Manohla Dargis has always been a pretentious shrew. It's alway boggled my mind that she's a film critic since it's been quite apparent that she hates the very medium of which she reviews (like Scott Holleran for boxofficemojo.com). A few years ago she was part of that movie critic consensus in Entertainment Weekly. After a few months they rightfully pulled her off since the majority of her grades were Ds and Fs…and this was during the great cinema year of 1999.

I don't know about this lady, but the people at Slant hate everything.

I saw Cloverfield and was disappointed because Abrams violated the very principles that he spoke about at the March '07 TED conference — the good monster flick is about the characters' journey, and there doesn't seem much of one here. The Rob-Beth relationship is too abstract to be visceral, and the home-video device makes it harder to grasp this. We never get that invested in the characters. The DVD knock-off Monster does a better job of establishing the bond of the characters and probing their emotions. Its CGI is inferior and the realism of the destruction is far less, but it works better as an emotional journey than Cloverfield did.

Also, for people intended on rescuing their friend, they make little effort to prep themselves — shouldn't they have raided Paragon sports before heading up to Columbus Circle? They have no gear, not even water or first-aid kits. I do give the director credit for keeping the geography of NY intact in the narrative — although walking from Spring St. to CC in heels, as Lily has to, is absurd (BTW, what job requires Rob to wear a suit-and-tie but not shave?), and given their location on the lower There is discussion of whether they should take the Manhattan Bridge rather than the Brooklyn, which is right given their location on the lower East Side.

I found the camera-work too jittery and dark to make many things out, though it certainly cut the production costs. It ruined the apartment cross-over though, since I couldn't make out what we were seeing very well.

There's no personality to the monster. Part of what made King Kong and even Godzilla interesting was the monster's personality or the possibility of it. In Cloverfield that is empty.

This is a hard one to reply to, primarily because I don't think the film was about any of the things you mentioned.

The monster doesn't need a personality, it is a monster from the ocean that tears shit up. The only personality needed is that it does its job, which it does.

I think complaints about the camera work are silly. People have been complaining about the Bourne style of filming and the handheld cameras used in The Kingdom, saying it is too jittery. However, with Cloverfield it is not some professional cinematographer running around the streets with a truck load of professional equipment. It's someone like you or me being chased by a giant monster that is eating people. What would you really expect?

Looking for logic in a film like this is ridiculous as well. Why didn't they get first aid kits and water? Who the hell knows or cares? I personally think if that is a problem for you then you really should avoid most monster movies because from the outset the film isn't logical.

As far as the character emotional connection you were looking for, I don't think this is a movie that needs that or wants it. Just sit back and enjoy it for 73 minutes. Shut your brain off and enjoy. This isn't going to be a Best Picture contender.

zaphod said:
I found the camera-work too jittery and dark to make many things out, though it certainly cut the production costs. It ruined the apartment cross-over though, since I couldn't make out what we were seeing very well.

To be honest…I don't think the camera work was jittery enough. There were plenty of shots that seem really well composed for off the cuff camera work. Not that any of this ruins the movie for me.

davidfrank said: To be honest…I don't think the camera work was jittery enough. There were plenty of shots that seem really well composed for off the cuff camera work. Not that any of this ruins the movie for me.

I agree, but I can't speak for others so I try not to say, "No, you didn't get sick because it wasn't too jittery." However, I think it is such an annoying complaint, but that is probably because I read a lot more annoying shit than most folks. :)

bradbrevet said:
Looking for logic in a film like this is ridiculous as well. Why didn't they get first aid kits and water? Who the hell knows or cares? I personally think if that is a problem for you then you really should avoid most monster movies because from the outset the film isn't logical.

I don't think that's fair. What made Alien, Aliens, and Predator such effective films was that the characters try to be smart (putting together make-shift weapons; going in w/ Marines; trying to figure out the Pred's tactics). This is what made FX so good as a thriller — the hero smarts up quickly and doesn't behave stupidly. What makes Cloverfield so galling is that the producer knows how to make clever and suspenseful stories and bollockes it here. The "rescue Beth" plot is what annoyed me; if they were just on the run, say, trying to get to the Holland or Lincoln tunnels, the absence of gear would have made more sense. I got not that much action, and nothing particularly thrilling — kicking enlarged face-suckers off people in night-vision just doesn't do it for me. This was no Feast in the sit-back-and-watch-crazy-happen sense.

The jitter-cam messed things up because what could have been powerful scenes — the Brooklyn Bridge collapse, the Columbus Circle crossover — become a barely intelligible. I kept thinking, that would have been awesome… if I had been able to see it.