Re: Cloverfield......HOLY EFFIN A!
Its not what you expect it to look like...it isnt too shaky..unlike blair witch...im going back to see it tonite. I have been studying film for 5 years...and i am still a film student....if you are going for a story you wont get much...what you do get is what appears to be a recording of what this group of people go through during the destruction... and it feels as if it is real....I loved it, and many of my instructors, with the exception of a few are eager to see it. It will make millins, but wont go down in history as being a monumental movie....but i sat on the edge of my seat and chewed off all my fingernails....
Well every review I've read say that it has several needless, pointless, and tacky shots that are clear echoes of 9/11 but there's not thematic significance so it's really just in poor taste and pointless.
To steal from wikkipedia...
Scott Foundas of
LA Weekly was critical of the film's allusions to the
September 11, 2001 attacks and called it "cheap and opportunistic". He compared its "stealth" attempts at social commentary unfavorably to the films of
Don Siegel,
George Romero and
Steven Spielberg, saying, "Where those filmmakers all had something meaningful to say about the state of the world and [...] human nature, Abrams doesn't have much to say about anything."
[35] Manohla Dargis in the
New York Times called the allusions "tacky", saying, "[The images] may make you think of the attack, and you may curse the filmmakers for their vulgarity, insensitivity or lack of imagination", but that "the film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence." She concludes that the film "works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt."
[36] Stephanie Zacharek of
Salon.com calls the film "badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic", and sums up by saying that the film "takes the trauma of 9/11 and turns it into just another random spectacle at which to point and shoot."
[37] Michael Phillips of the
Chicago Tribune warned that the viewer may feel "queasy" at the references to September 11, but that "other sequences [...] carry a real jolt" and that such tactics were "crude, but undeniably gripping". He called the film "dumb", but "quick and dirty and effectively brusque", concluding that despite it being "a harsher, more demographically calculating brand of fun", he enjoyed the film.
[38]
