Cloverfield destroys New York City(via The Vulture) So far, most of Cloverfield's reviews tend to write it off — or praise it — as a simple movie about a giant monster biting a hole through greater Manhattan (and lots of Manhattanites). But could it be something more? Maybe!
The Voice's Nathan Lee reads deep, positing that Cloverfield is a "death-to-New-York saga" and a comment on the accelerated yuppification of New York following 9/11. The movie, he says, "enacts its deft simulation of that infamous September morning in order to brutalize the society that flourished from its ruin like some tacky, tenacious, condo-dwelling fungus." Times economist Tyler Cowen thinks along similar lines but suggests it's more a slap at the social-networking generation, writing on his personal blog, "[T]his is a movie about how the young'uns have no tools for moral discourse and that all they can do is utter banalities and take endless pictures of each other and record their lives for no apparent purpose. I can't recall any other movie that so completely devastates its intended demographic." (more)
you know im getting tired of people acusing that cloverfield, exploids 9/11, in a offending way, and a) if 9/11 really has any influence it woulld be that is a point of reference to how people would really react to certain circunstances, and now all this peple from magazines and newspaper that have to review it and dont really research, jj and reves have said it so many times!!!! there is no real meaning.
ReplyDeleteJJ has said himself that Cloverfield is basically one big 9/11 reference - you can't deny it. (His quote was something like "we live in a time of great fear, and to be able to experience that fear through safe fantasy is blah blah blah." What "fear" do you think he was talking about? Fear of giant monsters?) Even if he didn't say it, and even if he didn't mean it, it's *obvious*. It would have been subconscious if it wasn't conscious.
ReplyDeleteI wish some of the film's fans would stop denying the obvious, which even Abrams himself has copped to. It's just as tiring for those of us who *don't* have our heads in the sand to hear that as it apparently is for you to hear the opposite.
Anyway, this post isn't about "exploiting 9/11", this post is about destroying the post-9/11 city that has become even more yuppified since then than it was before.
You can't have it both ways - either the film's about something or it's about nothing. If it's about nothing, then it's just a disposable piece of crap Hollywood filmmaking. If it's about something, then what is it about? These are critics trying to come up with some ideas; in my opinion they're trying to make something out of nothing, but in their own way they are trying to legitimize the film. You should be happy about that.