Cloverfield (Page 1 of 2)

I think that is the best thing about the movie. And I like the movie.

In November of 2007, I moved from my Sister's house out in the country to Downtown, Forth Worth, Texas. I had never lived in a big city before that point. It was always either the suburbs, a trailer park in the middle of nowhere or an apartment complex near a college campus of some kind. In this downtown area, I resided on the sixth floor (I think the top floor was the seventh) of an apartment building with concrete walls and linoleum floors.

On the release day of Cloverfield, in January, I took the elevator down to the lobby and walked three blocks (may have been more, but it still wasn't far) down the street to the AMC Palace 9. It was a cool, overcast Friday, early afternoon. I sat in the theater with my snacks and not very many people and was mesmerized for 90 minutes by this intense, creative American monster movie I had been anticipating since I saw the trailer online, back in the Summertime.

When I came out of the theater, walking home was a surreal, tingling experience. I kept looking up at the towering skyscrapers, waiting for that lumbering creature to make an appearance. I know that's silly but I couldn't help it. The movie had worked its magic on me. It was one of the more effective Horror films I had seen in a long time. It got under my skin and stayed with me.

Teague's theory, of simply putting characters in peril to garner sympathy without having to know them, is interesting and probably works for a number of other movies but is debunked here by the fact that most (if not all) of the panelists don't like or care about the characters, even after they are put in this terrible situation and one of them even loses a family member.

I do think Trey is on to something about trimming the party scene way down. I'll go even further with it and say we don't even need the stuff before it, with the footage of the couple being playful in bed, or Jason and his girlfriend getting items for the party. I think the film would be better to start the "recording" immediately on Rob entering the apartment and getting surprised at his friends and family having setup this going away party.

I never had an issue with Hud continuing to shoot the events of the film, even going back for the camera when he drops it, which ultimately results in his demise (Fun Fact: Leading up to the film's release, Hud had his own MySpace page, where his stats, such as his height were listed. After the film came out, his height was changed to read "3 feet", the monster having bitten him in half). I always thought of the camera as Hud's security blanket, a way for him to distance himself from everything he was seeing, thereby being able to cope with it better. It was as though looking upon these horrible things through a camera lens made them less real.

My issue has always been Hud, himself. "Douche bag" was indeed the wrong word. I believe Teague meant to say, "obnoxious". I know there are people like Hud who make light of everything to help deal with the severity of their situation. It's a survival instinct. However, I just couldn't get on board with Hud NEVER, eventually sobering up and taking things seriously. Even after Marlena died, he was still robbing every scene of its full tension by being overly wacky, in my opinion. I remember thinking, "Why did our surrogate have to be THIS GUY?" Having said all that, I absolutely love how after all of Marlena's constant snubbing of Hud trying to chat her up, she specifically turns to Hud for help when she's about to die and her last words are, "Hud? I don't feel so good."

Sure, Cloverfield could have been tighter, especially given its brisk running time to begin with. Sure, our heroes are kind of self-involved, rich kids with childish relationship issues but I kind of like that they're not the typical, "Man of Action" proactive stock. This is an indie drama with occasional interruptions from a terrifying, Monster Movie blockbuster. I think that's kind of neat and original. Having been a fan of Drew Goddard's work on Buffy and Angel for years beforehand, I knew that was his bread and butter. Those Whedon collaborators are all about approaching the mundane and melodramatic through a genre convention, making the whole thing unconventional.

Cloverfield is one of my favorite films but I don't watch it often because frankly, that monster's awkward design creeps me the hell out and I don't like looking at it (by the way, thanks to the Asshole on these forums who decided to use that monster's fucking face as their god damn avatar!).

Oh, and Lizzy Caplan gets first billing in the credits because they're going by last names, alphabetically.

Last edited by johnpavlich (2013-08-06 06:01:41)

The movie IS about something, just not the monster. If you weren't interested or invested in what it was about, that's fine and even understandable. But as the panelists discussed in the commentary, it was very much a response to the events of 9/11, as JJ Abrams seems determined to do in everything he does, forever. Rob was faced with devastating destruction and even after his Brother died, he rose to the occasion to become that civilian who ran into a crumbling building to save someone he could have easily left behind.

For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, I was under the impression that no one liked this movie and it was universally regarded as terrible. I think I may have extrapolated a bit too much from some of the negative comments I heard regarding the monster's design. In any case, I'm not one for blockbuster movies and I didn't like Lost, so I figured there wasn't much in this one for me.

In any case, I only watched this for you guys, and ended up really enjoying it. So thank you very much for that. 

I have much the same opinion as you guys, except I'm kind of torn over the party scene. Rather than getting rid of the party scene, I just wish it and Rob and Beth's whole love story had been better executed. That would help to make this movie be about something.

I've managed to avoid a lot of actual 9/11 imagery, so when I see it reproduced in a film, I don't really know what it is I'm looking at. I imagine if Japanese filmmakers ever decide to put fictionalized 3/11 imagery in their movies, I'll have a similar sort of negative reaction.

I always wonder why more found footage movies don't just make the person pointing the camera a professional. In Blair Witch, they just made the main characters filmmakers who were there, with cameras, for the explicit purpose of making a documentary. That can go a long way in taking care of the "Why is this dummy filming instead of doing X" problem. Someone like a documentarian, or a TV news camera operator, or even a wedding videographer, is so accustomed to shooting what's going on that it's second nature.

In Cloverfield, Hud is just a normal fella who gets handed a camera at a party, a chore he reluctantly accepts. Later, when the shit hits the fan, he insists that he wants to document the tragedy. That makes more sense if documenting everything that's going on is his (a)vocation, not a happenstance. I mean, the film takes place in NYC, so why not just make him an aspiring documentarian? You can't swing a dead cat in Manhattan without hitting an aspiring filmmaker. They could have even called it out: "Oh and here's Hud, as usual, filming us all for his doc that will never get made..." It just seems cleaner if, from the get-go, the audience understands that, oh, this dude is always rolling—it's his thing.

Frankly, I'm amazed y'all managed to go the entire movie without even one mention of Monsters. Impressive.

Re: Teagues constant (No one who films everything can ever be not annoying.) I'd like to introduce you to vlogger Michael Aranda, and one of his channels "What I'm Doing Right Now".

http://www.youtube.com/WhatImDoingRightNow

I approve of "Teague's Constant" so hard.

The Teague Principle

Teague's Law surely?

Teague's First Law of Character Dynamics: the dickishness of a constant observer can never be zero.  (Dickishness is usually measured in microTrumps, because values approaching one Trump are incredibly difficult to replicate under laboratory conditions.)

The latter.

And since you needed to ask, I'm assuming you don't agree with the awesomeness that is Mr Aranda?

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2013-08-12 05:39:40)

I am really surprised that you guys didn't mention the similarities of Cloverfield and War of the Worlds. They are extremely similar disaster porn movies from the average joes perspective. WotW came out 3 years earlier and does exactly what you guys talk about early in the episode and follows Cruise without being lost footage. With you guys being big Spielberg fans and having done an episode on WotW, I figured you guys would have caught the similarities