Cloverfield

[The Weakest Suit]

the subway "5 dollar foot long" commercial with godzilla is more fun to watch than cloverfield.

[Hoblit]

the subway "5 dollar foot long" commercial with godzilla is more fun to watch than cloverfield.

When I first saw the trailers for this I really wanted to see it. Then they showed more and more trailers and I was already noticing the camera work. I hate that jerky swing style. I know they use it to action up the action and it also works to disguise imperfections in CGI...but it just annoys the hell out of me. (Not to mention the little dizziness)

THEN I read the reviews when it finally did come out.

And here I am now, still haven't seen it.

[Mostess]

I will see this on video. It looks like a good smash-up derby.

I'm not sure how it happened, but the viral marketing strategy seems to have hooked a lot of people who wouldn't have gone to see it if they knew what it actually was. So there are lots of disappointed people walking out of the theater.

Apparently, there's jerky camera work, POV-documentary style, found footage scenario, no music, no narrator to answer your questions. There's a monster you can't really see most of the time, but who isn't really "scary" when you think about it later. There are characters who don't just get the hell out, make dumb comments, and scream a lot.

In other words, it's a horror movie. Lots of horror movies since "Night of the Living Dead" have done those things. But somehow people who find this stuff annoying got tricked into seeing the movie and so they hated it. One common complaint is that those things have been done before and therefore the movie sucked. Which is horrible logic, but it's kind of interesting from a how-(not?)-to-promote-stuff-online perspective.

[Mostess]

To add a more general thought: I think the genre of Science Fiction is being infiltrated by Horror to the point of mass confusion. I don't know why. Probably, there's not enough of a market for either, or there's enough of an overlap in the market for both that it makes economic sense. Certainly the concept of "genre" isn't very sharp to begin with.

But not enough people think of "Alien" as a haunted house movie, which is really all it is: the fact that the house is a space ship is really just incidental. There's really no science in it. Like a Trojan horse, the horror-in-space illusion has poured an army of horror movies into the Sci-Fi section of the video store ("Event Horizon" is the prototype of a bad horror movie riding the coat-tails of Sci-Fi).

Of course, "War of the Worlds" is one of Wells' Sci-Fi-genre-defining stories. There is certainly a place for the fear of monsters in Sci-Fi. But Stephen King used aliens as the monsters in "Tommyknockers" and I've never heard anyone argue that that's a Sci-Fi book. I can't think of M. Night's "Signs" Sci-Fi because it plays out a lot like "Night of the Living Dead."

But lots of good science fiction isn't even immediately recognizable as part of its own genre anymore. "Gattaca" is a good example, so are "A Scanner Darkly," "AI," "Children of Men," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." It's more like drama, because there's no monster and nothing blows up at the end. It certainly looks silly next to "Armageddon" on the video store shelf.

So I'll bet lots of technology buffs got intrigued by the ecological-economic-political drama hinted at by Cloverfield's viral ad campaign, and so they expected a science fiction movie. What a slap in the face to see your whole genre destroyed by some ugly, stupid monster with no plausible biological, physical, or even extra-terrestrial back-story.

[The Weakest Suit]

it's not that it was a horror movie, it's that the stupid yuppie characters kept making decisions that no one would make in real life.

[Mostess]

it's not that it was a horror movie, it's that the stupid yuppie characters kept making decisions that no one would make in real life.

Main characters' stupid decisions are the essence of Horror movie.

Like: "It's not that it was a pizza, it's that it was flat, round, and cheesy."

[The Weakest Suit]

it's not that it was a horror movie, it's that the stupid yuppie characters kept making decisions that no one would make in real life.

Main characters' stupid decisions are the essence of Horror movie.

Like: "It's not that it was a pizza, it's that it was flat, round, and cheesy."

you'll see...
i hope you like it better than i did.