why i won't be seeing cloverfield

ok. i get that to some people out there that title might seem a little shocking. (well, not shocking, but, maybe a bit weird?) but it's serious.

i will not be seeing cloverfield.

honestly, i'm sure it's a decent enough movie. i just have no interest.

1. it's godzilla. actually, my first thought when i saw the first previews was that it was a war of the worlds style invasion movie - which would not have been more interesting, or better. but my point is, i've seen godzilla. the original. the sequels. hell, i even saw the awful as all hell remake. okay, so it's a different take on godzilla, from the point of view of the victims (more on this in a second) but it's still, essentially, a godzilla movie. honestly, i had at least hoped it would be something "different" (not a giant reptile that might have come from the sea... maybe a giant bunny rabbit? or the stay puffed marshmallow man, making it actually a remake of ghostbusters told from a different point of view... no i'm not being entirely serious, but i'm trying to illustrate my point that godzilla is just sort of pointless).

2. it's the blair witch project. okay, so i'll admit i got sucked into the blair witch hype of 98 or 99 or whatever summer that was. i did. it was new, sort of. and it was - from a storytelling point of view - not even a terrible movie (though most of the storytelling was told off camera in all of the lead up and various viral marketing). yeah, it quickly became a joke, and is one of those movies that's scary like a scary campfire story is scary - it depends mostly on the environment in which you see it. but that whole "from the point of view of the handheld camera " thing just... ugh. one of the reasons blair witch works is that you NEVER see the witch, or even if there is a witch. the end, where they seem to die in the manner that some of the various townspeople describe how the "witch" killed before does seem ton indicate something, but you still just don't know, which is what makes it "scary." granted, reveals in horror movies can be scary - when you finally see freddy krueger, it's that much scarier because of how little you saw him up to that point. it's sort of a hallmark of the horror genre. but giant monster attacking new york movies DON'T work that way. the fear is not from the surprise, the fear is from the giant thing going to eat you unless you find a way to stop it.

i will throw one exception here, where i can see cloverfield working a little better than blair witch. for a movie like this to work you need to a) suspend your disbelief enough to believe that such clean images can come from a handi-cam with apparently unbelievably long battery life, and to believe that - while it's just a movie - it's "real" enough for you to invest yourself into it (blair witch did a decent job at this, though if you saw the movie in anything other than a dark, relatively quiet movie theater, it worked quite a bit less) and b) you have to give a shit about the characters. blair witch failed at that a bit, as you really kind of hoped - despite her desperate pleas - that the lead character/narrator was going to get it, and soon. if anything, you invested a lot in hating her. cloverfield seems to create characters for you to like and feel for, which, assuming you've suspended your disbelief enough, makes the rest of the movie that much more effective.

3. it's still just torture porn, sort of anyway. the shaky, slightly grainy images. the feeling that the subjects of the film are being brutalized by an unseen force. okay, it's not hostel or saw or anything like that, but it still owes as much to those movies as it does to the above. now, this might seem a bit of a stretch, but at the same time, there's not much else you can really call young, pretty people, being randomly picked off by something or someone. i mean, it doesn't seem to be the unmittigated gore fest or anything but..

4. jj abrams. granted, i like jj abrams. i liked felicity - yes, i LIKED felicity; i liked Alias (at least the first few seasons); i like Lost (what i've seen of it at least). but... there's just seems to be a sense with this movie that since he's behind it, it can't be touched, and therefore must be awesome. a lot of directors/producers fall into this trap, especially after they've had a decent string of successes that are in some way "unconventional." so this might be a slightly cynical/bratty point, but had anyone else been behind a movie like this, would it have been given as much positive hype? MAYBE spielberg (he was certainly given a bit of a pass on his remake of "war of the worlds") but i think that a lot of creators would have gotten far more critical eyes cast in the direction of this movie. would someone else have even gotten this movie greenlit?

5. viral marketing works, but can easily go wrong. truthfully, the days where an advanced campaign like "cloverfield" has had really work are gone. we're hit with so much information now, that the second something becomes part of the entertainment hype machine, it's fucked as every detail gets leaked, whether it's true or not. when cloverfield was first being marketed, it seemed very cool, and interesting (and maybe worth seeing). the best part for me was that it was largely a disinformation campaign - we were told NOTHING, not even if cloverfield was the real title (which a lot of reports had said it wasn't - that this was just another smokescreen meant to give the movie a further air of mystery and disinformation). but ultimately, maybe because of the writers strike - how much do writers have to do with marketing campaigns and movie titles? - or maybe because of something else (that's green with dead presidents on it), this all fell apart and it quickly became just another overhyped monster movie with an "interesting" angle.

maybe i'm just cynical, and i can see all of what i said easily being dismissed as me just disliking a popular movie because of hype. and maybe that's part of it too. granted, i've been known to love movies that have been hyped to death, but something about cloverfield just doesn't fit for me.

so i ask whoever's reading this one thing: convince me. without spoilers if you must, but convince me that this is a movie i should see - if you do and i see it and like it, umm, you'll get a prize. or something (no idea what but i'll come up with something).