Word: cloverfield
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...exploding, chests busting, legs sawed off. Yet the packed audience at a late-night screening of Paranormal Activity in Times Square this past week didn't need gore effects to be scared witless. Yes, they knew it was only a movie - one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events that were dreamed up by writer-director Oren Peli and are endured by actors Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston (using their real names). But when that door moved, the crowd's collective...
...crisis, people are more likely to stop and stare than try to help. This point is apt, and never more applicable than now, the era of YouTube, in which one man’s recorded misfortune becomes a complete stranger’s entertainment. In “Cloverfield,” the camera-wielding character often had no plausible reason to be filming, but Romero brings that decision to the forefront in “Diary.” At one point, the protagonist even stays behind in a zombie-infested hospital because he has to recharge his camera...
...strike Jokes, at least, have died down. David Letterman - back on the air with his writers after making a separate deal with the Writers Guild - has moved on to wisecracks about the Cloverfield monster and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Jay Leno, who has returned sans scribes but is supposedly writing the monologues himself (angering the Guild, which claims he's violating strike rules by doing so), is pummeling viewers with the usual rat-a-tat of gags playing off the headlines, from the presidential primaries to funny animal news...
...Much of Cloverfield's visceral force comes from its use of handheld cameras. By the time Blair Witch was made, unstabilized amateur footage was already visual shorthand for disaster, the vernacular of the apocalypse?think of the Zapruder film or the footage of Rodney King being beaten. And that was long before Sept. 11 and YouTube. Grainy, unstabilized footage gives us a sense that what we're watching is real?that the hand brake is off, that we won't be protected by the bland, safe conventions of a studio movie. "I felt like there...
...reveal what kind of apocalypse the beast in Cloverfield brings, whether it leaves behind a charred, crispy earth or a moist green one or whether it just?no fair!?succumbs to old-fashioned human military might. But there's a part of each of us that is rooting for the monster and that would be glad to see us go. Because we know there's a little beast...