well as how easy the retrostyling is going to be. Apparently. There's a special star cameo from Gorgeous George in the picture too.

- Rob Schmidt is to direct a feature film adapted from Stephen King's novel Insomnia. I like Schmidt a lot and I hope he can do a great job, something that can stand comparison to, say, Dark City.

- This infamous Cloverfield film - or whatever it ends up being called - is reportedly being directed by Matt Reeves. We already knew Drew Goddard is writing and J J Abrams producing - which gives us a 1-out-of-3 score, by my reckoning. I bet it isn't as good as Diary of the Dead.

- George Wolfe is directing Blood on the Leaves, while Jamie Foxx is to star and co-produce. The film is an adaptation of Jeffrey Stetson's novel about a conflicyed young attorney. He faces off with a black history professor accused of murderous vengeance against white men who were accused of committing racially motivated attrocities during the civil rights conflicts.

- The SciFi Channel's Tin Man has had it's first preview, and several details have been reported.

- Semi Chellas has been recruited to adapt Michelle Redmond's novel The Year of Fog into a screenplay. I'll place an early bet on Sarah Polley directing.

- Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael is directing From Within, a horror yarn about murderous mystery in a small Christian community. Yep - another one of those.

- TV vet Kevin Dowling has signed to (apparently) direct K-Ville, a New Orleans drama about which I know (or at least recall) little else.

- Jeffrey Wells has posted an audio recording of the entire Shock and Awe: New Wave Exploitation panel discussion from the LA Film Festival. Eli Roth, Jack Hill and Craig Brewer? How can you resist.

- As you probably suspected from the Sid Haig story last week, Rob Zombie's Halloween rehash has undergone some reshoots. What surprised me, a little at least, is how extensive these reshoots are: six new kills and an entirely remodelled finale.

- Latino Review are shamelessly hawking The Losers in the guise of a script review. They certainly seem to have some incredible contacts at Latino Review, but their script reviews make me feel ill. They seem to lap up anything as long as it is puerile, juvenile or adolescent and then forego any kind fo meaningful commentary or insight heap nauseating hyperbole all over the script instead. Every crappy comic book adaptation and toy tie-in is labelled 'dope', or 'the bomb'? Shameless.

- Jaime Lee Curtis is to play a human being in South of the Border.

- There's a Star Wars themed burlesque show coming to Dallas in which the performer dresses as Princess Leia in her metal bikini thing. I saw the link at TheForceDotNet.

- Hamas have killed off their Mickey Mouse lookalike. He died 'as a martyr' while 'protecting' his land from and Israeli 'terrorist'.

- The Simpsons' Jay Kogen is in talks to direct a straight-to-TV teen comedy film for MTV. The idea is to create modern equivalents to John Hughes' output, premiere them on the box and then push them to DVD - with even a theatrical release mentioned as a possibility. An incredibly remote possibilty, I imagine.

Movie Minesweeper - The Bishop Edition

- Jon Favreau is making a cameo in Iron Man, and it was the very last shot of the shoot.

- The Darjeeling Limited is the opening night film of the New York Film Festival.

- A Psycho remake TV series? Yep.

- Randal Kleiser is part of a start-up planning to bring 3D images to mobile devices.

- The odds are in favour of a TMNT sequel, if not the quality of a TMNT sequel.

- Nicholas Sparks' Dear John is to be a feature film, adapted by Jamie Linden and with Channing Tatum attached to star. Okay - but what about John Sullivan's Dear John? You can have that one on me, Mrs. H.

- Uwe Boll has called Postal his 'final statement'. So I assume Far Cry and Bloodrayne 2 and 3 and whatever comes afterwards aren't even supposed to be statements at all.

- Kim Jee-Woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird (missing an 'and' if you ask me) has changed financiers mid-production. The new team are CJ Entertainment, also in preproduction on Chan Wook Park's Evil Live.

- Death of a President's Gabriel Range is writing and will direct what sounds like a sort-of-Somersby, sort-of-Six Degrees of Seperation prodigal son drama.

- Mos Def is to produce and star in Bobby Zero. This one's about a social satirist come advertising copywriter (I wonder if he'll have a comic book gossip column too?). I like Mos Def a lot, and if he's that into this film, then I'm very interested.

- George Hickenlooper's next is to be Morning Spy, Evening Spy, an adaptation of the novel about a CIA operative obsessed with hunting down Osama Bin Laden.

- The Conan option has expired at Warners and it seems that New Line are to pick it up next.

- Starbucks are to hawk Arctic Tale in a return for profit points.

- Megan Fox has signed to appear in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

- The Franny K. Stein books are to become animated films.

- Michael Gilvary's spec script Transit has been snapped up by Thousand Words. The premise is simple: a fmaily on a road trip through the desert are hunted by criminals who stashed money in the family's car. Apparently, Gilvary did a recent rewrite on Rendezvous with Rama, which suggests that project might not be as conclusively dead as I had been assuming.

- The inevitable 300 spoof is to be 301: The Legend of Awesomest Maximus Wallace Leonidas, so Gladiator and Braveheart have clearly been tossed into the mix too. Rest assured that Troy is on the hit list also, and I assume a series of completely irrelevent films will be too (Borat again? Pirates of the Caribbean?)

- The Wall Street Journal are cautiously predicting big money success for Ratatouille.

- Cameron Diaz is to star in Richard Kelly's The Box. The film is adapted from Richard Matheson's Button, Button which has already been a Twilight Zone episode (in the 80s comeback series) where Mare Winningham had the role - and the story had been given a more satisfying, less daft ending (if you ask me). I've no idea how Kelly can spin this one out to feature length without making it mightily repetitive.

- Kevin Smith wants unknowns for Red State, which might actually really mean unkowns for once.

- The Hollywood Reporter are only just today covering Pool Rats being set up at Disney, despite the Mouse House registering the appropraite domain name weeks and weeks ago. Sigh.

- Carter Blanchard's spec script Near Death is about.... yep, you guessed it: spooky near death experiences. Fox Searchlight have taken the option.

- Marc Forster is developing, and may direct, Land of Roses. The film will be a drama about Ibrahim Parlak, a real-life Kurdsh Immigrant who campaigned to exonerate a falsely imprisoned terrorist.

- Sid Haig has been confirmed as appearing in the Halloween rehash

- Arthouse Films are to release The Cool School: How Los Angeles Learned to Love Modern Art. Jeff Bridges has narrted the film, which sounds just about perfect.

- The Cloverfield site URL is just redirecting to Paramount's homepage as I write, but any minute now (or hour, or day at least) it is going to go live, probably with a teaser.

- Jonathan Jakubowicz is to direct Queen of the South, all about a female, immigrant drug lord - a prettier Scarface. Apparently, Penelope Cruz, Jennifer Lopez and Eva Mendes are circling the lead role - I'd go for Lopez, personally.

- Arielle Kebble has signed to play one of the titular girls in A Tale of Two Sisters.