I was at work the other day when a customer walked in and claimed that a fellow employee of mine is ridiculous for recommending they not rent the film Dragon Wars: D-Day. Having not seen this film I can't comment on the quality, although the title does suggest something I am less than interested in. Needless to say, this particular customer went on to insult the film The Host. The Host is a South Korean monster movie in the vein of Godzilla. One thing he said that made me laugh was that he couldn't believe he sat through thirty minutes of watching a family eat in The Host. I too found The Host to be tremendously disappointing. Of course this is coming from a red blooded American male who may be more interested in the death and destruction that play out in the first thirty minutes of The Host rather than the last hour and a half of family drama. Coming back from Matt Reeves' much talked about and much anticipated film Cloverfield, I was perusing the web reading other reviews and comments on the film and found one specific reviewer who rather snidely said the only thing Cloverfield inspired her to do was go home and watch the far superior film The Host. I don't really see Cloverfield necessarily entering the annals of American film, other than perhaps riding the merits of its impeccable ad campaign, but the audience reaction following the end of the movie was completely shocking to me. Never before had I heard an audience boo as much as they did when the credits began rolling, but I could only reckon that perhaps they are also not big fans of J.J. Abrams television show LOST which airs on ABC. Like with Lost, Cloverfield hooks you into the story of a group of twenty-something New Yorkers on the eve of one of their friends leaving for a job in Japan (the home of Godzilla...I'm sure no coincidence). Like with LOST we are clued in to some of the back story of several characters throughout the film. You see what makes this such an interesting take on monster movies is that it is completely handheld a la The Blair Witch Project, another film which had trouble breaking beyond the rather genius marketing campaign. Unfortunately for our main character the tape that his buddy is recording the events on was previously used to document a day he spent with the love of his life, a girl who has since moved on realizing that he wasn't ready to commit and was in fact headed overseas. Sure, this may sound rather typical, and I won't lie it definitely is, but at no point does it seem to be over the top or overly sentimental. Regardless of all the back story, at the top of everybody's priorities when it came to the movie was what exactly is this monster that rips the head of the Statue of Liberty off and sends it hurling across Manhattan. I will tell you, without revealing too much information, that some viewers questions will not be answered by watching the movie and that is undoubtedly what drove the viewers to harness such resentment at the closing. With effective enough effects, some pretty stellar performances, one rather amazing bit of B-movie gore, enough scares and playing off the paranoia and fear surrounded by the climate of recent terror attacks (something which seems to bother a lot of people, although I find it a highly interesting phenomenon to examine in genre films like this one) Cloverfield is definitely worth seeing. Even if you end up disliking the ending, or feeling less than satisfied with the way the story plays out, take comfort in the fact that the film clocks in shorter than almost any film in recent memory.
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