A friendly tip...
Author: Ink-Stained Wretch
Just a friendly tip: your eleven bucks would be better spent if you hired some itinerant ruffian to repeatedly shake your head, belt you in the stomach and box your ears for half an hour.
That way you could experience all the nausea and permanent hearing damage while avoiding the painfully awkward "character development," the contrived devices to deliver exposition, the jaw-droppingly dim maneuvers intended to "keep the camera running" long after it makes any goddamn sense... and most of all, you'd get to avoid the relentless hope-crushing in the name of grim & gritty keepin' it realness.
Seriously: fuck this movie, and the Blair Witch it rode in on.
ha! i just saw it tonite.
**SPOILER ALERT**
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I was ready to leave in the very beginning. That party scene just hurt watching. And your points are right on the money. I felt the same way. But I still enjoyed the movie. There were more than a few things I enjoyed (you need to check out Evangelion, man!)
My brother just tipped me to a nice little easter egg: at the end shot on coney island, right before the cut to black, a spark appears in the sky and lands in the ocean. Kinda cool.
There's also this which I missed at the very end of the credit roll:
http://cloverfieldmessage.ytmnd.com/
I enjoyed the sound tho. Fuck. Our theater was shaking.
But dude, I could copy and paste what you wrote verbatim and that shit is undeniably the troof. Flawed but I still enjoyed the ride.
just a followup. i kindof went spelunking for more backstory and found a great article.
i suggest people watch the movie first before reading.
major spoilers alert
no spoilers read. i haven't seen it, but i just have to say...
dude, the statue of liberty with like, its head ripped off is like, so rad!
i can't even make it to things i need to see, so i am sure this will be a dvd banger. of course, i should start with blair witch which i have not seen either.
"Nothing speaks 'collapse of society' than a fallen Lady Liberty.. (Although it also does appear to signal lazy writers...)"
- Keith P. Fisher -
Who sends me this link... behold the gallery of the Statue of Apocalypse.
speaking of societal collapse...did anyone catch Life After People on The History Channel? Collapse and then some...
I'm not sure what was more enjoyable, seeing all the shit fall over or realizing how quickly it will all go.
wtf? fucking thing changed my link to this thread and i can't seem to edit it. here goes again.
Life After People
life after people-- fucking awesome. a must see.
Strange days... the air is full of pocky-klips (to quote the feral kids from Thunderdome.) In I Am Legend, Manhattan has gone if not to the dogs, then the deer. TV documentaries are staring down the barrel of extinction... Hell, it's almost like the '80s all over again. All we need are George Peppard & Jan Michael rolling cross country in an armor-plated Ark II, popping "killa cockroaches, I repeat, killa cockroaches" with their heavy artillery.
I freely admit that Cloverfield might not be as bad as I'm suggesting... maybe it just caught me squarely in the wrong mood. And it's no secret that I am sick, sick, sick of the "mockumentary" / pseudo-documentary style and would cheerfully like to see a moratorium put on this story-telling mode for at least five years.
But part of what really, really bugs me about the hype for this movie is this notion that there's even one thing "original" about it. In fact, I kept flipping back to two other recent movies that were about "the little people" caught up in some cataclysmic invasion.... For my money, Spielberg's War of the Worlds and the Korean giant monster flick The Host both milk a lot more out of this kind of scenario, ramping up the personal / pathos factor usually absent in these kettle-drum bangin' event movies.
Both WotW and The Host are awkward, deeply flawed movies as well... WotW is a movie that, sadly, is only, barely, the sum of the parts. Some of its scenes are raw, intense, overwhelming -- I would argue that there are bits in this movie that are among the most powerful scenes that Spielberg has ever shot. Unfortunately, they don't add up to anything larger and more meaningful, and their impact gets hamstrung by clumsy choices, a limping narrative structure and other scenes that just plain Don't Work. (Hello, random Tim Robbins cameo.) Likewise, The Host is a movie that's fucked up and off-kilter in a weirdly endearing way, much like the eccentric family desperately seeking a missing child who vanished during a giant monster attack. Nothing here that couldn't have been fixed by Harvey Weinstein's scissors, from back in the day when he was notorious for buying foreign flicks and cutting them to ribbons. Judicious editing would have pared The Host down to its effective, emotional core and removed the painfully awkward seventh inning stretch.
