Cloverfield
Feb. 10th, 2008 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaWe were in Bradford for two nights, for this conference about nanoparticles. Most of the students in my group are either Chinese and don't drink much or are Muslim and don't drink at all, so whiling away the evening in a pub isn't really an option. Handily, though, the hotel was next to a cinema. We went to see Cloverfield, a film I'd heard the odd fragment but nothing substantial about. The short review is, go and see it, and go and see it on a cinema scale while you can too. Some bits of it are scary or gory but it doesn't go out of its way to play that up, that's not what the film's about, and there is a monster but the exact nature of the monster isn't at all important and that's not what it's about either. It's about what people do when confronted with something immediate and life-shattering to deal with and as a film about that, it's really well-done.
It starts with a party, with all the gossip and social dynamics that go on at parties. I liked it right from there because it's not just a space for people to explain the plot set-up and character outlines to each other in clunky dialogue, as if they know there's going to be an action film next and the prelude needs getting out of the way; this is a bunch of people caught up in their own real lives. As braisedbywolves pointed out, the camera is cunningly given to the slightly dumb friend, who doesn't have the sense to stop filming or not to say the thing that's at the front of his mind at any given time. So you get a record of people chasing through the streets doing the sort of things which are objectively very stupid but that you know people would want to try and do. There's a monster knocking around, fair enough, but we don't get to know anything else about it, because the exact nature of it is as irrelevant to us as it is to the people on the ground. Obviously there was a certain amount of Hollywood reality-stretching, or it would be an even shorter film than it is, but most of it wasn't clanging enough to spoil the flow. The nearest approach, for me, was the girl pulled off the steel rod and later seen running around. Jonathan Kaplan says no, you know?
A redeeming feature of Brave New World might be in providing a range of identifiable concepts for types of experience. The Violent Passion Surrogate treatment in Brave New World, getting your dose of adrenins in a controlled situation on a regular basis... isn't that what cinema is, in some ways? Do I like this film just because it is skilfully done, providing an absorbing plot and believable character interactions without any unfollowable jumps, avoiding interruptions in the experience surrogate treatment? I am kind of suspicious of cinema. While it provides entertainment, isn't there, you know, something else I could be doing?
(Like spending Sunday morning in bed writing about it...)
braisedbywolves pointed out, the camera is cunningly given to the slightly dumb friend, who doesn't have the sense to stop filming or not to say the thing that's at the front of his mind at any given time. So you get a record of people chasing through the streets doing the sort of things which are objectively very stupid but that you know people would want to try and do. There's a monster knocking around, fair enough, but we don't get to know anything else about it, because the exact nature of it is as irrelevant to us as it is to the people on the ground. Obviously there was a certain amount of Hollywood reality-stretching, or it would be an even shorter film than it is, but most of it wasn't clanging enough to spoil the flow. The nearest approach, for me, was the girl pulled off the steel rod and later seen running around. Jonathan Kaplan says no, you know? A redeeming feature of Brave New World might be in providing a range of identifiable concepts for types of experience. The Violent Passion Surrogate treatment in Brave New World, getting your dose of adrenins in a controlled situation on a regular basis... isn't that what cinema is, in some ways? Do I like this film just because it is skilfully done, providing an absorbing plot and believable character interactions without any unfollowable jumps, avoiding interruptions in the experience surrogate treatment? I am kind of suspicious of cinema. While it provides entertainment, isn't there, you know, something else I could be doing?
(Like spending Sunday morning in bed writing about it...)
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Date: 2008-02-11 09:27 am (UTC)I also saw 'Juno' last week, which I'd also highly recommend. So, a good week for films all told.