Adventures in Netflixing: "Cloverfield"

The plot:  a giant sea monster (or space alien or whatever) rampages through Manhattan, cracking open buildings and sucking down the people inside 'em like a drunken businessman at a sushi bar barreling through a rapid succession of oyster shooters.  Throw in intentionally jerky hand-held camera work a la Blair Witch for a more *authentic* feeling and *immediate* experience.

I thought this flick was a blast.  When it was released theatrically, the smattering of reviews that somehow filtered into my subconscious convinced me this would be a third-rate Godzilla knock-off, at best.  Just now I hit the web to get a more comprehensive sampling of how it went down amidst reviewers at the time.  Some liked it, as I did.  Those who weren't fans echoed a few popular refrains:  "Waaaah waaah waaah!  The characters aren't fully developed!  Waaaah waaah waaah!  Post 9/11 images of exploding buildings are in poor taste!  Waaah waah waaah!  This film could have made a stronger case against contemporary society's tendency to be too busy capturing life, via camcorders and camera phones, to actually live life."

In response to the haters, all I can say is, it's a monster movie, people - not a Daniel Day Lewis biopic.  Although a more apt title than the arbitrary, Cloverfield, could well have been, There Will Be Blood, And Bleeding, And Bloody Bleeding Eyeballs. 

As for the criticism that the film misses an opportunity to explore our societal tendency to document life instead of living it.....well, the character who mans the camera for the greater part of the flick is so busy filming the chaos, at one point he neglects to notice a skyscraper-tall sea monster standing over him, licking its chops and eyeballing him like the last coveted h'ors d'oevre on a tray at a happenin' cocktail party.   I'd say that makes the point rather nicely.  Of course, if the filmmakers were more interested in lecturing or wagging their finger at us than entertaining us, they could have by-passed that whole camcorder angle altogether and had the character lug around a laptop, stopping in the middle of the ravaged streets and corpses to blog about the monster's rampage on an hourly basis instead.  (That would have been pretty funny, actually.)

Even the monster effects were decent, which lends credence to my theory that surgically extracting A-list salaries from a production budget might indeed pave the way for more fruitful expenditures in the creature creation department.  The whiplash filming style probably further lent itself to the overall believability..........it's not like they were ever focused on the monster long enough to reveal the pixelated equivalent of the zipper at the back of the costume.  Bonus points to whoever conceptualized the highly unique strain of eczema the monster was stricken with, whose secretions could not only chomp your backside but also impart a gnarly case of Bleeding Eyeball Disease. 

Good stuff.  A+!