But these movies I can forgive their flaws because they seem to have some kinda combination of soul and heart and brains... and ultimately, they have some sense of hope. This is the aspect I found most troubling and painful about watching Cloverfield... its insistence on brutalizing the characters not because it was what the story demanded, but because that's the reality of it, man, that's how the shit would go down. It's like some weird simulacrum of human emotion wrote & directed this movie; all the beats where we're supposed to care are there, but they so work on only a surface level, you're just left feeling empty -- and not even quite manipulated, it's like actually manipulating the audience's emotions was too much effort, so they opted to shake the camera and deafen us with the subwoofers instead. Cloverfield has, on some level, the mentality of a propaganda film; like I think Pauline Kael said about another picture, it's the kind of movie that, if there's a shot of a flower, it's only there so a Gestapo jackboot can stomp on it.
Sorry to ramble on so much, but something about this movie really bugged the shit out of me. And it relates to an idea a friend related to me recently: as an artists, you can choose to relate Beautiful Truths, Beautiful Lies, Ugly Truths or Ugly Lies. And it's often the Ugly Truths that are the hardest sell... the hostility towards the ending of No Country for Old Men is an example.
It's an ending that closes a theme instead of a plot -- and the theme is a deeply troubling one that aims squarely at the fables Americans tell themselves about good guys and bad guys, right and wrong. It acknowledges the raw, seductive power of nihilism, of chaos... a force that hurtles through our world like a freight train and can only be stopped if good men are willing to hurl themselves in its path, to sacrifice themselves. It's a cold, cruel illustration of the old saw that, "For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to sit idly." And it does this by showing the truth of things in the negative capacity -- showing a frightened good man, who's wise enough to understand the way of the world, who has made an active decision to sit idly -- at the cost of his own self respect and his own soul.
The meaning of Beautiful Truths and Beautiful Lies I think are self-evident... but Ugly Lies, I think that happens when an artist puts himself into the service of those dark, chaotic, nihilistic forces... when he celebrates ruthlessness and hopelessness not because that's the way of the world, but to prove that he's hardcore. The worst examples of gangsta rap fall into this category, as does Narc, an ugly, stupid movie that constantly tries to flaunt that it's real, man when every grain of its filmstock cries bullshit on its big, overinflated balls. I think of Irreversible and how its deeply creepy director supposedly would sit at a vantage point with a night scope so he could watch the audience's stunned, shocked reaction to its violent rape scene. And I would say Cloverfield falls into the same category.
Sorry about the tirade, I'm kinda talking aloud and trying to figure out some tradecraft issues myself here. Tho' feedback would be both interesting and helpful.
ink, i feel you. but at the same time: isn't it a bit balanced? let's just say for the sake of argument this movie was designed to do all those things to its audience. isnt that good to have every once in awhile? shouldnt somebody be the antithesis to every other film?
i dont know how i would react to this movie 20 years from now not having been a part of its very cool, beguiling run-up to its premiere. or if i had never had the chance to get a whiff of its viral marketing. i think that's a significant factor why i enjoyed this movie: not because it's "blair witch meets godzilla". but because it's "blair witch meets godzilla meets web 2.0 meets wtf does the monster look like meets slusho viral japanese website wtf is all this shit."
i respect how they packaged this film. i respect how it flew under the radar and made everyone talk. i even dig how they've setup a sequel, although i doubt there will ever be one.
the rumor is this will be out on dvd in april. again, i think this shit is awesome: it came, it did its thing, and it's going to be gone. i think it knows its limitations very well. and it understands its power is in limiting itself and letting the community extend its life through interaction and discussion, etc.
if they really wanted to be true fucking bad-asses, they'll make the movie a free download and then have people pay for all the bonus content. movie 2.0.
ok,
1) what's wrong with jackboots?
2) what does viral marketing smell like?