I’ve been pretty lazy about posting updates since the beginning, despite it pretty much being my unofficial new year’s resolution. I’ve just been busy with coming back to Portland, setting things up, paying bills, getting the water to work again (it went out while I was gone), working on finding a job and everything.
But I digress, I still don’t know what this site is going to be about but I know I don’t want it to be just another personal blog about some personal life. Those are boring, cliche and a dime and a dozen. Who wants to know about my day-to-day life? I barely do. I don’t need to document it for the the world to see, either. Let’s just stick with opinions and see where that takes us.
With that said, I just saw Cloverfield tonight. I went in with little to no expectations. I’d only seen the trailer with Transformers last summer, and didn’t get into the hype. I was pretty satisfied. Without giving anything away, I thought the camera gimmick was very well done. Many people criticize the movie for the gimmick or for the shallow characters or unrealistic actions, but I don’t think they really saw what the movie for what it was. You’re watching a video that people filmed for their friend’s going away party that turns into a documentations of some fucked up shit going on in the city. There isn’t going to be built up dramatic scenes that you don’t see in real life from an invisible third person perspective. Things that we see are happening to the characters that hold the camera, so we’re not going to see scenes where the camera holder shouldn’t belong in the first place.
Other complaints were how it invoked images from 9/11 too much. I don’t see how a movie set in New York involving some disaster on a realistic level can’t do this. It’s impossible. The movie does a really good job at what it’s trying to do: put us in a roller coaster ride. It also captures the contemporary setting pretty well, with everyone having cameras in our post-YouTube society.
I highly recommend the movie. It’s a simple story with a simple plot, but that’s not the point of the movie. You can know all the major plot points and spoilers and still enjoy the movie because it’s all about the process of getting from point A to point B, not so much why we’re on the journey in the first place. It’s a real breath of fresh air to see a monster movie that is more about the characters than the monster. There are no larger than life characters. We don’t know where the monster came from, why it attacks, etc. but that doesn’t matter. It’s just a plot element. The characters aren’t involved in anything to do with attacking/defeating the monster. It’s pretty much just a story about the little civilians in a modern Godzilla. I like that about it.