Honest Film Making

The earliest novels were epistolatory - in the form of letters. Early authors didn't have any model to explain the existence of an extended piece of narrative fiction, so I guess they struck on letters as a framing device. I've always wondered why film doesn't have a similar tradition. Filmmakers rarely account for the presence of the camera, instead it is traditionally invisible, the eye of God.

On the other hand, we have:

• Dogme 95, a filmmaking style that calls for complete simplicity: No sets, no props, no lighting, only handheld cameras, etc. But they don't acknowledge or explain the presence of the camera.
• The Blair Witch Project, which purports to be the video record of something chilling. But I have never seen it, and it is not purported to be very good. So I dismiss it.
• Documentaries and mockumentaries, like This Is Spinal Tap. But these don't really count, for reasons I can't really figure...

Then - there is Cloverfield.

The opening gives the whole premise - this was found in the memory card of a video camera in what used to be Central Park: codenamed Cloverfield. It starts with a guy recording his girlfriend, then jumps to his friends giving him a bon-voyage party. Then disaster strikes - his girlfriend shows up with another guy.

But things pick up when an explosion sends the head of the Statue of Liberty flying through the street. Now, our party needs to rescue girlfriend and escape from New York, because very bad things are happening. The promotions for Cloverfield didn't reveal the nature of the bad things, so I won't either. But they are very gristly.

But the whole thing is done as-if with a handheld video camera - no editing, no music, no angles that the guy holding the camera couldn't get. Of course, it is purely pretend. The battery lasts forever, the sound is better than you'll get, the light and night vision work suspiciously well. Nonetheless, a great concept, brlliantly executed.

The characters we get to share this adventure with are mostly nitwits. (Surprisingly, the one who I hoped would get killed first seemed to survive. See if you can guess who!). For me, the "cameraman", Hud, is the exception. Where everyone else were well-socialized yuppie scum, Hud was a Seth-Rogen-type clod, always ready with an inappropriate joke. Or maybe I just liked him because he mostly behind the camera.

Again, I'll skip over the bad things, in case you haven't heard about them yet. Better to be surprised. However, I will say that this film is clearly an attempt to work through the effects of 9/11, like Godzilla was Japan's attempt to work through the atom bomb. The special fx team clearly know what it looks like when a building collapses in NY. I wonder - is it too soon to use this in a monster movie?