Archive for April 8th, 2008
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
The spectacle.
I refuse to watch Cloverfield.
I will go to my grave without watching that movie. If I wake up some morning, and a paramilitary group has kidnapped me, and plans to force me to watch the movie, I will swallow my own fucking tongue.
I watched the trailer with apprehension, because I hate JJ Abrams and all things associated with him. The trailer angered me, as have all his works. It began with Alias (I was never a fan, but I understood the appeal), and then transfered to Lost.
Fuck Lost. I can’t stand the abuse of the “gap”. It’s a crutch, and even if he’s using it like the ancient techniques of the master, Hitchcock, he fails to close the loop with anything near the same flair and intelligence.
But let’s return to the current object of my scorn: Cloverfield. There are two important points that must be noted about movies like this, and their failure.
#1: Like the above example, you cannot fail to close the Gap. He set up the mystery for us “What is it?”. That mystery at the beginning of the story is paramount. You must have it. Lewis Black, the comedian, talks about the gap in his pseudo-autobiography “Nothing Sacred”. In the book, he discusses his first forays into the world of Stand Up Comedy (capitalization makes it MORE important!), and in a particularly shitty bar, following a punk rock band, the room was deafened. Black lamented the murmur of the crowd, roar of bikes outside, and pinball machines in the corner. Why?
Silence. It’s an essential component of public speaking, because in silence, you find the tension (re:gap). And tension is what the Gap is all about. Whether its a joke, a thriller movie, a mystery novel, everything is a slave to the tension. What people who don’t rant about this all day call “suspense”. First, the tension must build, and then, when the moment is right, it must be released. As Axe is known to say “You can’t show a gun, without it going off”. That is why I want to kick Ol’ JJ in his dick: he doesn’t turn the tension. There’s no release. You leave the theater, or turn off the tv, and you are frustrated. And because the Television nation is constantly anesthetized, they confuse that frustration, with emotional involvement.
Dear TV Nation: You are being tricked. Please stop giving this asshole your money. It enables him to continue shitting on our lives.
#2: The camera. Fuck. I thought they had learned the lesson when they made Blair Witch, but apparently whoever greenlit that piece of shit, somehow made an impression, and producers still think it’s A-Ok. Let me explain something to the people who make movies (and why am I the one having to tell YOu this? What the FUCK):
We know they’re fake. yeah, I know this comes as a shock to you, but the viewing public understands that they’re seeing a movie. The reason the Blair Witch managed to pull anybody into their little game, was the hoax surrounding the footage. They told us IT WAS REAL. With that assumption in hand, we made our way to the screen, and some of us were pulled in. BUT… The rest of us were too busy thinking the same thing “Jesus christ, hold the fucking camera still”. The effect in BW and the effect in Cloverfield yields the same result: I am so aware of the camera moving, that I can no longer focus on the narrative of the story. You have broken the spell, so that quality or quantity of the content you are presenting means nothing anymore. My emotional wall is back up. You fail.
The bottom line is that film is a visual media that requires a very specific look to tell a specific story. The thought “hey, what if we made this look like handheld footage!” is a novelty, and has some juice. The problem arises in that novelties have the annoying tendency to wear off. Anybody old enough to remember He-Man is well aware of this fact.
Mahalo