Idol Pleasures - Cloverfield
In the essay Idol Pleasures, Peter H. Gilmore begins with:
My generation was the first to grow up bathed in the glow from that flickering window into mediated fantasy called television. Aside from the growing repertory of talk shows and forms of entertainment adapted from earlier radio broadcasts, films became a staple to fill air time and provided a steady diet of literature from base B-movies up to high art cinema. The imagery that flashed ephemerally by, and for some time only in stark black and white, formed our collective unconscious of archetypes. My favorites, the ones that remained long after the show time was past, were the monster films.
He discusses recording the sound in cassette tapes to listen to later, before the ability to capture both the audio and video on home recorders. Sneaking out of his bedroom at night, he would watch the horror films that played on “The Late Show” and “The Late, Late Show”.
He sought out the toys of his favorite monsters, and grew most fond of the one he refers to his “patron divinity”, Gojira “King of the Monsters”! His house in Hell’s Kitchen prominently features a number of models of the radioactive reptile, and he’s always excited to see the next movie that tells the continuing story of Godzilla and related daimones.
Magus Gilmore was recently invited to addend a screening of the new giant monster movie Cloverfield. The film was rumored pre-release to have possibly been based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, or even a new Godzilla movie. A review of his was published on the culture and entertainment web-magazine Buzzine.com.
Cloverfield: Review
Peter H. GilmoreI just got back from a screening of Cloverfield (digitally projected and looking very sharp). I thought you, my fellow monster fans, might enjoy some of my reactions. There are “spoilers.”
So, in brief, it is a fun “ride” of a movie, worth seeing on the big screen, and the decision to make it a “found videotape” is a gimmick which allows the story to have a very immediate “you are there” feeling. Yes, it could be described as The Blair Witch Project meets the American Godzilla, but it succeeds with this premise, and there were some smart choices made so that it functions satisfactorily for a feature-length movie. At a bit under 90 minutes, it doesn’t wear out its welcome.
It is a bit tedious at the start as the characters are established. They are all dull normals who are conventionally good-looking and witless. Patton Oswalt was on-the-money in his salty, early pseudonymous review–it looked like they were filming the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. No geeks or nerds (or odd-lookers) amongst the crowd. Not a single person who might have actually watched a Godzilla film (the leads are probably all too “cool” to have intentionally seen a kaiju flick). A true Giant Monster Geek would have been a welcome addition. He or she then might have had the savvy to advise the others what actions might be possible in order to get through a giant monster attack. If these vapid folk actually watched the news reports on the TV screens in the background, they would have had more info to work with and perhaps bettered their odds. However, these brain-dead mannequins do everything wrong, so they are essentially a guide for how NOT to survive a kaiju visitation.
View the rest at the Buzzine website.
