Cloverfield: (2008. dir: Matt Reeves) This is the kind of movie you point to when people ask why genre films are important. This, Attack the Block, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead. They are like snapshots of our cultural underbelly in a particular moment. If a historian from the future is researching the turbulence during the sixties over Civil Rights, he watches the newsreels and listens to the speeches, but then he must watch Night of the Living Dead as well. That's where he'll get the uncensored, chthonic rabidity of emotion which clawed its way up from beneath it. For the Red Scare, it's Body Snatchers. For the growing nuclear menace of the Cold War, War of the Worlds. For the terror of nuclear technology in general, possibly the Day the Earth Stood Still, or even the James Arness movie Them! in which he fights a whole population of giant ants, and which is surprisingly effective, even in adulthood. Point is, the straightforward media outlets will only tell you so much. Look to genre films to give voice to the irrational mutant weirdness which comes squalling alongside any major cultural shock.
Cloverfield is, on the surface, what would happen if Godzilla (not him exactly, but something very like him) attacked Manhattan today and we saw it not through the eyes of the scientists and military and people who have power to fight it, but through the eyes of the normal joe who can do nothing but gather his loved ones and flee. Really, though, it's about 9/11. The only direct reference is when a character amidst the unexplained chaos moans, "It's happening again," (which made me cry, incidentally) but it brought all those (still lingering, just buried) feelings back up from that decade-past day, all that raw fear and grief and channelled it into a more complete catharsis than any other I've managed to conjure in these ten years.
SPOILER ALERT
"Found footage" films are hard, because there are always one or two shots that you think, "OK, why are you still filming?" and it pulls you up out of the story. This has those, but they are few. (The worst is when the photographer gets it and the camera falls just right to show his dead body. It only happens in Hollywood, and it always makes me scowl.) To make up for it, there's a wonderful device at play: the footage we're watching has been taped over images of the romantic day the two leads spent earlier at Coney Island, and just as the tape runs out, the camera is pointing out over the ocean and if you look very closely you can see the alien's ship falling from the upper right hand corner of the frame into the sea. I bring it to your attention because it's so subtle that if I hadn't been alerted to it in advance, I would not have seen it, and it's a perfect detail.
I Sell the Dead: (2008. dir: Glenn McQuaid) There's just enough plot in it to fill a segment of Tales from the Crypt. The director spent most of his time getting the "look" of the film, which is a fashionable blend of sepia-edged Victorian and primary-colour-bright comic-book. He hired good actors, and then gave them nothing of interest to do. It's not funny, and not scary. The pace drags like hell, which would kill it dead even if the script was not already moribund.
It is rare that I will rate a movie one-star on Netflix. Even something ridiculously bad like the Curse of the Komodo gets two stars, because, although I didn't like it, it didn't do more or less than it pretended to. Its reach was short, but its unpretentious grasp complete, if you know what I mean. When I give a single star, it's because there is the potential for so much more than is realized that one leaves it with fists clenched in frustration and a bitter-tasting resentment toward the director. I Sell the Dead gets the one-star treatment. These actors were ripped off. Their time ought to be restored to them along with a suitably hangdog apology.
As luck would have it, though, for those of us who are keen to watch a rollicking comedy about grave-robbing, the Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis Burke and Hare is on its way to DVD even as we speak.
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