In Cloverfield the people run……

In Cloverfield the people run
Between the buildings with a gun,
That mark the place; and in the sky
The jets, still bravely fighting, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

This afternoon I went out and saw J.J. Abrams newest movie, Clovefield. Normally I would tell you what it was about and what I thought but for those who want to see it and have not, I will not go into it.

The best way to go into this movie is knowing nothing. We have seen the commercials and trailers but there is so much more that will make you jump.

This movie was tense and scary, I had to check my pants a few times. The Blair Witch like style really added to the mood and I thought it was well done.

Just looking at the production value I loved it. I have always been a fan of J.J. because he is a fan of movies and T.V. shows and that shows in his work. Love it or hate it he always tries new things and leaves an audience wanting more.

Is it a movie that will be on my list of all-time faves? Doubtful. But for 90 minutes on a Friday afternoon I was on the edge of my seat feeling much better about my day as I watched New York get torn to shreds.

Too bad the “monster” did not find Isiah Thomas and eat him. Then again that probably would not help the Knicks out either.

Here are what some other big name critics thought. (from Wikipedia)

Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film an “old-fashioned monster movie dressed up in trendy new threads”, praising the special effects, “nihilistic attitude” and “post-9/11 anxiety overlay”, but said, “In the end, [it's] not much different from all the marauding creature features that have come before it.”

Scott Foundas of LA Weekly was critical of the film’s allusions to the September 11, 2001 attacks and called it “cheap and opportunistic”. He compared its “stealth” attempts at social commentary unfavorably to the films of Don Siegel, George Romero and Steven Spielberg, saying, “Where those filmmakers all had something meaningful to say about the state of the world and [...] human nature, Abrams doesn’t have much to say about anything.”

Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle calls the film “the most intense and original creature feature I’ve seen in my adult moviegoing life [...] a pure-blood, grade A, exultantly exhilarating monster movie.” He cites Matt Reeves’ direction, the “whip-smart, stylistically invisible” script and the “nearly subconscious evocation of our current paranoid, terror-phobic times” as the keys to the film’s success, saying that telling the story through the lens of one character’s camera “works fantastically well.”

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly said that the film was “surreptitiously subversive, [a] stylistically clever little gem”, and that while the characters were “vapid, twenty-something nincompoops” and the acting “appropriately unmemorable”, the decision to tell the story through amateur footage was “brilliant”.

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that the film is “pretty scary at times” and cites “unmistakable evocations of 9/11″. He concludes that “all in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it.

For those of you who saw it, what did you think?

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