Life Interrupted

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2008)

This may be the first post postmodern film. A MTV inspired style of self-conscious life narrated in real time with a herky-jerky style that becomes a topsy turvy big screen reality. A real time reality not found in traditional movies. Sure, the Blair Witch Project pioneered the style, but Cloverfield, a big movie, a big budget movie, a big story movie, that takes The Real World and makes it an epic movie. Sort of a combination of The Real World's young adult swirling lives, The Amazing Race's group dynamics, and non-professional documentaries found on Youtube. But, in Cloverfield, the ultimate prize isn't money or fame, but survival.
With a story that is universal: love and loss. A behind the camera Falstaffian figure telling the story, and the story told entirely in the moment. Despite the shakiness of the camera and the rules of the reality game, a movie with a delicate suppleness showing time suspended through the replay of the discovered disk containing a preexisting real-time love story caught in calmer more innocent times. The camera captures the sensibility of a younger generation in its use of language, raw feelings of young love, and a realism that engages viewers of any age. The shaky camera does become a bit much at times, but a glance or two away from the screen at a static theater chair, or the empty box of popcorn on the theater floor restores the movie viewer's center and eases the stomach.
The story is simple enough: a going away party of twenty-something's at a Manhattan apartment have their lives interrupted by an unimagined evil and violence. Told with in a self-indulgent egocentric style of narrative familiar to us all from television. A style that has leapt from the small screen to the big and creates a new effective form of movie making. Off putting at first, the various narratives spoken to the camera keep us up front and close to the action and up to date with their stories, viscerally involved, with the fantastical growing disaster that has torn their comfortable lives and New York to pieces.
Interesting movie making, done with incredible art direction, control of crowd scenes, special effects, believable nightmarish monsters, and style. Done in a way that brought all of 9/11 back to me. What it might have been like if a camera had been found in the rubble of the Twin Towers detailing the lives of real people the same age as the characters in Cloverfield with the same hopes and dreams and desire to live long lives as they confront a fate they could not have imagined as they woke up and got ready for the day on that beautiful morning.
I am still a bit sea sick and oppressed by what I saw on the screen. I am also incredibly impressed by this post postmodern movie. I remember the story about the long time New York Times movie reviewer panning Bonnie and Clyde. He did not appreciate the new style and stylized violence of the movie. He just didn't get it, and by not getting admitted to the NYT's readers that the times had passed him. He retired shortly after the movie became a hit, his artistic point of view too rigid to admit the brilliance of Arthur Penn's vision.
In 2008, after a decade of radically changing media and media content delivery systems, it's idiotic to hold to a rigid view of what constitutes movie art. Digital, high speed downloads, cell phone movies, blogs, iPods, iPhones, electronic books bang bang boom and poof... something new was probably invented whilst I write this. I watch a downloaded mini movie by Martin Scorsese late one night, a take off on Hitchcock for a Spanish champagne, and it is so good I smile in bed like an idiot. I email it to a friend in London and ten minutes later he emails me a video taken with his phone that day of a walk in a park with leaves so golden and red that the video seems hand painted.
Cloverfield, a movie as metaphor on many levels: a going away party for a young executive leaving for Japan, the land of Godzilla and Mothra, dependent as metaphor on what your definition of 'going away' is. Cloverfield, first person self conscious narratives with more Oh My Gods than a Catholic mass, a life boat in a stormy sea mounted camera, focus and film quality that would not have been allowed in the Golden Age of Hollywood, and the lives and fates of a group of generation Xers (or is it Yers?) whose lives are suddenly in the grip of a mindless evil, made for this movie lover a new kind of movie, a movie that I would recommend highly.