http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/movies/18clov.html
I’m learning to like Manohla Dargis, the relatively new NYTimes film reviewer. This Cloverfield* review may cinch it – it’s like A.O. Scott on bitchy pills.
For a brief, hopeful moment, I thought the filmmakers might be making a point about how the contemporary compulsion to record the world has dulled us to actual lived experience, including the suffering of others – you know, something about the simulacrum syndrome in the post-Godzilla age at the intersection of the camera eye with the narcissistic “I.” Certainly this straw-grasping seemed the most charitable way to explain characters whose lack of personality (“This is crazy, dude!”) is matched only by their incomprehensible stupidity.
*Though she didn’t make any mention of how completely awful this title is for a monster movie. It sounds like a Watership Down sequel.