« Ode To Hillary - From Jim Morrison | Main | George Lucas Wants you to know... »

10 second movie review: Cloverfield

Cloverfield: Rating - Skip. Rent the original Godzilla instead. Raymond Burr sitting on a block of ice with prestone running through his veins could emote more energy than any of the characters on the screen in this movie, including the "monster".

Phil Spector once described the record album as "2 hits and 8 peices of crap". Modern movies are much the same idea in that the moments captured on the trailer almost always make up all of the better scenes of the movie. 9 times out of 10, once you've seen the trailer, youve seen all thats worth seeing in the movie. Trailers thankfully end in 90 seconds where you are forced to sit for 90 minutes through the movie.

Exhibit A for this case is made by the movie "Cloverfield". If you've seen the trailer, thats it. Seriously, thats all there is. Cloverfield is yet another movie where youth culture makes its shiny faced debut and you just weep for the species. You know the plot to this movie before you sit down to watch it - a big spooky monster comes to New York, makes a hash of the place. You know it because its been done before, lots and lots of times before. The fact is, I cant think of a time when it was done worse than this movie, and that includes the laughible "Q". What you dont know is this is yet another modern movie where the the overdone technique of "hand held video" is used in the same way for film in the same way that garlic is overused in bad restaurants.

The film starts at a going away part for a young man going away to become his company Vice President in Japan. One look at the guy and you say to yourself, "Vice President! Wow, just imagine how far he will go when he finds a comb!"

The camera wanders around for 20 minutes as you "get to know" the people at the party. At this point I began to say to myself " Hey wouldnt it be great if a big slimy monster fell from the sky and ate all these people? Now I would pay to see that!"

And guess what, thats exactly what happened. So, in that respect, the movie works on a very satisfactory level. Unfortunately in the process of removing the main characters from the movie(which you feel surprisingly good about), the monster messes up some very nice places in New York, so you feel bad about that and you really feel bad that its the real estate getting smashed that gets your emotions going and not Johnny "brothers-brown-suit-who-was-just-made-vice-president-and-shipped-to-japan-for-the-mattel-company-who-youre-supposed-to-care-about-but-dont".

This is yet another modern movie where CGI is used to replace script, plot, direction, acting, lighting and story structure. Cloverfield is to film what the Dixie cup is to Wedgewood pottery. My rule is that if you take the CGI out of the movie, could you still make the movie? If the answer is no, then dont make the movie because no matter how good you think the CGI is for whatever scene you think you need it in, its not as good as your imagination would be in the same place. A good director knows when you put your imagination to work. A bad director just makes a tentacled creature appear on screen. Cheap and easy to use special effects has ruined filmmaking. When directors had no special effects they were forced to write better stories, use better actors, spend more time on scene composition. Now they just put any old damn thing on screen and clean it up later and by "Clean it up later", I mean insert a big improbable multi-tentacled slime creature.

You know, like that video game we used to play. Yeah, that would be cool...

Because thats what film today has become. It used to be moving literature but now its the recorded replay of some video game that is on its way to become a rollercoaster somewhere. Yeah, that would be cool...Clovefield! The rollercoaster!

I've had a real dry spell with movies lately, I mildly liked "The Coward Robert Ford" and I really hated and was geniunely disappointed in "No Country For Old Men" so I may need to go watch Ikiru as a "palette cleanser".

If todays directors spent half as much time on plot and script as they do making sure the movie music playlist in Itunes is programmed for the latest hip tunes and the product placement is optimum, we would have some good stuff out there.

What we have instead isnt movies but really,really long trailers.

Posted @ June 03, 2008 09:17 AM | Current Affairs

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://varifrank.com/MT/mt-tb.cgi/1086